applied intelligence | ai
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Lately, many of you have been reading my articles and newsletters and asking how I came up with applied intelligence (ai) — ai wasn’t a grand theoretical model, project or anything like that. It was a discovery that emerged from my Douglas Blackwell consulting practice, we identified the whitespaces of market opportunity by applying business intelligence strategies to capture opportunities. Therefore, ai was a defined empirically-based strategy development process — good, reliable trial and error.
Douglas Blackwell is not a traditional consulting company, not a conventional ‘management consultant.’ We are a relevant to-the-times, 21st-century strategy development partner for individuals and organizations who would rather lead than follow.
Authentic and sustainable value can only be created with another authentic and well-defined disciplined framework for analysis and execution. A process anchored in a foundation of relevant principles to guide the generative insights process. A dynamic thinking-to-action process ecosystem, embracing reality, reliant on a robust process firmly based on mathematics and philosophy.
Therefore, ai optimizes the scientific process to gain scientific wisdom through a holistic equation/formula that evaluates the value-added characteristics of an idea, as the interest rate value changes to find the maximum utility function of the idea.
The objective of maximum utility (MU ) is to find the maximum utility point of an idea by selecting the idea having the highest degree of utility across the most probable future world.
However, identifying the winning characteristics for the idea and teams to succeed is the challenge, because how the future world unfolds is independent of the idea itself.
Therefore, ai is a shift in thinking from the deterministic and mechanical narrow machine ‘intelligence’ first approach – to the Socratic-ai thinking approach derived from the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. In a learning method involving dialogue between teacher and student, the teacher asks open-ended questions to help the student develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter or topic. The goal is to encourage critical thinking and assessment, revision and iteration to maximize the value-adding characteristics of the idea.
The Socratic-ai approach builds the scientific mindset, which empowers users of ai to think more efficiently and effectively, to gain valuable insights that can be applied to the problem that needs to be solved.
With the ever-accelerating rate of change in information delivery systems, we must be cautious of what we accept and what is accurate. Straightforwardly, ai provides a practical integral calculus solution with intrinsic functionality for each part of the process, helping to augment human intelligence — with speed and precision.
The general idea about AI’s value is that it will automate repetitive tasks, reduce and replace workers dramatically, saving corporations money and boosting profitability. These were the same theories put forward when the PC came into play. However, we can find no credible evidence this is true. There is no evidence that fewer humans and more machines automatically create meaningful, long-term, sustainable growth.
What is clear, however, is the ones who are touting the ‘value’ of machines are the ones selling them to you.
This type of sales rhetoric happened before — during the first Industrial Revolution, which began to usher in technological equipment or industrial tools. There is the story of the Luddites (the Luddite period was between 1811–16). The narratives surrounding the Luddites are stories about people resisting the inevitability of change. Casting them as a group of ignorant trades going around destroying equipment, who were anti-progress and wanting to remain in the past. But of course, these are only stories, and similar narratives are being used today by the Big Tech aristocracy, against the less informed.
“We are confronting a series of cases where technology is being used by tech companies and executives in different industries as a means of trying to drive down wages and worsen conditions so that the entrepreneurial class can make more money.”
— Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine
Business owners, then and now, have been led to believe or want to believe that technology is one-dimensional, its main function is to reduce cost by reducing human resources, and voila, increased productivity and profitability. Such narrow and uninformed thinking combined with sales and marketing propaganda and stupid people on social media has led to this wack thinking.
We need to find a productive middle ground between business and workers relative to the application of AI for a smooth transition to the future of work. It’s always been the individual decisions people make about technology that eventually decide the future. Not the specific technology per se.
Therefore, ai strives to find that middle ground because the true value of AI is to provide more focused and effective tools for the workplace, to enhance human productive capacity and capabilities to innovate and create value for the enterprise and worker.
The most successful products will be those providing useful and reliable customer experiences — a new software paradigm shift.
Mindset shift
The one thing we know for sure is that life is uncertain, and randomness prevails. De Rerum Natura, Latin for On the Nature of Things, says that all that truly exists in this world is atoms and void. On the Nature of Things is a first-century BC poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus, who explored Epicurean physics through poetic language and metaphors. Lucretius believed that the nature of the universe is made up of atoms and void, and the perception of time is based on the movements of human purpose and deeds.
His work explored the principles of the nature of the mind and soul with explanations of sensation and thought, which are core to the human condition and the laws of our natural intelligence. So there is no divine intervention or deities, just atoms and void in space and time and we are left to our own devices to fill the void and build our world through our intellect.
Learning, therefore, is paramount to achieving, and it’s the mission of ai to help everyone fill their opportunity void. So the technology we create will serve our humanity best — not the other way around.
“Technology, as we have seen, promises to bring the forces of nature and culture under control, to liberate us from misery and toil, and to enrich our lives.”
— Albert Borgmann
The ChatGPTs of the world want us to be deterministic in seeking knowledge top-down and machine first. However, the commonsensical Socratic-ai approach encourages us to apply our intelligence instead and use AI as an augmenting tool. Moving away from the anti-intellectual plague of LLM summarizations and hallucinations…to a more focused language model approach.
Optimally, ai doesn’t seek to lead the user…to find all the ‘certain answers’ but to generate more questions, generate insights and evaluate probability. Bolstering critical thinking skills to produce high-performance thinkers that can produce winning strategies to effectively compete in the universe.
Hence, ai is a proprietary six-step (6ai) process that guides the user through a scientific strategy development process, retrieving highly relevant information from verified and reputable sources that are empirically warrantable.
The six steps are as follows:
1. Identify the Problem & Data Sourcing, and Aggregation 2. Framing the Strategic Question, Insight & Targeting 3. Idea Generation, Strategy & Planning 4. Finding the Objective Truth, Data/information Quality Control 5. Understanding the Challenges & Execution 6. Iteration and Testing Measure and Monitor
As you can see, ai is part science (machine) and part art (human,) which is why intertwining and interaction between mathematics and philosophy is critical. The pursuit of strategy deterministically is short-sighted, ignorant, and ineffective.
The Socratic-ai process works to help users see past the boundaries in their minds to discover the possibilities that exist in the void…the whitespaces of opportunity.
The Conversational Contextualization Questioning Framework (CCQF) combined with the Open-ended Probing Clarifying and Socratic (OPCS) questioning process is the backbone ecosystem driving ai.
6ai leverages focused language models because to truly maximize the productive value of language models, a higher dimensional paradigm of information retrieval, augmentation and integration is required. Context is everything! Every successful organizational strategy must be underpinned by an in-depth understanding of both macro and micro of industry, market, and the competitive environment.
6ai empowers users to find their own insights and craft their own strategies at a fraction of the cost of using consultants, advisors, and specialists; one can design anywhere from high-level multi-billion-dollar corporate strategies to personal growth strategies.
ai, standing on the shoulders of giants
applied intelligence (ai) methodology is not original thinking, it stands firmly on the shoulders of intellectual giants! Recognizing the undeniable symbiotic relationship between mathematics and philosophy to solve problems scientifically.
The ai methodology adheres to Einstein’s Process of Discovery, the same process he utilized to discover the theory of relativity, which states that space and time are not absolute but relative to the observer’s frame of reference. This means that measurements of space and time can vary depending on the observer’s position or motion, and so, too, is the development of ideas relative to the variables in their situational environments.
So, understanding the laws of physics was crucial for Einstein’s discovery of relativity. Similarly, the laws of nature underpin applied intelligence’s intellectual architecture, which separates our natural human biases and proclivity to make decisions through emotion. Particularly with those things or phenomena we don’t understand or are too lazy to research.
The theory of relativity adheres to the regularities in physics, and similarly, ai focuses on human regularities — laws of nature that govern us. Both provide an inertial frame of reference — observe, analyze, and help humans make executive decisions based on the relevant variable forces in play relative to the idea or problem looking to be solved.
Frames of reference set the framework for points of view (POV) based on the relevant facts, but not from hypotheses and nice theories. Inertia has a purpose, holds meaning and provides answers. Getting through it is critical to learning. Strategy pursuits require suffering, suffering strengthens the mind and gives you the courage; to persevere from your insights and breakthroughs.
Until we have a dependable and credible scientific process to meaningfully test ideas against the inertia forces of the marketplace regularities, we can’t make reasonable determinations as to the feasibility, viability, and potentiality of the idea being developed. This is the big purpose and mission of ai.
The Laws of Physics & Nature always apply. No matter what! We must incorporate reality into our first principles. Otherwise, we act on ego and hubris — not the maximization of our intellect…our applied intelligence.
The next intellectual giant we stand on is mathematician and philosopher Emmanuel Kant, and his theory of knowledge, a combination of thoughts and intuitions, concepts and contents that says we gain knowledge in two ways: a priori, meaning some knowledge is independent of experience and is based on pure reason alone. Second, knowledge depends on sensory experience for concept formation, which is how understanding of the world — how we get meaning! Aristotle explained the fundamentals of this over 2000 years ago when he defined human intelligence through the five senses.
Kant’s transcendental philosophy unifies empiricism and rationalism to explain authentic human intelligence. And we get similar from another great thinker, mathematician and philosopher, Rene Descartes. Descartes demonstrated the essence of intelligence by taking the complex and making it easy to understand: “I think, therefore I am,” a statement that expresses intelligence as a function of consciousness — there can’t be any doubt about that!
Awareness of the world means getting its meaning, therefore, logically, without conscious meaning, there can be no intelligence. Intelligence requires consciousness, and machines do not have consciousness. They are not organic or biological matter — just machines. What AI has is amazing memory so that amazement can fool the less observant or wilfully ignorant with the appearance of intelligence.
In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, another mathematician and philosopher, believed that pure mathematics was a hypothetical construct; “made up” of its own rules to validate its theories and inferences — essentially ChatGPT/LLMs.
Also, neural networks theory is a construct theory that relies on human biology to explain its machine learning theory. However, the theory falls short and is self-contradictory because it only focuses on brain chemistry and not the whole body. But as cognitive and computational neuroscientist Anil Seth puts it, “We are intelligent because of our bodies.”
MIT professor and the father of modern linguistics, the great public intellectual Noam Chomsky, says that “we don’t know the world and don’t understand nature and its restraints. Too often we accept things that can’t ever logically be true,” laying out how ChatGPT/LLMs teach us nothing! “It’s a made-up language that violates every principle of language, so there is no point in even looking at its deficiencies because it does nothing! And all this is doing is wasting a lot of energy in California.” Using incredible amounts of data to find superficial regularities, things that a five-year-old can do, tells us nothing, which is what ChatGPT gives us — nothing!
No amount of brute force capital can circumvent the laws of nature. And throwing $500 billion at the wrong problem, i.e., the new “Stargate Project” the tech bros are now hyping up via the puppet-stooge president, Donald Trump, still won’t get them to AGI — science fiction.
More and more data and data centres won’t do anything for humanity, only for the billionaires. It is a shameful and an incredible waste of time, money and energy resources.
The new tech aristocracy-industry oligarchy and its billionaires running America have purposefully made AGI too big to fail, the $500 billion buys them time and keeps large LLM vendors going. The AGI fantasy beast must continue to be fed along with the supporting cast of lower industry characters and its VC courtiers.
The future of AI is not about increasingly bigger models; bigger doesn’t mean better rings true, so it’s about purposeful cognitive models using smaller, more focused, and higher-quality data and insights. This is the authentic version of AI.
There are two fundamental approaches to AI. The first is exclusionary and impractical — the pursuit of making AI competitive, surpassing and replacing human intelligence.
The second is inclusive and human-centric, with a true understanding of the limitations of AI. This approach does not pursue any alternative to human intelligence, it takes an augmenting approach instead, utilizing AI to amplify human intelligence. 6ai uses generative AI’s narrow “intelligence” practically, purposefully and responsibly to augment human intelligence capacity, capabilities, and ingenuity.
There is no data about the future; all data comes from the past, so you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward, says Steve Jobs. The best ideas do not come from top-down theories, and they don’t come fully formed. They develop as you work on them with applied intelligence and relentless iteration. The six steps is a framework process to generate and monetize opportunities out of the whitespace.
Good decisioning requires a defined process and relentless iteration, and as you gain more insight the better you become at applying your intelligence to effectively design winning strategies. Knowledge compounds and provides optionality and opportunities.
6ai Technologies –Empowering Strategy for Human Progress.
