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This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial organisational leaders and aims to help map current events to longer term themes of our context and provide questions, tips and tools that can help in navigating these times.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” -Henry David Thoreau
“Senior health officials [in Israel] are pushing for a tiered system whereby those with vaccinations can go to restaurants, attend conferences, and use gyms. Those without the jabs can’t. This is fascinating ethical territory.” - Exponential View
“More than 7% of British children have tried to kill themselves by the age of 17, a study has found. The Millennium Cohort Study, which tracks the lives of 19,000 people born at the start of the millennium, found that pressures from education and social media were among the causes of the suicide attempts.” - The Week
"Accepting at face value the conspiracy theories and the account of the man that women accused of harassing them seems to me to be quite a strange way of standing up for and supporting those women." - Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt
“The trains could be pulled by an inexhaustible herd of Unicorns overseen by stern, officious dodos. A PushmePullYou could be the senior guard and Puff the Magic Dragon the inspector. Let’s concentrate on making the Protocol work and put the hallucinogenics down.” - Conservative MP Simon Hoare regarding a proposed Scotland to Northern Ireland railway.
Quick Snippets
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We’re running short of cardboard. Whilst this feels a bit temporary - DS Smith can build more capacity, plus we’ll return to shops to some extent - it again shows how inept demand forecasting software is at accommodating black swan events, as well as the dangers of just in time supply chain management. Where else is your supply chain creaking? Will you need to allocate more resource to have more raw materials and work in progress on site?
I read this week about how scientists are testing if they can communicate with a human’s subconscious whilst they are dreaming. The answer appears to be yes. So if we have the rise of brain implants in coming decades, the ability access your dreams and subconscious, desire from advertisers to know exactly what you want right now, the obvious question is should your neuroprivacy be protected? How and who gets to do that? Standards and rules are so critical but when we live in an era where moral standards are subjective and transitory, the most powerful voices (usually tech companies) set the boundaries. Is this a good thing? How could it be better?
Meanwhile machines are inventing mathematics that has never been seen before. Genuine machine learning has the ability to take large datasets, initial programming and extrapolate at a speed and level of complexity beyond what humans could have reached in our lifetime. This will accelerate the speed of new discoveries, increase the potential for new products and businesses coming to market quicker, shorten life spans of products and lead to greater consumer turnover of what they spend money on much quicker. If you thought the last 20 years had seen a phenomenal rate of change, you haven’t seen anything yet. What could AI do to where you spend your days working? How can you be an early adopter?
Rising geopolitical tensions
As Obama and then Trump reacted to the Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by enjoining less conventional wars, instead relying on special forces and drones in more countries than ever, the rivals and enemies of the US have taken the opportunity to stretch their own muscles.
Russia enjoys assassinating its enemies and hacking massive datasets in the US. North Korea joins in the hacking. Myanmar’s military coup leaders shut down the internet. China & India keep fighting on the fringes. China allegedly disappeared Jack Ma, one of the most influential and wealthy tech leaders in the world. Iran has said it “may” enrich uranium to 60% (enough to make a dirty bomb). Oh, and drone swarms are now almost so advanced they can’t be defeated by us.
How does the West respond? Biden leads off by kinetic action against Iranian proxy fighters in Syria. Signalling back and forth between Iran and the US. You open up nuclear negotiations, we tell you we’ll increase to 60%. We’ll fire rockets at your soldiers, you’ll blow up some of our bases. Switzerland functions as the channel for most messages between Iran and the US - you can’t help but feel it would be better if the Swiss took over from here. Alongside US action, Britain has decided to add to its MI6 and Special Forces capabilities by rolling out the Royal Marines to act unconventionally.
Does it matter? The odds have to be high that Biden enters the US into a new war, given the long period that there has been since the US last did this. A more interventionist and global approach will lead to greater risk of conflict. A rising risk of serious conflict will impact financial assets, immigration flows, foreign direct investment and regional travel. This remains one of the risks getting least airtime these days.
A Long Read for the Weekend
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I have spent some time reading this week about pirates, the Scottish clearances, and deficits, and the values (or lack of) of leadership or those with power rings large through all three. We are continuing in the Information Age but we are now unleashing machines to chart progress for the way ahead. A machine will respond to rules, it doesn’t have the ability to think independently (yet) but who carves those rules is key. China’s great goal is now to establish itself as the future standard setter for the world, which would give it enormous power. In the field of AI, establishing clear rules and boundaries are actually moral questions (who do the machines kill first, can autonomous weapons be allowed, how do machines get to use data, should a computer be able to make a decision as to whether your life support machine gets turned off, who gets out of prison, who is allowed to travel, who is a good member of society etc) that governments and regulators are poorly positioned to do. Is there a need for a standard, a code of practice (almost like a Bendictine Rule of Life) that AI researchers sign up to? Humans are incredibly bad at responding to societal change that happens over a long period (see climate change, or the boil a frog story). What’s your role as a consumer or leader in this?
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