Global leaders deal with chaotic and changing situations, often filled with tension and conflict, which can make people feel excluded and prevent #community building. Two disparate yet connected fields grapple with the continued emergence of ethical dilemmas: #Technology and #AI, and #DEI. As much as we think these fields aren’t related, how we manage #conflict, check our assumptions, and navigate connection is what creates the path forward.
Read MoreThe Great Wave
Hokusai's story exemplifies many of the key themes im exploring in a current manuscript about the importance of subjective intelligence in the advent of ai: the importance of #persistence, the value of #lifelonglearning, and the deep #insights that can come from looking closely at one's craft over an extended period.
Read MoreMy memories are Metas training data - How Politics and Technology Meet
Technology is not neutral; it is always shaped by human hands. Meta’s plans to use personal content posted by Facebook and Instagram users to train algorithms suggest our digital histories are being repackaged to teach AI about—and how to mimic—humanity.
How should content be governed?
The roots of Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht's story run deep into American libertarianism. Trump's recent pledge to commute Ulbricht's sentence sheds light on the intertwining of politics and tech.
Read an insightful extract on Silk Road's rise and fall by Joshuah Bearman: https://lnkd.in/ghr_A5iy
The Double-Edged Sword of AI in Education and Work: Lessons from the Frontlines
As adjunct faculty, I get a front-row seat to the AI revolution in education and the workplace. What I've observed is both exciting and concerning, a paradox that we must navigate carefully as think about our future work.
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How real is Singularity? #KnowYourJargon
Singularity, the idea that technology will surpass human intelligence, is an irrelevant red herring in our current world. In becoming preoccupied with this debate, we miss numerous nearer-term milestones relating to synthetic media or misinformation being met with growing frequency and instead contemplate esoteric questions about consciousness and sentience.
Read MoreTransparency and Explainability Don't Equal Trust
Trust is transitioning from institutional to "distributed," shifting authority from leaders to peers, which is often overlooked and perpetuates trust issues. If trust is predictable, it isn’t needed – is it? If the inner workings of AI, government, and the media were just more transparent, if we knew how they worked, we think we wouldn’t really need to “trust” so much. It would be more predictable.
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Taxonomy v Folksonomy
The concepts of taxonomy and folksonomy hold significant implications, especially in the context of emerging technologies like OpenAI. While traditional taxonomies offer structured hierarchies of knowledge, allowing for a systematic approach to information organization, folksonomies represent a more fluid and emergent way of categorizing information based on user-generated tags and metadata.
However, the challenge arises when technological advancements fail to incorporate divergent thinking and promote groupthink through convergent taxonomies. This phenomenon is particularly evident in language models, where developers' linguistic and cultural biases can influence the interpretation and representation of (the dominant) language.
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Image Credit: Wanda Tuerlinckx , Humanoids
Who is pacing this race?
Employees have been encouraged to ‘automate their roles’ to demonstrate self-direction and continuous learning. In the past, an employee's skills, motivation, and business interests determined the pace of change. Soon, the pace may be beyond their control, risking job loss before they can adapt to consider the next set of problems. If they can’t find problems faster than the pace of automation, they are not adequately prepared for transition.
Read MoreCorporate Ozempic
Insightful article is about the things no one wants to talk about when it comes to #ai and #jobs. While ai brings much opportunity, it will require an ongoing adjustment.
"Overdone pandemic hiring was a reasonable explanation for the tech layoffs in late 2022. But 18 months later, there’s been sufficient time to reduce headcount. There’s no incentive for a company to slow-roll this process — a drip feed of layoffs drains company morale. There is something else going on."
"It’s the denials that first raised my antennae: “We’re not restructuring because AI is taking away roles,” Alphabet’s Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler told analysts on the company’s most recent earnings call. That’s the “I gave up gluten” of tech."
And much like Ozempic, serious irreversible negative impacts may not be visible now...but will be felt for many years to come.
Fundamentals of workplace automation
[ From McKinsey ]
As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated—at least in the short term.
The potential of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics to perform tasks once reserved for humans is no longer reserved for spectacular demonstrations by the likes of IBM’s Watson, Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, DeepMind, or Google’s driverless car. Just head to an airport: automated check-in kiosks now dominate many airlines’ ticketing areas. Pilots actively steer aircraft for just three to seven minutes of many flights, with autopilot guiding the rest of the journey. Passport-control processes at some airports can place more emphasis on scanning document bar codes than on observing incoming passengers.
What will be the impact of automation efforts like these, multiplied many times across different sectors of the economy? Can we look forward to vast improvements in productivity, freedom from boring work, and improved quality of life? Should we fear threats to jobs, disruptions to organizations, and strains on the social fabric?
Earlier this year, we launched research to explore these questions and investigate the potential that automation technologies hold for jobs, organizations, and the future of work.3 Our results to date suggest, first and foremost, that a focus on occupations is misleading. Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the near or medium term. Rather, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed, and jobs performed by people to be redefined, much like the bank teller’s job was redefined with the advent of ATMs.
More specifically, our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.4 In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages. Although we often think of automation primarily affecting low-skill, low-wage roles, we discovered that even the highest-paid occupations in the economy, such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives, including CEOs, have a significant amount of activity that can be automated.
The organizational and leadership implications are enormous: leaders from the C-suite to the front line will need to redefine jobs and processes so that their organizations can take advantage of the automation potential that is distributed across them. And the opportunities extend far beyond labor savings. When we modeled the potential of automation to transform business processes across several industries, we found that the benefits (ranging from increased output to higher quality and improved reliability, as well as the potential to perform some tasks at superhuman levels) typically are between three and ten times the cost. The magnitude of those benefits suggests that the ability to staff, manage, and lead increasingly automated organizations will become an important competitive differentiator.
Christine Haskell, PHD has built her practice on credible, published research and data. In the Research Series, you’ll find highlights, shareable statistics, and links to the full source material.