Category: Change

How Social Network and Facebook Backlash Should Not Have Let Down

In is quite interesting to note that the strong backlash against Facebook end 2018 / early 2019 has let down, while Facebook has not visibly changed its operating model. Articles from the time are still quite relevant such as for example: ‘Facebook must decide: Is it for the mob or for democracy?‘ or ‘Is It Wrong To Feel Bad For Facebook?‘.

It is increasingly clear that the revenue drive of social networks like Facebook is built on increasingly targeted advertising, and stickiness of the network itself to capture more attention for adds; and this, in turn, has the consequence of having the network show us what we’d like to see, creating relatively isolated communities of similar interest which sometimes lose touch with reality.

Still, it is amazing how the social network backlash has disappeared from front concern when the basics have not changed, people are still addicted to social networks, and the risk of manipulation linked for example to elections, has rather increased through AI generated content and the current possibility to target people at the individual level. Effective regulation has not really been implemented. So why don’t we hear so much about it now? Is that the result of effective lobbying? Is that because people have more pressing concerns? Is that because we resign ourselves to the situation?

I hope that the current debates about election manipulation will come up again around the US presidential elections, and that the subject will be tabled again to finally provide a strong regulation of social networks. We should not lose sight of the need to tackle this issue to protect democracy and our societies from excessive manipulation.

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How We Need to Increase Efforts to Protect Against Inadequate AI Generated Content

Following up from the previous post ‘How We Underestimate the Availability of AI Generated Content‘, this interesting post ‘AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race‘ goes one step further looking at the consequences of this technology.

“[the exercise of generated a fake AI-generated website provided] a glimpse into a potentially darker digital future in which it is impossible to distinguish reality from fiction.“

“Such a scenario threatens to topple the already precarious balance of power between creators, search engines, and users. The current flow of fake news and propaganda already fools too many people, even as digital platforms struggle to weed it all out. AI’s ability to further automate content creation could leave everyone from journalists to brands unable to connect with an audience that no longer trusts search engine results and must assume that the bulk of what they see online is fake.”

The issue is really that machines can generate content much faster than humans, and that all social networks rely mainly on humans to weed out inadequate content. Those tools could thus be “weaponized […] to unleash a tidal wave of propaganda could make today’s infowars look primitive“.

There is thus a definite urgent need to develop “increasingly better tools to help us determine real from fake and more human gatekeepers to sift through the rising tide of content.”

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How We Underestimate the Availability of AI Generated Content

Just take 1 minute to visit ‘This Marketing Blog Does Not Exist‘. Looks like a genuine blog, just as this one, right? Wrong, it has been entirely AI generated including the head shot of the supposed writer. And the texts do seem to make sense at first glimpse.

We are coming to a situation where we not any more in a position to distinguish AI generated content from human content. Speech generators produce real-sounding audio. Soon we won’t be able to distinguish deep-fake videos from real videos (the picture represents a snapshot from a deep-fake video of Obama compared to a real video extract).

For end-users, there is a definite need to clearly identify content that is AI generated. For some people, this also creates an unprecedented opportunity to swindle or otherwise abuse the confidence of readers or viewers at an unprecedented rate.

In a year where AI-engines are now being put widely at the disposal of the public, I believe we widely underestimate the impact of those technologies in the current world and how an increasing portion of what we read, hear and watch is AI-generated fiction. A wake-up call could be needed!

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How to Move in the Collaborative Age in the 2020s Decade

In this post ‘An Agenda for the 2020s: Inventing the Knowledge Age‘ by Alan Wenger (a New-York based Venture Capitalist), some key success factors for moving into the Collaborative Age are listed.

First, I note that the overall perspective of the author is quite aligned with my Fourth Revolution viewpoint: “Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.” Attention being new the new scarcity, it is an essential skill we need to practice more.

According to the author the key success factors include:

  • Fighting the climate crisis
  • Defending democracy
  • Promoting universal basic income
  • Fostering decentralisation
  • Developing mindfulness
  • Resuming learning

I’d probably add something about inequality and inclusiveness

In any case, important transformations will have to happen in the 2020s decade to move into the Collaborative Age. They will be accelerated by the Covid crisis and possibly other upcoming world transformations as well. Be ready for change!

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How Attention Should be Consciously Exercised

I like this quote from Valeria Maltoni post ‘Clear Thinking in an Age of Confusion‘, which covers a variety of sources for clarity: “Attention is a muscle you can exercise. People so often look but don’t see“

Attention is important because otherwise we tend to close ourselves into our own thoughts and frames. It requires open mind and being free from worries to notice those things that are outside our usual frames. I am always surprise at how much we can miss if we don’t pay attention.

And it is definitely worth it. “Strategic thinking is all in the doing… if you can think clearly enough to do the right things in the right context. Notice more, and you’ll find those things, because you’ll see them. Then you’ll know“

What type of exercise is meant here? Meditation, meditative walking, and all sorts of mindfulness exercises are good. But it is certainly also staying curious and open to new things through our relationships, reads, travels and other occasions to discover.

Consciously exercise your attention and discover new facets in your everyday life!

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How Internet is Getting Increasingly Split

A good summary of what is currently happening on the internet is given in those posts by Darin Stewart ‘Welcome to the Splinternet‘ and ‘TikTok is just the latest victim of the fracturing Internet‘. Of course the trend has been around for some time, but it now definitely clear that internet is not any more global, but multiple.

“What was promised as the great agent of globalization is rapidly becoming an enabler of isolationism. The borderless, digital frontier international businesses and organizations aligned themselves to is fragmenting. New borders and checkpoints are emerging.” “Technical fragmentation currently prevents roughly 25% of internet users, most in emerging markets, from accessing 70% of the Web. Political fragmentation has already divided the Internet into East and West, but recent developments are further divvying up the web into strongly bordered regional federations.”

This fragmentation has been driven by legal aspects (data protection laws), copyright and commercial issues, political issues (China being the best known, but India also participating) etc. It is quite interesting that this trend is parallel to the trend to reel back from globalization.

“Over time it creates a parallel reality that is extremely difficult to break out of. When amplified by the walled garden effect users are separated from non-aligned segments of the web as firmly as if they were on different networks altogether.”

When travelling it is possible to overcome some of the access limitations but when staying in one’s country, only advanced tricks will allow to overcome these limitations. Most people will increasingly be participating to a more limited version of internet. And that is probably reinforce the current issue of people being increasingly caught in the bubble of their own opinion and social network.

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How Conversations with Artificial Intelligence Become Realistic

In this post ‘Conversations with GPT-3‘ we get some interesting insight about the experience of conversing with an artificial intelligence, on the basis of the largest natural language AI around, which was released in July 2020.

GPT-3 is “Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is the third-generation language prediction model in the GPT-n series created by OpenAI, a for-profit San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory” [Wikipedia]. It is one of the largest AI system produced so far.

“GPT-3 has been trained on most of what humanity has publicly written. All of our greatest books, scientific papers, and news articles. We can present our problems to GPT-3, and just like it transcended our capabilities in Go, it may transcend our creativity and problem solving capabilities and provide new, novel strategies to employ in every aspect of human work and relationships.”

The post presents some example of the texts that were predicted by AI. Well, the conversations are quite astounding even if of course, what “Wise Being” says (it is the name of the machine” is extracted from what we could call common knowledge. Take for example the conversation around Love.

The conclusion is that very soon we’ll be chatting with AI bots without even realizing that we are. They will regurgitate our entire knowledge in the right way, providing deep reach out in our collective culture and production.

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How We Need to Be Graceful in Times of Crisis

I like this quote attributed to Dustin Poirier (an American martial art artist): “When times are good, be grateful, and when times are tough, be graceful“. I find it fits particularly well with the current economic crisis.

I was of course particularly touched by the recommendation to be graceful when times are tough. This is hard, and requires a lot of awareness. Too many people tend to focus on their own interest and lose gracefulness in tough times. This can be observed every day in the current Covid economical crisis.

I realize however through the quote that the appropriate mindset to deal with tough times also comes with the need to be grateful when success hits. It comes to recognize that we are not the sole cause of our success and that many others have contributed; and that is also why it is important to be graceful when times are tough with everyone and everything that surrounds us and contributes to our being.

Gracefulness in crisis is not easy when stress is high and the horizon is blocked by unknown factors. I still believe it is a good mindset to strive to. Are we all sufficiently graceful in the current crisis?

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How Changing Ourselves and Be Happy Is Our Responsibility

In her book ‘What I know for sure‘, Oprah Winfrey makes the point that changing ourselves, overcoming our wounds and overcoming our internal program are things for which we need to take total responsibility.

“Like me , you might have experienced things that caused you to deem yourself unworthy . I know for sure that healing the wounds of the past is one of the biggest and most worthwhile challenges of life. It’s important to know when and how you were programmed, so you can change the program. And doing so is your responsibility, no one else’s. There is one irrefutable law of the universe: We are each responsible for our own life.”

This responsibility can be tough to carry and we may need some help with it, but it certainly remains ours. And, “If you’re holding anyone else accountable for your happiness, you’re wasting your time.“

What I like in this quote is that first, it presumes that all of us can change and even recover from deep wounds, if we are willing to do so. And it squarely puts the responsibility on us for our happiness. Stop looking for excuses outside and do the work!

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How to Explain the Excessive Usage of Personality Tests Results

In a professional environment or out of personal curiosity, we’ve all taken personality tests that indicate our strengths and weaknesses. Why are those reductive tests so popular and in use? In David Epstein book ‘Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World‘, the author takes the position that it respond to our and organisation needs to classify us and pigeonhole us.

“A lucrative career and personality quiz and counseling industry survives on that notion. “All of the strengths-finder stuff, it gives people license to pigeonhole themselves or others in ways that just don’t take into account how much we grow and evolve and blossom and discover new things,” . “But people want answers, so these frameworks sell. It’s a lot harder to say, ‘Well, come up with some experiments and see what happens.’”

On one hand I find those tests quite insightful and they generate useful thinking about oneself and what we should reinforce or change; on the other hand it is true that they tend to classify us. By the way, the best advice is certainly not to try to improve weaknesses but rather to further enhance those strengths that make us so specific.

Organisations are then advised to seek diversity (i.e. a set of people which results to the test spread nicely across categories), and may outright reject applications on the basis of test results.

Those tests are an extremely reductionist approach to our personality and they also don’t account at all on the fact that we may evolve. Taking important decisions on their basis and letting them classify ourselves in categories is certainly excessive. They should remain as an interesting insight in our personality, but should not be used beyond a certain limit.

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How Life Coaches Should Be More Aware of Their Limits

This interesting article addresses a key question: ‘Life coaching is unregulated and growing rapidly. Should it be reined in?‘. As life coaching becomes more prevalent as a career and service, shouldn’t it become more regulated and should not access to the profession become more restricted?

Of course the article is written by a psychiatrist and therefore he complaints about the amateurish handling by coaches of exchanges that border on therapy (and tends to protect his profession, degree and the many years of associated suffering). Coaching is “intended for individuals without mental health problems. It’s also supposed to be more collaborative, brief, focused, future-oriented and informal than psychotherapy.” However, “it must be difficult for a coach to come across as anything other than a therapist. Common topics for leadership coaches – performance maximisation, workplace relationships and professional anxiety – are the bread and butter of many a therapy session. The confusion is even greater with coaching outside of the work environment, which can encompass, as the ‘life coach’ moniker makes clear, just about anything.”

The author also makes an excellent point on the issue of stigma getting into psychotherapy. “People who are concerned about stigma might think that coaching offers a creative workaround – a malleable means of offering therapy under a different guise and a different name. While the motivation might be noble and understandable, the reality is scary.“

From my own experience of coaching, I believe the point made can be sometimes valid. While coaches have a high-level training about the fact that there is a border beyond which they are not supposed to intervene, and require psychotherapy, this training is quite limited. Also, I have observed that many life coaches have entered into this activity following strong personal issues, questioning and sometimes difficult events, sometimes more as a way to discover themselves. They are not always extremely stable themselves, and they sometimes investigate areas that should be off-limits. They should probably be made more aware of their limits.

I am a strong supporter of coaching as a softer way to challenge people and enhance their underlying performance. Coaching training if done properly is quite thorough, but it is true that more exchange with psychotherapy professionals and more awareness of the limits of coaching versus therapy would probably be useful.

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How Non-Conformists Must Find New Safe Spaces

In this comprehensive post by Paul Graham ‘The Four Quadrants of Conformism‘, he addresses what is the type of person moves that actually move the world (hint: they are quite few in number). The challenges raised by an increase in conformism in the current world are also exposed.

The quadrant of conformism is the degree of conformism axis against a passive/active axis. This creates roughly four types of people and it would be linked more to personality than cultural influence. There are more conventional-minded than independent-minded people, and fewer active/aggressive people than passive.

“Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it’s no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay“

“In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened.” We are reverting to a pre-enlightenment situation where people were expected to be passive and conventional. The fact that universites are becoming locations where intolerance becomes prevalent, while they have historically, on the contrary, be places of tolerance and investigation, is a worry. This safe space has not been replaced by the internet or other safe locations.

“Though I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I can’t predict how it plays out. Could some universities reverse the current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want to congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandon them? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened.”

“But I’m hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at protecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised, they’ll create new ones. That may require some imagination. But imagination is, after all, their specialty.“

Our increasing conventional society is a worry, but I believe we underestimate the existence of free inquiry possibilities as information is becoming increasingly available. Innovators had to be close to universities and their incomparable library; this constraint is now obsolete and virtual locations will develop offering the same possibilities.

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