DOTTING THE i

The difference between study and reading, as I see it, is the bar is set much higher for study than for reading. All you need to read successfully is to understand. Study implies the need to not only understand but also remember and correlate what you  just read with something else. Often that requires re-reading, even some writing of your own to streamline and imprint the process. This week I studied two ideas, two different sources. 

I once told my boss that if my simplistic rationale appeared to be me talking down to him, it was not. That’s just me, taking care of me. I need very simple logic for me to connect the dots. Combine that with my dependence on metaphors, sometimes it takes longer for me to dot the “ i ” than to pen the phrase. Imagine two photographs, one of a happy person standing soaked in the rain; the other of the same, smiling person in the rain except under an umbrella. Add the umbrella and the context changes, not about people in the rain but about possibility. That’s how my study went; sort of like connecting distant 3rd cousins in the same pedigree. 

“Graves’ Values Systems” came out of research done back in the 1950’s. Similar to personality inventories, it created personality categories and predicted how different types of individuals perceived each other, in different kinds of situations. GVS was revisited in the 1990’s where its ultimate application was for how organizations function and optimizing resources. The article was compelling enough for me to re-read and take notes. 

Then I watched a moderated discussion between historian, Yuval Harari and journalist, Thomas Friedman. Wonderful juxtapose with Harari spanning human history over millennia, making cause-effect observations from foot prints left behind. Friedman on the other hand was stuck in the present, plunging ahead into an impending future that is yet to unfold. One references civilization from primordial to the present and the other from one election cycle to the next. Every idea expressed, from either perspective, took an immediate left turn and spiraled like water down the drain, to the central problems humans face. They didn’t agree on everything but they did concur on the most pressing issues, avoiding nuclear war, being proactive with climate change and coping with unavoidable risks that come with an explosion in technological advance. Three problems, if you will, are ripe with potential to upset if not wreck a civilization that we take for granted.

Graves’ Values point out natural pitfalls that could be minimized but fall between the cracks. The segue between Graves’ and Harari/Friedman was; Graves’ worked at the individual & small group level while the latter expanded the same mechanics to a global scale. Extrapolated out from individuals to cultures you get an appreciation for how short sighted and unprepared humans are for change. On the other hand, futuristic forecasts suggest - more than suggest Humanity’s longer range, uphill challenge. My thumb nail sketch of that scenario would be of distraught parents from the 1960’s whose run-amok, tie dye kids ran off to San Francisco to become flower children. If you have no control over your own creation then you become a spectator within your own journey. Clearly, the future of our species will unfold. Western religion requires a deity that controls everything but I kicked that habit. I’m inclined to trust Dalai Lama’s observation; “No one is in control.” Destiny can manifest itself in any of many possibilities. Then, after the fact, once it becomes history, it would seem to have been inevitable. Still, nothing happens in the past or in the future. Things only happen in the present and that’s where Friedman has leverage that Harari does not. 

Controlling artificial intelligence isn’t going to be the problem.  Competing with it is. When monster, external algorithms (artificial intelligence and machine learning) meet our needs better and faster than our minds are able, the Matrix model becomes a real concern. Would you like the red or the blue pill? I know this makes me sound like a conspiracy geek and I’m not really. In 1903, kids who could read about the 120 ft. flight of the Wright brother’s contraption would be senior citizens, watching Neil Armstrong step down onto the moon, all in less than a human lifetime. 

Today, the very best polo ponies in the world are cloned, born ready for polo. It takes 6 to 7 years to train a natural polo pony but only half that time to ready the clone. In a string of 8 clone ponies there is no diversity, genetically they are all the same pony. If that’s not a monster, external algorithm at work I need some clarification. Harari isn’t saying, this or that will happen, only that things will change rapidly and people are preoccupied with nostalgia and old world stuff. E.O. Wilson’s comment seems more relevant with every passing. “The problem with Homo sapiens is that we have Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions and God like technology.” When the gap between humans and technology becomes so great that only a tiny elite (corporations, government, military) control the data and how it is employed, people risk becoming biological gadgets. My generation is over the hill, the next may make it through but my grandkids are certainly in the cross hairs. If I’m just and old man pissing in the wind, studying Harari & Friedman is still better than watching the news.