All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

In election years past, I’ve avoided the temptation to endorse a particular presidential candidate. The temptation this year is, if anything, stronger than ever, but talk about a slippery slope …

So this week’s re-run from 2007 isn’t so much an endorsement than a suggested thought process for deciding who deserves your vote.

Or, if that’s too hard, who deserves your vote less.

– Bob

I’m going to form a new political party — the Competence Party. Our platform: Competence does matter … a lot more than policy.

We’re deep in the heart of presidential electioneering. Here’s what I haven’t heard from any of the candidates: “If you elect me, I will appoint the best people to every position in government, and I define ‘best’ as ‘most qualified to effectively take care of the people’s business.”

Here’s what I also haven’t heard: “As president, I will insist that everyone who works for me gives me the most accurate information possible — the information I need to hear, not the information I want to hear. I will base my decisions on this information. The only time I will trust my gut is when I decide what to eat.”

Anyone can present ideas that seem brilliant in sound bites and PowerPoint slides. It takes competence to make something useful happen. Most of what any administration ought to be doing is pretty much the same regardless of any policy specifics. That’s especially true if you inject competence into the process of policy formation, to weed out the alternatives that just won’t work.

If you think I’m singling out the current administration, or any recent administration for praise or criticism, I’m not. Form your own conclusions about either or both.

This is about the coming election. Based on the current round of speeches and debates, there are only three conclusions a reasonable person can draw. One is that the candidates think policy issues are all that matter — that if you’re headed in the right direction, then everything else will happen as if by magic. Another is that one or two candidates really do care about competence but are afraid to raise the issue for some reason. The third is that the candidates figure we citizens don’t think competence is important.

Nothing, not even character, is more important.

If you want to join the Competence Party you have to accept the party’s platform. Raise your right hand, place your left on whatever book you want (the Competence Party doesn’t much care where or whether you worship, so long as you’re good at what you do) and vow to uphold these principles:

  • We will know what we want to accomplish, be clear in how we describe it, and know why it’s a good idea.
  • We will concentrate our efforts on a small number of important goals, recognizing that if we try to accomplish everything we’ll end up accomplishing nothing.
  • We will be realistic. We will choose courses of action only from among those possibilities predicated on all physical objects obeying the laws of physics, human nature not somehow changing for the better, and what has gone wrong in the past having something useful to teach us.
  • Our decisions will always begin by examining the evidence. And we will recognize that when our cherished principles collide with the evidence, the evidence wins. Every time.
  • With new evidence we will reconsider old decisions. Without it, we won’t.
  • We will never mistake our personal experience for hard evidence. Personal experience is the evidence we know best. It’s also a biased sample.
  • We will think first, plan next, and only then act. The only exception is a true emergency, where making any decision in the next two minutes is better than making the right decision sometime in the next several days.
  • We will never mistake hope for a plan. A plan describes what everyone has to do, in what order, to achieve a goal. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t.
  • We will sweat the details. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t have any, which is why those who stop with them always fail.
  • We will put the most qualified person we can find in every position. We’ll find some other way to reward high-dollar campaign contributors. Also, if we find someone is not able to succeed at what we’ve asked them to do, we’ll replace them with someone who is.
  • We will never blame anything on the law of unintended consequences. Our job is to foresee consequences, which we can usually do if we think things through.

No, I’m not really going to try to form the Competence Party. It’s enough of a challenge applying these principles to our day-to-day work. I’m not really suggesting you join, either — you’ll have plenty to do applying them to your day-to-day leadership.

And, anyway, building a political party from scratch isn’t something I’m competent to do.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Experts don’t just know stuff. Well, yes, they do know stuff, but more than that, they’re immersed in it. True experts, that is, live in the stuff’s gestalt.

Which gets us to David Brooks’ take on the subject of artificial intelligence. It matters to you, not because Brooks is misinformed, but because he lacks the deep background … the gestalt … of computing in general, let alone what those of us who have toiled in IT’s trenches over the years recognize as familiar misconceptions.

No, I take that back. Brooks’ take on the subject is hazardous to business IT’s health because he lacks the gestalt but also has the ear of business executives – often, more so than the CIO and IT’s expert staff.

Start here, where he cites the Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff regarding human intelligence: “What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection.”

Now I don’t mean to be snide or nuthin’, but explaining that human thinking is an “incorrigibly human activity” isn’t an explanation at all. It’s just repetition.

Then there’s this: “Sometimes I hear tech people saying they are building machines that think like people. Then I report this ambition to neuroscientists and their response is: That would be a neat trick, because we don’t know how people think.”

Clever. But the most active realm of AI research and development is built on a foundation of neural networks, which were devised to mimic a model of human neural functioning.

Which leads directly to one of the most important aspects of artificial intelligence – one Brooks misses entirely: for AI to be useful it should do just about anything but mimic human intelligence. Read Daniel Kahneman’s mind-blowing Thinking, Fast and Slow and you’ll understand that the Venn diagram circles showing “What humans do,” and “Get a useful answer” have so little overlap that it’s only because we humans are so numerous that there’s any hope of us getting right results of any kind.

Then there’s this: “A.I. can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages of images that make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean the A.I. “mind” is like the human mind.”

No? Taking ideas other humans have produced and synthesizing them into new forms sounds a whole lot like how humans think … certainly, how experts like David Brooks (and myself, for that matter) arrive at many of the ideas we share. As someone once said, stealing an idea from one person is plagiarism; stealing from three is research.

Brooks is less wrong than, as someone else once said, “insufficiently right.” What he gets right (in my awesomely humble opinion) is that AI is, and will be even more, a tool that makes humans more effective. What he misses is that the most optimistic expectation about AI envisions humans as cyborgs – as computer enhanced humanity with AI taking on a far less narrow role than a mere tool in this duality.

But where Brooks’ essay scores an F- is his prediction that A.I. isn’t “… going to be as powerful as many of its evangelists think it will be.”

What’s unfortunate, and is up to you to fix, is that when the business executives who comprise your executive leadership team want to understand AI they’re more likely to encounter and buy into something written by David Brooks than by, say, someone like Geoffrey Hinton, just as they’re more likely to buy into any plausible-sounding content generated by a well-known personality than by someone less arresting but with deeper exposure to whatever the subject is.

AI is built on information technology. Those of us who live in IT’s gestalt know, deep in our bones, that IT’s capabilities increase in R&D time, which is to say, fast and accelerating.

Human capabilities, in contrast, are increasing at evolutionary rates of change, which is to say, much slower.

Unless we achieve a state of computer-enhanced humanity, AI can’t help but surpass us. The question that matters isn’t whether.

It’s when.

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