How We Should Join ‘Team Human’ in the World of Social Media

‘Team Human’ is a movement created by Douglas Rushkoff through its TED talk ‘How to be Team Human in the digital future‘. I’m definitely on!

It starts from a rather depressing statement about social media: “Does social media really connect people in new, interesting ways? No, social media is about using our data to predict our future behavior. Or when necessary, to influence our future behavior so that we act more in accordance with our statistical profiles. The digital economy — does it like people? No” I am not so extreme in opinion, but it is certain that in part, social media has been designed to be addictive for some purpose.

His concern is that technology moguls now seem to have stopped caring about the people. “It’s funny, I used to be the guy who talked about the digital future for people who hadn’t yet experienced anything digital. And now I feel like I’m the last guy who remembers what life was like before digital technology. It’s not a matter of rejecting the digital or rejecting the technological. It’s a matter of retrieving the values that we’re in danger of leaving behind and then embedding them in the digital infrastructure for the future. “

“Join “Team Human.” Find the others. Together, let’s make the future that we always wanted.”

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How We Are Feeling Machines that Think

I like this quote from Antonio Damasio: “We are not necessarily thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think”.

Well that’s quite true of course, and it is demonstrate that our emotions drive our decision-making much more than our thoughts and rationality.

This has quite serious implications. Marketers and sellers know a lot about this. We may not be sufficiently self-aware to perceive that emotions drive a lot of our actions, and it may be required to give some more thoughts about this observation.

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How Technology Providers Should Care About Their Externalities

Following up on our post ‘How to Manage Unintended Consequences of Technology‘, in this interesting piece ‘Embracing externalities‘, Seth Godin remind us that externalities should be accounted by industrialism for the better.

“The opportunity is simple to describe but requires real effort to achieve: the community must enforce systems that build the external costs into the way that the industrialist does business. Faced with an incentive to decrease bycatch, waste or illness, the industrialist will do what industrialists always seek to do–make it work a little better, a little faster, a little more profitably.”

This thought is quite interesting to apply to the externalities created by technology, for example social networks. How can we make sure companies that create value from those products compensate for the externalities they necessarily create?

” Industrialism can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place“. So do any technology provider: ‘Technology can’t solve every problem, but it can go a very long way in solving the problems that it created in the first place’… We should not forget that regulation can achieve this goal.

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How to Manage Unintended Consequences of Technology

New technology always has unintended consequences, and possibly unintended usage. In this interesting post ‘Managing the Unintended Consequences of Technology‘, some take-away points from the 2018 Unintended Consequences of Technology Conference are exposed.

The main recommendations I noted from the post are:

  • hire a more diverse workforce (to better anticipate unexpected usage)
  • de-bias the data sets used for developing new technology, to avoid unexpected algorithmic discrimination
  • develop a product impact advisory board

In a complex world I believe it is quite impossible to predict what technology will be used for, but we can certainly try to avoid unexpected consequences. I am a strong believer in the need to have more diversity to avoid blind spots related to cultural and social backgrounds.

The fact that there are conferences on the subject looks like quite a good starting point to work on the subject!

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How the Dunning-Kruger Effect or Illusory Competence Impacts Organisations

I knew about it and observe it regularly, but it did not know it had a name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is basically the illusion of being competent when one is not. This is specifically applicable when someone starts to learn in a new field.

The Dunning-Kruger effect or “the cognitive bias of illusory superiority” would stem from “an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability“. What is quite amazing is that apparently this cognitive bias has only been formally described and documented in 1999!

The funny part of course is that “The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks while his face was covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras.”

More seriously, this illusion has daily unfortunate consequences in organisations, and I have observed also that the education system of some countries tends to increase prevalence.

At least the next time you encounter this symptom you’ll be able to put name on it!

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How the New Service Platforms Bring More Self-Respect Into Service

In this opinion post ‘The Servant Economy‘, a few interesting discussion points are raised about the transformation of the service economy brought by the intermediation platforms such as Uber, delivery companies etc. Those are around since about a decade, so it might be time to take stock of the changes they brought.

Old fashioned servants

Can we describe what happened by the “unkind summary […]: venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance“? There is some substance in this description, but I am not so sure it describes it all.

While of course those platforms have created a gig economy and no “real jobs” they have also provided substantial opportunities to many people, making them free agents instead of having them subject to the arbitrary will of bosses and employers. They have created more self-respect for more people. Some may be struggling with this, but I believe it is a fact.

The post also asks what is really the value added by those new services. “Looking at this incredible flurry of funding and activity, it’s worth asking: These companies have done so much—upended labor markets, changed industries, rewritten the definition of a job—and for what, exactly? Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone“. And of course most of those companies are not profitable and rather consume huge amounts of capital. Still they do provide services that were difficult to access, and have transformed the personal transformation industry across many countries. I am using the global nature of those applications on quite regular basis to resolve local transportation issues when I am travelling.

I would thus not be so pessimistic about the changes brought by the new service platforms. They bring change, and I also believe that they have the potential to bring more self-respect of the independent agents that they bring together.

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How to Be Aware that Stress Closes our Hearts

This beautiful post by Leo Babauta ‘The Beautiful and Scary Practice of Moving Closer‘ reminds us that when we are under stress we tend to close our hearts and this creates damage in our relationships.

“The sad effect of these habitual reactions [to stress] is that they move us further away from others, and from the direct experience of the moment.” and this has many consequences: “Closing our hearts to others and creating distance from them out of habitual reaction to stress is the heart of aggression, violence and pain.” This in turn creates deep unhappiness.

I fully concur with this observation as under stress I tend to turn inward to myself and cut out relationship with others.

Leo Babauta goes on to propose to be more mindful in our reaction to others in particular when stress is involved. And make the effort to move closer rather to move further away. That’s tough for sure, but I will try it out. “It’s an incredibly beautiful practice. And yes, it’s filled with shakiness. That makes it even more courageous“

I am not sure I will be able to overcome instant emotional reactions, still it is worth trying, don’t you think?

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How to Practice at Our Edge to Progress More Quickly

Following up on our previous post ‘How We Need to Dose Our Self-Transformation Effort‘, I like this post of Leo Babauta ‘The Rule of the Edge‘. It is quite simple actually: “practice at your edge most of the time“. “And this rule is what will help you grow the most, over time“.

The idea is to stay just on the edge, but not more: “Your edge isn’t pushing yourself until you’re ready to collapse. It’s not pushing to injury, pushing so that you can’t practice tomorrow. It’s not studying all day long until your brain has melted. It’s going to the edge, not diving off it.”

What I like in Leo Babuta’s approach (and I encourage reading the full post) that what is proposed is to accept that it is not possible to be at one’s edge all the time. We need to be mindful about our body and mind, and accept that we need some rest from time to time.

What’s amazing of course is to see how our edge shifts over time when we are practicing at the edge often!

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How We Need to Dose Our Self-Transformation Effort

Following on our previous post ‘How to Accept to Stop Chasing Perfection – a New Trend for Self Help?‘ and the
Guardian article ‘Want to transform your life? Stop chasing perfection‘, I want to share an interrogation that pervades my study of self-improvement. There are a number of philosophies that encourage passivity and acceptance, while obviously some effort is needed to improve; on the other hand it should not become a struggle. How to encounter the just middle? How to dose our effort?

This is well expressed in the Guardian article: “Transformative self-reinvention may be an overoptimistic dream, but defeatism about change is its own kind of false comfort, too: both are forms of absolutism that serve to justify passivity.“

It seems obvious to me that passivity is not the response. Self-improvement is needed, a minimum being what is required to adapt to changes in the society and environment that surrounds us. Some effort is thus needed. Too much effort will lead to suffering, and possibly be counter-productive by cutting us away from important social ties.

It seems to me that the answer is given by the theory of flow: flow is achieved when faced with a somewhat difficult task, but not so difficult that it strains us too much. It is all a question of dosage – being just outside our comfort zone but not too far.

How is currently your dosage? Are your objectives too challenging? Are you rather too easy on yourself?

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How to Accept to Stop Chasing Perfection – a New Trend for Self Help?

In this excellent Guardian article ‘Want to transform your life? Stop chasing perfection‘, the issue of perfectionism and how it influences negatively our lives is addressed in a straightforward manner. The main idea of the article is that we should learn to be more contented with what we have rather than trying to be perfect – and that this trend would show in the recent self-help literature.

The main recommendation is “Give up the rat race, accept reality and have the courage to be disliked – the latest self-help trend is not about self-reinvention but finding contentment in the life you have“

According to the author, “In response to the prevailing mood, there has been a noticeable change of tone in the world of self-help, a publishing genre historically dedicated to promising massive, near-effortless transformation overnight, or in a couple of weeks at most“. The author then describes a number of trends including some trends inspired by Buddhism about living in the present and accepting one’s being instead of chasing for transformation.

I am not so sure about this trend in a world that exposes us increasingly to the more than perfect pictures of others on social networks and thus to emotions of envy and wishes to transform one’s lives. There is definitely a tension between several views of the word: living a contented present with minimum means, and self-transforming to a better self. And both co-exist without being necessarily opposed.

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How Our Usage of Maps Has Changed Dramatically

It is amazing how our usage of maps has changed dramatically with the advent of portable electronic maps. The interesting part is that beyond the map itself as a tool, our relationship with our geographical environment is also changing dramatically too.

Dwindling Road Maps

I am of a generation that used paper maps and atlases to navigate the world, including for driving around. I notice how this mundane task (which was traditionally a highly contentious activity for couples when the significant other was reading the map) has changed.

What I find to be the most startling change of functionality is the possibility to zoom as we want, using maps as an actual multi-scale tool, in addition to knowing at any one time where one is located thanks to the GPS.

Moreover, the amount of data super-imposed on the map has increased tremendously, allow new usage of maps, and they also are increasingly updated more or less real time. We tend more and more to interpret our immediate environment not only with what we can observe, but with the added data available in our pockets, from the location of services and businesses to their rating and more detail about their operation. It is augmented reality in its infancy. And it is only the beginning.

It is amazing how with portable multi-scale, multi-layer maps our perception of the physical world around us is changing. I still hope we will able to keep relying on actual observation of reality!

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How AI-based Systems Show Substantial Limits in Addressing Extremes

In this interesting post ‘Deepnews.ai, progress report #3‘, Frederic Filloux explains the struggles to get an AI framework to actually work on a specific subject which is to check the veracity of news.

The idea is to develop an AI based application that would be able to give a rating of quality to broadcast news. As stated in the post, using a neural network the system is able to measure accuracy of a news article with a 80% accuracy. The interesting part of course is that the system fails sometimes on pieces of high accuracy and interest, but are way different from the average – and those can be highly valuable, Pulitzer-price potentials.

There are two learning points from those experiments:

  • “The mysterious and dangerous beauty, so to speak, of A.I. models is they are rarely fully understood by their creators“
  • once trained, an AI will correctly appraise information close to the average, but will be at a loss to consider data which is significantly off the charts, rating it in an absurd way – AI algorithm thus promote conformity.

AI is a great tool but its limits need to be understood. I am particularly concerned about the fact that it may force conformity into social systems.

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