Self-Reliance and Value Creation
Managing the Mind Towards Caribbean Wealth Creation
Perry C. Douglas
Freud compared the human mind to a large iceberg where the conscious mind represented only about 5%, the tip of the iceberg, those decisions made in consciousness. The other 95% is unseen, below the water, the subconscious mind. However, that 95% influences most of our daily decisions and judgments. According to Freud, our feelings, behaviour, cultural beliefs, biases, motives, and decisions are most heavily influenced by our past experiences which are stored in our subconscious. So, the critical decisions we make are made more by emotion and intuition rather than by intellect, reason, or logic.
The unconscious mind has enormous processing power and instinct, allowing us to live our daily lives without thinking much about it. We don’t have to tell ourselves not to run into walls, how to drive to a destination without using a GPS, or how to avoid dangerous predicaments, we don’t think about how to breathe, or chew food because the unconscious mind does all that for us, guided by our past experiences.
Research tells us that the average person makes 35 000 decisions a day, most are economic or linked to socioeconomic situations. Therefore, economics-based decisions are the most made decisions in peoples’ lives. Hence, life is intrinsically always about economics, first and foremost. Behavioural economics and neuroeconomics are disciplines that concern themselves with how people make economic decisions, and how they assess and manage risk. The conscious mind (the 5%) information processing system only has so much capacity, holding as much information as can fit onto a posted note, a visualization analogy given by Dr Renne Richardson Gosline; MIT Sloan School of Management. Where she is the Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Initiative on The Digital Economy, and a Black woman, which is important to mention. Dr Richardson Gosline is an expert on the intersection between behavioural economics and technology and its implications on cognitive bias. She is also a leading thinker on the science of digital brand strategy. Therefore, she provides critical insight into how our social structures and technology interact, and how it affects performance and self-perception.
In the case of AI, it is available to us as an augmentation to human intelligence. We simply need help from intelligent technologies to perform optimally and to compete successfully with the various tasks in this technologically driven world. Dr Gosline calls it the need for “The Outsourced Mind,” and provides great insight as to why and how enterprises, organizations, and developing nations, must utilize AI and machine learning technologies to succeed.
Outsourcing the mind is simply recognizing a scientific fact, that we need more conscious processing power, awareness, and analysis to perform. Caribbean leadership must put the primitive nature of ‘ego’ aside and focus on the efficacy of science, and not waste time with counterproductive theories in economic development discourse that are primarily driven by emotion and wokeness. In this economic universe, like it or not, your worth hinges on the value you can create. For Caribbean nations, the same is true, you must create value if you want to achieve wealth, influence, and relevance in the world. Forget about all those nonsense narratives about global racial equality and fairness. Don’t be a sucker, those things are not human rights, they must be created through the value you create yourself in the universe. It’s always about value through the sophistication of self-preservation! Which are entrepreneurship and self-reliance!
Behavioural economics is about decision-making, but the quality of information and decisioning systems we have in place to make those choices are most critical. The intersection between behavioural economics and artificial intelligence shows us how the decisions that we make are increasingly being sent to the Outsourced Mind — intelligent technologies. More and more we rely on algorithms for our tasks and performance. How much control do we want to have over the decisions we make, and how much do we want or must allow AI to do the work for us to stay competitive? Therefore, without significant and transformative use of data science and AI, holistically, the Caribbean is self-inflicting more generations of pain and suffering on itself. There is no chance for economic prosperity in the Caribbean without the aggressive and strategic application of knowledge, and intelligence-based technologies as the underwriter of future prosperity.
IN THE WORLD of investment and business, the unconscious mind must be put in the back seat, and a conscious and weaponized mind must take the wheel. The future prosperity of the Caribbean region depends on the proper and aggressive use of data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in all areas of society — business, education, healthcare, social service delivery, crime prevention, etc., it must be applied strategically in all these areas relative to its augmenting value. Still, we do need to move faster and go further than most, as the rest of the world is way ahead of us. We must apply intelligence strategically, and leadership courageously, if we are going to successfully transition our legacy economies in this decade of digital transformation; and to survive as a viable species over the next 100+ years.
The pursuit for all Caribbean stakeholders (political, economic/business, social/environmental activism, etc.,) must be to increasingly outsource complex problems that aid decisioning, to those useful algorithms. Forget the emotion-driven bogus “solutions” which has plagued and set the region back for multiple decades. We must be consciously aware of the transformative nature that knowledge and technology applications have on our human socioeconomic growth. However, tech is not a magic bullet; strategy must underpin it all! The increasing evolutionary process from manual to digital requires more knowledge and technology consciousness minds than ever before.
So, Dr Gosline has termed the phrase Homo Techologicus, where our minds are essentially co-creating along with technology. Algorithms are tools, that essentially mediate human decisioning toward the objective of achieving desired outcomes. Algorithms are extensions to our brains, in the same way, a hammer or a screwdriver is an instinctive extension of our hands — everything flows through the human mind. So, with that knowledge in hand, the Caribbean can find and accelerate its competitive advantages in areas like AgTech and zero-emissions-based economy pursuits. More reliance on knowledge ecosystems than on western aid agencies and useless UN Advisors — self-reliance is a virtue!
