A Platform for Change…
ai | ap3 — software solutions that empower human value creation
The Stoics believed that the meaning or purpose of life is the pursuit of knowledge and virtue and that our happiness stems from our intelligence to craft the lives we want to live. Separating oneself, therefore, from cursory, emotional herd-like thinking is the first step towards creating a unique value proposition for oneself in the universe. And so, with all the hysteria surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) these days about how it will replace humans. It would be wise to step back from all the noise and survey the landscape critically, and skeptically. So, those who take the time to survey history know that the hysteria and hype at the moment surrounding AI is nothing new in history. The prudent thing to do is to focus on what you can control — your mind — behaviour; and when it comes to technology just remember that technology is simply an extension of our minds — our metaphysical selves.
Technology advancement is always about change, and with that comes tensions due to uncertainty. AI has brought the world to another inflection point, however, this is normal in the evolution of capitalism — capitalism evolves through technology. Some collateral damage from that evolution is growing income inequality, wage pressures, downsizing and cutting of jobs, even in the tech or knowledge worker sector.
Just the other day British Telecom (BT) announced that it is set to axe up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 as it pushes into AI, more than 40% of its global employee base. 30,000 of those eliminated will be consultants. This tells us that the more artificial intelligence and machine learning are integrated into the work environment, the less of a need for “subject matter experts,” i.e., consultants. The company said the cuts aim to benefit from a broader move to “digitize its business and take advantage of new technology, such as artificial intelligence.”
All past industrial revolutions saw similar labour adjustments, yet perhaps not as dramatic as this 5th Industrial Revolution (5IR) happening now. Nevertheless, while it might seem that capitalism is harmful as people are losing their jobs, the efficiency process via technology remains the most proven system for civilizations to prosper. The reality is that capitalism is simply an extension of the Sophistication of Self-Preservation | SSP — where the human condition dictates that people act in their self-interest. All of which are inherently driven by entrepreneurship, innovation and technology: capitalism.
So the future capitalism we develop will very much be dependent on the technologies we choose to develop and how we decide to use them in our everyday lives. So, humanity and business are one, can’t ever be separated and are very much interwoven into the fabric of our civilization.
Technology is conceived in the mind and brought into existence with our actions. So I would not panic, the arch of evolution is long and humans have a knack for not replacing themselves.
Digital Anthropologist Giles Crouch in his recent article titled: The Tension Between Business & Humanity in the Digital Age, makes the point that Cryptocurrency, for example, is not about technology. What it is is a stance against the current financial system, the big banks, unfairly taking financial advantage of people through the movement of their money. The technology behind crypto he says is just an extension of our feelings, which enables our argument to be expressed.
In the final analysis, humans will ultimately decide about the level of AI usage in their lives, and the value we put on it relative to our jobs. Businesses will align with the demand trends as always, and society will continue to evolve because if we allow machines to do everything, what will be our purpose for living — life will have no meaning. History has thought us that things might be confusing and uncertain in the present, but civilizations will continue to evolve in their best interest, and technology will continue to be utilized to serve the human interest.
Technology is an augmenting tool
Before moving along, let’s put a practical definition of technology out there for reference. Technology refers to the tools, technics, innovations and processes humans create to solve problems and achieve their practical goals. Technology, therefore, fundamentally is about the evolution of humanity. Humans are the most unique animals, and our intelligence and ability to apply that intelligence in our self-interest is the most defining characteristic of our species.
So technology essentially serves the needs of our biological and emotional selves. Stone tools, for example, were the earliest technologies to serve those human needs — to construct shelter, hunt and gather for sustenance; fight other tribes for survival or more land to expand power. Societies have advanced because they have been able to apply their intelligence to innovation, finding the capacity to do more by applying human intelligence.
Technology, therefore, has multiple possibilities and meanings as an extension of self, which are related to the decider’s psychological makeup, past experiences, culture and belief systems. Scientist Pehipe Almedia, has said that the “long-term thriving technologies are the ones that have strong potential to be used in multiple ways, be it to elevate and heal or to seize and destroy.” So, it’s less about “technology” and more about us and how we apply our intelligence.
Nevertheless, humans can be overly emotional about decisions, and when those decisions are driven by fear, making good critical thinking decisions become more of a challenge. So, emotional and intuitive thinking opens us up to putting the cart before the horse when it comes to intelligent technology decisions— putting the technology (cart) ahead of the people (horse.) This type of functional, linear thinking often leads us down the wrong development path — causes us stress and anxiety. It is also very one-dimensional, focused more on cause and consequence, and is symptoms-oriented and short-term in thinking.
With change, some see opportunity but for others, change represents fear and anxiety and the risk of potential for loss. So as managers or executives of organizations and governments, providing visibility and communicating how the organization intends to go forward is important to building inclusive organizations. Macroeconomic changes, market dynamic changes, technology changes, sector changes, regulatory changes, etc., all go into the change management equation. This is why strategy development must include risk management too.
Leen Goriseen in her book Natural Intelligence (2020) says that a shift towards design and developmental thinking would be better, and is more naturally aligned with ecological patterns in nature, relative to survival and adaptation. Hence, a disciplined strategic value-creating methodology modelled within the reality of nature would add more intrinsic value to problem-solving. It can’t be AI alone!
Accordingly, what is happening today around AI can be seen as short-sighted, short-terminism. We are failing to think critically and not looking at the big picture in the context of history, and the evolution of civilization. Our applied intelligence is what makes the world and applying it to how we see our lives being lived is how we find our happiness. Which is the whole purpose and meaning of life.
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” — Aristotle
ChatGPT, for example, is all the rage today but just because the ignorance of the herd is moving we should not be reactionary; applying our intelligence effectively to artificial intelligence must be our move! Control of the technology we created to serve our humanity and our individualism, we must never lose sight of — it is always about control in the end! All things being equal, ChatGPT does not give us any advantage over others, because everyone has access to the same ChatGPT technology — nothing is ever that easy!
So where is the advantage of using ChatGPT? The advantage comes when we apply our human intelligence: our individuality, creativity, innovation, perseverance, resilience, spirit, drive, and courage. Again, the optimal move is to couple the capabilities of AI and big data with our authentic human selves, to optimize the outputs that serve our humanity best. So, technology serves us best when we remain in full control of it!
AI and the future of work
Recently, the “Godfather of AI,” Harry Geoffrey Hinton quit Google to speak his mind on artificial intelligence, saying that it may soon grow smarter than — and even manipulate — humans. The artificial intelligence pioneer’s work on neural networks — the method that programs and teaches A.I. to process data in a way “similar” to how the human brain works. Neural networks is the basis of Hinton’s work and what OpenAI/ChatGPT and Google Bard stem from.
The neural networks concept is predicated on trying to imitate human biology function. However, neuroscience at this point still does not know how the human brain really works — about the science of consciousness. Machines are not sentient beings and can’t think naturally either, like humans. Humans have consciousness, feelings, biology, and those facts can’t ever be gotten around.
According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex. Seth is also the co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness. He points out that humans do not perceive things as they are, rather we are predictors. Constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, we experience the world and the self with, through, and because of our bodies. AI is also a predicting machine but can’t predict as humans do.
So, the moral of the story is one of simple math and biology— the mighty independent variable in the equation, is a human being. The body exists entwined in nature. The human cannot be authentically replicated. Full stop! Neural networks are only a cheap theoretical conceptual imitation that people buy into because they believe whatever someone with a PhD says. We buy into their constructive illusions. So neural networks can present all the theorizing or philosophical math it wants, but in the end, they can’t ever get around the mighty independent variable of the human body.
So the fact that humans exist in a state of nature: physical-biological matter, real space and time, all those facts factor into human authentic experiences that affect the decision-making process. So unless it is a real human, it’s just artificial! The metaphysical existence of the human body, with all its chemistry, is connected with nature and cannot be duplicated by a machine. The connection with nature and the application of human intelligence in nature is the most awesome thing about humans.
Therefore, when it comes to transformation and the 21st century, people act authentically human, acting on emotion and self-interest, susceptible to hype and fear. This human reality effectively is part of the human decision-making process.
Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology
According to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article titled Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology: Companies are pouring millions into “digital transformation” initiatives — but a high percentage of those fail to pay off. That’s because companies put the cart before the horse, focusing on a specific technology (“We need a machine-learning strategy!”) rather than doing the hard work of first fitting the change into the overall business strategy.
The same research article also found that digital transformation (DT) risk is the #1 concern of executives — 70% of all DT initiatives do not reach their goals. Of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on DT last year, it was estimated that over $800 billion went to waste. The main reason for the many failures is that leaders invest in the specific technology first without having a real business strategy in place. They get caught up running with the herd mentality, and when you combine the fear of being left behind, it often leads to uninformed and poor decision-making.
The second major reason for failure according to HBR, leaders often fail to leverage their inside talent — internal human resources. “They seek, instead, transformation by bringing in an army of outside consultants,” who run bogus cut-and-paste, one-size-fits-all con jobs about having the relevant expertise. So instead of relying on experienced and knowledgeable insiders who have real skin in the game, leaders transfer responsibility to wet behind the ear, recent business school grads who know absolutely nothing about their business.
Also, a Forbes article supports HBR research — Forbes says about the nine hundred billion-dollar big consulting industry: businesses are better off internalizing their strategy process, consultants are basically “telling you what you already know,” and much of the information we can find ourselves.
The article goes on the say that the people who are doing the bulk of the work are fresh out of college (like I was) or business school, with little-to-no work experience. They know absolutely nothing coming in about your industry, company, or particular issue. More interestingly, the director or partner on the project is not a subject matter expert either. Consultants can never actually make the tough decision. No outsider can ever truly understand the needs of the various stakeholders. No outsider has as much at stake personally and professionally.
To cap it off, acclaimed professor Mariana Mazzucato in her most recent book titled THE BIG CON — How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies; says that the overuse of consultants, both by private businesses and governments around the world “stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes efforts to fight climate change.” In short, big consulting weakens organizations and societies! So, like HBR and Forbes, Mazzucato is also for the development of organizations’ value creation through internal human resources — doing it themselves.
Professor Mazzucato goes on to explain how many governments have stopped investing in their capacity, and many, particularly in the developing world, the former colonies, have never properly invested in their capacity and capabilities. Instead, they’ve remained limp, infantilized and dependent on their former colonizers — through the likes of the UN, IMF, development banks, aid agencies, philanthropic organizations, and Western neoliberal institutions and academics. Dependent on everyone and everything except themselves! They have become fragile, nonresident, and as she puts it, “one group of actors has ridden the wave of this, the underlying depletion of capabilities, to earn huge sums of money: the consulting industry.”
Consulting companies, such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting and Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY are hired by governments, businesses and other organizations to perform different types of tasks on their behalf. And most of the time the consultants are the highest paid at the table, so when it comes to the developing countries after they pay the consultants, corruption takes its usual slice of course, there isn’t anything left. Like a virus, consultant contracts span the entire value chain and sectors, across countries and continents, affecting all levels of society. The industry has contributed to and directly created dysfunctions in government and businesses around the world, but nowhere is it so pervasive than in the former colonial nations. Leaving whole governments timid and hollowed out, unprepared and incapable of building economies to participate or prosper in the new global economy.
In the end, the cumulative effect of using consultants “stunts innovation and capacity development and learning, undermines democratic accountability and obfuscates the consequences of political and corporate actions.” According to Prof. Mazzucato. People pay the price through wasted resources and government and businesses make decisions with impunity and no transparency. This Big Con imperils whole societies.
The advent of the digital age offers us an opportunity to escape, rethink, and do better. Technology, particularly big data and artificial intelligence can be better applied to society through the applied intelligence process, to build economies that are fit for purpose. The applied intelligence framework, for example, will allow developing political economies to set their own climate objectives and integrate them into their growth agenda. No longer beholden to neo-colonialism funding, to do projects directed by the West, and in their interest, to facilitate their climate accords.
New thinking, new technologies and systems are required to rid developing political economies of consultants who suck up access to much-needed knowledge-ecosystem networks, and capital. Governments must revive their public sector by investing in its capacity. Doing better and creating value for stakeholders must be the main priority objectives.
So leaders must take a human approach to transformation and put people and strategy FIRST! Because people are smart and ambitious enough and once acquiring the necessary knowledge, and when given the right tools and opportunities, they can accomplish great things. So, let’s focus then on a new paradigm of thinking and action from the inside out, that empowers people through applied intelligence. |
ai | ap3, solutions
Douglas Blackwell Inc., proprietary applied intelligence (ai) process coupled with its ap3-software, offers organizations a disciplined strategy-building solution for winning in the digital age. Human intelligence intertwined with artificial intelligence delivers powerful functionality and outputs. Leaders of businesses, institutions and governments alike can now enhance their organizations’ value, and do great things by internalizing the strategy development process.
The applied intelligence approach calls for the use of data science/AI as augmenting tools to human intelligence, not replacing it, in finding the most relevant information for subject matter knowledge, in any given domain. By perceiving things in comprehensive complexes of empirical facts, certain general features can be found and extracted, becoming helpful to us in the formulation of strategy and vetting “good” ideas rapidly, and with precision.
Our ai method comprises AI-powered research capabilities combined with computational engines that will identify emerging innovations, mega-demand trends and supply chain optimization. Identify risks and rewards scenarios to zero in on finding growth opportunities out of the whitespace. The goal is to select and manage those worthy ideas and rank them to the highest potential for success across all probable future worlds.
The 21st-century business environment requires agile decision-making, rapid prototyping and flat decisioning structures. With speed and accuracy underline the process. However, the process of digital transformation itself is inherently uncertain, and having a risk management mechanism in place is essential. Business culture must align with business intelligence and this requires empowering software to do so.
We can only move forward and succeed with strategy by seeking the objective truth as a basis for making good informed decisions. In the digital era, with all the noise and the pontificating crowd and where ideology and ego trump facts and critical thinking; applied intelligence…ap3…is the choice for serious decision-makers, the authentic leaders — trailblazers.
…ap3 provides insight into sourcing and development, strategy and planning, execution and measurement, and iteration and testing. And a keen understanding that “garbage-in is garbage-out.”
So ai | ap3 is an intrinsic quantitative process that aligns with digital transformation — driven by logic and relentless iteration, is coherent and empirically warrantable — a resource that guides you through a scientific six-step applied intelligence process producing a set of viable strategic options for management to consider.
Effective strategy building:
In every case, the strategy for building an effective strategy is the same: splitting the complex but continuous problem into infinitely many similar pieces, and then solving them separately and putting them back together.
Accordingly, the HBR research article also emphasizes that the future of a successful organization rests in being driven by disciplined strategy development and technology, in that order. So the applied intelligence quantitative research insight gathering and strategy formulation delivers the right processes and technology at the right time! It is agnostic and can be applied to any problem in any domain.
The ai — applied intelligence process is based on Einstein’s discovery principles & concluding. And Einstein’s process of discovery forms the basis of ai — the process avoids the very human instinct of bias, priori hypothesis…going out and cherry-picking data to back up preconceived ideas. Einstein explained that principles are the driving force behind discoveries, innovation, and strategy and that mathematics is necessary to make things precise and informed on the conceptualized phenomena being examined. Enabling us to make useful predictions about optimal decisioning.
…ai helps in finding the maximum utility of an idea
So characteristics and the utility of an idea matter, and this is core to the insight algorithms and paramount to the ap3 Insight Engine.
Ultimately, management is presented with a set of optimized winning strategies from the insight machine, highly relevant to the times, based on facts, and creating a confidence-building road map for informed business decisions.
Social impacts and transformation
Examining the previous transformative industrial revolutions of the past, human displacement can not ever be prevented. However, it can be mitigated or limited if these transitions can be well thought out. Social impact considerations, then, must also be factored into the transition equation.
The trailblazing CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff has said that business is the greatest platform for change and that solving social problems is at the very heart of business success. “In the future, profits and progress will no longer be sustainable unless they serve the greater good.”
Benioff goes on to say that, intelligent businesses that run strategy first have figured out the need for a set of guiding principles because“after all, a company is fundamentally made up of people, not things, joined together on a shared mission.”
Politics and economics go hand-in-hand! Politicians make economic policy decisions based on their political ideology, self-interest, and expediency. Developing countries and their governments, for example, — political economy leaders simply can’t get around the fact that economic development and technology transitions require a sophisticated combination of technology and human intelligence. And at the same time, human displacement and inequality are a part of the socioeconomic evolutionary cycle. So these negative social impacts can’t simply be swept under the rug, problems must be dealt with and ap3 provides a social impact analysis function output for that.
The utilization of good technology/software presents an opportunity and a platform for change! Moving away from the paternalistic and debilitating dependency culture — ripping power from the grasp of big consultants and neoliberal Western institutions, academics who have no skin in the game is the optimal chess move.
The language of mathematics is the truth so math is most reliable in finding out the objective truth. The equation below is the equation powering ap3:
What the equation does, based on basic differential calculus and physics principles, is it cuts through the inertia by removing the strategy process from the hands of ideology, intuition and ego. Getting to the objective of showing us the quickest most efficient path forward; i.e., how we get from here to there!
And like in mathematics confidence is built through proofs along the way, and adherence to science is the best verifier of imagination — innovation, and the creator of things that make the world.
Therefore, ap3 is essentially a proving equation — a rigorous process which unequivocally confirms the truth behind ideas or strategies. It handles the data and the complexities and turns it into simplicity. Every step completed is an integral step in proving strategy — breaking things down into smaller parts and making them easier to solve — reassembling the answer into a solution that feels miraculous.
A properly constructed strategy is reliable and scalable — ap3 will find things we’ve never seen before or things that existed but could not have been conceptualized, nor quantified. The process allows us to test out theories and see if it is real or not, or can be practically applied in reality.
Going back to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once again…he tells us that the secret to his two-hundred-plus billion-dollar company’s success is its focus on empowering people which enhances its market value. Benioff understands that technology is about helping real people pursue their ambitions, upgrading their skills and enhancing their individualism to live happy lives.
In an ever-evolving universe, no one has yet to corner the market on good ideas. So we should not outsource our potential to consultants, especially when we have the technology to do it ourselves internally! Don’t be fooled by the hype surrounding OpenAI /ChatGPT, nothing is ever that easy. Be skeptical and take no one’s word for it. How we decide to apply our intelligence to the tasks and technologies that serve us will ultimately determine our future trajectory. The ap3-platform provides vectors of take-off in your very own sandbox; to empower, transact, innovate and create value. A committed and courageous platform for change in the human interest is what ap3 is! Flexible, non-static and agnostic, dynamic and seamless enough to be integrated into future advancing technologies that help advance human civilization.
