Month: October 2021

It’s all A and no I.    All intelligence requires agency.  None of the machines we’ve built have agency in themselves.  Yet these are very useful tools, just as woodworking, machine tools, hydraulics, and electric motors greatly extend what our physical bodies can accomplish. 

What we term “AI” can be grouped into algorithms and machine learning.

Algorithms are created by individuals who have agency.  “IF this then that,” and “do this next” programming.  The intelligence is in the individual, who can reasonably explain the why and the how of the algorithm.  Millions of us receive customized email messages from Amazon which recommend products based on our previous searches.  These are created by algorithms and software written by intelligent individuals.  Glenn Brooke gets recommendations on an odd collection of old books, new business books, backpacking gear, laundry soap, and dog poop bags.  

Machine learning is a relatively new kind of tool.  Intelligent people create a training data set and a decision model to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so.  During the training phase there is a feedback loop so that over time the model gets better at making predictions.  There are some similarities to the way we think neurons in our brain work, but machine learning make progress in a different way than human thinking (which is partly why it’s a valuable tool).  A machine learning system cannot explain how it arrives at a prediction, but the predictions are useful.

There are many different applications for machine learning.  Most are quite specific to a business or research process.  Famous examples are the machine learning models that play Go and Chess better than any human or earlier software program.  Alpha-Go, for example, was trained by giving the model tens of thousands of games of Go, then played against itself.  Alpha-Go plays quite differently than any human Go master.  Alpha-Go can’t play backgammon or checkers or Monopoly — but the underlying machine learning technology could be pointed to new training data sets to create a world-class players in those games.  Another powerful example of machine learning is DeepMind’s system to predict 350,000 protein structures – a real leap forward for medical treatments.

The ability to make better predictions or decisions from messy, complex data is a powerful asset.  The key thing to recognize about machine learning is that no one can really explain in detail how the prediction was made, and the machine learning tool is not self-aware of why it has been optimized a certain way.  Intelligence is still required to decide what to do with the prediction that machine learning made.  

There is no universal “AI.”  Algorithms and machine learning models are exquisitely built to accomplish tailored tasks.  You can combine many of them into systems which appear to act intelligently, but all the intelligence is in the creators.  The idea that a new intelligence will spontaneously develop when we connect a sufficiently large amount of computational power is simply false. Intelligence requires inference and leaps of connections which are impossible in today’s 0 and 1 binary coding systems. Everything that “appears” intelligent is a function of human designs. Scientists and philosophers have at best working definitions of alive, intelligence, and consciousness which are far short of being able to engineer these things.

Remember: We shape our tools, and our tools shape us.  He who shapes the vocabulary shapes understanding.

“Things are going downhill.”

“We need to stop this before it gets worse.”

“Back in my day we never had this mess.”

Embedded in these statements is an implicit “things used to be better.”  Sometimes that is true.  Yet there remains the pervasive idea that things are worse now and we need to “return to” something. 

Challenge question: “When were things great for everyone? At what point in history was 99% of the human race experiencing a life free of struggles and corruption and failing?”

When in history were these things — globally, for all peoples — not an issue?

• Lack of accountability
• Partisan news  
• Lying politicians and corrupt rulers
• Ungrateful youth
• Nepotism and favoritism surpassing competence
• Elders resistant to progress
• Racism, sexism, classism
• Elites believing they have the right ideas
• People believing wild rumors and rejecting facts
• Censorship and suppression of information
• Failures of masculinity and femininity
• Unfair employer practices
• Distrust in institutions
• Wealth spent foolishly

We have made enormous progress, and there is still progress needed.   People have experienced “Camelot” moments in time but they didn’t last and certainly didn’t include many people.   Heaven is in the future, not the past.  

Watch out for this: Many manipulators and unscrupulous leaders desiring power will constantly refer you back to some time “before X was lost.” The scrape the wounds rather than heal them because they know open wounds ooze energy and passion. They don’t want to solve the issue, just make promises in a way that pulls you into their orbit and fuels their desires. This is at the root of many mob behaviors.

What can I do to positively influence the next 10 generations?  What is in my 300 year plan?  My legacy is most likely through developing people and creating through communication rather than inventing something.

Therefore, I begin by clarifying the characteristics of the people, and then asking what I can do to foster those characteristics.  Wise people have observed that history is biography.  So, too, is the future.

Given the scenarios of the next 300 years, what are the people characteristics we should encourage, foster, and reinforce?  In no particular order, maybe some overlap and redundancy:

• Strong sense of identity
• Pragmatic problem-solvers
• Change-shapers
• Rule themselves before they rule others
• Know, fear, honor, and worship the Lord
• Attentive to the Holy Spirit / Muse
• Lifelong learners, creators, lovers
• Optimistic and realistic
• Not easily fooled or tempted to evil
• Clear understanding of their gifting and calling
• Easily pleased and difficult to satisfy
• Generous hearts
• Understand the truth of “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”
• Abiding sense of personal and collective responsibility
• Ability to learn from history and biographies
• Skilled communicators and persuaders.  Excellent listeners. Skilled at coaching, and mentoring.
• Tech-savvy and know how to keep technology in its proper place as a tool
• High level of self-respect
• Able to lead themselves before they lead others
• Teachable, and able to teach
• Seek forgiveness, and willing to forgive others
• Good citizens, participating in civic and political spheres
• Know the Bible.  Prayerful and worshipful.  Strong intercessors.
• Effective parents and grandparents
• Good neighbors
• Hospitable
• Courageous
• Mentally and physically tough
• Active, not passive, but knowing that genuine rest has ROI.
• Live fearlessly out of their calling.  Not victims.
• Use money well
• Crush lies with truth, knowing that the truth is good enough.
• Know peace, what it costs, and willing to fight for it.
• “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.”
• Entrepreneurial — able to create value from what others see as nothing
• Effective managers in organizations
• Chain-breakers, freedom-lovers, justice-seekers
• Able to laugh at themselves
• Readers
• Thoughtful decision-makers
• Persistent, faithful, persevering
• Full of hope and confidence in God
• Conveyers of joy
• Mindful of evil and the ways of evil
• Dreamers and doers, adapters and overcomers
• Able and willing to stand up to bullies, thugs, and tyrants
• Protectors of the weak and defenders of the defenseless
• Know how to talk to themselves and feed their minds with what’s needed
• Future-focused without severing themselves from the best foundations of the past
• Resilient and antifragile — get stronger with stress

(What have I missed, or surprised you?  Let me know in the comments.)

These characteristics must be taught and modeled, recognized and acquired.  They don’t “just happen.” They are “the better angels of our nature” to borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. 

Every individual in every generation needs to strive for these characteristics.  Indeed, fight for them. They’ll only succeed with the help of parents and family, neighbors, teachers, mentors, pastors, employers, and philosophers – the people who create the space which fosters these characteristics, and specifically teach them. (Government powers always seek to press into this space, but the consequences speak for themselves.)

I heard recently that basketball is the most over-coached and under-taught sport.  In my lifetime I have witnessed a growing passivity to character-building.  We are drawn to the coaching part, and fear the teaching part – or perhaps, we don’t know how to teach for character. So, what can I do to foster and develop people like this, over the next 10 generations?  I don’t expect to be alive on the planet in the year 2321, but I could be influential even then.

What could we anticipate in the next 300 years?

My conviction is that living in the best possible way in a 300 year plan is living the best possible way for a 1 year plan. Why 300 years?  It’s 10 generations.  It’s long enough that the only question holding your attention is “What is the most worthwhile investment of my time, gifts, and energy to benefit humanity?” 

We must first anticipate what could happen in the next 300 years.  It’s an exercise of extrapolating from hard trends evident today, adding in elements which are likely, and stretching your imagination to weave into likely scenarios.  Demographics, geopolitics, technology trends, persistent human strengths & foibles, economics, social structures. Whatever we imagine will surely be incorrect in precise details, but still useful. My book “Bold and Gentle” has guidance for my adult children for the next 50 years of living in this age of exponential technology change.  I made specific predictions about the largest issues that would affect us (including pandemics).

It’s possible that the human species will be gone in 300 years.  I doubt it, despite our astounding capacity for self-sabotage.  A friend recently pointed out to me that humans adapt to change better than any other species – indeed, we change the environment to suit us – and we are the superior long-distance runners in the animal kingdom.  We go the distance. 

The future need not always move in the positive direction.  We don’t know what mathematics was lost when the Islamic caliphates collapsed.  The secrets of Roman self-healing cement were lost for a millennium and still can’t be replicated well; the same is true for the cement used by the Ancient Ones who built the pyramids outside Mexico City.  We have almost nothing of the philosophy and art of the Assyrian empire. The jungles crept back over magnificent cities in Central America and at Ankor Wat.  The 20^th century saw many retreats from knowledge, art, sophistication, and justice. 

Overall, I’m an optimist about the future.  Winston Churchill commented during the worst of the London Blitz that he saw little value in being a pessimist.  I’m long people, and short government. We must temper optimism with realism, especially about the fundamentals of human nature, and the recognition that we overestimate how much can be done in a few years and greatly underestimate how much can be accomplished in hundreds of years.

Ready?  Here we go.

Foundation truths:

• The future can be shaped by people with agency.
• Exponential technology trends — and the changes are accelerating — will utterly transform the capabilities people think as “normal.”
• People will still be people, with similar aspirations we experience today, and every generation must learn anew.
• The future is integrated. All the elements I could possibly tease out and consider separately are still entwined and enveloped by all the other elements.
• “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

Assumptions for this exercise:

• Wars, tyrannical governments, pandemics, and natural disasters will kill many millions over the years but not end the human species.
• We successfully adapt to environmental changes.
• Jesus’ return happens after 300 years from now.

So my thoughts about likely scenarios, in no particular order:

• Global population will level off and begin a slow decline 150-200 years from now.  Effectively every human mind is connected at some level via technology; this is widely perceived as a both a blessing and a curse.
• The human footprint will extend further into the solar system — the moon, asteroid mining, low-earth orbit habitats, and Mars.  We will have as detailed an understanding of the oceans as we do the land today.  Many people will gravitate to these new frontiers. 
• Medical advances will lengthen healthy lifetimes to the point where we grow into a new collective sense of who is “old.”  Breakthrough genomic analysis paved the path to treat the most common chronic diseases of the 20th century — including diabetes and neurological dementia.  We will look back in revulsion and wonderment at circa 2000 medical paradigms for treating cancer.  More will go into shaping health and less to treating late-stage disease.  People will still die.  Even 300 years from now medical care and life-extending options will not be equally available to everyone.
• Exponential technology changes in computing, materials, sensors, energy, and biotechnology will generate more 98/2 distributions than 80/20 distributions. Inequity (unequal outcomes) exists, and is used by some as a driving force for political and social change.  There will be completely new industries and job opportunities by 2050.  And again in 2100. Every generation will be challenged to adapt and find meaning amidst fast changes. 
• There will be an ebb and flow of religious dynamism in tension with areligious world views.  New syncretisms of old religious ideas with neurochemistry and machine learning will arise.
• English as written and spoken today will be an important language but likely not the globally dominant language.  There are good geopolitical reasons to think the United States and China will be strong in 300 years (e.g., natural resources, strategic geographic buffer of oceans and mountains), but other nations and coalitions of nations will be critically important.  India, Vietnam, Korea, Turkey, and Brazil are likely to be important centers of economic and political power. The African continent will be fully developed.  
• Wars will occur.  The weapons will largely be enhanced versions of what exists in the 21^st century, much more AI-driven capability, and some new types of weapons.  Courage, resolve, leadership, deception, and maneuver tactics will be critical elements.
• Personal privacy will continue to be a point of struggle for power, influence, and dominance.  National governments will experiment with different legal approaches.
• The unintended structural threads of the global credit cycles in the 21^st century – we have fewer business cycles and more credit cycles now – shred.  The debt reset will be difficult, with a thousand fathers to blame, and we’ll move past it to something I can’t yet conceive.  This will cement digital currencies as normative.
• There are likely to be at least 2 major reserve currency shifts after digital currencies become the norm, especially in the economic frontiers in the solar system.
• The primary reasons people struggle to achieve their dreams and reach full potential are neither technical nor economic.  Our individual and collective capacity for self-sabotage will remain limiting factors. 
• We are likely to go through two “Renaissance” movements in the next 300 years — recovering old wisdom and applying it in new ways, particularly in art, narrative, and governance.  A significant component will be integrating training in mental fortitude and creative flexibility with historic education topics.
• Many institutions will be broken, re-formed, and renewed.  The breaking points for change will approach as people recognize that the leaders of the institutions care more about protecting the status quo than serving the people the institution was created to help.  Guilds and unions will resurge multiple times as the global labor pool levels and demographic changes ebb and flow.
• Some corporations and associations will become more powerful than most of the national governments.   One continuing paradigm for major institutions is the desire to control the narrative.  The proportion of the human population which desires to tell others what to do does not change.
• We will leverage deeper understanding in neurobiology and psychology to shape “learning how to learn” at every age.  Technological changes move fast enough and typical lives are long enough that we’re motivated to learn new skills to remain employable and successful. There will be ongoing tension between true education and indoctrination. 
• Skilled and wise leadership paired with character and integrity will be much needed, and always at a premium. 

What’s your reaction to this list?  Hit reply and let me know.

I should add another key caveat to this exercise: It’s difficult to make our minds go beyond a linear extrapolation of what we imagine happening soon. My ancestors in 1910 would have scoffed at the idea of GPS navigation or DNA sequencing, or that Woolworth’s stores would be a memory.  My 12-year-old self could not have imagined that Sears and Montgomery Wards would practically disappear with the rise of ubiquitous ecommerce. Paradigm shifts seem obvious in retrospect. Paradigm shifts are difficult to anticipate in an 80/20 world, and practically impossible in a 95/5 world like ours. People will still fundamentally be people in the next 300 years, so it is people that deserve our attention.

We are capable of enormous powers of self-sabotage.  This is ever a danger to undermine our contributions, though our circumstances shift over the years and seasons. 

Here is a list of signals that you might be self-sabotaging, in the Jeff Foxworthy (“You might be a redneck if…”) spirit:

• Embracing known lies as excuses
• Seeking pleasurable distractions
• Choosing to do lesser work than you’re capable of, and being satisfied with first efforts
• Thinking too much about what others think of you
• Frequent procrastination on a significant project
• Assuming a failure is fatal or cannot be used to move forward
• Stalled because you’re spending more time imagining fearful situations than potential payoffs
• Failing to cheer others on and celebrating their good work; letting jealously and envy rule your mind
• Wallowing in anger about minor matters
• Choosing to stride alone rather than going with others when appropriate
• Habitually failing to get appropriate rest and recovery
• Absorbing criticism, even constructive criticism, as personal attacks
• Consciously ignoring wisdom from experience
• Staying ‘safely’ in convention and majority positions which you know are limiting
• Choosing noise and chaos to avoid difficult internal emotional work
• Redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim
• Trying to please the wrong audience
• Demonizing all emotions, aiming to be completely rational
• Unwilling to create sustained changes for a new season or opportunity
• Avoiding uncomfortable-but-growth learning
• Preferring pleasure over joy
• Addictions of many kinds; the compounding interest works against your best capability
• Seeking to control all things rather than working with what you can control
• Looking for cost-free and effort-free solutions
• Interpreting all information by how it affects your self-identity

What if you recognize something here is true about you?  (In candor, I could create this list because I have done all of these, and often.)

Repent. 

I’m not speaking of wailing guilt and shame, but the way the New Testament speaks of repentance.  The Greek word in the NT translated at ‘repent’ is “metanoia” which means “change of mind.” 

We need to change our mind when we self-sabotage.  That’s a decision, followed by actions which are consistent with your new way of thinking.  No one can do that for you.  All good things are on the far side of that decision.

Repent, then lead yourself forward.

I want to adopt the mindset of a tree. A grand old tree is the metaphor for the life I want to lead that positively influences the next 300 years.

We read in Psalm 1 that the blessed man – whose delight is meditating on God’s law day and night — is “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” There is profound tree imagery from Genesis to Revelation.

The structure of a tree reflects both the past and the present. Did you know that less than 5% of the mass of a tree is alive?  The leaves, flowers, the thin layers of xylem and phloem under the protective bark, and water/mineral absorption layers in the roots are alive.  Everything else is residual history of previously living tissue.  The past shapes and supports the living.  Damages sustained in storms and by insects will slowly be repaired by living tissue.

Trees send their roots deep and wide for water and minerals. Their roots cling powerfully to the earth. Given a choice to ram my car into a tree or a telephone pole of the same diameter I would opt for the telephone pole. Rare is the wind strong enough to push a tree hard enough to pull it out of the earth.

Trees hold their head and branches skyward, reaching for the sun. A mature, healthy oak tree can have 200,000 leaves. During 60 years of life that oak grows and sheds nearly two tons of leaves. About 70% of the nutrients a tree takes from the soil will be returned in the leaves.

Trees are rigidly flexible. Trees endure seasonal heat and cold, wet and dry, winds, insect and disease. Trees don’t pack up and move to new locations in good time or bad.  They are where they are, and no matter the weather they stand firm.  Yet trees are flexible.  Their leaves adjust position to better capture sunlight.  Limbs and branches can sway and bend without breaking.  Trees are resilient benders; they quickly recover their original position.

Trees provide security and food for other plants and animals. Vines, moss, lichens, many insects, small rodents, and some predators view trees as refuge. They produce abundant flowers, fruits, nuts, and seeds, scattering them to the world. The produce oxygen from carbon dioxide.

Trees are anchors of ecosystems. They can purify water. They hold soil in place, limiting water’s power of erosion. Decaying leaves and needles shift the pH of the soil to match their preference.  Trees change the temperature of the surrounding air; the transpiration of water shapes the microclimate around trees. They shape the wind. Solomon is said to have planted trees to transform the desert. Workers ringed rocks around the base of the tree to condense moisture from the air when the desert cooled at night, dripping into the rocky soil to sustain the tree.  Over the years the trees grew and changed the desert into forest and fields that could be cultivated. The Assyrians, Persians, and Romans all knew one of the fastest ways to destroy an enemy’s homeland is to cut down all the trees.

Every tree is unique, and can stand alone, yet trees thrive best when they are together with other trees. Trees communicate with other trees through chemical signals, both above and below ground.

Even in death a tree leaves a legacy that nurtures and sustains. Their wood is valuable. Dead trees become home to different insects and animals than live trees. Decaying trees enrich the soil of forests. The roots of a tree continues to stabilize the earth for many years after its death.

So what must I do to be tree-like?

• Send roots deep into wisdom
• Hold my head and hands up to heaven
• Patiently endure
• Bear fruit generously
• Anchor and interact with the ecosystem where I have been planted
• Provide space for others to live and thrive
• Translate my past into present strength

Leaders are in the education business, because leaders need to pull people – team members, bosses, customers, partners — along with them.  Pushing people is partially effective, but requires positional power. Educating people is a key part of persuasion and influence.

The word ‘educate’ comes to English from Latin: ducere, meaning to draw or lead, with the prefix e to indicate “out of.”  Education is not pouring into, but drawing out.  It’s not cracking open the skull and stuffing in facts.  Education requires that we use information, questions, dialogue, and experience plus feedback to shape the way a person thinks and behaves.

Therefore, education will never be an efficient process.  There are efficient ways to give people information.  There are efficient ways to begin dialogue.  Yet education is about a whole person, requires their participation and cooperation, and touches the mystery of how the mind works.

Sometimes people have created a loose connection between education and indoctrination.  Working from formal definitions:

Education: imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

Indoctrination: teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view.

Observation: If we approve of the curriculum and worldview, then we call it education.  If we don’t, we condemn it as indoctrination.

Education is an open mindset; indoctrination is a fixed mindset. A test to consider:  An educated person may develop a separate worldview from his teachers, disagree on many matters, and still be friendly and learn from one another.  An intense focus on indoctrination yields a situation where departure from the doctrine is labeled heresy and destroys fellowship.  Indoctrination as a strategy does not create mature individuals who continue learning and growing.  People hell-bent (I use that word purposefully) on indoctrination do not tolerate a student exceeding the teacher.  The only cooperative part of the indoctrination process is obedience and rote learning.

Education must be a mix of information and experiences.  Sharing stories is crucial.  Few will remember your seven brilliant bullet points, but they will remember the well-told story that touched their heart or made them smile.  Better yet, share a story which made them see differently!  Inspiring, transforming leaders weave stories and information together.  They give people context where they can fit in the facts and information. 

Your leadership will go to new levels when you see yourself as an educator.

The ability to see a situation in a different way is a powerful leadership tool.  It’s called “reframing.”

Marine infantry are taught how to take out tanks.  Tanks are loud, powerful, intimidating – but they have weaknesses that can be exploited.  They use the expression “Hunting Tanks is Easy and Fun.”  This is brilliant reframing: a Marine thinks of himself as the hunter having fun, rather than a puny human about to be crushed.  

For centuries no army could withstand heavy cavalry charges, until William Wallace created a defensive wall of 20 foot long spears.  The Nazi military machine simply went around the impregnable French Maginot line using speed and mobility to their advantage. 

Johnson & Johnson reframed their contaminated Tylenol debacle into a new packaging campaign which made their brand even more trustworthy. 

Multiple companies have turned the challenges of increased regulatory requirements into a business advantage – they excelled and systematized to a point where competitors could not keep up.  Instead of the regulatory burden dragging the company down, it created a business environment where only the very best could compete at all.

These are all cases of reframing.  The difficulty plus a creative solution became the means of greater success.

You’re going to face difficult, seemingly impossible situations as a leader.  It takes some creative thinking and boldness to find an approach where the difficulty is the seed of the beneficial future state. 

Here are some tips to think differently about a problem situation:

• Make the difficulty 10x bigger, and 10x smaller, and ask what’s still true.
• Shift your perspective up, down, left, right, closer and farther away. Reverse the situation and look at from the top down and bottom up.  Insights emerge when you consider problems from multiple vantage points.
• How does the strength of the problem become its liability or weak point?
• Fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen.  Take any one away and the fire goes out.  What are the foundational elements of the difficulty you face that could be neutralized?
• What new technology capabilities are emerging that could change the environment where the difficulty currently thrives?  What new technology lets you do an end-run around a Maginot line?
• What processes could be added to solve a problem?  What processes need to be disrupted to create a solution?
• What difference does geographic location make? 
• Are the relationships that can be strengthen (or weakened)? 
• What are unlikely things that can be put together?  Uber = personal cars plus an app.

The key is to think about the problem in a fun way.  Play with it in your mind.  Don’t make it a horribly frightening “tank” but something entertaining.   This is a learnable skill, so practice on small things and you’ll be ready for the big crisis.  Remember, “Hunting Tanks is Easy and Fun!”