Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention: AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it. A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a …
This is a good twitter thread from Kay Whitlock: There is an interesting set of narratives that underpins the populist project in North America. Wedge politics has always been about stoking fear in an unreal other (there is a campaign ad for a Black Republican running for Congress that shows him holding an AR-15 rifle and threatening to empty the clip at 5 “Democrats in white hoods” as Ku Klux Klan members run through his back yard. I’m obviously not linking to it, but there you go.) The reason for this is that a wedge issue like abortion or gay …
William Blake pioneered it: The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; thiswas never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works. And Kate Bush just got her windfall from it: It is not going to work for everyone, but if it’s one thing I have learned since the dawn of the World Wide Web, its that we can still find the means to …
This quote from Richard Rohr, is one of the core principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living. It is also good complexity praxis, good leadership practice and good pedagogy. I was on a coaching call this morning where this came up too, listening to a team I am working with describe the trap we often find ourselves in as consultants, tempted to provide the new things a group should be doing, often in the form of recommendations or lists of …
You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love. I love it for so many reasons, not the …