Thought Leadership: A few centuries ago, producing light was a difficult, costly, and time-consuming endeavor. For instance, to produce long-lasting candles, humans had to harvest spermatici oil from whales. Today, of course, producing light is incredibly inexpensive, and it has produced a great many benefits for society. It has also created the undesirable situation where [...]

Urgent:  This is the most important TED talk you can watch. If you are concerned about AI--and you SHOULD be--Tristan Harris' brilliant and heartfelt 15-minute presentation offers the most clear and concise definition of the problem humanity faces regarding AI I have yet to hear. It also offers a detailed description of what we, as [...]

Thought Leadership: One definition of leadership is the following: “Leadership means making happen what otherwise would not.” This, however, begs the question: How do leaders “make happen what otherwise would not happen”? One answer is that effective leaders use new, different, and better questions to probe the future. To this end, I like this quote [...]

Thought Leadership: To the right is a partial list of the books I’ve used to put together my course on “Foresight: Why Thinking About the World of Tomorrow is Today’s Most Important Skill”--which I am teaching this Spring semester at the College of St. Benedict’s and St. John’s University. I do not show it to [...]

Thought Leadership: In the coming age of AI, what might be one of humanity’s last remaining superpowers? In light of the news I shared last week suggesting that AI is about to become 1000-fold more powerful within 6 years, now is a good time to begin thinking about this question. One of my answers to [...]

Thought Leadership: Sometimes, we choose not to think things because they are simply too painful to think about. For example, I mentioned last week that scientists have recently found microplastics in rainwater. If these super tiny particles are in the rain, it means they are falling onto the land and being absorbed by plants and [...]

Thought Leadership: I encourage you to watch or listen to this 1-hour podcast conversation between Ezra Kelin and Benjamin Buchanan, the former top White House advisor on artificial intelligence. My main takeaway was this: Artificial general intelligence may be only 2 or 3 years away from “landing” on humanity. Folks, this is a BIG, BIG [...]

Thought Leadership: In his article, “AI Could Usher In a New Renaissance,” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, writes that AI may soon reach a point at which it could train itself “on self-generated data through a process known as recursive self-learning.” This is true, but if AI can generate its own data and [...]