Harold Jarche

augmentation not automation

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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.”

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innovating networks

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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.

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communities are the new conference

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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.

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automation, algorithms, and us

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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

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20 years of PKM

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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.

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mobilize and focus

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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.

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best finds 2023

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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. Here are the highlights of 2023.

January

“ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest’ content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices”. —Paris Marx

February

“Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior ‘identity-protective cognition’ (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, ‘a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.’” —Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

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better stories

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I watched and thoroughly enjoyed Ari Melber’s interview with author Yuval Noah Harari on MSNBC — Yuval Noah Harari on GOP losses, conspiracies, AI, religion & history. A few quotes stood out.

  1. “the most successful fiction ever created is not God, it’s money”
  2. “human beings think in stories, and the only thing that can defeat or displace a story is a better story”
  3. “the super-power of our species is not individual genius, it’s the ability to cooperate in large numbers. So if you really want to change something, join an organization or start an organization. But 50 people who cooperate as part of a community … can make a much bigger change than 500 isolated individuals.”

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frames for collective sensemaking

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“The communicative solution to pervasive misinformation is not better facts, but better frames”, concludes Kate Starbird (University of Washington) in Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemaking. Starbird describes the case of a frame called ‘Sharpiegate’ during the 2020 US Presidential election.

We highlight how, prior to the election, elites in politics and media — including President Trump himself — set an expectation (or a frame) of a “rigged election.” As the election progressed, many of President Trump’s supporters went to the polls (or their mailboxes) and misinterpreted their own experiences through that lens. Later, they went online, sharing those experiences and seeing other “evidence” from around the country, which they interpreted through the same “rigged election” or “voter fraud” frame.

The entire post is worth reading. I want to highlight three insights Starbird found concerning rumors, conspiracy theorizing, and disinformation.

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