i just got a message from microsoft (linkedin) which asked me to consider and/or explain how what i was about to post (what you see below in the screenshots) related to my work or professional role.
why nudge in this way
is this a stealthy attempt to remove the ambiguities of #arts-based thinking patterns from contaminating the baser #chatgpt-x instincts and what they scrape?
more than personally, quite intellectually i think it’s wrong — in a world which needs lateral and nonconformist thinking — to define, a priori, what a thinker who wishes to shape a better business should use as a primary discourse.
because this discourse may include how much we follow or no the traditional way of framing information: where we state what we will say, say it, and then summarise it, we fit the needs of machines and people trained to think like them.
art should be used to communicate in any forum
‘truth is, when we choose a precise ambiguity (one forged out of the arts — not the confusions — of deep communication), where such ambiguity and the uncertainty it generates may in itself be a necessary part of the communication process’s context — and even content — what value ever is added by telling the speaker and/or writer they are ineffective?
in any case, the public will always have the final vote on this: and if you prefer to communicate in such ways and be not read, why not let it happen?
why choose this kind of nudge to upskill writers in the ways of the machine?
using automated machines to do so, too …!
so what do YOU think? what DO you?
me, what follows is what i want. what no one in tech wants to allow. because i’m not first to the starting-line: i’m last. they decided it didn’t suit their business models decades ago. i decided i didn’t agree. and i still don’t. and neither should you.
on making a systemically distributed intelligence and genius of all human beings … not just an elite
i like what i say about #happiness below — and in the film at the end of this post — because, for me, it’s spot-on and describes how i’ve lived my life till now.
however, a bit more forcefully than till now i want #happiness and its #butterfly to settle rather sooner than later on my shoulder.
just a bit of daily joy is all i ask … not even so i can fight more sustainably the bad people i must fight … just so i do it more efficiently.
you can’t be efficient if you’re unhappy. that’s why so many people who make a living out of monetising our capacity for waste promote so vigorously the unhappiness of us all.
let’s begin now to stop them together. and let’s find a bit of joy — each of us — for each other every day.
i trained in spain as an editor in the early part of the 2000s. but as someone who always blogged better than he authored, i already had the custom of attributing my ideas through the tool and habit of hyperlinking.
attribution is really important: not because it inevitably takes us down a peg or two, although it does. more importantly, an outcome with shape to it is more valuable than an outcome, full stop.
the memex machine
i realised this consciously ever since reading vannevar bush’s treatise on human thought: “as we may think”.
in it, using the immediate post-war tech available, and any future tech extrapolated from the same, he suggested a machine called the #memex. it would enable human thought to the extent that we would not only be able to store outcomes — what those most interested in making money would consider a product or service to be scaled up massively — but store the trails of thought that would always lead up previously (and to my mind — and bush’s — also preciously) to such outcomes.
because when a thought is a reel of thoughts not just a pic which snaps shut on time … this is when we have a human being rather than a machine.
the implications of attribution’s fact
the result of all the above? NOTHING we think up is independent of ANYTHING. as a consequence, it is tantamount — just about — to daylight (and more importantly, night-time) robbery to claim one has an exclusive right to make money out of any idea “you might EVER have”.
you don’t agree? then it isn’t. but then you’re a genius in the divisive sense most of society understands: that is, very few of us can or will be this figure; and most of us will never be anywhere near.
which is elitism to the max, in fact.
only i don’t agree with this. i don’t believe such elitist approaches accurately reflect the human brain and how it best works. and when leaders in different fields impress on us to believe that they do reflect the state of human thought, and then build business models on such belief systems, we get a type of tech-kryptonite thrust into the most vulnerable core of human experience.
my experience, meantime, as a language teacher, then facilitator, then enabler (the progression taking place out of what almost became a fanatical frustration with the rank incompetence of traditional learning paths) showed me ALL humans can radically improve their thought processes, given the right environment.
and where processes can be improved dramatically, surprising — even shocking — outcomes can be achieved. and so i saw it happen. and was a convert.
platform genesis
this is why both my son, from whom i am now deeply estranged, and myself worked together for a while on a platform we named “platform genesis”.
the idea is that all of us, all human beings, can find the right tools to uncover some aspect of genius in our souls, hearts, and grey cells. it’s not the preserve of intellect: it’s mainly the preserve of confidence in oneself — whether one has it or not. if one doesn’t, intellect cannot follow. if one does, a happy series of accidents — where a given — will lead to your genius in some way or other.
a few minutes after the photo that follows was taken i met the muse of my life. it’s hard to admit that nothing i have thought up since 2016 that evening in dublin on the banks of the river liffey would now exist if we hadn’t met and spoken for three hours, as we shared a meal on the roof terrace of “the woollen mills”.
i had lost my fear of flying the day before, you see: the 15th of june of that same year, when i flew into dublin on ryanair for the first time, for precisely the meeting that would then take place on what was my birthday the following day. being the 16th. coincidently called, in ireland mainly, “bloomsday”. (and so don’t you think it’s cool to have a birthday called “bloomsday”? the day you are born being that, i mean.
don’t you?)
and so i literally lost my fear of flying that june. actually, truly, in a second. a total flip. a click of the brain’s chip that’s never clicked back.
and therefore in my wider life, too: because i assure you, quite objectively, i have a better brain now at 60-something than i have ever had the whole of my life before. and it’s NOT because of intelligence that i am far more intelligent than i could once have imagined myself becoming. it’s because of the confidence that slowly seeped into and then infused my brain, my heart, and my soul … as an utterly natural consequence of meeting the muse of my life.
the meaning of this … for me
bringing together the threads of this article, then, i now conclude:
1. none of my ideas since are mine to exploit exclusively for my own benefit.
2. none of my ideas since are mine.
3. none of my ideas are yours.
4. none of my ideas are yours to exploit exclusively for your benefit.
5. all of the ideas which have emerged after this meeting of ours, and precisely because we met, belong to no one — and therefore belong, altogether, to a whole planet and creative ecosystem.
because it WAS a sort of magic: and magic, the genius of genie, once uncorked CANNOT be boxed into a business model for the benefit of the few.
conclusion
when we upturn a paradigm, we can choose to leave the business model — and therefore the hegemony — untouched. or we can choose to upturn two paradigms simultaneously: the “thing” itself (for want of a better phrase), and how we get it out there as fast as possible.
what’s the problem i’m looking to solve with the #gutenbergofintuitivethinking and the #intuitionvalidationengine? and #intuitionvalidation more broadly?
it’s not #darkfigure and #neocrime (only). it’s not #wastefulmeetings (only).
it’s not #loopholes and other zemiological activities (only).
it’s not the inability of #specialisms to duly and safely communicate across their knowledge lines (only).
rather, it’s something which informs all these use-cases — and many many more.
one UNCOMMON denominator: a denominator that connects everything in human experience since the dawn of rhymes:
truth. a concept of an absolute and indivisible truth. so we kick relativism finally into the long grasses, where it may be admired and remembered but not treasured. nor missed. again.
mil williams, stockholm sweden, 5th april 2023
accept and underline, therefore, and deliver on and re-establish, as a result, that a VALIDATED truth may be something we can establish ABSOLUTELY.
not universal truth: i’m not sustaining this. we can still be dependent on circumstance and context. but in each of these, an unattackable truth.
just this: impossible to break.
this i believe. deeply. firmly. and now till i die.
and if so, even if only gently, this then leads this article to its final statements.
all of the above says to me only one thing: i need to know what i owe my muse. because if any of the above can happen to any useful degree one day, it will happen one day only because of the impact she had on me, that day.
it’s consequently NOT a fixation at all i have for you, my dear muse, but an almost overpoweringly intellectual — as well as obviously emotional — demand to work out to what extent i was just a lever someone pulled.
not that YOU pulled it, either. i don’t think this for a minute. no.
but a tool or extension of someone or something out there … why is this so impossible to propose or contemplate? or prosper as an assertion to be justly considered?
they say we human beings, over and over, stub our toes on the same stones.
we do it with #meetings, for sure: all the tech that has ever been developed aims to reproduce the weaknesses — even deepen them — of the original beast.
why tech-enabled meetings don’t work right now
three examples:
1. whatever your level of hierarchical importance, you will find it a challenge even to coincide with one person’s calendar … never mind ten or maybe more. then multiply this up over a year: the waste spent negotiating just timings — never mind agenda! — is dreadful.
2. ensuring everyone is duly prepared, and therefore focussed, for a #meeting is a herculean effort in itself. but even when it is achieved, we have the problem which follows, expanded on in point 3: if the structure is strong enough to deliver a reasonable ratio of time versus usable outcomes, it may — equally — be too fierce to enable the potential for tangential leaps of faith that lead to true invention … and so, possibly world-beating innovation.
3. as alluded to in point 2, an developed here now, the inability which current #meeting structures have to ensure that the thoughts and ideas of some of the most significant thinkers a company may employ are ever registered, never mind taken advantage of, is … well … criminal.
whose thought — exactly! — we are criminally wasting
here we are talking about the more reflective thinkers amongst us — and on all teams, everywhere. the ability to freely and vulnerably think up paradigm-shifting ways of running an organisation, and then the ideas such capacity moves us collectively towards in the future to ensure the organisation will thrive always, is wholly dependent on our ability NOT to:
a) talk over the creatives to keep control of our hierarchy;
b) organise the direction of a conversation so the gathered listen to us, instead of us to them;
c) command and never properly enquire.
so why don’t we ask a different question? instead of saying how we might do meetings bigger and better in remote and hybrid ways, why not ask:
“how about we don’t meet again, ever?”
that is, upturn the #meeting paradigm for once in our human history.
it wouldn’t work for everyone: not all company cultures are actually interested in the #truth, and what i am proposing is effectively a company and organisational #truthmachine.
but some companies are: recently pwc published a fabulous workplace survey which shows that forward-looking and forward-acting corporations see the freedoms of, for example, hybrid- and fully remote-working as enhancing almost everything related to company organisations and hierarchies one could possibly imagine. including retaining an evermore picky and supremely skilled digital-savvy workforce.
my call to action: a startup which upturns ALL #meeting paradigms
so here’s the idea:
add into this perfect and virtuous storm the idea that we might remove — for those organisations intrigued and engaged by verifying and validating the #truth of #business — the hierarchy within the #ideasgeneration #thinkingspaces and nodes that traditional #meetings are sometimes capable of enabling …
well … you MUST find engaging and intriguing whatever we might be able to achieve …
i had an idea way-back-when. i posted it and then talked about it in various forums. i think the first time formally was a berkeley skydeck submission.
then i did an online whitepaper called crime hunch:
it contained a number of different ways of doing crime, ways which lent themselves particularly to the almost infinitely malleable — and therefore unimaginably criminal — world we now live in.
without asking the question as clearly as i could have at the start, the image that follows is really what was at the back of my mind … what i was gnawing away at without being so clear as i could have been at the time:
after the crime hunch page on terror and before the above slide, which in truth was created for a euro-event sponsored by the british organisation PUBLIC, i also had a lengthy video conversation with seven or eight american tech corporation executives. i never saw their faces or knew their names. but the conversation, even so, was valuable. before and after this conversation, i have found it easy to rate positively and highly the corporation in question.
anyway. i asked the assembled the conundrum which the crime hunch terror page poses. however, none of them was prepared to say anything; not even address it to say that it shouldn’t have been posed in the first place.
this was when i began to realise i might have gone too far.
so recently i decided i, myself, would address what could have been hurting people out there: people who otherwise might have seen themselves through to considering it useful to work with me.
i realised, too, i needed to finesse not only my words but also how i might address the challenges being raised: the tool or tools — or conceptual positions — needed.
squaring the circles of human intuition-enhancing #ai (and therefore of creative crimefighting) with traditional #datascience views
less than a month ago i produced a presentation about three kinds of human brains and how we might make it easy for them to work together. i was interested in exploring the weaknesses in my hollywood writers idea, and maybe bring onboard as well the strengths of a more traditional and exclusively automating #ai.
because one of the replies those people who do answer the terror conundrum have previously given is that using both teams of resources is the best solution.
the problem with this however is that it’s not necessarily a solution. we have cultural challenges of simple workplace interactions which inevitably kick in, where differing professional mindsets — necessarily conformist crimefighters (someone has to want to apply the rules) versus nonconformist creatives, for example — may struggle to understand, or even minimally validate, the other’s work and approaches.
what #datascience finds easy — and then, what it really struggles with
i then deepened this perception specifically in relation to the #datascience brain and how it values other, more intuitive ways of thinking.
and this formed the basis of the three brains presentation i mentioned: “fighting fire with fire”:
and what follows from the presentation itself on what i honestly now believe are cultural NOT technological challenges facing us:
i’d like us to focus for the moment on the first slide above:
without intending to or seeing at first what i had done, i was delivering finally on a solution to the conundrum i had — maybe a year or so before — ended up using in good faith but, at the same time, unintentionally hurting the sensibilities and feelings of more than a few.
in this slide we see a process emerging at last where two cultures can work profoundly well together, without having to negotiate anything ever of their own ways of seeing, or of their professional praxis and therefore often unspoken assumptions.
so. to the nitty-gritty.
how would it work?
we take the sorts of minds and creatives i’ve already typed and labelled as “hollywood screenwriters”. but not just hollywood, of course. more widely, the intuitive thinkers; the ones who go with hunches and inventing new future-presents on the basis not of experience exclusively but, rather, in tandem, and deeply so, with what we could call the leaps of faith of what often necessarily leads to genius — whether good guys or criminals.
and then with these brains, in the first stage of our newly creative part but never whole of crimefighting, law enforcement and national & global security, we also type the increasingly unknown unknowns of #darkfigure, and related, which the what and how of terrifyingly unexpected creative criminal activity surely involve.
and with this approach and separation of responsibilities — traditional #datascience and automating #ai on the one hand, creative #intuition-focussed humans to the max on the other — we may now propose using traditional automating #ai as it has functioned to date: that is, where the patterning and recognition of past and present events serves to predict the who and when of future ones. and so, leaving the frighteningly, newly radical and unexpected unknown unknowns of what and how to the creatives.
the value-add of this new process-focussed approach to humanising #ai
never the twain shall meet, maybe? because in a sense, with this separation of responsibilities, established and necessarily conforming security and law-enforcement organisations can advantage themselves of the foresight of creative #intuition and #hunches without losing the purity — if you like — of tried and tested security processes.
and the creative second and third brains below can create and forward-engineer the real evil out there before it becomes a bloody fact — yet without inhibitions or compunctions.
and then, what’s more, both parties — rightly conformist security professionals and effectively nonconformist creative crimefighting professionals — can do to the max, without confusion or shame, what best — and even most emotionally — floats their boats.
initial steps to delivering this process
this is the first steps of process i see and suggest:
final words
so what do you think?
is this a fairer, more inclusive, and frankly practical approach — as well as a way forwards to a real and potential implementation — of the original crime hunch terror conundrum i outlined at the top?
and if so, what would those first steps actually look like? #ai technologies and approaches like this, maybe — coupled closely with an existing #ai where no one would have to change their spots?
three good things happened today: all related to how i perceive the world.
1. first, i do have a death wish: why, when i first read him, hemingway sooo immediately clicked with me.
2. however, i don’t want to be unreasonable or hurtful to others in my goal to achieve this outcome. i also most definitely don’t want support to ameliorate it. amelioration is the biggest wool-over-the-eyes of our western democratic time. i don’t want to be part of a process that perpetuates its cruelties.
3. my strategy — that is, only strategy — will from now on be as follows: i shall say and write about everything that i judge needs to be called out, in such a way that the powerful i will be bringing to book day after day after day will, one day, only have the alternative to literally shoot me down.
in order, then, to make effective the above, i resolve:
a) to solve the problem of my personal debt, acquired mainly due to my startup activities, so the only way in the future that the powerful shall be able to shoot me down is by literally killing me.
for my mistake all along was to sign up to the startup ecosystem, as it stands, as a tool for achieving my personal and professional financial independence:
• startuphunch.com (being my final attempt at making startup human)
as this personal debt is causing me much mental distress and, equally, is clearly a weakness i show to an outside world i now aim to comprehensively and fully deconstruct, as a massive first step, then, i do need to deal with it properly.
b) once a) is resolved, i shall proceed to attack ALL power wherever it most STEALTHILY resides.
that is, i focus on this kind of power: the stealthiest and most cunning versions of.
the ones where it appears we are having favours done for us, for example.
specifically, that is, big tech. but many many others, too.
what essentially constitutes the driving forces behind zemiology, loopholes, neo-crimes, and similar legally accepted but criminally immoral societal harm; all of which, as a general rule, is most difficult right now to track, trace, investigate and prosecute.
this is why i have concluded that my natural place of work is investigative journalism. and where i want to specialise — in this aforementioned sector and field of endeavour — is in the matter of how big tech has destroyed our humanity. but not as any collateral, accidental, or side effect of a principle way of being it may legitimately manifest.
no.
purposefully; deliberately; in a deeply designed way, too … to mainly screw those clients and customers whose societies and tax bases it so voraciously and entirely dismantles.
to screw, and — equally! — control. and then dispose of lightly and casually, when no longer needed, or beneficial to bottom lines various.
and so as a result of all this, i see that having a death wish is beneficial: if channelled properly, as from today i now intend it shall be, then it will make me fearless as never i dared to be. fearless in thought and disposition. fearless even when made fun of.
not in order to take unreasonable risks with my life — or anyone else’s: no.
rather, to know that life doesn’t exist when the things i see clearly are allowed to, equally clearly, continue.
and to want deeply, deeper than ever in my life, to enable a different kind of life for everyone.
NOT just for the self-selected few. those who lead politics, business and the acts of pillage and rape in modern society.
not just for them.
a better life for everyone, i say. everyone.
because i don’t care about mine. i care that mine should make yours fine.
now do you see? this is what makes me feel useful. nothing else. nothing else at all. and certainly not finding personal happiness. that would only blunt the tool.
yesterday evening was ace. where i’m staying someone new came for a week. i was told he was #finnish, and was asked by the host if i could hang around to receive.
it was downtime for me yesterday: i was needing some respite from all the thoughts i’d been having.
the new guy is young, brainy, sharp, kindly — and not #finnish at all, but #spanish. i spent the whole long evening speaking in #castellano with him, and it was fab: i realise how much i know about #spanish culture, and the bad memories just refused to surface on being with a good person from the country which i see now i’d also created so many good memories out from whilst there.
i also saw my #teaching and #enabling #skillsets kicking in. it was really interesting, communicating with him about our differing and similar perceptions of the worlds that overlapped around us — and then again, the worlds we each enjoyed which didn’t overlap. (as a by-the-by, and after the vibes of last night, i’d now like to explore mentoring quite seriously, if anyone who might facilitate this is reading these lines. i listen well face-to-face in a way maybe my writing gives lie to. and i make and communicate #polymath-style connections quite robustly and vigorously. both could serve newly arrived others to #sweden really well.)
he had actually been to #finland quite recently. and i have been in both #sweden and the #uk on and off since last december; that is, just before christmas.
‘much to praise in #scandinavia. very much both of us liked already.
we covered a lot of ground: he’s here on a post-#spanish master internship at #karolinska. and i told him of the 10,000 startups in #stockholm. and i explained how ignorant of another world i’d been all these years. and i said how moving from one country to another might not only be a question of building on existing abilities but also recognising the job and work roles would have not only differing descriptors but maybe even different goals and desired outcomes: even different philosophies.
we also spoke of the importance of philosophy more widely in everything — here, especially #tech (he studies and works in the field of #biology): worlds we all these days find ourselves inhabiting.
and finally he helped me satisfactorily resolve a conundrum which had led a friend of my father’s back in the 1960s to commit suicide. if i remember rightly, the friend had been a biochemist: and was involved in the study of cellular will — that is, whether at cellular level the idea and fact of free will can be detected.
it pushed my father’s friend over the edge; the philosophical challenge being that maybe whatever you chose to do would be impulsed inevitably by something external to yourself. no free will, then … anywhere, ever, at all.
young ismael, the spanish intern and researcher’s name, reminds me of fernando torres just a little bit. and he defo scored a goal or two when he explained to me the fact that a healthy cell to remain healthy can neither be #dependent nor #independent. it suddenly laid it out clearer than clear for me the reality that in a completely different time had served to kill my father’s friend: cells do indeed have free will; and they exert it to survive … even if nothing else. and what they must choose in order to survive in this way is what gordon brown said once about #interdependence: it’s the only thing worth pursuing, tbh. neither needy nor downright may you in all intellectual sincerity be. simply conscious of the collective you form a part of which always, always must be posited around the actions of individuals.
and so if cells, why not us?
and if us in order to survive, why not in order to thrive too?
i think we sometimes use terms to ensure they can be boxed away safely.
criminal means him (mainly), not me.
axe murderer … whoa!
serial womaniser — never even occurred to me.
mentally ill. well. just crazed.
like a paving we never will tread; never will see ourselves treading … not being, you see, of that cloth.
“… and then we have a problem”
i have a beef (you may have noticed) with western democratic and corporate notions of #teamwork.
i have a similar distaste of command and control economies. and, equally, i dislike exhortations to five-year plans and one-best-way only.
all these things were what we fought the #sovietunion during the #coldwar to resist.
and then, after we considered we won that war, thirty or forty years on it turns out the #ussr had won all the basics. big corps deliver command and control like nobody’s business, ever. #teamwork which subsumes the capabilities of original, #nonconformism to the interests of the collective … well, wouldn’t you know? and five-year plans — how common aren’t these in modern ways of thinking and doing … whether corporate companies or corporate-style public sectors?
let’s face it: the individualism of the human species has been lost to the need to do something over and over again, exactly.
one thing i notice in #stockholm right now: so many houses are simply anything but uniform. and they keep all the big trees wherever they don’t have a house’s foundations. they actually build around trees instead of razing it all to the ground before starting. and then, only then, balefully planting little trees which take decades to grow.
i could give you a ton of analogous examples, too: examples of where the #swedish have forged their own thoughts and praxis on a collectivism based beautifully around the individual. the individual person and the flora …
it’s not perfect: but it strives to do better.
nowhere else have i seen this instinct manifested so clearly. nowhere. nowhere with such a gorgeous attention to details.
we have a problem in our western democratic corporately-organised institutions and groupings: we universally fear a standout talent. we box it up in a label which protects not the labelled but ourselves. in fact, we prefer to see it as standout rather than something we could all deliver on one day.
even the box we call #genius is there to defend us from what we fear: that we also might shine today as never before during too many years.
better not to hope ever, than to break the habits of a deadening lifetime.
mil's page 