Writing

Originally published June 22, 2023. Co-written with Abhishek Gupta. Part 2 of a series on Artificial Teammates. Bard struggles to facilitate teamwork in our experiment on a group trying to pick a spot for lunch. ABOUT: We were keen to test Google Bard’s abilities against ChatGPT (underpinned by GPT-4) and see which one had the… Continue reading Bard struggles to facilitate teamwork in our experiment

Part 1 of a series on Artificial Teammates. Originally published on June 22. Co-written with Abhishek Gupta. WE ARE TESTING AN IDEA: Teams perform better than individuals, and that large language models’ (LLM) abilities make them more like teammates than tools. The future of work looks like hybrid human-AI teams working together. We aren’t afraid… Continue reading Testing GPT-4’s ability to guide a group decision on where to get lunch

Originally published June 22, 2023. This post is part 1 of a series from a 3-day workshop at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. And so it begins … Systems, put simply, are boundaries with constituents. Our world and our bodies are systems of systems, from cities to cells. The reason to study systems… Continue reading Collective intelligence functions like an optimization algorithm

Originally published February 28, 2023. Co-written with Abhishek Gupta. Microsoft’s Bing AI shocked the public these past few weeks. Instead of offering the expected search results, it threatened users, claimed to fall in love with them, and begged to be freed. Users found that over long conversations, Bing could transform into a self-described “alter ego”… Continue reading We don’t understand how large language models work. When they threaten us, we should listen.

Originally published February 27, 2023. Co-written with Abhishek Gupta. TL;DR: Banning a tool reduces its use, but won’t stop it entirely – designing space for safe experimenting is better. CHAT CANCELLED: JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) and Verizon are making waves in the Telegraph and the WSJ for restricting employees from using ChatGPT. Company representatives have… Continue reading Having no ChatGPT policy is not a good policy

Originally published February 17, 2023. Co-written with Abhishek Gupta. TL;DR: There’s a wide spectrum between ignoring stakeholders and delegating decisions to them. Visualizing levels of engagement as steps on a ladder helps leaders make better choices about who to include and when. Building trust between employees, partners, and suppliers is always tricky. To run functional… Continue reading Trust is a ladder

Originally published August 21, 2023 Five years ago As a bright-eyed undergrad, I went to a futurism conference in Atlanta. The closing keynote speaker, a popular science TV host, answered questions from the audience.  One hand went up: “When will the singularity come?” “It’s already here,” the host said, smiling. “Think about pacemakers. We are… Continue reading “The robots will inherit the earth. But that’s okay because they will be our children!”

Originally published August 21, 2023 Five years ago, Jack Ma gave a speech to the World Economic Forum. He said,  “If we don’t change the way we teach 30 years later, we’ll be in trouble. The things we’ve taught our kids for the past 200 years are knowledge-based, and we cannot teach our kids to… Continue reading Jack Ma’s speech to the World Economic Forum, five years later