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

best finds 2023

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. 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

Read more

better stories

by

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.”

Read more

frames for collective sensemaking

by

“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.

Read more

don’t know much about technology

by

I would never describe myself as a ‘techie’. In my second year of undergraduate studies (1978) I failed my computer programming course in Fortran Watfor & Watfiv [that was with punch cards and a terminal that sent the batch to Vancouver and returned results in 24 hours] but the professor gave me a pass if I promised to never take a programming course again. I have kept true to my word all of these years.

You could say that I am not one to jump on the next technology craze. I ignored computers through the 1980s and into the 1990s. However in 1994 I saw my first website at the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM). It was a revelation. For the first time I saw how computers could connect people. During my undergraduate years nobody explained the relevance of computer programs. It was all about making some arcane program work. I could not relate my life to any of these programs. The web made sense to me.

Read more

talking to people

by

In a post called, I am fed up with hiding myself, Mita Williams concludes that academic writing removes authors from their work by turning them into ‘sources’ and ‘references’ and that large language models are doing the same, but making authors even further removed from their work.

In writing this post, I’ve come to realize that the concerns here dovetail with a long-standing bugbear of mine: that libraries overemphasize authority from sources, and does not do enough to support bibliography, a format in which authority derives from people and their choices.

In a separate post, Williams states that, “The alternative to AI is talking to other people.” —Mita Williams 2023-09-19

Read more

Whither peer to peer?

by

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” —Frank Herbert (1965) Dune

In 2012 Dave Weinberger described how software developers learn — mainly peer to peer.

… in the knowledge network that developers have created for themselves … the idea is instead that all learning ought to be in public and be something that makes the public better. It improves the public act of learning. The act of educating — of teaching — are done in public so that others will learn from them and this idea of education as a public act has tremendous power and tremendous benefits because it makes the entire network — the entire ecosystem — smarter. If we can apply this within our businesses and within our educational system and beyond then our own knowledge network will become much smarter, much faster. —YouTube 2012-05-29

Read more