Author: wp

Leadership in the world is failing. Leadership today no longer supports people’s purpose for their existence. No, it’s not their responsibility, but they are actively or passively participating in initiatives that take that purpose away.

Employees are just going through the motions, and certain stratifications of leadership are doing the same. Leaders, in whatever guise or role they hold, need to lead with intention. They should believe in what they are doing and empower their people to believe and achieve.

But the corporate environment today is not built for people. It is built for corporations, and ultimately for the benefit of those that make it into the highest echelons of socioeconomic society. Leading with altruistic purpose is within their power, but profits, power, and control over their environment — not the natural environment, but their social scope — overshadow the altruistic characteristics that leaders need as stewards.

To compound impacts, nations now operate like corporations, and the detrimental outcomes are spreading. A rebalance in the role of leadership is needed across all sectors of human existence. A responsible, altruistic attitude and the will to deliver on those objectives need to be entrenched across the layers of people taking on the roles.

We are humans, and humanity as a term holds with it strong associations of empathy and social care. We should live up to our namesake.

[cleaned up in collaboration with ChatGPT]

In unity, we have some semlance of control over our environment. In a society where the wealthy can leverage $400 billion as a bludgeoning tool to shape what the rest of us feel and experience, half a billion of us withholding just $100 a year could begin to shift that balance. A little self control goes a long way.

A reminder that collective restraint can be more powerful than concentrated wealth.

Ever find yourself going down a mental rabbit hole that is self perpetuating in an unhelpful and unproductive way? Ever find yourself unable to internally correct this trajectory which ends up being an unmitigated sprial into deconstructive thinking? How do you stop the nose dive? A dark corner, out of sight? How do you turn off the brain from recursively creating thoughts repeatedly with no path out of the maze of self deception, self deprecation and despair? I can’t imagine how many people have this and at what scale and intensity. Some must clearly manage it while others succumb to its lure.   

While conversational and chemical therapies exist, I feel the real promise lies in self-actuation — something that must go hand in hand with healing a broader societal fracture. People need to uncover their social selves (not manufacture one), and be honest with themselves about who they allow themselves to be. This is harder said than done – so many cliched sayings exist: “go out and find yourself”, “you do you”. None are prescriptive nor provide any guidance to what they allude. They are just quick catch phrases. I don’t have solutions, only a direction: toward authenticity, connection, and the courage to stop running from one’s own mind. For that, you need people, community and a mutual trust that you can truly rely on.

We are evolving our AI capabilities at breakneck speed, driven by competition and profit, progress is given the utmost importance. Beating the competition is paramount.

At the same time, every involved and observing person is aware that this phase of humanity holds immense promise and also the potential for great harm. The capability of AI (trained properly) has the potential to avoid biases or falsehoods while being able to assess, analyze and draw high probability conclusions based on solid data, and laser focused pattern matching can outperform human capability in many domains. This can be leveraged to discover novel and highly effective solutions for a myriad of human ailments (cancers, technological barriers – list is limitless). It can also be used for harm – unmitigable hacking, digital theft, development of tools and weapons with the intention of causing harm.

While either path is pursued, the engines of AI consume massive energy and other natural resources like water, rare earth minerals etc. 

In the back of our consciousness, we seem to be trading near term risk with the belief that these advancements will yield results that will help us eliminate the problems we already see and envision for the future. I hope our faith here isn’t misguided. 

Can the mind ever see past the illusions its own brain creates?

The capacity of the brain — that being the physical structure, the activated neurons, chemical distribution, and probably a myriad of other factors — to alter the perception of reality is astonishing. The consciousness that perceives this reality is easily convinced of the presentation and heavily disadvantaged in modifying it to suit its needs.

This may be one of humanity’s greatest challenges. While the degree of impact varies, nearly everyone struggles with this condition to some extent—though a few may have found reliable ways to rise above it.

Refined in collaboration with ChatGPT.

We hire politicians by voting for them based on their promises, ideals and principles. Some of them turn around and sell out their employers to 3^rd parties for more money than they can make honorably serving their trustees. When these politicians appoint business owners to accomplish certain objectives and those objectives/means/policies then don’t align with the citizens that voted for the politicians, ceasing to purchase goods/services sold by the business owner is a legitimate (and very effective) means of voting disapproval of the un-elected individual. In an environment where civilian citizens are losing more and more of the levers of control to concentrated wealth and fringe ideologies, democracy has a better chance when additional legitimate levers are applied to achieve a favorable outcome for the greater public population. 

(This post was refined in collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude)

The last great frontier for AI, beyond achieving truly semantic reasoning, will be motivation. We see this with humans – we have Organic Intelligence but an unmotivated human can result in applying none of that to their existence. Our motivations drive us to achieve – whether for bad outcomes or good – because we have an end goal which we are motivated to reach. How would we instill motivation into AI? Are directives enough? Can we program competitiveness? Can AI tell the difference in quality of the electricity they are consuming or the capabilities of the HW on which they run? What will cause an AI instance to want more, to achieve something they don’t have already or to achieve more of something that they do have?

I had some thoughts on GenAI:

We have Generative AI but we don’t have Cognitive AI. Generative AI creates new content using weights, probabilities and basic context (which is based on probability from training data) but the analysis and content generated isn’t novel or based on reasoning across data – it’s not information from data. For that you need Cognitive AI.

ChatGPT, with prompts, refined it to the following:

We have Generative AI, but we don’t yet have Cognitive AI.

Generative models create impressive content — fluent, convincing, and often surprising. But the surprise lies in form, not in origin. What looks novel is usually a high-probability remix of a low-probability combination. It’s simulation, not discovery.

There’s no awareness. No purpose. No internal thread of logic connecting “why” one idea builds upon another. It’s not invention — it’s interpolation.

Cognitive AI, if and when it arrives, will reason across data. It will generate content because of insight, not merely in the shape of it. It will model the world, not just mimic our words about it.

Until then, calling what these systems do “creative” or “novel” might be more wishful than accurate. We’re not watching ideas unfold — we’re watching echoes of them recombine.

It not only corrected some false assertions, it also helped make my thought more readable and less terse.

Humans have to work with a very large vocabulary. sometimes in acronym form, sometimes in unpronounceable terms and yet others times in overloaded terms and/or reused acronyms and terms. Properly understanding requires context in addition to vast memorization capability. In addition the ability to comprehend concepts is invaluable. 

AI/ML is able to accomplish this but without true comprehension rather, in the case of most current models, a probability based semblance of understanding. 

Some humans excel at this, some less so than others. Essentially, as with most things, there is a bell curve representing how humans are dealing with this knowledge phenomena.

The AI/ML phenomenon extends beyond just language. Depending on the modality—whether it’s text, image, audio, or another form—and the way data is tokenized and embedded into tensors, these systems can process a vast range of input types. Their capacity to generalize across modalities reinforces the illusion of comprehension. Unlike humans, they can do this across datasets of a scale and diversity that no individual could ever realistically engage with.

You have to create language neutral, sensor (humans have vision, smell, sound, feel, taste) based memory contexts. Each recollection should associate with as many senses as possible. Language can then be applied to this multi-modal experience.