"And I have always believed you have to find as many dots as possible before figuring out how — and to what end — to connect them.
If you are looking for facile explanations and gurus sharing their received knowledge (especially in the rapid-fire, sing-song broetry style), you need to look elsewhere."
Well said Stowe. To add a dot to the conversation, from the world of applied creativity (problem solving not art) people have sometimes heard of 'divergent thinking' (discovering new dots) and 'convergent thinking' (joining them in new ways). They may even have seen the two combined into a diamond shape, especially these days from design thinking or elsewhere. But most people misunderstand how they work. They narrow their options in divergence, and jump to conclusions in convergence, because its more comfortable to do that. We like to have 'certainty'. Even if its wrong because dots are missing.
Finding dots and connecting them is a lifelong practice, not a temporary distraction from pitching certainty. You can't track every possible dot for every problem, but you can notice your own filters and look beyond them.
On AI layoffs, the 55% sounds generous. I wonder if that is a real cross section, or talking to smart people who do what we all should, which is fail quickly and learn from it. Perhaps if they had made an investment in training people to use AI effectively, they would have seen exponential growth and been able to pay their staff more. People who were laid off, are not going to be very confident about re-joining those employers.
I didn't look deeply into the story but it does sound anecdotal. But I'm not sure that 'training people to use AI effectively' would lead to exponential results. It's like Solow's Paradox: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. | Robert Solow (1987)' There's a lot of talk about AI's impact on productivity, but I'm not sure that it's as straightforward as it seems.
Perhaps another way of looking at Solow is, that was in 1987 and a lot of computing, certainly the things I was doing with computing at that time was creating digital versions of manual things. For example as a sales person I used tickler cards for my prospect and sales records, for planning calls, visits, end of leases etc. In the early 80's I had a Sinclair Spectrum with a black and white TV and a dot matrix printer. I used this to do away with my manual system, using a database as a CRM. Setting it up cost me a lot of time, but once I had it up and running I did increase my efficiency and was the top rep amongst some very good sales people, all of them older than me and all of them scoffing at my belief in a little home computer. I was consistently 2nd out of around 30 sales people. They were all experienced Sales People and I was in my first year of a Sales and Marketing Management Diploma. In the late 1980s I had a PC and all my sales people were on Tracker, which I had oversight of. That created huge efficiencies and increased sales because I had oversight and could manage what my team was doing.
Do my eyes deceive me? This is the real Stowe Boyd that I got so much from back in the golden days of Twitter circa 2006ish? I’m so glad to have found your wisdom here. Love your take on all things! Sorry for fangirling.
"And I have always believed you have to find as many dots as possible before figuring out how — and to what end — to connect them.
If you are looking for facile explanations and gurus sharing their received knowledge (especially in the rapid-fire, sing-song broetry style), you need to look elsewhere."
Well said Stowe. To add a dot to the conversation, from the world of applied creativity (problem solving not art) people have sometimes heard of 'divergent thinking' (discovering new dots) and 'convergent thinking' (joining them in new ways). They may even have seen the two combined into a diamond shape, especially these days from design thinking or elsewhere. But most people misunderstand how they work. They narrow their options in divergence, and jump to conclusions in convergence, because its more comfortable to do that. We like to have 'certainty'. Even if its wrong because dots are missing.
Finding dots and connecting them is a lifelong practice, not a temporary distraction from pitching certainty. You can't track every possible dot for every problem, but you can notice your own filters and look beyond them.
Well said, Alan.
On AI layoffs, the 55% sounds generous. I wonder if that is a real cross section, or talking to smart people who do what we all should, which is fail quickly and learn from it. Perhaps if they had made an investment in training people to use AI effectively, they would have seen exponential growth and been able to pay their staff more. People who were laid off, are not going to be very confident about re-joining those employers.
I didn't look deeply into the story but it does sound anecdotal. But I'm not sure that 'training people to use AI effectively' would lead to exponential results. It's like Solow's Paradox: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. | Robert Solow (1987)' There's a lot of talk about AI's impact on productivity, but I'm not sure that it's as straightforward as it seems.
Perhaps another way of looking at Solow is, that was in 1987 and a lot of computing, certainly the things I was doing with computing at that time was creating digital versions of manual things. For example as a sales person I used tickler cards for my prospect and sales records, for planning calls, visits, end of leases etc. In the early 80's I had a Sinclair Spectrum with a black and white TV and a dot matrix printer. I used this to do away with my manual system, using a database as a CRM. Setting it up cost me a lot of time, but once I had it up and running I did increase my efficiency and was the top rep amongst some very good sales people, all of them older than me and all of them scoffing at my belief in a little home computer. I was consistently 2nd out of around 30 sales people. They were all experienced Sales People and I was in my first year of a Sales and Marketing Management Diploma. In the late 1980s I had a PC and all my sales people were on Tracker, which I had oversight of. That created huge efficiencies and increased sales because I had oversight and could manage what my team was doing.
I agree that organizing information and working with data is a straightforward productivity tool, but AI may operate outside of that paradigm.
Do my eyes deceive me? This is the real Stowe Boyd that I got so much from back in the golden days of Twitter circa 2006ish? I’m so glad to have found your wisdom here. Love your take on all things! Sorry for fangirling.
Aw shucks.