[TLDR: Adaptability in the face of change is paramount for leaders seeking long-term success. Yet, a cognitive bias known as “target fixation” can inadvertently obstruct the ability of business leaders to spot crucial signals of necessary—even lifesaving—change in the business environment.]
It is a pleasure to welcome the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms. We share terms like Markov Blankets, The Free Energy Principle, Homeostasis, and Entropy.
While scams and fraud have been around as long as human society, what happens when a scammer is no longer a person but an AI? As in Esperanza’s case, trust is often the scammer’s most potent weapon. This elderly woman, driven by her religious obsession, gave her life savings to someone she believed was divine. With its capacity to learn and adapt, AI could potentially exploit that trust on a much larger scale.
In The Hidden Spring, our guest Mark Solms does not dive too deeply into Karl Friston’s mathematics. As you will discover, he summarises its implications, describing Friston’s free energy as a quantifiable measure of how a system models the world and how it behaves. This notion leads to a very different idea of consciousness from Descartes’s reason-centric version that set up the puzzling dualism of “mind” and “matter”, a la Damasio’s Descartes Error. Mark explores the “cortical fallacy,” which refers to his view that neuroscientists who have argued that the “seat of consciousness” is in the cortex are wrong. Recent neuroscience has shed light on where this is.
As Mark points out, damage to just two cubic millimetres of the upper brainstem will “obliterate all consciousness.”
So where does it “Spring” from?
AI has a Problem of Privilege.This week’s Thursday Thought draws an unlikely parallel between Woodstock ’99 and the burgeoning issue of AI’s privilege problem, warning of an oncoming “Tr-AI-wreck.
I was MC for the tech stage at the Fifteen Seconds Festival in Graz, Austria. My friend Greg Satell joined me on stage and wrapped his change framework around the compelling question: “How Can We Save The World From AI.”
I was MC for the tech stage at the Fifteen seconds Festival in Graz, Austria. I had the pleasure of meeting the brilliant Phaedra Boinodiris. She is the author of the book “AI for the Rest of Us”, and is a co-founder of the Future World Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to curating K-12 education in AI ethics.
Hire For Neurosignature Train For Skill. In a changing workplace, rather than hiring solely based on skill, we might consider a candidate’s neurosignature. Each neurosignature brings unique strengths to the table. Hiring for neurosignature and training for skill might lead to higher workplace happiness, higher revenue and lower employee turnover.
To successfully navigate the new world, we must humbly accept; that we don’t know what we don’t know. Like the mapmakers of the past, we must accept that accepting ignorance had to come before embracing knowledge. In the business world, this means a departure from the world of a five-year plan (map) in favour of the uncertain harbour of a five-year direction, where an organisational North Star serves as a magnetic force. This new mental map leaves enough room for uncertainty, deviation and exploration, just like the Ribeiro map.
In his book, Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organizations, and Life, Aidan McCullen writes about how, centuries ago, sailors would set out to sea with maps labelled with the Latin words hic sun dracones – here be dragons – which meant that they didn’t know much – if anything – about the uncharted waters and unexplored lands that awaited them.