Fictional Intelligence

At the Learning Technologies Conference last week, there was a lot of discussion both in conference sessions and in the general social chat, about AI, Artificial Intelligence, in HR, L&D and OD. It's a maturing 'science', with an increasingly well-understood potential and some well-demonstrated examples. However, this post is not about that.

Image: Patricia Hebert

This post is about how science fiction (SF) is ahead of this particular game, and has been for far longer than we've been angsting about it. 

And the good news is that, contrary to traditional expectations of various dystopian futures (well, not entirely), the premise is that humanity has a huge part still to play - not necessarily in its/our classical form perhaps, but in working with and, in some cases, as part of the collaborative whole. OK, in many cases, we may not have been altogether willing participants initially (and that's more about some humans' inhumanity to some other humans, than anything else), but it's our basic humanity which acts as the conscience and the ultimate arbiter of how 'the machines'/AI work/will work.

In his keynote talk on Day 2 of the conference, Daniel Susskind (@danielsusskind) shared John Searle's Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal from February 2011, after IBM's Watson computer beat two human competitors in the TV game show 'Jeopardy' - "Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!'" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703407304576154313126987674). His premise is that Watson doesn't think, it computes. By extension therefore, we could say that Watson doesn't care that it won Jeopardy.

But we care. And because we care, we can moderate, influence and thereby work with 'the machines'. We just have to learn to appreciate the value and insight they can bring to our work, so that we can learn to humanise the outcomes and realise the benefits.

To finish, just to say our reading doesn't always have to be entirely business or professionally focused for us to be able to draw out some analogous insights. Sometimes, it can just be for our own entertainment. If you'd like to escape into some recent great SF I've read which kinda supports my earlier points, whilst also being rattling good reads (Warning: Some war/violence, some human/animal hybrids, some human/machine over-familiarity), I can recommend the following (all available on Amazon): 

"Autonomous" - Annalee Newitz

"Dogs of War" - Adrian Tchaikovsky

"Ghosts of Tomorrow" - Michael R. Fletcher

Any other Fictional Intelligence recommendations please?

Plateaued?

Some quick thoughts from this week's Learning Technologies Conference at ExCel London.

Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash

I heard several people say that they felt there wasn't much new, that there seemed to be a lot of 'the same sort of thing' as last year (and the year before that etc).

If it's true that, as a profession, we tend to leap ahead in steps, always jumping forward to the next, new, shiny thing/theory/approach/tool, and that we're not currently able to do that because we can't see anything like that ahead, then I'd suggest that this is a good thing. 

If we have plateaued, then this is surely the time to adopt a more pioneer attitude. Let's colonise that plateau, own it, build on it, create a community out of all the other homesteaders. Let's talk to and learn from each other, borrow from and lend back to them our collective knowledge, skill and tools, and then support all of that with an infrastructure that encourages and allows our shared space to be a better, more collaborative, productive and joyful place to live and work.

[This blog brought to you by the School of Over-wrought Analogies]

Deep Thought?

I do a lot of thinking.

Image: Pixabay

I do a lot of worrying. I worry that I don't think deeply enough. I think that if I did, I would post more blogs. I worry that, when I do post blogs, they're not deeply thought-through enough. I worry that my peers think I don't think deeply enough. I think about that a lot. 

I worry that I don't spend enough time thinking about improving my practice, but just getting on with it. I worry that I might have lost my edge since I was ill and elected to follow a different professional path. I think that sometimes, I don't give a sh*t about that. Then I worry about how unprofessional others might think that is. 

Sometimes, I think that I over-think things.