The Weekly Distillation No.73
Neural Networks; DALL-E; AI; Fake Skin; Advice; WFH; Retirees Returning; Bodies; Burnout; Keys
This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial leaders who want to learn about the moment we are living in but don’t have time to read broadly; who want to grasp the key themes; and who want to create better ways of advancing their mission. The Weekly Distillation covers a broad range of topics with the intent to curate the key narratives of the week, how they fit the broader themes of society and to pose questions that help you to think deeper on the application in your context. You can read more about the key themes I see here.
People once said………….
“Neural networks are not ‘code,’ they behave more like Petri dishes. You watch them go and hope you can understand what’s happening as you feed it.” - Anonymous neural network researcher
"If you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned." - Elon Musk
“If all of the world's water was poured on the contiguous United States, it would cover the land to a depth of about 107 miles (145 kilometres).” - USGS
Skim it in a minute
Redesigning humanity
I mentioned last week that I was reading “Fall” by Neal Stephenson. In the last couple of days, the main character (dead, but brain scanned onto cloud storage) is ‘waking up’, as a ‘brain’ connected to a computer, and creating its own metaverse and sense of ‘consciousness’. Is this what it means to be human? On Friday night I had the privilege of eating in a great steak restaurant with a couple of amazing Americans (one of them had been in the first 50 employees at Apple and went on to co-found Electronic Arts). The tastes, the smells, the deep and meaningful conversations and empathy in the pain and celebration in the joy of life, the savouring of single malt whisky and laughing with the waiters - how can an AI programme ever replicate this?
I’ve also been reading old writings that talk into times of Gnosticism when people believed that the body and soul were separate, and the soul was good but the body was bad (and so any concept of resurrection was offensive, whichever belief system it came from). I wonder if we’re recreating this, with a sense of separation between the various parts of being human, and believing that if we can only replicate / extend the longevity of one key part (usually the brain), then we will have everlasting life and fulness and joy. As we shift from “how do we heal the body” to leveraging technologies to “how do we redesign the body (pre-birth, or through life) we’re opening up a lot of questions as to what kind of humans we think we should be. Should there be limits on life that we don’t try to fix? Is all progress good? Is fixing the menopause a good thing, for example? What might it mean for family life for mothers to have children much later in life? Would this be good for women? Would it be good for children? Good for society? Or how do you feel about 3D printed body parts? Recently a woman received a new ear that was 3D printed. The company that made it believes that ultimately they can print livers and kidneys.
How’s your frame of being human going? If an AI ‘brain’ and a 3D printed body approaches you in the street (covered in ‘skin’ that can feel pain, recently produced in Glasgow) and asks you for a coffee - is this a human? If not, why not? Are they entitled to all the employee protections when they work for you?
Too far away to worry about? Some researchers believe that at least one model (DALL-E) may be (unprompted) creating its own language for items it is discovering. And researchers are also arguing that as AI develops new ways of approaching problems, humans will adopt those into their cultural norms. Even if AI technically ever reaches consciousness (which I don’t believe it can), it remains the ability to choose its own moral code. When we’re feeding these algorithms on massive datasets, this could go any which way.
Bosses, Burnout and Boredom
Elon Musk hits the headlines again, shock. This time it is for demanding his employees at Tesla and SpaceX return to the office 40 hours a week (minimum).
The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much—so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt.
There are of course companies that don't require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It's been a while.
Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in.
Thanks, Elon
There’s no doubt that in some roles and organisations the concept of WFH or WFA is ridiculous. Anything that is in-person service (waiters, labourers, drivers, pilots etc) doesn’t work. The gold-panning centre I went to yesterday would not work if all the staff were WFH. But for knowledge workers? Executive roles? Creative roles? Yes, there are some serious questions to ask and answer when some people in a firm get to WFH/WFA and some don’t - but that doesn’t mean the answer is all staff should WFH. Why can’t you work out which roles genuinely require it and which ones could leverage the greater flex? Because if you don’t, much of your workforce that could WFH will, in my view, ultimately choose to leverage that flex by moving to a new firm.
I’m intrigued by Mana, a new startup leveraging people’s passions with skilled people who want to give back through advice (as I understand it). I recently read that top-performers don’t always give the best advice (which means that sometimes they presumably do) but the concept of democratising access to advice is appealing. A large part of my working week is proving advice / mentoring / coaching to people - and I also take the opportunity regularly to leverage others who have wisdom and experience that can help me get better too.
Gen Z workers are experiencing ‘burnout’ at rapid rates. Some of this seems to me to be the realities of many early-stage careers - long hours, boring tasks, no agency and little scope for creativity. However, there seems little doubt that WFH is not helping Gen Z (and neither is the 4.5 hours a day on social media I’d argue) and there’s a need for regular in-person connection points in the workplace for this generation to meer peers, to build relationships and to get in front of bosses. How many managers are just thinking ‘you’re just another young person moaning’ versus ‘there might actually be a specific issue here, unintentionally caused by WFH’?
Meanwhile retirees are returning to the workforce, whether out of boredom or a need to pay the bills. A good hiring pool in a tight labour market? We’re moving into the ‘seven day weekend’ era of Ricardo Semler (check him out) where we bring mini-retirements into the now (WFA) and take work into the retirement era (ongoing employment part-time).
If you are into the whole WFH/WFA thing, you might want to leverage the offer from the Scottish Government of a £50,000 bond to go and live on a Scottish Island. I have a strange relationship with Scottish Islands, as we use them in for deal codenames in the corporate finance firm I work for, and so I feel joy or pain dependent on the island. If you want that lifestyle change, could this be the capital that opens the door? Only 100 available to start with.
When the bodies turn up
I’m fascinated by the water crisis. Drought and associated famine are a scourge of the world. Lack of clean water and toilets kill far too many people. Economies are limited, education is lacking and women are kept out of the workforce around the world. And now the bodies are turning up too.
We don’t have a water crisis - 71% of the world is covered by water and unless I am mistaken, it’s not leaving planet earth into space. We have a salt problem, and an infrastructure problem. If we can take the salt out of the water, which is fundamentally an energy problem, then we have clean fresh water. So then it becomes an infrastructure problem - how can you efficiently and economically transport that water to where it is needed. This is one of the great problems of the world - and micro-desalination technology has to be one of the great possibilities of the 21st century. Yes, it comes with environmental challengers (energy use, disposing of the brine) that mean that water reduction, reuse and recycle is also a sensible approach (see LA this week).
There’s a lot of focus on the long-term impact of climate change. But the nearer term issue is simpler - we’re running out of fresh water (for multiple reasons) and if we dn’t fix this we will have far greater migration and people will die, economies will crumble and wars will increasingly happen over water. The good news - we have plenty of water and we just need to get it into the right form and to the right location, in economic, efficient and environmentally appropriate ways.
Final thoughts
I had a pretty incredible experience yesterday. On Thursday I had driven south to a small town called Moffat, for a family day out. We took 4 hours to drive there and 1.5 hours back (we went the long way there). Motorways, A roads, small and windy roads - the whole lot. When I got home at the end of the day I realised I had lost my house keys. We searched the car, the bags, everywhere. No keys. Two days later, we drove North to Aberfeldy, 2 hours North of Edinburgh - Motorways, A roads, small and windy roads - the whole lot. We went to the gold panning centre (which is fantastic for families with young children) and had a great time. At the end of the day, we were getting in the car to return to Edinburgh - and I spotted my keys on the roof of the car, just sitting there! We must have driven 100 miles+ in the meantime, often at 70 miles an hour. A real-life miracle. Very grateful for them turning up. Hope you had a good long weekend (if in the UK) or weekend (if elsewhere).
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