Harold Jarche

low-quality goo

by

The race toward an AI-driven society is not only costly in terms of electricity and water use with the current AI data centre boom, but the longer-term impacts on how we communicate may be significant.

“This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created. Where the volume of content created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it quickly and find high-quality stuff.

The social and political consequences of this are huge. We have grown so used to information abundance, the greatest gift of the internet, that having that disrupted would be a major upheaval for the whole of society.” —Ian Betteridge 2024-01-24

Read more

meaning-making

by

“The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.” —Marshall McLuhan

For the past decade I have promoted the idea that a job is not the same as meaningful work. Most jobs are refillable and replaceable. One worker leaves, another one fills the job position. Our work can help to define us, but our jobs should never define us.

Read more

curiosity and humility

by

I think the only way we are going to address the many complex challenges that face society today are through curiosity and humility. Sparking curiosity is possible, with the right supports and environments. In addition, curiosity trumps knowingness — already knowing and not looking for disconfirming data. Curiosity and humility combine to make us better learners, and better leaders.

Read more

a thousand scandals

by

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We were made to rote-learn science without adopting the scientific mindset and scientific ways of thinking, philosophy of science. The result is a population with bigoted, dogmatic people even having degrees in engineering and science without having the scientific temperament or critical thinking skills.” —@impactology

My grandpa was a Nazi, by @bastianallgeier

My grandpa taught me that Nazis are fantastic storytellers. The new Nazis are on Tiktok and elsewhere on social media, telling great stories. Stories of safety, of simplicity, of order and justice. Stories of lives without crises. Adventure stories.

The only way to look at all of this is from the distant future. What happens if we let the Nazis take over again. How would our world look like in 20 or 30 years from now. I shudder from the thought. There is no option that fascism would ever lead to anything else than destruction.

Read more

augmentation not automation

by

In automation vs. augmentation, inspired by danah boyd, I wrote that I am mostly in the augmentation camp, though I am concerned that automation + capitalism = a perfect storm. This was the case with the augmented work enabled by the personal computer. Knowledge work improved significantly but wages did not. We are seeing this emerging in the ‘AI wars’ featuring ChatGPT, Bard, Co-pilot and others. It’s a battle between big money to get the biggest slice of this pie, not to augment human work or improve society, yet the mainstream press treats these algorithms like actual artificial intelligence that can think and even ‘hallucinate’ for themselves. But they are just algorithms.

Dave Snowden has a good article about this on anthropomorphising idiot savants — “AI is a set of algorithms and energy-hungry training datasets that may also manifest in physical objects.”

Read more

innovating networks

by

Ed Morrison posted on LinkedIn an overview of his approach to innovation ecosystems and working with Wabash, a large transportation, logistics, and distribution company. As regular readers may know I am a huge proponent of Ed’s strategic doing framework and particularly how it applies to agile (with a small ‘a’) sensemaking.

Ed states that an innovation system consists of three types of “networks embedded in other networks”.

> In affinity networks, participants promote their shared interests.
>> In learning networks, participants help each other learn and adapt.
>> In innovating networks, participants create shared value through collaboration and recombinant innovation.

Read more

communities are the new conference

by

Are communities the new conference?

I asked this question in our monthly video call of the perpetual beta coffee club [PBCC] which I facilitate. There was almost universal agreement that people prefer to engage in communities, both online and in-person, rather than a conference, particularly ones that have a lot of vendors. The PBCC was a significant sanity check for many of us during the lock-downs of the early stages of the SARS-2 pandemic. For the first few months we switched to weekly video calls so we could stay in touch and find out what was happening around the world.

Asynchronous, continuous online communities like ours provide something that most conference do not — time for reflection and deep conversations.

Read more

automation, algorithms, and us

by

In March 2023 I wrote — understanding the hype and hope — of AI and I highlighted several insights from various experts.

The Good

  • “With an LLM even a problem with only one user, will be doable, enter your ask, and code gets written, problem gets solved. Runtime ends, app dies. Done. Single use apps are born.” —Linus Ekenstam
  • US Copyright Office —  “ … it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity.”
  • «And in ChatGPT + Wolfram we’re now able to leverage the whole stack: from the pure “statistical neural net” of ChatGPT, through the “computationally anchored” natural language understanding of Wolfram|Alpha, to the whole computational language and computational knowledge of Wolfram Language.» —Stephen Wolfram
  • “Allen & Overy (A&O), the leading international law firm, has broken new ground by integrating Harvey, the innovative artificial intelligence platform built on a version of Open AI’s latest models enhanced for legal work, into its global practice.”—David Wakeling

Read more

20 years of PKM

by

This year marks the tenth anniversary of my personal knowledge mastery workshops. Ten years before that I discovered PKM and started working on my own frameworks which grew into client projects, first with Domino’s Pizza for their franchise leadership development program. Subsequent clients included ING Bank, Carlsberg, Citibank, the MasterCard Foundation, United Cities & Local Governments, and many more. What is available today has twenty years of experimentation and application behind it.

The inspiration for the ‘in 40 days‘ format came from my friends at En Nu Online in the Netherlands. Since then, hundreds of people have participated in the program, coming from all continents (except Antarctica of course). The content has changed with the times and will continue to be in a state of ‘perpetual beta’, as I try to meet the changing needs of the modern creative knowledge worker. Several new topics were added in the past year.

Read more

mobilize and focus

by

In a 2018 post entitled 25-10-3 I referred to research that showed that in some cases small groups of committed individuals who want to influence society require at least 25% participation to effect change. In cases where people have an unshakeable belief, such as religious zealots or fervent believers, then you only need 10% participation in the change movement. Additionally, to effect change inside an organization as few as 3% of the organization — the influencers — can reach 85% of the organization.

Read more