For CEO's & Founders
For Senior Leaders
For HR Leaders
For Leaders in Education
Executive & Senior Leadership
For Divisions and Functional Teams
Board Level Teams
Values Profile
Network Analysis
Behavioural Report
Energy Audit
Maturity Profile
Emotional Assessment
Cognitive Map
Team Energy Grid
As we look back over a tumultuous 2024, what happened that may change all our lives?
It’s easy for our attention to get drawn to the election of a new prime minister in the UK or a new President in the USA. We may have been distracted by South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, when he attempted political hari-kari by declaring martial law, only to apologise and revoke it 6 hours later in a desperate attempt to cling to power. We may have glimpsed a moment of hope for repressed people when Abu Mohammed al-Golani’s rebel alliance swept into the Syrian capital Damascus, bringing down the brutal regime of President Bashar al-Assad and ending five decades of Baath Party rule. But none of these political changes will keep us awake at night for very long. We may continue to mourn the war in Ukraine or the Palestine-Israeli conflict, or any of the other 120 armed-conflicts going on around the world. But these terrible things are unlikely to change our lives irrevocably.
This year’s Paris Olympics or the end of billionaire singer Taylor Swift’s Eras world tour in Vancouver on December 8th, whilst entertaining, are not going to change our lives. Even the closure of the Ann Summers store in Doncaster or the $12 Billion expansion of Disney’s Cruise Line or Microsoft $69 billion entrance into the gaming industry when it bought the makers of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty won’t move the dial for most.
But what we should pay close attention to is the awarding of the Nobel prize, for Physics, to the “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton in October 2024. This was the culmination of nearly fifty years of research, where he was up against some of the smartest brains on the planet. He took on Alan Turing and those that believed the best way to train AI was to teach it to understand the meaning of what it was digesting. In the ultimate “VHS-Betamax” battle, Hinton was proved right. Turing’s semantics and symbology crowd lost.
Hinton believed, from the start, that AI development would go much faster if we focused on human biology and understanding how the human mind learns. His passion for deep learning, within neural networks, and his breakthrough on refining something called backpropagation enabled AI to emerge as the most important change in our lives in 2024.
Many won’t have noticed this seismic disruption any more than Paul Krugman did in 1998 when he said that the internet will have no greater impact than a fax machine. Krugman was himself a Nobel Prize winner in economics, proving that even very smart people can miss the point spectacularly.
In the flurry of videos that emerged after Hinton was nominated, he suggested that despite ChatGPT4 having 100x fewer connections than the human mind, it knew hundreds of times more than any one person. AI can literally do more with less. He explained that this was because AI was much better at making connections than human beings.
Given AI will change all our lives and the functioning of every business on the planet, we should definitely pay more attention to what is going on in the tech world. But we must be distracted by the media on this who love to tell AI Armageddon stories of robot takeover when humanity will be subjugated by Skynet overloads or the Machine City from the Matrix. Rather we should follow Neo’s example and “wake up” to what’s happening. AI is already faster and smarter than we are. It makes better connections than we do.
If we really want to avoid AI taking over, we need to paradoxically, partner with AI. If we develop a more reciprocal relationship with AI, we can create a much brighter future. The secret here is our ability to collaborate, with AI and with each other to solve the wicked problems we have created for ourselves.
Humanity has, over thousands of years, become the most dominant species on the planet because of our ability to collaborate. But we’ve been overtaken. AI can now make better connections than we can. Plus, it can leverage those connections better than we can. If we want to fight back and create a future that we want to live in then humanity must rapidly develop its collaborative capabilities, and way beyond our current level.
This is quite the challenge for business – knowing who to collaborate with. Most businesses are incredibly insular. They’ve yet to develop the collaborative capabilities they’ll need to compete in the future. Organisations much prefer to recruit their own subject matter experts and seal them off within the corporate machinery. Any intelligence that sits outside the organisation is either ignored or viewed with deep suspicion. At best organisation may engage with a “supplier” using their corporate muscle to maintain control of the transaction. It’s rare for organisations to build partnerships with each other or with external sources of intelligence. In fairness how do organisations know who they should partner with?
Ironically AI has solved this intelligence problem. Today’s LLMs have been trained on vast data sets. Organisations could look at their supplier base or potential supplier base and assess the data sets on which their suppliers and potential partners have been trained. I calculated recently that I’ve personally spent 110,000 hours researching what makes human being succeed or fail. That’s the equivalent of working 8 hours a day for 40 years without a day off. But when offering to help government, schools or corporations do better the scale of our “training set” is rarely if ever considered. The breadth and depth of our training set is also rarely considered.
So, when choosing which AI or human supplier to partner with you may want to investigate the scale, skills, and sophistication of their data set. That’s what makes AI smarter and it’s also what makes humans smarter too. If you want to remain competitive well into the future, the scale, skills, and sophistication of your, and your partner’s, data set is what will make your organisation smarter too. After a tumultuous year we should be smarter about intelligence – our lives depend on it.
Alan Watkins & Graham Cooke book “Smarter Than You?” on the future of humanity’s relationship with AI will be published in 2025.
