Power, Purpose & Prosperity
The Struggle Between Technology & Humanity
“Those who cannot remember the past,” philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “are condemned to repeat it.” Today when we think about artificial intelligence (AI) we must do so with history firmly in mind and see AI in the historical context, of the evolution of automation technology. Today, many have gotten caught up in narratives around AI, the most popular one, is that one day AI will become smarter than us…eventually replacing us. But that can only happen if we let it…our choices matter. AI is an effective platform to be used for many things, it increases our productivity so adapting to its helpful utility functions can be extraordinarily useful. However, that doesn’t mean it will or can serve humanity well. AI, therefore, should be seen for what it is, a productivity tool that is realigning the factors of production. In the end, our human progress will depend on our decisions; about how we choose to use technology and who we choose to make the important decisions about it.
Having a clear and focused strategy in a collaboratively way toward AI and business is critically important to society’s progress. Without a well-defined strategy whatever we do will be lacking and failure will always be lurking. So strategy is the most important thing! Without a comprehensive strategy, we engage in fantasy, and in the digital era using data and AI to formulate strategy is vitally important. The historical evidence also tells us that it is a mistake to believe that technology/automation has always been the broad-based solution that has advanced humanity. Good and coherent strategy coupled with innovation and ingenuity is what history shows has advanced civilizations. Good strategy has done everything from winning wars to effectively feeding expanding civilizations.
So how we think about technology and decide to use it is what determines our experiences — our successes and failures. To date, AI has been misdirected away from bolstering humanity; we’ve not utilized it effectively enough to craft our desired experiences around it. Instead, we’ve allowed others to decide for us and we’ve driven AI with a Plato-like fascination, with an impossible language, which has separated us into two streams of existence. One of human general intelligence and the other of deep learning machine language intelligence.
We’ve been led to worship AI because others are telling us to and we’ve blindly accepted their technologies and themes, which have served the interests of big tech corporations. Not humanity’s. We’ve unwittingly been driving ourselves directly into uncontrollable, where now, AI’s perception of the universe is what governs our minds.
AI has been mainly directed by the business models of a few dominant tech companies, (i.e. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, to name a few usual suspects) supported by the venture capital (VC) community. Together, have locked down government and policymakers to their technologies and their corporate vision of the future. These few corporations, their billionaires and their supporting cast are building AI technology ecosystems in their own financial interests. And so, a continuation along this path will mean that ultimately, the machine, not humans, will one day set the standards for humanity. Handing over power to deep learning’s impossible language machine will allow it to make humanity’s most important decisions for it. However, it’s already well begun…via social media addictive algorithms.
In the timely release of the new book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity; from the bestselling co-author of Why Nations Fail and the bestselling co-author of 13 Bankers. Economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson deliver a bold and factual representation of history, countering the disingenuous false narratives and myths around technology and human progress. The book demolishes the prevailing technology is everything narrative — how it alone is responsible for civilizations’ progress. The authors propose ways in which digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing as well as private profit. Using historical evidence, they show how in the past technology coupled with the right strategies, has expanded economies and bolstered civilizations, adding significant value to humanity.
A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.
applied intelligence | ai
applied intelligence offers the digital solution platform for that necessary value enhancement of human flourishing. Specifically, the ap3 software platform allows humans to internalize their enterprise strategy development process, putting the power in their hands by letting them decide how to utilize data science and AI ecosystems in their best interests.
Going against the status quo has always been the driving force behind successful entrepreneurship and invention. So why are we stifling and shifting away from what has worked for thousands of years? By bowing down to big tech and its billionaires who design products only to support their market share growth? Why are we allowing ourselves to let go of our visions for our enterprises and world, to adhere to the billionaire’s business goals? When you see a company like OpenAI with a product like ChatGPT, understand that its core funders are among the likes of Microsoft, Elon Musk, etc. So it is no surprise that Microsoft, for example, has a new product hitting the market called “Copilot.”
Microsoft’s new 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with a company’s internal data from Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and Microsoft Power Platform. The Business Chat feature works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts.
Copilot essentially runs ChatGPT as its new main feature. However, Copilot only marginally increases 365's admin efficiencies. Copilot is grounded and limited to a corpus of internalized data, basically a souped-up admin tool. However, the competitive enterprise of the future requires a bold dynamic function that gathers global demand-side market data and creates insights to drive strategy and growth. In the new economy, admin efficiency gains are not enough to compete in a globalized world! Demand-side market information to build effective growth strategies is what is required for the 21st-century enterprise to compete and win. Strategy leads optimizes innovation, and applied intelligence delivers an inherent risk management function to strategy development. Therefore, the intrinsic strategy process, not ChatGPT/Copilot or technology…is what meaningfully increases growth and sustainable value creation for the well-informed enterprise of the future.
The ap3 platform puts the power and process in your hands, to turn insight into strategy. Strategy-focused algorithms combined with human general intelligence produce relevant enterprise, organizational, and institutional strategies, you can bank on. It does not operate like the superficial and unreliable ChatGPT, a toy, that does not know what the hell it’s talking about, but just makes stuff up. ap3 does advanced research and is transparent in providing the sources of the information. ChatGPT does not do that, and deep learning systems were never designed or trained for that. Therefore, by applying ai | ap3 as your main internalized strategy operating system, you can be confident that it knows what it’s talking about.
Winning in business in the digital era requires making decisioning with enormous speed and precision, the more you can effectively internalize that decisioning process, the more value the organization creates for itself. And at a fraction of the cost of having to hire useless, no-nothing consultants.
Strategy is agnostic, it can be applied to all decisioning. The digital era is no different. So, all things being equal, if everyone has access to the same technology…information resources…then where is the advantage? Don’t be fooled, the consultants only come with their usual cut-and-paste template strategies, and the wet behind-the-ear recent university graduates, who no absolutely nothing about your business and life too for that matter. So what you’re paying for are nice PowerPoint presentations that have also been given to everyone else in your 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. (Forbes)
Acclaimed professor Mariana Mazzucato, exposes the consulting industry, in her most recent book titled THE BIG CON — How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies. The overuse of consultants by private businesses and governments around the world “stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes efforts to fight climate change.”
Just recently, the headline was, Microsoft strikes $2 billion AI partnership with KPMG, over the next five years to co-develop cloud and generative AI tools. Rival consulting giants like PwC and Accenture have also made large-scale commitments toward AI-powered changes. The big picture… market domination, control and stifling of innovation, product diversification! Only more different shades of grey! Rushing to embrace generative AI’s impossible language, since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched its capabilities — the herd is moving. Again, the intensification of multi-layered, intertwined oligopoly companies, billionaires and millionaire executives working 100% in their financial interests, to zombiefy the future of work. Resulting in the stagnation of creativity, choice, and entrepreneurship, toward bolstering the ever omnipresent dominance of the big-tech aristocracy.
Power and Progress…studies of the last 1000 years of human socioeconomic development show that the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organized, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.
The proper telling of history shows that everything comes down to power! Those who have it and those who don’t; and the only power we really have, is our power to choose what we do next.
Economic development tended to enrich and empower small elites while generating few benefits for agricultural workers: peasants lacked political and social power, and the path of technology followed the vision of a narrow elite.
Like it or not, the reality is that many of us allow ourselves to become willfully ignorant peasants to technology — controlled by big tech corporations. We are reactionary and don’t engage in any critical thinking, for example, just the other day a couple of oligopoly corporations and their billionaires engaged in a reshuffling of power and people. Facebook/Meta, took advantage of the disaster of a takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. “Our vision is to take the best parts of Instagram and create a new experience for text, ideas and discussing what’s on your mind,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, with the launch of his new product Threads. However, there is nothing new here, just Twitter people who were fired by Musk moving to Meta and then creating a version of Instagram that is text-focused rather than image focused.
But in typical fashion, like mesmerized sheep, the peasants of social media flocked, and 30 million downloads on the first day was the result. The blind herd never stops to ask if this is useful to me in my life. When we don’t apply our intelligence, our internal ai, we willfully throw ourselves under the control of addictive algorithms and become suckers to the financial musings of billionaires. We end up worshipping them. They become your Gods and the social media you read every day becomes your bible.
Another example of billionaires and oligopoly big tech wanting to control the universe is the recent passage of Canada’s Bill C-81. The law simply requires tech companies like Google and Meta to compensate Canadian news organizations for the content that appears on their platforms. Pretty fair and straightforward business, right? But in response to the passing of the bill, Google and Meta threatened to remove the news links. Again, big tech wants control of everything, particularly things that affect their bottom line. And of course the aristocracy believes, they can’t ever be regulated.
The benefits of tools, automation, and industrialization have been shown over the past 1000 years to enhance prosperity by expanding economies through entrepreneurship. As old jobs faded due to new innovations, technology and automation served as expansive value creators— new jobs, new skills, more research and opportunities, and new industries were created that once couldn’t be imagined. This has been the progressive value-added that technology has provided over the many centuries. Today, however, the Plato-like fascination with deep learning’s impossible language is regressive to humanity. Never before have so many humans worked so hard and unsuspectingly to replace themselves, to destroy their democracies.
Capitalism can’t authentically work if technology is dominated by a few tech autocrats and their court. Dictatorial corporations that are run mainly by white men where everything is plain vanilla — is a very unhappy and dull place to live. In such a machine-driven universe, diversity, innovation and creativity do not exist. Vision and authentic invention are no more, grey covers the entire universe, and here, is where uncontrollable AI thrives.
And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.
Power and Progress have exposed the false narrative that technology automatically equals progress, a narrative that is a self-serving and convenient myth. Propagated by a huge technology industrial complex, its acolytes, which include government, media/journalists, academia, and the big consulting firms (the likes of McKinsey & Company, PWC etc.,) are the foot soldier Stormtroopers.
Big tech has even taken the souls of higher learning, universities like Stanford are no longer places of higher learning and discovery, but a place of singularity and conformity, pumping out cone-head intelligence workers for big tech, in different shades of grey. Bending to bogus VC valuation schemes, underpinned by the oligopoly mafia, doing nothing more than playing a pump-and-dump start-up funding game — it’s a sport now.
Is it any wonder we continue to see scams like Elizabeth Homes, a former fake biotechnology entrepreneur convicted of fraud in connection to her blood-testing company, Theranos. And Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, also known by the initials SBF, CEO of cryptocurrency bullshit company FTX; is another fraudster who was touted by the very elite of tech funders. The tech phone book continues to get filled with names and stories like these.
Therefore, we are seeing the re-emergence and rise of the new tech-aristocracy — kings and oligopolies…which run the world.
An oligopoly is a market in which control over an industry lies in the hands of a few large sellers who own a dominant share of the market. Oligopolistic markets can be described as having homogenous products, few market participants and inelastic demand for the products in those industries. Aristocratic means belonging to or typical of the aristocracy…where the wealthy few collaborate to dominate a society economically and socially.
Conversely, ai | ap3 positions itself as a disruptor, an intrinsic cultivator of countervailing powers of authentic capitalism and entrepreneurship, with non-adherence to the herd. ai | ap3 offers the thinking among us, those who don’t want a right-wing wack job like Elon Musk telling us how many characters we can express ourselves with. There is a great need for a return of courage and freedom, back to real capitalism and authentic entrepreneurship that serves humanity best. Not the Frankenstein that is developing and blanketing us.
Douglas Blackwell’s proprietary applied intelligence platform turns insight into strategy, to effectively be applied to the right value-advancing tasks. Leaders can build their organizations’ capacity and capabilities by internalizing the strategy development process and doing so incredibly better.
So the applied intelligence approach calls for the use of data science/AI as an augmenting tool to general intelligence (not calling for consultants,) in finding the most relevant information for subject matter problem-solving. By perceiving things in comprehensive complexes of empirical facts, ap3 finds certain general features and examines and extracts them into an insightful formulation engine to build actionable strategies. It intrinsically interweaves human intelligence with artificial intelligence to maximize value creation for organizations. It solves the proverbial business transformation gap problem — the transitioning solution necessary for going into the 5th Industrial Revolution (5IR,) where human-AI collaboration represents the future of work.
So ai is the holistic process of a countervailing force against uncontrollable AI, it represents freedom! And ap3 is the Insight Engine giving users the freedom and power to build effective organizational strategies and manage risk simultaneously. Its sweet spot is providing the value functions available from big data and artificial intelligence along with the executive decisioning functions of general intelligence. Clients are guided through a disciplined six-step applied intelligence process that retrieves relevant information from verified, reputable and reliable sources for valuable insight.
…ai is agnostic, built on Einstein’s process of discovery & concluding; avoidance of priori hypothesis…starting with preconceived notions or ideas. It comprises data science and AI-powered research capabilities and harnesses computational engines that can identify a corpus of information: emerging innovations, research reports and journals, scientific and academic publications, financial information, investment news and research…i.e. Bloomberg, discoveries, mega-demand trends, ways and systems, supply chain optimization opportunities and enormously more!
It’s a real-time functionally-intelligent utility built to work on comprehensive complexes of empirical facts, that can identify certain general features of information and knowledge that are well sourced, verified and can be extracted as reliable.
The task of ap3, therefore, is finding the maximum utility of an idea across all possible situations in any presented future world scenario, and formulating strategies accordingly to meet and maximize the idea’s identified objectives. Related to its success fundamentals because regardless of how good an idea sounds, how the future world unfolds is independent of that idea itself. So well-researched, informed and formulated strategy development is the common denominator for success.
The following figure shows the representation that depicts the utility of the idea (represented as ai) as the interest rate value changes.
Below is a representation of the ai | ap3 platform process flow:
So ai gives us a choice about our future — either to design the world we envision or adhere to the one being dictated to us. Everyone has access to the same technology but it’s how one decides to use it that is most material. Douglas Blackwell doesn’t believe in participating in the future, we believe in designing the future. Accordingly, we must urgently find our way out of the AI matrix, and to the decision-making table, otherwise, just a few hubristic billionaires will continue to make the most important decisions, for us.
In the end, the optimal choice is not between ai or AI but choosing the most effective way to innovate and create value for ourselves in the 21st century. To decide who we are and how we want to live. Our irreplaceable and unique factors of being human remain the supreme and steadfast reality in the universe. Thus, we must become emboldened by our humanity, and not allow ourselves to become willfully ignorant, lazy, fearful, and uninformed about expressing our individuality and applying the power of our general intelligence. AI is special for its unbelievable unhuman-like processing power, but ai, understands the dangers of improper AI fascination development, and one-dimensional usage. Therefore, the risk to humanity grows exponentially and becomes an existential threat when we put aside our general intelligence and rely too much on technology. This environment becomes fertile ground for uncontrollable AI! We must never forget that humans are the creators of all technologies in the universe, created to serve us and not the other way around.
