Our Outcomes Depend on Our Choices
Perry c. Douglas
September 9, 2024
In the first quarter of the 21st century we find ourselves at the dawn of the Fifth Industrial Revolution a time of rapid change driven by new technological innovations. Led by intelligence-based technologies which are being pushed by Big Tech corporations and their billionaire (BT&B) owners. The narrative is that artificial intelligence is the future so we should just go along with BT&B, allowing them to be the arbiters of our lives because they know the technology best.
Nevertheless, for those of us paying attention to a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence, it is clear that civilizations’ progress depends more on the choices we make about technology than the technology itself. The other clear thing is that those who are allowed to make the most important decisions on how we develop and use technology, end up gaining the most benefits from it.
Far too often we become apathetic and trusting of elites and others to make the most important decisions for us about technology. Therefore, the Big Tech Aristocracy (BTA) ends up benefiting the most. While our share of the prosperity generated by that new technology is in the margins.
Technology is a choice and the choices we make about how we use technology and integrate it into our lives, to enhance our human capacity, creativity and ingenuity, are critical to the type of outcomes we generate.
How we exercise our sophistication of self-preservation (SSP,) when we are confronted with new ways of organizing production and creating value, remains central to our overall individualistic value creation in the marketplace. This is the inflection point of making choices — either we can serve the interests of the BTA or we can apply our intelligence and serve our own self-interest. Which will lay the foundation for broader more inclusive future prosperity.
History tells us that the wealth generated by technological innovation and improvement, from the European Middle Ages has been captured by the nobility — the aristocratic groups — used to build grand houses and cathedrals. Today it’s mega yachts, planes and wasting money to go into space for joy while inequality grows.
So the stories about the industrial revolutions in England bringing widespread prosperity are not exactly so. It created urbanization in the city of London — the emergence of the new urban working poor.
In the 21st century, the beginning of the digital/AI era we see similar patterns emerging relevant to our time and place. We see BT&B directing development and production to suit their business goals; products that undermine jobs through excessive or unnecessary automation. Supported by narratives about replacing workers as the path to maximizing profitability and value. Even though there isn’t any credible and objective evidence showing technology alone, is an effective value creator.
However, we must be able to decipher hype from the truth, because Big Tech calibrates narratives to convince us about what they believe is good for society. But many of us play into those narratives by choosing not to address the changing technology environment, becoming intellectually lazy, and sticking our heads in the sand.
In his bestselling book, The Black Swan The Impact of the Highly Improbable, author Nassim Talib gives the story of the “Thanksgiving Turkey,” to make a point. Turkeys are defined here as suckers, gullible and trusting of others and naively allowing themselves to get “fattened up,” only to be served later at Thanksgiving dinner.
The parable of the turkey is one where the turkey is kept in a warm coop in wintertime, with plenty of corn to eat, mingling with all the other turkeys. But one particular turkey is so willfully ignorant and buys right into the situation. He eats everything without thinking about why he’s being fed and treated so well.
In the springtime, the turkeys can go out and play together in the farmyard, with plenty of food to eat and shelter from the elements if need be. On occasion, nice people would even come along and tend to them, ensuring they had enough to eat and that they remained in good health. “Gosh we’re lucky,” our turkey would often say to his friends, who were somewhat suspicious and indulged much less than our turkey did. “What wonderful lives we have. We are fed and taken care of, and all we have to worry about is eating enough and having fun.”
As summer passed and the days got shorter and colder, our turkey continued to enjoy life in the coop and farmyard. The farmer came and turned up the heat, and since it was much colder, they rarely went outside. Slowly our turkey fattened up becoming plump and tender. Our turkey continued to say to his fellow fowl, “Boy how lucky we are, we get this life, we have all that we need right here, and the good farmer is taking care of everything.” Nevertheless, many of the other turkeys remained cautious and skeptical about the treatment.
Then came Thanksgiving!
“Consider that [the turkey’s] feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest!” Not being aware of its surroundings, and critically thinking about the events happening left the turkey gullible, buying the improbability of such a wonderful situation it was enjoying; at the hands of others.
Taleb is warning us to be aware of the motives of others because there is always a motive, and you are the only one ultimately responsible for your own self-preservation. So don’t be a turkey.
As a first principle, we must always be skeptical because it forces us to look for the objective truth, which will provide the truth about a given situation or circumstance. Skepticism would have served the turkey well, as it did his thinking friends who avoided the kitchen table. Today, we must also avoid being turkeys in the digital world. The likes of OpenAI/Chat, for example, seem to be this wonderful thing leading many of the willfully uninformed to believe it will make them smarter and build their value in the marketplace.
However, it’s the opposite, everyone has access to the same GPT and similar technology, so it’s counterintuitive to believe GPT etc., can create a competitive advantage for you. Like the turkey, the more you indulge the hype the more likely you will be to play yourself and diminish your value to the enterprise against the generative AI-based technologies. You are effectively proving how replaceable you are.
“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race looking out for its best interests. But on the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black
Similarly, if you are not turning on your SSP; thinking and taking action about how a particular technology impacts you, then you become highly vulnerable to being replaced by it. We must think critically and apply our applied intelligence (ai) analysis effectively, to make sound decisions about how we can be proactive about our best interests.
The ai process serves as a framework methodology for assessing risk and reward and developing highly informed strategies for winning.
Like the turkey, over-dependency or reliance on the self-serving narratives of BT&B may lead you to highly compromising situations, relative to your value to the enterprise. Blindly believing AI will make you smarter with no strings attached. However, it will lessen your critical thinking ability and worth in the universe.
If we choose to fatten up our minds with the narratives of what the BTA is selling us, at a minimum, it will leave us without nutrients and ultimately make us more susceptible to being treated like feudal-like peasants — now paying Cloud rents.
How we choose to use AI will determine how AI works for us, and whether or not we become turkeys or high performers in the age of AI.
AI is an augmenting and enhancement tool which can help us with our selected tasks and to become better at our jobs. However, it still depends on how we decide to use it, otherwise, we’ll continue to fall for the Everything-AI hype, and unwittingly turn ourselves into Thanksgiving turkeys.
Like the turkey who came to rely on the farmer for food, we too can stupidly come to rely on AI, for our competitive advantages. Not being cognizant that knowledge and application are still the mainstays of success in the marketplace. The turkey never applied any intelligence and was unable to assess his risk, similarly, if we don’t assess our own risk/reward in the age of AI, we’ll find ourselves being the turkeys of the digital age.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. AI and automation technologies are just tools — extensions of human productivity— augmenting tools for human intelligence.
Humans must not be apathetic and play a part in deciding what technology is developed and how it can best serve them and humanity, and not the other way around. AI technology can be empowering to humans while functioning effectively to achieve efficiency gains for owners of enterprises. There is a productive balance out there but we must make our voices heard in the development of these AI tools — providing that balance.
One thing is certain, however, we must not allow all the major decisions about AI technology to remain in the hands of a few hubristic leaders.
The technology we use is a choice, and so too is how we apply it to the value-driven tasks that we need to get done. The turkey felt life was going great, and in the AI era, we too can get lost in the excessive hype and clever narratives. And we end up not paying attention to the realities of what is occurring — it is often too late when the farmer shows up not bearing food but with an axe!
Our turkey learned very quickly that it shouldn’t have fattened itself up and could’ve been more observant. We should learn from the poor turkey and think more critically, and objectively about what is happening with our existence in the universe. Exactly how will “AI make my life better” or “exactly how best I can align with the technology in the workplace to help increase enterprise value and mine simultaneously.”
Nevertheless, talent and an entrepreneurial mindset, combined with hard work, curiosity and critical thinking still matter most in the success equation. More so now in the digital era than at any other time in history!
Accordingly, AI amplifies talent and all the other attributes stated above — nothing has changed over time when it comes down to winning and losing. The core characteristics of life remain the same, regardless of era.
Taleb would advise us not to be easily accepting of nice stories and the improbable. Being curious and skeptical are great attributes to put forward and it’s a driver of knowledge acquisition.
So, strategy is imperative to success and one of the key functions of generative AI which can help you build knowledge for strategy, most effectively. The applied intelligence approach is straightforward: It provides us with a framework for analysis and decisioning, using data and practical observation to help us reach empirical conclusions. It focuses on redefining how strategy is crafted in the age of AI. Empowering strategy for human progress by identifying the whitespaces of market opportunity, so the go-getters among us can execute confidently!
Taleb says that our risk grows the more incurious and intellectually lazy we become, so we must avoid our human nature to construct illusions in our minds to make us feel better about our apathy and indifference to changing environments.
Someone who does not vote and does not care about politics and the general affairs of society, who lacks curiosity and a desire to learn would be considered or classified as an “idiot” member of society in ancient Greece. So let’s not be the “idiots” in modern times, in the AI era and get involved meaningfully in having a say about how AI impacts our world.
In ancient Greece, democracy evolved from a desire of its citizens to become better and contribute to improving society. The more informed and involved citizens became the more ‘civilized’ the city-states too became, knowledge flourished and democracy evolved.
Not being willing to learn about AI and leaving it to others, allows for them to impose their interests on us. Always accepting what Big Tech and its billionaires are feeding us would be considered “idiot” and turkey-like behaviour. Moving to modern times “idiot” has come to be best known for stupidity, but stupidity has more to do with the information we choose to consume. Accepting information or narratives without scrutiny or the application of logic is not intelligent.
Manifesting ignorance, therefore, leads to a particular vulnerability for falling for conspiracy theories, being intellectually incapacitated, and leaving one with ridiculous beliefs, for example, that authentic knowledge can be acquired by scrolling through TikTok and other social media. One is only fooling themselves and becoming stupid.
Being a “turkey,” an “idiot”, or just plain “stupid” is a choice that we make every day, by the information we choose to consume or not consume. Apathy, acquiescence to others, or non-adherence to the objective truth only ensures that you’ll remain stuck with the life of a turkey or “idiot”. We’ve learned from history and Albert Einstein told us that“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Collective action is one of the strongest forces and underpinnings of democracy. So can channel the human spirit towards the democratization of AI by being actively involved with its development and application.
We can’t depend on, wait for, or expect the government to solve all our problems. We must be active participants in our existence. Technology and AI have a lot to offer, but we must be consciously aware of both the risks and rewards and act accordingly and in our best interest.
We have the power to imagine how we see the world, we can provide our own visions of the future and apply our intelligence to learn and innovate for the most desirable outcomes. And get away from always acquiescing to the elite.
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