When I was a teenager my father encouraged me to learn to touch type, in those days this being on electric typewriters. His rationale was that if I was preparing my resume I wouldn’t be able to give it to the typing pool to do. Needless to say I have benefited from his encouragement greatly over many years, in more ways than preparing my resume.
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I get very annoyed when I see discussion or predictions of “when AI will reach human-level intelligence”. That implies that intelligence is just one thing that you can measure linearly. Humans do not have even just 7 intelligences, as proposed by Howard Gardner. There are more dimensions to intelligence than we can imagine.
Machines have already vastly outperformed human “intelligence” in myriad domains, including of course almost all games we have invented, among them chess and Go, and a multitude of data-driven judgments and decisions. AI will inevitably continue to exceed the capabilities of both average and exceptional humans in more domains every year.
James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, that the Earth is a holistic self-maintaining system, died last week. As a coincidence I read his last book, Novacene, over the weekend before I had heard the news.
One of the biggest, broadest shifts in place across human society is from centralized to decentralized organizations and structures.
Yet there is massive uncertainty about how far it will go. It is possible we are moving towards a world defined by Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), participatory democracy, decentralized finance, and self sovereignty. It is also possible that existing institutions and hierarchical societies and organizations will dominate indefinitely.
What will determine the path forward is the quality of leadership in enabling a decentralized world
I began work as a professional futurist in 1998, and it has been my full-time avocation (other than entrepreneurial endeavors) since 2006.
For many years my reputation and credibility as a futurist has been significantly supported by my 2002 book Living Networks, which anticipated many developments of the last two decades, including pointing to the rise of social networks and micro-messaging before any of today’s social platforms existed.
That was not the only thing it got right.
As we emerge from the pandemic, in most countries office work is resuming at scale, meaning doing hybrid work well is a priority for every organization. This topic currently makes up a considerable portion of my client work.
Many workers and executives have learned to appreciate the many positives of remote work, yet for many reasons very few companies will dispense with offices, since they can play a valuable role in highly productive organizations.
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LinkedIn has today entered the service marketplace business. This is substantial news in the rapidly evolving work landscape.
Now anyone can use LinkedIn’s ‘Open to Work’ feature at the top of their profile to indicate availability to provide services, either local or remote, across 250 pre-defined categories (shortly expanding to 500), with for now no fees (or direct invoicing) for freelancers or clients. LinkedIn’s intention is to develop the feature substantially.
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Facilitation is arguably the most valuable skill in the world. If you can help people to be collectively more intelligent, you unlock vast wealth. Facilitation can also be applied to individuals, in assisting them to apply their capabilities to achieve what they want.
‘Facilitate’ means to make easier. If you can ease the path to people working well together, beautiful things can happen.
A while ago on The Virtual Excellence Show I interviewed Nancy White, recognized by many as a master facilitator in both virtual and physical spaces for the last couple of decades.
Here is a segment of our broad-ranging conversation in which Nancy shares deep insights into developing facilitation skills. Recommended! Watch the video, or read the full transcript below.
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Driven by frustration with the Spotify algorithm I have just posted an Idea Submission on the Spotify community website titled Introduce a serendipity dial. What I wrote is copied below, click on the link and vote it up if you like it!
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