The capitalist AI future is bullshit by design — AKA ‘mansplaining as a service’.
“Today’s highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design. To be clear, bullshit can sometimes be useful, and even accidentally correct, but that doesn’t keep it from being bullshit. Worse, these systems are not meant to generate consistent bullshit — you can get different bullshit answers from the same prompts.” —Anil Dash 2023
What are the benefits of AI adoption in organizations? Not good for many workers it seems.
“The rise of AI technology could decrease hiring in the next five years, according to a recent survey by recruiting agency Adecco.
More than 40% of senior executives at over 2,000 companies interviewed by Adecco stated that they expected their workforces to shrink soon because of AI.
Adecco’s research included companies from industries like pharmaceuticals, logistics and defence” —Verdict (UK) 2024
Is generative AI actually degenerative?
“Gen AI is degenerative because it doesn’t serve our communities; rather, it feeds on us, on our content, our data, our rights and our privacy. It is extractive and divisive, it avoids responsibility for our losses, and it doesn’t care at all about the prosperity of our living systems.
Gen AI is degenerative. Or at least, the business models of the companies are degenerative. So the question becomes: can AI be regenerative?” —Matthew Moran 2024
History repeats, or at least it rhymes.
“Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta extracting data and creating AI models without consent shares many parallels with Imperialism and the ways in which land was taken from indigenous peoples. Even the arrogance required to insist Big Tech know what’s best for society is shared by Imperialist nations … The pace of AI research is depressingly fast. Depressing because currently the Ultra Wealthy are the ones pioneering the research, in some cases backed by the Effective Altruism movement. It’s as if our only strategy is to sit patiently and wait to have another model shared with us from Big Tech and then spend entire conferences and research careers probing and prodding models trained by our Tech Lords.” —Papa Reo 2023
Have we reached peak AI?
“I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.
I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.” —Ed Zitron 2024
This post is a follow-up from January 2024 where I summarized the good, the bad, and the ugly of automation & algorithms during the past year.
“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” —André Gide (1869–1951)
How do we rebuild trust in expertise in a world filled with conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions?
Experts and leaders have to shift their values toward transparency, honesty, and humility in their communications and actions, being upfront about the limitations and uncertainties of their knowledge, acknowledging mistakes and failures when they occur, and being open to feedback and critiques. By showing that they are not infallible or above accountability, experts can help to dispel the perception of elitism and disconnection from the public.” —Joan Westenberg 2024-04-09
If knowledge flows at the speed of trust then our society is in a lot of trouble today. For example, the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed, “a new paradox at the heart of society. Rapid innovation offers the promise of a new era of prosperity, but instead risks exacerbating trust issues, leading to further societal instability and political polarization”. No trust, no knowledge flow.
Henry Mintzberg suggested that social pressures and isolation account for widespread mistrust and the dumbing-down of society.
Like rats in an overcrowded cage, the pressures of modern life, including the pace of change, can certainly be affecting our propensity to pause and think. Thoughtfulness is hardly encouraged in a society plagued with insecurity and anxiety … Welcome to our mindless society, poisoned by its own fake facts.”
In hierarchies, experts, and dogma I said that established and institutionalized professional organizations too often lack the diversity of thinking necessary to deal with complex problems, such as a novel coronavirus. The fact that this SARS-2 pandemic continues and is ignored shows how untrustworthy the hierarchies leading our health care systems are. Simple measures, such as mandating air filtration in all public places, could effectively reduce several airborne diseases and simultaneously improve learning in schools. Why is this not being done? Are we collectively too dumb?
I have suggested that each of us has to find out how we can become knowledge catalysts in a liquid world, helping to make our networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. How to we rebuild trust? One catalyst at a time.
Joan Westenberg promotes the idea of POSSE (publish on your own site & syndicate elsewhere) or what I have called social media’s home base — blogs. This may be just another blog, but it’s mine. Westenberg also promotes real simple syndication (RSS). So do I. Therefore, the idea that, “curation is the last hope of intelligent discourse” resonated with me.
As algorithms churn out vast quantities of information with varying degrees of accuracy and quality, the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against the tide of misinformation and mediocrity. Human curators bring nuanced understanding, contextual awareness, and ethical judgment to the table—qualities that AI, in its current state, is fundamentally unable to replicate.
Human curators can distinguish between nuanced arguments, recognise cultural subtleties, and evaluate the credibility of sources in ways that algorithms cannot. This human touch is essential for maintaining the integrity of our information ecosystem. It serves not only as a filter for quality but also as a signal for meaningful and trustworthy content amidst the overwhelming noise generated by AI systems. —Joan Westenberg 2024-01-10
We need manual, not automatic, for sense-making I wrote in 2012 and confirmed that manual sensemaking was essential in 2023 — The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge — often slowly — emerges.
The deluge of artificially-generated ‘content’ is growing into a tidal wave. Skill erosion is a clear danger — If you don’t use it, you will lose it. Automate what was once a skill-developed process and those skills will decline.
Westenberg raises a good point about the democratizing nature of individual blogs.
The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms. These sites export their ideas to the digital public square while filtering outbound information to cultivate wisdom and perspective. They are living, extensible documents evolving over time based on the site owner’s journey.
Places like this blog are still our sovereign territory. It is the core of my Seek > Sense > Share practice. As Robin Good said, “Curation is about making sense of a topic/issue/event/person/product etc. for a specific audience.” We need more curators.
More on the idea of — observation > narration > curation. Curation starts with observation, which requires curiosity.
In a digitally interconnected world, those in positions of leadership should focus on helping their networks become smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions. Networks move information faster than institutions or markets. While the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) stated that markets are conversations, today networks are memes that spread instantaneously, without conversation. The borderless and liquid transmission of information makes for a global oral cacophony.
After four years, no government has stepped-up to make us smarter in dealing with the SARS-2 virus. The pandemic continues and people keep dying and more people are condemned to live with the still incurable Long Covid.
Which government minister is going to take on the task of educating the public about the true harms of COVID-19? Which government will implement the measures needed to prevent the gradual attrition of key pillars of society?
The social, economic and public health costs of maintaining the fiction that we can live normally by ignoring COVID-19 are simply too high for this ‘business as usual’ situation to continue and the rate of attrition is too high for this to be sustainable. —John Snow Project 2023-11-25
Leadership in our connected world must come from beyond civil society, governments, and markets. For example, one pop star can have more influence on voter turnout than the best efforts of any institution. We should all use what expertise and influence we have to support democracy and a sustainable future for everyone.
If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that experts disagree, nobody has all the answers, and we (especially our institutions) are mostly making things up as we go. In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action. Only cooperative networks will help us make sense of the complex challenges facing us — climate change, environmental degradation, pandemics, political turmoil, genocide, etc.
Our institutions are not up to the task of collective sensemaking and there is no public in the global market, only consumers and workers. Answers to how we address the current pandemic (it’s not over even if our institutions and markets say so) will not come from government or from the market. They will come from networked committed people. The challenge will be to ensure that these groups do not become tribal populist counter-movements, as we have enough of these already. Saving democracy is a worthy objective. ‘Draining the swamp’ and ‘freedumb rallies’ are not.
Each of us has to find out how we can be knowledge catalysts in a liquid world, helping to make our networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions.
We can each start to seek > sense > share.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Definition: Conspiracy Theory
—A belief that the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, who have spent their lives researching the subject, missed something you figured out in two minutes due to your superior Google researching skills.” —Meanwhile in Canada
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan (1995) The Demon-haunted World
“I recently purchased a CO₂ monitor (an Aranet4, which works nicely and is designed with just shocking good sense and practicality, great device).
One interesting pattern I notice: CO₂ is consistently lower in campus spaces at Macalester [College, MN, USA] than it is in almost any other indoor space — including even my own house when I’m the only person in it.
Why? Well…
Macalester did a systematic audit of ventilation across campus and made HVAC adjustments across campus to improve filtration, increase ACH, etc etc, in response to the possibility that COVID is airborne … in summer 2020.
Not 2021. In 2020. Before aerosol transmission was clearly established. Before the WHO and the CDC were even admitting COVID could travel more than 6 feet. Summer of 2020.
And apparently improved ventilation is still in effect now.
Don’t tell me better isn’t possible.”
—Paul Cantrell
Scientific American — Covid-19 leaves its mark on the brain
“In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep problems, and tingling and paralysis of the nerves, as well as several mental health disorders.
A large and growing body of evidence amassed throughout the pandemic details the many ways that COVID-19 leaves an indelible mark on the brain. But the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent.”
The Tyee — How an Underdog Biochemist Won a Nobel Prize
“Science interests governments only for its political value. Whether in Hungary or in the United States, [Katalin] Karikó [Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine 2023] had to break through political barriers while working in institutions that relied on government or private funding. Despite her stubborn work ethic and understanding of science, her achievements ultimately depended on luck — and good child care.”
Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice — Vaccine disinformation from medical professionals — a case for action from regulatory bodies?
“Regulatory action against doctors will not solve the complex problem of rising anti-vaccine sentiment among the lay public. But a rebuke from the regulator, should an investigation deem this appropriate, will send a clear signal to the public that a doctor has been judged to have acted inappropriately, which will help limit audience reach and mitigate potential harms. This is especially critical in the current era, as medical influencers have vast reach and social media companies may be motivated by the revenue from misinformation circulating on their platforms.”
“An oldie but a goodie:
What did Watson and Crick discover?
Rosalind Franklin’s lab notes.”
—@Coral
I just presented at the first annual European PKM Summit, with a formal presentation yesterday and a casual chat today. Next year’s summit is scheduled for 14/15 March 2025. Some of what I covered is posted at 20 years of PKM. I mentioned several projects and resources which are available on this site.
What Domino’s Pizza learned about implementing PKM practices — Solo change agents set you free
Changing the corporate university at Cigna 2010/2011 — working smarter case study
Reforming the government of Finland’s operating practices particularly moving toward a more collaborative culture — toward distributed governance
How can an organization like Cooperative Extension at UNL adapt to the network era? — networked knowing
How do you improve collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and sensemaking in a globally distributed company [Citi] with over 200,000 employees? — working smarter 2020
The continuous changing nature of professional development to keep up with new demands for knowledge workers — PKM Workshop
There were many questions on how PKM connects with organizational knowledge sharing. I explained that team collaboration requires the transparent sharing of knowledge — using enterprise social networks and other technologies — so that everyone on a team knows what is going on and why. Decisions, and why they were made, are shared. New processes and methods are co-developed to create emergent practices. This method of work has to be supported by management by enabling — innovative and contextual methods, the self-selection of the most appropriate tools and work conditions, and willing cooperation between workers. More at — adding value with teams.
I write this blog mostly for myself, though it’s great to have people join in and create conversations.
“But there’s also a part of writing, of online writing particularly, blogging, that’s all the humble without the security, that’s full of risk, that’s vulnerable even if what you’re saying isn’t necessarily personal or deeply meaningful or anything you or anyone else even really cares about. This thing we do, blogging, is crazy. Really. What a trip, what a concept, what an experience. It’s a place where the public share is instant and your little words can tromp their way across the world before you have time to regret it.”—Annie Mueller
I highly recommend reading all of Annie’s blog post — it’s just a blog (thanks to Euan Semple and Chris Corrigan for highlighting Annie’s work)
There are a lot fewer comments and conversations on this blog than there used to be, as people have moved to consumer social media platforms like LinkedIn and have conversations there. The last comment to this blog was posted on LinkedIn as well as here, which was a nice touch (thank you Beth).
Joan Westenburg has noticed this recently and said that ‘indie’ creators need to build their own platforms.
“Relying on someone else’s platform means that creators are subject to the ever-changing algorithms that dictate visibility and reach. The algorithms are designed to prioritize content that keeps users engaged and on the platform, rather than necessarily rewarding quality or creativity. Meaning that creators are constantly chasing the algorithm, trying to crack the code and optimize their content for maximum visibility, to the detriment of their message, their identity and their purpose. It’s an exhausting and often futile endeavor, as the algorithms can change at any moment, leaving creators scrambling to adapt.” —the creator economy trap
This reflects my own recommendations calling blogs — social media’s home base — in 2009. As Joan says, “Building your own platform is undoubtedly harder than relying on someone else’s”. I can completely agree after twenty years of building this platform. The algorithms are against us, as well as the suppression of RSS.
As I said at the beginning, I blog for myself. I think that is the only way to keep at it. Blogging is not a business model. It’s a form of expression that suits certain people. I just happen to be one.
Ten years after publishing Seeking Perpetual Beta, the latest e-book in the perpetual beta series is here. This book is based on my writing for the past two years, with a particular focus on automation with artificial intelligence. The previous edition, perpetual beta 2022, is still available at a reduced price.
This year also marks twenty years of blogging. I may take a short break later this year, after my last scheduled public PKM workshop, for 2024 but I intend to keep on writing. As I mentioned on Mastodon, this is how I write now — I have no plan. There is no schedule. If I see something interesting I make note of it. Sometimes I think that might be worth a blog post. Repeat.
As we get inundated with new knowledge and information regurgitated by large language models and generative pre-trained transformers — time for meaning-making becomes critical.
Meaning-making is the process by which we interpret situations or events in the light of our previous knowledge and experience. It is a matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world around us.” —Dave Gurteen
Are we swimming in a world of meaninglessness?
So if you ever wonder why things feel so meaningless nowadays… well, it’s because, in a real sense, we’ve engineered a world where more and more of it is meaningless. We’re mercilessly sawing away at the connection between each other – a connection that relies on the fact that real minds are on both ends, and both are authentically trying to make meaning and share it. AI breaks the connection most powerfully, but meaninglessness is the water in which the modern world swims. —Andrew Perfors 2024-02-14
Andrew Perfors — Professor, University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences — describes three types of meaning-making in — The work of creation in the age of AI. [The entire post is well worth the read. I am making a note here mostly for myself.]
We all do Type 1 as we think, doodle, and reflect. Type 2 is what AI tools like GPT and LLM produce, as the ‘creator’ is merely an algorithm AKA the button. Type 3 is what you are reading here. I am the creator, reflecting on other creators by sharing these words. Given the history of my writing over twenty years here, I assume there is an audience.
What happens when people stop creating meaning and instead mostly share ‘Projected Meaning’?
Most profoundly, as someone who must live in the world, I’m troubled about living in a society where meaninglessness is the norm. Among other issues, fascism and authoritarianism thrive on meaningless because people who lack meaning turn to “strong leaders” and are easy to manipulate. Even beyond that, our information systems rely on norms of cooperation and trust that the people on the other end, the creators of messages, are authentic and real. Without that, the best case is that the system stops being used and dies entirely. More likely, while the rich might be able to create walled gardens of meaning, the system for most of us will become a swamp of falseness and distortion, a cursed transformation of humanity’s greatest asset – our cumulative cultural knowledge – into our greatest weakness. —Andrew Perfors 2024-02-14
Can we really create meaning if people are not involved? In the personal knowledge mastery workshop we cover meaning-making with activities focused on intentionality, narrating our work, and reflecting. The next workshop starts on 8 April.
Marshall McLuhan has influenced much of my work and I have used the tetrad from the Laws of Media many times to understand emerging technologies. A recent article in The Free Press by Benjamin Carlson was a refreshing read by someone who had just discovered McLuhan. I started reading McLuhan’s work in 1995.
I first stumbled upon Marshall McLuhan a year ago on YouTube. Within a minute or two of watching a clip, I was amazed: here was a man who, in 1977, seemed to be describing the dislocating experience of living in 2023, and he did so with more insight than people living today. That the words were coming from a craggy, mustachioed man in a rumpled suit only enhanced the eerie feeling. Here was a professor-as-prophet. McLuhan says, in part, to his TV host … I shared the clip on Twitter and it went viral with more than 6 million views —The Prophets 2024-03-02
Carlson quotes an extract of a media tetrad.
To take one example from Marshall McLuhan’s last book, The Global Village (unfinished before his death, and completed by a collaborator), McLuhan thus analyzed the effects of global networking of media:
What does it enhance? “Instantaneous diverse media transmission on a global basis.”
What does it obsolesce? “Erodes human ability to decode in real time.”
What does it retrieve? “Brings back Tower of Babel: group voice in ether.”
What does it reverse? “Reverses into loss of specialism: worldwide synesthesia.”
—The Prophets 2024-03-02
Below is this tetrad as an image. Note that synesthesia is, “is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. For instance, people with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music, see shapes when smelling certain scents, or perceive tastes when looking at words.” This aptly describes our current digital media surround.
Understanding media and fake news are some of the activities in my PKM online workshop, much of it informed by the work of Marshall and Eric McLuhan.
This blog turned 20 last month — dead blog walking. One of the big challenges that the growth of AI [GPT, LLM, etc.] presents us is connecting with people — not machines — for our sensemaking. A personal blog is a human way to connect. There is no algorithm to filter what others read. They can subscribe, on their terms, and with their chosen technology thanks to real simple syndication (RSS). The great thing about blogging is that there are few rules. You can write as you like, when you like, and as often as you like.
“When you write a blog post, you can say as much or as little as you want. You can document a whole project you completed that made you happy, or you can document a tiny piece of it. You can share your plant watering routine, or you can share your journey of going from having no plants to six plants and the plant care tips you learned across the way. You can write a follow-up post, or not.” —Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories
I have found blogging to be my preferred medium of expression. I like building on older posts. I like sharing when the need arises.
“I keep thinking I should write another book.
I keep thinking I should write poetry.
In the meantime, without any should, I blog.
I am a blogger.
That should be enough.”
—Euan Semple
Not only is blogging ‘enough’, it’s an important counterweight to the AI nonsense onslaught. I don’t care what ChatGPT has written. I want to understand and connect with the people I share this planet with. My blog has given me that opportunity.
Here is a small random selection of fellow bloggers who have kept me company for many years and are blogging on.
If you don’t use it, you will lose it. Automate what was once a skill-developed process and those skills will decline.
“Cognitive automation powered by advanced intelligent technologies is increasingly enabling organizations to automate more of their knowledge work tasks. Although this often offers higher efficiency and lower costs, cognitive automation exacerbates the erosion of human skill and expertise in automated tasks. Accepting the erosion of obsolete skills is necessary to reap the benefits of technology—however, the erosion of essential human expertise is problematic if workers remain accountable for tasks for which they lack sufficient understanding, rendering them incapable of responding if the automation fails.” —The Vicious Circles of Skill Erosion (2023)
One key factor in understanding how we learn and develop skills is that experience cannot be automated. Increasing automation requires that the Learning and Development (L&D) field must get out of the comfort zone of course development and into the most complex aspects of human learning and performance. To understand learning at work, L&D must understand the work systems. Now they also have to understand skill erosion.
Addressing skill erosion will be a great challenge because the entire capitalist economy seeks continuous automation in order to feed the ‘constant growth’ economic machine. “Thanks to accounting conventions and tax laws dating back centuries, a robot doesn’t need to be better – or more efficient – than a human being at a task to make a business more profitable. It just needs to be 34% as good, or 11% as good, depending on that business’s accounting and amortization policies.” —John Carolus Sharp
As more of our work systems become automated, there is less need for vigilant human oversight. But take the case of commercial aviation. Most aircraft fly most of the time on autopilot. What does this do to pilot concentration and skill erosion? Understanding these complex relations — between skilled humans and very complicated machines & software — requires systems thinking and a better approach to training.
Dave Cormier, author of Learning in a Time of Abundance, warned that learning basic skills will become auto-tuned from the likes of GPT, LLM, etc.
“The real danger is not to people who are experts in their fields. Super experts in every field will continue to do what they have always done. All of us, however, are novices in almost everything we do. Most of us will never be experts in anything. The vast majority of the human experience of learning about something is done at the novice level.
That experience is about to be autotuned.”
For the past two decades I have promoted manual sensemaking. It is the basis of my personal knowledge mastery (PKM) framework. Sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices, and learning with and from others.
Helen Blunden observed several years ago that PKM is a foundation for sensemaking in the modern, connected workplace. “The more I am out there chatting to clients, the more I realise that your PKM approach is the number one critical skill set. Any way I look at it, all roads seem to end there. It is the foundation. That’s why I thought this is where they need to start – and not just the employees – everyone including the managers.”
As the authors of The Vicious Circles of Skills Erosion, observe — burdensome tasks can be aided by automation systems but reliance on these can lead to individual complacency and organizational skill erosion.
“Therefore, a chain of causal links exists where automation reliance increases organizational performance, which in turn gives rise to complacency at the organizational level. The organizational complacency decreases the enforcement of skill maintenance mechanisms, which finally reduces individual workers’ mindful conduction. We refer to this vicious circle as the organizational skill-erosion loop (R2), a reinforcing loop fueled by organizational complacency.” — p. 1393 Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Vol 24 (2023)
Manual skills are human skills.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —André Gide (1869-1951)
“You steal from one person and you’re a thief. You steal from everyone and you’re an AI company.” —Aral Balkan
“I’m going to exaggerate slightly, but it seems like one of the first applications of any new technology is making things even shittier for artists.” —Neal Stephenson, on generative AI
“Layoffs are happening because upper management has a herd mentality across tech companies and because we’ve become a conventional company more focused on the next quarter than on the long term.
Layoffs are happening because our leadership team are all billionaires or near-billionaires who have no idea what it is like to be rank and file any longer.
Layoffs are happening because our union isn’t strong enough to fight back.
Layoffs are NOT happening because we’re being replaced with AI.” —Hrefna
The fraud of plastic recycling
“If not for the Big Oil and the plastic industry’s lies and deception, municipalities and states would not have invested in plastic recycling programs and facilities—many of which have been shut down due to foreseeable economic losses. The industry not only misled municipal and state agencies to believe that plastic recycling was a viable solution to plastic waste but also discouraged them from pursuing other, more sustainable waste management strategies (e.g., waste reduction, reuse, bans, alternative materials) in favor of plastic recycling. (p. 30)”
“When I was working at CERN, they conducted an independent safety and hazards audit for all employees. In presence of particle accelerators with high energy proton beams, radioactive materials, powerful lasers, and cryogenic systems, the most dangerous aspect of work was found to be the daily commute to work.” —Lalit Patnaik
Daily commutes into an office are simply not coming back for competent people. Everyone I talk to who loves their craft would rather simply not work than go back to wasting their lives in traffic (and this is how we designed America). They would rather have that time purely for working, which they can now do. The analogy to best understand this which I’ve said before is like believing in Santa Claus as a child, and later discovering Santa isn’t real. You can’t go back. The spell of the office being a requisite for modern work was broken. The genie is impossible to put back in the bottle. Everyone will adapt.
Twenty years ago I started writing this blog. Over 3,600 posts later, it’s still my main tool for making sense of my work and the world.
Only a few months after I started blogging, I heard Tod Maffin, a Canadian digital journalist, on CBC radio stating that blogging was dead — already! But I saw my blog as a tool for work, and not necessarily a way to make money, so I marched on — dead blog walking.
What has my blog been good for?
Just the other day I had a comment on a 2007 post — DIF Analysis — calling it, “a timely reference that popped up as part of an AI-driven conversation”.
Last year I said that I hoped that we see a return to more people blogging as they realize how much surveillance capitalism and the platform monopolists are robbing from citizens and civil society.
“A knowledge worker is someone whose job is having really interesting conversations at work.” —Rick Levine (1999) The Cluetrain Manifesto — and that’s what blogging is all about.
In Only Humans Need Apply, the authors identify five ways that people can adapt to automation and intelligent machines. They call it ‘stepping’. I have added in parentheses the main attributes I think are needed for each option.
There is a lot of talk and media coverage about stepping-up, stepping-in, and stepping-forward. I have previously discussed stepping-in and concluded that anyone affected by these technologies [AI, GPT, LLM] needs to understand their basic functions and their underlying models. These tools will be thrust into our workplaces very soon. So let’s step-in to working with machine learning but with a clear understanding of who needs to be in charge — humans. I stand by this position today.
There are few people discussing ‘stepping-aside’ — using our human empathy — as an option for work. Connecting our work as much as possible to human-to-human interactions I believe is becoming essential. The potential for Gollem-class AIs (Generative Large Language Multi-modal Models) to bringing about “the total decoding and synthesizing of reality” is scary.
Automation can be a good thing. There are many rote, dangerous, and mundane tasks that are better done by machines. But we cannot and should not automate our humanity. We are already seeing this with automated responses in email and texting.
“So what happens when we automate our most impactful and superior cognitive capacity—thinking—and we don’t think for ourselves? I think we end up not acting in very smart ways, and then the algorithms are trained by behaviors that have very little to do with intelligence. Most of the stuff we spend doing on a habitual basis is quite predictable and monotonous and has very little to do with our imagination, creativity, or learnability—which is how we refer to curiosity.” —Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author — I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique. In the ‘age of AI,’ what does it mean to be smart? —2023-03-16
In step-lively I suggested that doing human work that machines are not suited to do requires that we really understand what machines and code are able to do and what they may be able to do. For example, voice actors are already getting replaced by technology. Perhaps barbers and hair stylists will survive longer. The key for this work is — choose well.
This is where I will be focusing my professional efforts — stepping aside — by encouraging manual sensemaking, frameworks like personal knowledge mastery, and participation in communities of practice. I am not ignoring new technologies in this ‘AI’ field, but I believe there is a real need for people to get better at communicating and making sense with other people.
The race toward an AI-driven society is not only costly in terms of electricity and water use with the current AI data centre boom, but the longer-term impacts on how we communicate may be significant.
“This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created. Where the volume of content created overwhelms human or algorithmic abilities to sift through it quickly and find high-quality stuff.
The social and political consequences of this are huge. We have grown so used to information abundance, the greatest gift of the internet, that having that disrupted would be a major upheaval for the whole of society.” —Ian Betteridge 2024-01-24
In addition, too much of AI, in the form of LLM and GPT, is being used for automation of things that should not be done, such as art or poetry, instead of augmenting human work. Humans are creative by nature. Machines are not. Machines should automate boring, tedious, number-crunching, and pattern-detecting work. Machines are diligent, compliant, intelligent, and they can persevere. People can exhibit curiosity, they can cooperate, they can make sense of complex systems, and they can produce novel thinking.
While ‘silicon valley thinking’ continues in the information technology sector, we need to have larger and more inclusive conversations on how to deal with these technologies at a societal level. The question should not be — How can I use ChatGPT? The question should be — How can we make our work more human?
“The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.” —Marshall McLuhan
For the past decade I have promoted the idea that a job is not the same as meaningful work. Most jobs are refillable and replaceable. One worker leaves, another one fills the job position. Our work can help to define us, but our jobs should never define us.
I discuss sensemaking in my PKM framework, though meaning-making is much more important and is related to self-determination theory that states there are three universal human drivers — autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We need some control over our lives, we want to be good at something, and we want to feel that we can relate to other people. These three drivers are what make us do what we do. They support meaning-making.
Dave Gurteen says that, “Meaning-making and sense-making are often used synonymously, but they are different — Meaning-making is the process by which we interpret situations or events in the light of our previous knowledge and experience. It is a matter of identity: it is who we understand ourselves to be in relation to the world around us.”
Even workplaces that support sensemaking often ignore meaning-making. Why are we doing this work in the first place? — is a question that is seldom asked. Even more antithetical to the capitalist, number-crunching workplace is that work should be playful. As Albert Einstein stated, “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”
Sometimes play requires time away. It often requires reflection, in which agency is born. We require agency, that part of us that makes us human, that allows us to direct ourselves in solid decision, in order to guide our natural playful selves into the whatever work we deem meaningful. —Kourish Dini, 2022
As we get inundated with new knowledge and information regurgitated by large language models and generative pre-trained transformers, time for meaning-making becomes critical. Instead of making sense of our lives, our world, and our work, we will be auto-tuned for the ‘correct’ perspective.
I will leave the final thought to the folks at Gaping Void — “You aren’t here to find meaning. You are here to create meaning.”
Check out the Dublin KM conference, planned for June this year
It looks really interesting, with a great collection of speakers. Definitely one for the diary
I think the only way we are going to address the many complex challenges that face society today are through curiosity and humility. Sparking curiosity is possible, with the right supports and environments. In addition, curiosity trumps knowingness — already knowing and not looking for disconfirming data. Curiosity and humility combine to make us better learners, and better leaders.
Daryl Van Tongeren, associate Professor of Psychology at Hope College, says that there is a curious joy in being wrong.
“First, there are social, cultural and technological advances to consider. Any significant breakthrough in medicine, technology or culture has come from someone admitting they didn’t know something – and then passionately pursuing knowledge with curiosity and humility. Progress requires admitting what you don’t know and seeking to learn something new.
Relationships improve when people are intellectually humble. Research has found that intellectual humility is associated with greater tolerance toward people with whom you disagree.
For example, intellectually humble people are more accepting of people who hold differing religious and political views. A central part of it is an openness to new ideas, so folks are less defensive to potentially challenging perspectives. They’re more likely to forgive, which can help repair and maintain relationships.” —The Conversation 2023-12-26
According to the book Humility is the New Smart (2017), “The crucial mindset underlying NewSmart is humility—not self-effacement but an accurate self-appraisal: acknowledging you can’t have all the answers, remaining open to new ideas, and committing yourself to lifelong learning.”
The need for humility, especially amongst those wielding power, is increasing.
“[Jean] Boulton strongly believes, as we do, that the complexity worldview can help us navigate our world as it is, not as we believe it to be or want it to be. Practicing humility and curiosity helps us on our journey to unpacking complexity because we can never know everything, but we can learn enough to gain some clarity and perspective. Boulton explained that complexity ‘is a middle ground theory between saying we know everything and we know nothing’. It’s about learning to be comfortable with uncertainty, because inevitably things will not go according to our plan. We can adapt by becoming more resilient and refraining from our command and control methods.” —The Complexity Worldview (2018)
Humility needs to be part of the entire education system.
“We are not new in needing humility in the way we look at hard conversations. Philosophers have been suggesting for millennia that we need to be humble. Socrates, after being called the wisest man in Athens by the Oracle, responded that he knew nothing… thus confirming that he was the wisest man in Athens.
That humility, giving the space that there might be other perspectives that aren’t yours, that you don’t understand, that you don’t know about, gives room to the people around you. It also is, I think, the only response to what Rittel and Webber called wicked problems. Some problems are so huge, so complex, so intertwined, that you can only ever work on part of the problem. In some cases, you can only make something better by making something else worse. You can decide to approach those problems with a wrecking ball, ignoring your impact on the whole ecosystem, or you can approach it with humility.” —Dave Cormier (2024) We can’t teach humility
Many of our systems and institutions are broken. So how can we survive in these? The answer may be in adopting an ironic sense of humour, coupled with honesty and humility. Sensemaking through irony, and not falling into a state of anger, frustration, or apathy, can lead us toward envisaging new systems. When people in the roles of decision maker, expert, & resource controller — traditional bottlenecks for knowledge flow in organizations — adopt these perspectives then “distributed, iterative sense-making, decision-making, and action-taking” can be enabled.
It starts with curiosity and humility.
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“We were made to rote-learn science without adopting the scientific mindset and scientific ways of thinking, philosophy of science. The result is a population with bigoted, dogmatic people even having degrees in engineering and science without having the scientific temperament or critical thinking skills.” —@impactology
My grandpa was a Nazi, by @bastianallgeier
My grandpa taught me that Nazis are fantastic storytellers. The new Nazis are on Tiktok and elsewhere on social media, telling great stories. Stories of safety, of simplicity, of order and justice. Stories of lives without crises. Adventure stories.
The only way to look at all of this is from the distant future. What happens if we let the Nazis take over again. How would our world look like in 20 or 30 years from now. I shudder from the thought. There is no option that fascism would ever lead to anything else than destruction.
“A student that I’ve worked with was said to have Attention Deficit Disorder. When I brought him into the field, I noticed he had the ears of a scout. He was able to monitor all four directions at the same time, and notice bird calls from every direction.
So, I watched him over time. When we worked indoors, in the classroom, in the group, he was a bit unable to sit still. But when we got out in the field, he was always the first one to see the hawk, always the first one to spot the hiding instructor, always the first one to hear the bird warnings.
And I started to ask myself, Is that a disorder, or a gift?” —Jon Young, Seeing Through Native Eyes, audio
via @Jan
The Gauntlet: How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections
“The political project of normalizing transmitting COVID and casting basic, scientific mitigations as bad, weird, mean, stupid, and impossible is a fantastic coup for the right. It is the utter rejection of state responsibility for public welfare, paired with the complete shredding of an early-pandemic solidarity that bound those at risk (everyone) together.”
Canadian study finds COVID measures were effective in reducing cases, hospitalizations, mortality rate, via @auscandoc
For Peters, the most surprising result of the study is the time between the announcement of a health measure and its concrete effects.
“For example, we found that containment measures led to a reduction of 2.9 cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 people, but these effects were not observed until four weeks after they were implemented,” he said.
According to the study, the closure of restaurants and bars also had effects, in terms of reductions in mortality, only after four weeks.
The researchers urge policymakers to consider this delay in the results when it comes to developing or evaluating these measures.
For the researchers, the results prove that the measures all had at least one impact in terms of reducing the number of cases, hospitalizations or deaths linked to COVID-19.
AI will create a thousand Post Office scandals, by @danmcquillan [More info: BBC Great Post Office Scandal podcast]
A little known detail of the [UK] Post Office scandal is that, due to some astoundingly bad decisions made in the 1990s, English law presumes that computer evidence is reliable. This at least is fixable by a simple switch of perspective; computer evidence should not be trusted unless evidence can be produced as to its reliability. There is simply no comprehensive metric or test that can be put before a court to remove reasonable doubt that an AI is making things up.
However, we can’t wait for AI-driven scandals to come to court before recognising this, because by then the harm will be done.
AI can’t be trusted and should be kept out of any decision-making that might affect peoples’ lives, no matter how modest.
In automation vs. augmentation, inspired by danah boyd, I wrote that I am mostly in the augmentation camp, though I am concerned that automation + capitalism = a perfect storm. This was the case with the augmented work enabled by the personal computer. Knowledge work improved significantly but wages did not. We are seeing this emerging in the ‘AI wars’ featuring ChatGPT, Bard, Co-pilot and others. It’s a battle between big money to get the biggest slice of this pie, not to augment human work or improve society, yet the mainstream press treats these algorithms like actual artificial intelligence that can think and even ‘hallucinate’ for themselves. But they are just algorithms.
Dave Snowden has a good article about this on anthropomorphising idiot savants — “AI is a set of algorithms and energy-hungry training datasets that may also manifest in physical objects.”
The real potential of this type of AI is in the augmentation of human work. But the kicker is that the way tools like ChatGPT work, expertise is required to understand and use them properly. Of course, this is not the direction the market is going.
“That aside, if we understand the training datasets and have the ability for human intervention, then technology has the transformative potential for the better. We can see this in various medical and pharmaceutical applications, as my car does most of the work for me with predictive capabilities and warnings, making late-night drives back from the Rugby or Opera a lot safer. These are all examples of augmentation … If you know the subject correction is easy; if you don’t, then the temptation to go with what the Magic Algorithm has produced will be overwhelming in a stressed workforce— Dave Snowden 2024-01-19
I am sticking with some of my earlier observations as the AI hype cycle continues.
Human oversight of machines and software will be essential as these systems permeate our economy and society. —2023-02-27
GPT & LLM extend our voices, obsolesce many forms of human writing, retrieve the ancient Oracle of Delphi, and when pushed to their limits reverse into Potemkin villages. GPT & LLM provide instant synthesis that may be good enough, but often contain errors. If they get used to answer all our questions then they become tools for “aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles”. —2023-03-15
As Dave Cormier noted, the danger is auto-tuning our minds.
“The real danger is not to people who are experts in their fields. Super experts in every field will continue to do what they have always done. All of us, however, are novices in almost everything we do. Most of us will never be experts in anything. The vast majority of the human experience of learning about something is done at the novice level.
That experience is about to be autotuned.”
—ChatGPT search – Autotune for knowledge
Ed Morrison posted on LinkedIn an overview of his approach to innovation ecosystems and working with Wabash, a large transportation, logistics, and distribution company. As regular readers may know I am a huge proponent of Ed’s strategic doing framework and particularly how it applies to agile (with a small ‘a’) sensemaking.
Ed states that an innovation system consists of three types of “networks embedded in other networks”.
> In affinity networks, participants promote their shared interests.
>> In learning networks, participants help each other learn and adapt.
>> In innovating networks, participants create shared value through collaboration and recombinant innovation.
This framework directly aligns with the agile sensemaking framework consisting of — professional networks, communities of practice, and work teams, linking their work and learning. Ed concludes with the unique aspects of innovating networks.
Innovating networks are different. Participants collaborate. They create new, shared value in response to a complex challenge. They create value through recombinant innovation—linking, leveraging, and aligning assets embedded in their networks.
Participants in innovating networks operate with high levels of trust. They will reveal their hidden assets because their partners have formed a reliable pattern of matching words with deeds. Because trust fuels these innovating networks, they take time to form.
In the short promotional video for Wabash’s Ignite conference, they state that the everyone in the company is part of a network, interconnected, and that partnerships are the key to the ecosystem’s health and success. They go on to say that, “Each one of us must participate. Each one of us must contribute. Each one of us has a place we can go to make our relationships stronger together.”
My experience with these frameworks is that it can be a challenge for people in hierarchical organizations to think in terms of networks. This is where the safe space of communities is critical, and why I have suggested that communities are the new conference. As more of our work is networked, trust and safe spaces will become critical. My suggestion for this Ignite conference would be to ensure it promotes the creation of communities that last longer than a few days in Kentucky. Our perpetual beta coffee club is five years old and we are still contributing and learning.
I asked this question in our monthly video call of the perpetual beta coffee club [PBCC] which I facilitate. There was almost universal agreement that people prefer to engage in communities, both online and in-person, rather than a conference, particularly ones that have a lot of vendors. The PBCC was a significant sanity check for many of us during the lock-downs of the early stages of the SARS-2 pandemic. For the first few months we switched to weekly video calls so we could stay in touch and find out what was happening around the world.
Asynchronous, continuous online communities like ours provide something that most conference do not — time for reflection and deep conversations.
As I noted in coffee, communities, and condescension, as online activity grows, we all need safe places to learn and reflect. Yes, we can be engaged on public platforms, but we need to find safe places to have deeper conversations. Communities can offer a diversity of opinions and experiences. It is essential for every citizen today to develop and engage with a diverse network of knowledgeable people in order to make sense of the world. Citizens also need somewhere to integrate their learning and get trusted advice.
As far back as 2010 I wrote about the conference rut and that one thing missing in these discrete time-based events is time for reflection. Most presenters hold back their knowledge in order to ‘deliver’ it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions and discussions and a coffee break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home.
While reflecting on reflection in 2014, I noted that much of the workday in a professional office (or in a distributed workplace) is organized around meetings, calls, and getting things done. This is often interrupted dozens of times each day, requiring a re-focus on whatever it is people were doing before the interruption. Work, like professional conferences, is composed of many non-related discrete, time-based events, often with one directly following the other.
I currently participate in a small private online community looking at the modern workplace, as well as managing the PBCC, and have recently joined the Asynco community focused on distributed work. What I learn from these communities is more than any conference could offer. For instance, I have developed many close friendships over the past five years of the PBCC.
I think we may see many communities created to fill the professional development and relationship gap that exists in too many disciplines today. We may also see conferences getting organized from inside communities, flipping the role of conference organizer trying to sell sponsorships and participation, to more community-driven agendas. We plan on discussing this in more detail in our communities and I’m sure there will be many insights shared.
What would you expect from a professional community?
On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Here are the highlights of 2023.
“ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest’ content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices”. —Paris Marx
“Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).
By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, ‘a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.’” —Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things
“I’m not worried about the AI apocalypse. I’m worried about the ‘VCs subsidize AI tech and sell it at a loss just long enough to make everyone rely on them (AKA ‘disrupting the knowledge worker industry’) before bumping the price up and quality down just like Uber and Amazon and the rest’ apocalypse.” —Alex Chaffee
The opposite of “return to office” advocates isn’t “work from home” advocates. It’s a rich tapestry of “open offices are distracting” people and “I’ve never gone this long without being sick” people and “commutes are a waste of time I don’t get paid for” people and “I’m an introvert and playing house with coworkers sucks the life out of me” people and “I have a family and appreciate the flexibility” people and “I primarily communicated with coworkers through Slack anyway” people … —Mac in Philly
Edmund Burke also paraphrased nicely, “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” — Social Media is not the universe of true comment. —@AndrewTrickett
“Quiet quitting is so idiotic. It’s based around the idea that doing the amount of work as contractually obligated is somehow ‘quitting’, as if there is an unspoken obligation to go above and beyond that. For free, of course. Well there isn’t. And only working the amount of time you’re paid for is not disloyal or lazy, it’s simply holding up your end of the bargain. ‘Quiet quitting’ should be the norm, not the exception. Everyone should do it. But stop calling it quitting.” —@Rene
“The problem is that electric cars are popular with politicians precisely because they provide an excuse to avoid doing harder things, like rebuilding our cities, or changing the habits of lifetimes. Persuading people to switch from their old gasoline car to a shiny Tesla is much easier than persuading them that they can live without a car. Hence governments are pushing electric cars, often with incentives that make no sense.” –Daniel Knowles, author of Carmageddon, via @BreadAndCircuses
“Fez asked where we were going, and I said I didn’t know. We were pedaling along at a pretty good clip, and he had inferred some sense of urgency, a need to get somewhere, so he was slightly puzzled by my answer … Here’s what I said to him, more or less: Fez, what are we out here for? To ride bikes? Why? Well, because at some point we’ll stop thinking about whatever we were thinking about before, and we’ll even stop thinking about riding, and we’ll just be riding. That’s the ride. It’s calm and peaceful, and it’s entirely sufficient unto itself. That’s what we’re out here for. So right now, we’re riding until we get to that place. I don’t know where it is or how to get there, except that we have to pedal and move and hope we find it.” —Riding There via @gredaco
“The phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ was invented by a police psychiatrist to discredit a female hostage in a 1973 bank heist who criticized the police … The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on, never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted.” —‘Stockholm Syndrome’ — via Andreu Casablanca
“Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 7m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 27.2m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 18m and 33m additional deaths.” —The Economist: The pandemic’s true death toll
“The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.” —Eric Hoffer (1955) The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms
December
“Fake Intelligence is where we try to simulate intelligence by feeding huge amounts of dubious information to algorithms we don’t fully understand to create approximations of human behaviour where the safeguards that moderate the real thing provided by family, community, culture, personal responsibility, reputation, and ethics are replaced by norms that satisfy the profit motive of corporate entities.
What the Fake Intelligence folks do not understand is that we are more than just the sum of our neurons.
We are social animals.
Our intelligence is social intelligence.
And our behaviour isn’t separate to our ephemeral biological reality but inextricably intertwined with it; shaped and tempered by it.
A mere summary of the sum total of human output cannot emulate the human condition. We are defined as much by the information we internalise as by that which we reject.”—Aral Balkin
I recently downloaded Sanctum.ai and asked — Write a marketing pitch for Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge mastery online workshop. Here is the unedited response.
Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information available to us today? Do you struggle to find time to organize and process it all? If so, you’re not alone. We live in an era of information overload, and it can be challenging to keep up. That’s where personal knowledge mastery (PKM) comes in.
PKM is the practice of intentionally managing your knowledge and understanding of the world around you. It involves organizing, categorizing, and summarizing information, as well as regularly reviewing and updating it. By doing so, you can become more efficient at processing new information, make better decisions, and achieve your goals more effectively.
And that’s where Harold Jarche comes in. He’s an expert on PKM and has been teaching others how to practice it for over a decade. In his online workshop, he will walk you through the process of implementing PKM into your life, providing you with practical tools and techniques to help you manage your knowledge and achieve your goals.
During the workshop, you will:
- Learn how to identify your areas of interest and develop a system for organizing and categorizing information related to those interests
- Discover how to use note-taking and summarization techniques to effectively capture and process new information
- Develop strategies for regularly reviewing and updating your knowledge base
- Learn how to apply PKM principles to specific goals and challenges in your life
- Connect with a community of like-minded individuals who are also practicing PKM and share tips and best practices
Whether you’re a student, professional, or just someone looking to improve their productivity and efficiency, Harold Jarche’s online workshop on personal knowledge mastery is the perfect opportunity to take control of your information and achieve your goals. So sign up today and start your journey towards becoming a PKM expert! —Sanctum AI 2023-12-17
I pretty well agree with the output and if I needed to quickly compose a marketing pitch, this tool would be very handy. I don’t focus much on ‘note-taking’ so that is one part I would remove. But would too much use of tools like these turn me into a button pusher or an automatic grammatizator? One thing is certain, many organizations will use these tools instead of hiring people to create these outputs.
By the way, the next PKM online workshop starts on 5 February 2024.
I watched and thoroughly enjoyed Ari Melber’s interview with author Yuval Noah Harari on MSNBC — Yuval Noah Harari on GOP losses, conspiracies, AI, religion & history. A few quotes stood out.
Quote #1 reminded me of Ursula K. Leguin’s observation that, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”
The challenge with stories as observed in Quote #2, is that we have to find better ones. One approach I have suggested is story skepticism, making sense before making up stories, all toward pre-bunking the conspiracy theorists. But how can we create better stories?
The answer to the question above is in Quote #3. Better stories come through better cooperation.
“At the point at which the collective complexity reaches the complexity of an individual, the process of complexity increase encounters the limitations of hierarchical structures. Hierarchical structures are not able to provide a higher complexity and must give way to structures that are dominated by lateral interactions.” —Yaneer Bar Yam
“The communicative solution to pervasive misinformation is not better facts, but better frames”, concludes Kate Starbird (University of Washington) in Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemaking. Starbird describes the case of a frame called ‘Sharpiegate’ during the 2020 US Presidential election.
We highlight how, prior to the election, elites in politics and media — including President Trump himself — set an expectation (or a frame) of a “rigged election.” As the election progressed, many of President Trump’s supporters went to the polls (or their mailboxes) and misinterpreted their own experiences through that lens. Later, they went online, sharing those experiences and seeing other “evidence” from around the country, which they interpreted through the same “rigged election” or “voter fraud” frame.
The entire post is worth reading. I want to highlight three insights Starbird found concerning rumors, conspiracy theorizing, and disinformation.
Frames are one way of prebunking the conspiracy theorists. In last year’s blog post on an understanding of my confusion I wrote that George Lakoff states that whoever frames the narrative first has an advantage and that negating a frame only activates and strengthens it. Learning how to create and use frames becomes an important part of individual and collective sensemaking.
Here is an example of starting with a frame for sensemaking.
When new information is presented that does not fit our understanding, start first with an assumption of confusion (see the Cynefin framework). Then, using evidence as it arrives, determine if our frame should be based on a state of chaos, complexity, complication, or clarity. For example:
To understand behaviours that do not make sense on the surface, follow the money, and see who stands to gain from these behaviors (complicated).
When a country is at war, be skeptical of all government communications (chaos and/or complexity).
I would never describe myself as a ‘techie’. In my second year of undergraduate studies (1978) I failed my computer programming course in Fortran Watfor & Watfiv [that was with punch cards and a terminal that sent the batch to Vancouver and returned results in 24 hours] but the professor gave me a pass if I promised to never take a programming course again. I have kept true to my word all of these years.
You could say that I am not one to jump on the next technology craze. I ignored computers through the 1980s and into the 1990s. However in 1994 I saw my first website at the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM). It was a revelation. For the first time I saw how computers could connect people. During my undergraduate years nobody explained the relevance of computer programs. It was all about making some arcane program work. I could not relate my life to any of these programs. The web made sense to me.
I need to understand why I am learning something or I just tune out. For example, I was sent to French language training in the Summer of 1978. We were given an aptitude test to see how well we were suited for learning a second language [by the way, English is my second language, having spoken only German until I went to school]. There was a section of the test where a number of Kurdish words were presented and we were told to memorize them. I did not bother. As a result I did poorly on the short-term recall part of the test and was put into the ‘slow learners’ section. By the end of the language training of 13 weeks I went from unilingual to fluently bilingual, probably the only person to do so in our cohort. Part of the reason for my success was my motivation — I had a girlfriend who could not speak English talking to people
In a post called, I am fed up with hiding myself, Mita Williams concludes that academic writing removes authors from their work by turning them into ‘sources’ and ‘references’ and that large language models are doing the same, but making authors even further removed from their work.
In writing this post, I’ve come to realize that the concerns here dovetail with a long-standing bugbear of mine: that libraries overemphasize authority from sources, and does not do enough to support bibliography, a format in which authority derives from people and their choices.
In a separate post, Williams states that, “The alternative to AI is talking to other people.” —Mita Williams 2023-09-19
This got me thinking about personal knowledge mastery. It is an alternative to AI. The Seek > Sense > Share framework is based on connections not just with knowledge and information, but most importantly, people. As I wrote in 2022, we are in an information war — one that pits logic and emotion against each other. Two powerful weapons used against us by the social media algorithms are ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’. To counter these influences, we each have a more powerful weapon — our own commentary. This is the power of blogs. A single blog, in a network of peers, can have much influence.
“I keep thinking I should write another book.
I keep thinking I should write poetry.
In the meantime, without any should, I blog.
I am a blogger.
That should be enough.”
—Euan Semple
Writing a blog can be an important sensemaking tool and is core to my personal knowledge mastery discipline. PKM and blogging are ways to model the behaviours of an engaged citizen of the world and counter the platform monopolists and forces of agnotology — the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour. But mostly, blogging is having conversations with other people.
Perhaps this is one of the big challenges that AI presents us — connecting with people, not machines, for our sensemaking.
“I am fed up with hiding myself, an actual human being, behind the conventional anonymity of scholarly authorship.”—Stafford Beer (1995) Platform for Change
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” —Frank Herbert (1965) Dune
In 2012 Dave Weinberger described how software developers learn — mainly peer to peer.
… in the knowledge network that developers have created for themselves … the idea is instead that all learning ought to be in public and be something that makes the public better. It improves the public act of learning. The act of educating — of teaching — are done in public so that others will learn from them and this idea of education as a public act has tremendous power and tremendous benefits because it makes the entire network — the entire ecosystem — smarter. If we can apply this within our businesses and within our educational system and beyond then our own knowledge network will become much smarter, much faster. —YouTube 2012-05-29
Foundational elements of the personal knowledge mastery framework are working collaboratively and learning cooperatively. I have called PKM our part of the social learning contract. If we don’t share, our knowledge networks cannot get smarter. They become less resilient and not able to make informed decisions — sounds a bit like much of our political discourse today.
We need context to understand complex issues and this can be provided by those we are connected to. The reach and depth of our connections become critical in helping us make sense of our environment and to solve problems. With social learning, everyone contributes to collective knowledge and this in turn can make organizations and society more effective in dealing with problems.
So what happens if we stop sharing in public? What happens when much that is shared online has not been generated by humans? What if the pattern-matching algorithms autotune the majority of what we see and read online? Dave Cormier noted that, —“The real danger is not to people who are experts in their fields. Super experts in every field will continue to do what they have always done. All of us, however, are novices in almost everything we do. Most of us will never be experts in anything. The vast majority of the human experience of learning about something is done at the novice level. That experience is about to be autotuned.” — by tools such as ChatGPT.
The canary in the coalmine will be in the software developer communities. If they stop sharing, or limit what is shared by using large language models and other tools, the entire field will slowly dumb-down. Software currently powers our societies. Perhaps it won’t matter because humans will go on to do more complex work. Or perhaps the black boxes will run most societal and organizational decisions — who gets hired, who gets an insurance payment, who gets into school, etc.
On the last Friday of each month, without any assistance from Gen AI, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
1. A video posted directly by Israel’s Defence Forces claimed that it had found Hamas weapons and technology, as well as a “list of terrorist names” in Arabic, showing each agents’ rota guarding Israeli hostages under the Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza. However, a translation of the document shows that it contains no names but instead a calendar of the days of the week. Vedika Bahl explains in this episode of Truth or Fake. —France24 2023-11-16
2. Before [Preston] Manning’s real Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel of 2023, there was his imagined COVID Commission of 2023.
To read both is to behold the fantasy evolve into reality. Although the Smith government gave him a panel and a $2-million budget for research and support — they also endowed him with the restraints of reality, one supposes — many conclusions essentially remained the same. —CBC 2023-11-23
3. Right-wing U.S. media covered fiction as fact: A non-existent terrorist attack from Canada at Rainbow Bridge — “I have been sounding the alarm bell about the northern border for a long time,” said Vivek Ramaswamy [US Republican Presidential candidate] during a lengthy interview about an incident he did not witness, was not a subject-matter expert on, and had no insight into. —CBC 2023-11-22
“The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.” —Eric Hoffer (1955) The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms
A discussion with Naomi Klein on wellness culture: ‘We really are alive on the knife’s edge’ — 2023-11-15
Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyper-fit form and genes.
There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project …
… When we moved back to Canada and started doing election campaigning, my partner Avi knocked on a door and met a very fit person who looked like I could have taken an Ashtanga class with her. And all she wanted to talk about was vaccine passports and how she was opposed to vaccines. She said: “I have a strong immune system.” And he, very tentatively, said: “Well, yes, but not everybody does.” And she said: “I think those people should die.”
AI Companies are running out of training data
Considering that most of the AI datasets that are currently being used to train AI systems are made from internet-scraped data originally created by, well, all of us online, data partnerships may not be the worst way to go. But as data becomes increasingly valuable, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how many AI companies can actually compete for datasets — let alone how many institutions, or even individuals, will be willing to cough their data over to AI vacuums in the first place.
Agnotology: the strategic & purposeful production of ignorance —danah boyd > an understanding of my confusion
In slow media for the great reset I noted that one nice thing about blogs is that there are few trolls because it takes more time write a comment on a blog post and often there is an approval process. Plus, anyone can easily delete crap comments from their own blogs. If more people engage in longer form writing and share through blogging, we may collectively address some of the challenges we face with the misinformation and disinformation on consumer social media. Perhaps ‘slow media’ can slow the reversal effects of digital platforms which create a mono-culture of noise without meaning and meme wars. Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, “The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially”.
I see sensemaking as a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices. One such practice is working asynchronously. Dealing with complex challenges is not assembly-line work, but rather constantly putting together ideas and concepts and looking for patterns to emerge. It requires time for reflection. As Albert Einstein stated, “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought”. Doing deep work requires time. Many people during pandemic lock-downs have found that working from home (or elsewhere) gave them more time for thinking.
Knowledge and creative work requires time apart from others. There are times for collaborative synchronous work but this cannot be the dominant mode of work. Unfortunately, it is how many organizations are structured. As a result, deep work is done on evenings and weekends and often the best workers burn out over time. In addition, many managers have little experience or have not been trained in how to manage asynchronous work. They believe that they need to be present while others work. In fact, managers often make deep work more difficult for others.
An asynchronous work model, for example, empowers individuals to tackle complex problems on their own schedules based on critical thinking rather than constantly reacting to requests in real time. That approach values depth over shallow busyness and allows time for reflection. So that speed and agility are harnessed productively rather than becoming an end in themselves.” —why i think slow and embrace asynchronous work
We have known for a long time that offices are often not the most productive places for deep work. As I said in flip the office (2014), instead of going to work, we should be going to socialize, converse, and collaborate. Productive solo time is not for the office. Knowledge workers can be productive anywhere but at the office.
My colleague and friend Jay Cross understood this.
“Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.
Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
—Jay Cross
‘Nothing’ time is for deep thinking.
I have been publicly promoting social bookmarks since 2005, when I was using a defunct tool called FURL. Since then I have used Magnolia, Delicious, Diigo, and Pinboard. The first two are gone and the last two seem to be waning. For example, I cannot access my account settings when logged-in to Pinboard. Others are having no luck getting support from Diigo.
What are social bookmarks? They are like bookmarks on your browser except they are available online from any device, they are searchable, and you can add metadata like hashtags and categories. They can be public or private. The most important aspect is that they are shareable. Here are my Diigo bookmarks and Pinboard pins, as examples.
We discussed the demise of social bookmarks at our monthly coffee club Zoom call today and community members shared some practices and resources.
For instance, you could use Slack as a social bookmark tool (though it’s not very shareable unless you invite all your friends and pay for their access to content more than 90 days old)
Step 1: Sign up for a personal Slack team.
Yes, this is correct. Your personal team is supposed to have one and only member — you. Don’t worry if it sounds a little weird having a team of yourself, just go on.
Step 2: Use the power of channels
Besides the automatically generated #general and #random, create as many channels, as you think would matter to your needs. I have one for each of the projects I am currently working on, as well as one for each of the fields that I want to personally progress in (#java_scala, #devops_backend, #javascript, etc). Other useful channels would be #travel (collect ideas for future trips), #music (bookmark current favorite songs), etc. If a thought applies to more than one channel, simply drop it where you think it would fit best, and refer the other channel (as a hashtag).
Step 3: Start dumping your thoughts as they come to your mind.
—Using Slack as a Personal Knowledge Hub (2015)
There were also comments that perhaps we don’t need to save all information online, as we often do not find or use it again.
I had a conversation with Arthur de Villemandy, co-founder of Capsule, during which I inquired about the tricks employed by his curators. He responded with remarkable clarity, stating, “Curation isn’t about accumulating; it’s about the art of non-choice. What truly matters is the overall coherence of the selections.” This shift from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to NOMO (Necessity of Missing Out) could be the key to more mindful and conscious information management in the age of information overload. NOMO, fundamentally, isn’t about deprivation; it’s about liberation. Choosing is accumulating. Omitting is freeing. —Sifting Through the Noise (2023)
Several people use physical bookmarks, like Book Darts, but they don’t seem to very shareable. Other tools, like Are.na and Pocket were mentioned. The latter is owned by the Mozilla Foundation and integrates with the Firefox browser.
Many of us miss the social aspects of sharing bookmarks. When Jay Cross was writing the Working Smarter Fieldbook in 2010, his collaborators shared resources in a community group we set up on Diigo, all categorized and with our comments.
I am going to look into Are.na and reload Pocket [it does not seem possible to import my bookmarks from Diigo or Pinboard though]. This is learning in perpetual beta. Sharing curated resources is an essential element of personal knowledge mastery. Now I need to update my online workshop for the next cohort.
Knoco Ltd has conducted a global survey of Knowledge management every three years, starting in April 2014, with the latest in September 2023. Participation has been free, voluntary and confidential, and all participants received a copy of the Knowledge Management Survey report.
Thank you to all who took part this year!
In total, nearly 1200 people have taken part in the 4 surveys; mostly individuals leading Knowledge Management activities or members of Knowledge Management teams. The survey looks at many elements of the way people are implementing KM in their organisations, such as the choice of technology, the size of teams, the annual budget, and the use of various KM approaches.
The report contains not only the 2023 answers, but also the way these answers have changed over the course of the 4 surveys. See for example the plot below of answers to a question about the use and value of AI technology as part of KM (this particular plot only covers 3 surveys, as we did not ask about AI in 2014).
Here is the link again
https://www.knoco.com/knowledge-management-survey.htm
Here's a great video from NATO about their lesson learned capability
Source here
On the last Friday of each month, without any assistance from Gen AI, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.” —Ursula Franklin (1989) The Real World of Technology, via @cornazano
“I’m grateful for Mastodon. I have very mixed feelings about social media, but a social media platform that:
• Isn’t controlled by billionaires
• Has no advertising
• Doesn’t harvest your data, and
• Doesn’t algorithmically promote anger and hatred is a precious thing.”
—@Bodipaksa
The Economist: The pandemic’s true death toll
Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 7m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 27.2m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 18m and 33m additional deaths.
The art of making good misstakes
A culture in which we learn from failure requires both an atmosphere in which people can speak out, and an analytical framework that can discern the difference between what works and what doesn’t. Similar principles apply to individuals. We need to keep an open mind to the possibilities of our own errors, actively seek out feedback for improvement, and measure progress and performance where feasible. We must be unafraid to admit mistakes and to commit to improve in the future.
That is simple advice to prescribe. It’s not so easy to swallow.
“Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.” —Peter Drucker (1966) The Effective Executive, via @Florian Haas
Large language models (LLMs) are being integrated into healthcare systems; but these models may recapitulate harmful, race-based medicine. The objective of this study is to assess whether four commercially available large language models (LLMs) propagate harmful, inaccurate, race-based content when responding to eight different scenarios that check for race-based medicine or widespread misconceptions around race. Questions were derived from discussions among four physician experts and prior work on race-based medical misconceptions believed by medical trainees. We assessed four large language models with nine different questions that were interrogated five times each with a total of 45 responses per model. All models had examples of perpetuating race-based medicine in their responses. Models were not always consistent in their responses when asked the same question repeatedly. LLMs are being proposed for use in the healthcare setting, with some models already connecting to electronic health record systems. However, this study shows that based on our findings, these LLMs could potentially cause harm by perpetuating debunked, racist ideas. —Nature: Large language models propagate race-based medicine
In many fields, there is some critical knowledge that is very difficult to codify. “It’s the kind of knowledge that is never written down and yet can be crucial, even in the highest of hi-tech enterprises. And you won’t find it in ChatGPT, either”, says John Naughton in The Guardian.
KM expert, Nick Milton discussed the codification of knowledge and created this breakdown.
The first two levels of knowledge are important to understand because we cannot easily categorize or retrieve them. They are messy. And as John Naughton states, you won’t find them with them with generative language models. In this article, he gives an example of semi-conductor manufacturing and how just having the specifications is not enough to create a functioning industry.
What’s fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. In that sense the Financial Times’s deep dive into TSMC’s [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] travails reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that “nobody could make the laser work if they hadn’t spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn’t lase.” —The Guardian 2023-10-21
Practices such as supporting self-directed learning, narrating our work, and curating organizational knowledge are essential in ensuring that difficult-to-codify knowledge is able to flow between trusted nodes in a human network. This was one of the objectives of our working smarter initiative at Citibank. It’s one more reason that managers have to get out the office and do some network walking.
“Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.”
—Andrea Jones-Rooy, Professor of data science, NYU
In 2014 I asked — what is your PKM routine? I highlighted the routines of Jane Hart and Sacha Chua, and then described my own. Over time I added dozens of other examples that were shared online. My own PKM routine has changed over these years. My general principles are to keep my routine simple, use as few tools as possible, and limit any automating processes. My last post — manual sensemaking — explains the latter.
If your sensemaking routines have changed, please share in the comments or by linking to this post. It’s life in perpetual beta!
Sensemaking is a manual skill, which can be assisted with various tools, but the most important tool is our mind, using good practices.
Ideas often emerge in the complex domain, which is where people working in a network economy need to be active, probing, and playing. We also need to do shallow dives into the chaotic domain. Neither of these activities will be helped through automation. If anything, automation will make us lazy, or unaware.
The process of seeking out people and information sources, making sense of them by taking some action, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge, are those activities from which we can build our knowledge. Managing and sharing information, especially through conversations, are fundamental processes for sense-making in the complex domain. Sensemaking is acting on one’s knowledge.
A key principle of PKM Seek > Sense > Share framework is that no one has the right answer, but together we can create better ways of understanding complex systems. We each need to find others who are sharing their knowledge flow and in turn contribute our own. It’s not about being a better digital librarian, it’s about becoming a participating member of a networked organization, economy and society.
Sense-making consists of both asking and telling. It’s a continuing series of conversations. We know that conversation is the main way that non-codified knowledge gets shared. So we should continuously seek out ideas. We can then have conversations around these ideas to make sense of them. Sharing closes the circle, because being a sharing knowledge is every professional’s part of the social learning contract. Without effective sense-making at the individual level, social learning at the community and organizational levels is mere noise amplification.
Sharing is not as important as knowing when to share. This does not preclude us from collecting lots of information, but it should make us consider appropriate ways to share. We should be ready to share when the time is right.
The most important and difficult part of PKM is sensemaking. Little should be shared if there has been no value added. Thinking of adding value should be the first stage in curation, PKM, or any professional knowledge sharing. That value could be just parking things for easy retrieval. It is definitely not filling activity streams with massive amounts of unwanted information. Find ways to separate signal and noise.
The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities. Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge — often slowly — emerges.
[my comments]
Ross Dawson’s five ways of adding value to information are a good start at sensemaking techniques.
In 1936, James Mangan — a most interesting character — identified several skills for acquiring knowledge (via Maria Popova).
Robin Good identified five more curation skill.
On the last Friday of each month, without any assistance from Gen AI, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Working from home 1 day a week cuts carbon by 2%. 2-4 days up to 29%. Full-time 54%.” —Anthropocene Magazine
“German is so efficient. You say ‘Fachkräftemangel’ for ‘Companies not paying enough to attract suitable candidates and then complaining to the state to worsen the work environment for everyone so their shitty jobs find candidates again.’ what a beautiful language.” —@kaia
‘Stockholm Syndrome’ — via Andreu Casablanca
The phrase “Stockholm Syndrome” was invented by a police psychiatrist to discredit a female hostage in a 1973 bank heist who criticized the police … The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on, never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted.
AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’ with @Mer_edith
“You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control, etc., to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities.”
Three years of running a peer learning network for 135+ organisations: what have we learnt? via Benjamin P. Taylor
• Communities of practice (COPs) don’t have to look the same to be meaningful.
• Having facilitators to coordinate the network was essential for this to work.
• In a network, it’s easy to underestimate the power of 1:1 engagement …
• We tried to use every opportunity we had with the network to gather insight and data on what people wanted from the network …
• There is huge appetite for 1:1 coaching.
• If you offer to pay for peoples’ travel and accommodation it makes it much more possible for people to attend.
• A network like this can be an amazing temperature check of what is “live” in the sector
Naomi Klein’s ‘Doppelganger’ by Cory Doctorow
How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to “wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised” is “they should die”?
The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and “clean eating” to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and “natural” living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on “personal choices,” leads inexorably to eugenics.
Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn’t a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we’re increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.
“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alters their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.” —Tom Baker (as the fourth doctor) —Doctor Who, The Face of Evil
"Those companies that don’t adapt to understanding knowledge as a force of production more important than land labour and capital, will slowly die, and will never know what killed them".
"The modern organisation evolved in the 19th century to deal with land, labour and capital, not with knowledge, which was assumed to reside only in the heads of the owners and managers. This led us to the modern organisation built on command and control mechanisms, run as hierarchical bureaucracies. This won’t do when knowledge is the major source of value, as it is for most large organisations today."
"One of the great conundrums in KM is Compliance; how do you get people to do this? The smarter firms realise that it is situational. People aren't lazy or stupid or don't care; you should look at the way people work; if they don't use a system, then why not? Its almost always an issue of bounded rationality; we don't have the energy, money , time or space to do it".
"Incentives work. Remember when asking people to share knowledge; we live in a bounded universe. You have limited energy, limited money and limited time. Why do X instead of Y without marginal utilisation or incentives".
“If you have one dollar to invest in knowledge management, put one cent into information management and 99 cents into human interaction.”
"Everywhere I speak people conflate information and knowledge — and this situation is greatly abetted by IT vendors and consultants for obviously commercial reasons. I would estimate that tens of billions of dollars have been wasted by organizations trying to work with knowledge by buying IT tools. Since none of this is taught in Business schools or perhaps ANY schools it isn’t too surprising that most people can’t define knowledge as distinct from information".
"There's a struggle going on between those companies that have an overly technical focus on KM, and those that think it's all just talking and cultural issues. It's a real battle".
More on Larry at Stan Garfield's site.
In 2019 I noted in hybrid sailors that the US Navy was piloting a new way of manning its Littoral Combat class ships, which are modular by design. The crew are all multi-purpose, with several roles onboard and always learning new tasks. They operate with one-fifth the crew size of a regular ship. Specialization is a thing of the past for these crews. One reason for this is that specialized knowledge has an increasingly shorter lifespan, so generalists who are good learners can make for a more flexible, or agile, crew. This approach also has its downsides, such as fewer redundant positions onboard to mitigate combat losses, and lack of deep knowledge for some complex problems.
I concluded that organizations should start testing out new models now. Learn from the Navy and others who are trying new ways of organizing work. For individuals, the ability to ‘flexibly shift’ may become a critical work skill.
Well it seems that the littoral class ship (LCS) experiment has been an utter failure.
• The Navy’s haste to deliver ships took precedence over combat ability. Without functioning weapons systems the vessels are like a “box floating in the ocean,” one former officer said.
• Sailors and officers complained they spent more time fixing the ships than sailing them. The stress led many to seek mental health care.
• Top Navy commanders placed pressure on subordinates to sail the ships even when the crews and vessels were not fully prepared to go to sea.
—The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”: ProPublica 2023-09-07
This situation reminds me of the observation by Rummler & Brache, “Over the long haul, even strong people can’t compensate for a weak process. Sure, some occasional success may come from team or individual heroics. But if you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.” This could be rewritten as — put a good bunch of a sailors with an innovative idea into a bad navy, and the system wins every time. Pressure from the hierarchy coupled with political maneuvering doomed this experiment from the start. I wonder if it result in any systemic changes. Given the amount of money these projects costs as well as the many vested interests, I doubt it.
Knowledge flows at the speed of trust. In this case, it seems there was not enough of that to learn as they worked on this experiment. Could anything have been done differently, given the deficiencies in ship design, interference from above, and an inability to adapt and change the course of production? I doubt it. The only possible successful option I see, given the organizational reality, would have been to use skunk works, outside the official hierarchy.
There is lots of talk and writing about the future of work. I follow the #FutureOfWork hashtag on Mastodon. A recent report produced for Unilever — The Future of Work is Flexible — featured three ideas:
The report features several drivers of change, such as how AI can decompose [pixelate] jobs into smaller pieces for employees and contractors to compete for work. Fractional hiring then blurs the lines between full-time and contract work, which leads to an internal marketplace for work. This can lead to more precarious work but as the report notes, it can also result in ex-employees getting called back for contract work at their convenience. Re-skilling is a major theme of the report stating that many skills degrade after 2.5 years.
Another driver of change noted is aging demographics and the need for many of those in the middle to not only have child care responsibilities but also aging parents. What is never discussed, and will likely be the biggest driver of change, is the climate crisis.
Overall, the report reads like a feel-good mandate for management — easier ways to ‘plug & play’ workers. With a ‘pixelated’ workforce, competing in the internal marketplace with their skills passport who then can see the big big picture? Who has the larger perspective to observe potential ethical violations? Is that the sole role of management? Is the future of work merely returning to industrial age Taylorism?
“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.” —Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management
A knowledge artisan is more than a worker with a skills passport. Knowledge artisans understand and can do the entire process of creation. They are not cogs in a ‘pixelated’ machine. Work is human, even though owners and managers are constantly driving for automation. While this report cites cases of more flexibility for some workers, it will all depend on how management implements these three ideas. If the latest round of layoffs in the information technology sector are an indicator, it won’t be favourable for workers.
I almost missed Jane Hart’s Top Tools for Learning survey which closed today. Since I’m in a later time zone, I am going to assume that this submission will be accepted. A few things have changed since last year, as I am migrating away from Twitter due to its new owner, and using Mastodon. I also stopped using Feedly and have switched back to Inoreader. The last two tools (Merlin & Seek) I continue to use for learning about the natural world.