The Ending of an Era: How AI is Redefining Our Legacy #57 #cong24 #legacy

Synopsis:

When we look back on this time, it will feel as transformative as the arrival of the internet. The tasks we grapple with in our work today may soon feel as antiquated as sending mailshots via post. But our legacy won’t just be about adapting to AI; it will be about how we shaped its impact.

Will we use AI to solve meaningful problems, unlock creativity, and deepen human connection? Or will we let fear hold us back from progress?

The tools may change, but the essence of work—creativity, connection, and innovation—remains timeless. As we approach this new era, the question isn’t just about how we’ll work—it’s about what we’ll leave behind.

What kind of legacy will you create in this AI-powered era?

Total Words

1,237

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

1. We Are at the End of a Work Era
The way we’ve worked for decades—manual processes, human-first systems, and intuition-driven decision-making—is giving way to a new era where AI is integral. Just as the internet revolutionised communication and productivity, AI is poised to redefine how work is done across industries.

2. AI is a Tool for Amplification, Not Replacement
AI isn’t here to replace human creativity or ingenuity; it’s here to amplify them. From automating repetitive tasks to uncovering insights faster, AI allows us to focus on high-value, strategic, and creative efforts.

3. Change is Uncomfortable but Necessary
Like previous technological leaps (e.g., email replacing post, cloud computing streamlining collaboration), the integration of AI into the workplace comes with challenges. However, embracing this evolution with curiosity and intention can unlock incredible opportunities.

4. This is a Pivotal Moment for Humanity’s Future
We are at an inflection point where the decisions we make about AI will shape the trajectory of work, society, and even human identity. Our legacy will be defined by how we balance innovation with intention, using AI to bridge gaps, foster inclusion, and create a better world for generations to come.

About Maryrose Lyons:

Maryrose Lyons is the Founder of the AI Institute.
Passionate about the intersection of humanity and technology, Maryrose is a vocal advocate for using AI as a force for good, empowering individuals and organisations to adapt, lead, and leave meaningful legacies in this transformative era.

Contacting Maryrose Lyons:

You can see connect with Maryrose on BlueSky and LinkedIn.

By Maryrose Lyons

The Ending of an Era: How AI is Redefining Our Legacy

Think back to the 1990s. If you wanted to run a marketing campaign, it meant designing a flyer, getting it printed, stuffing envelopes, and paying for postage—then waiting days or weeks to see any response. Today, you type out an email, hit send, and track real-time analytics within minutes. What once required a team days of effort can now be done solo in an afternoon.

That shift wasn’t just about speed or convenience; it completely transformed how we approach work. Now, we’re standing at the precipice of another revolution—one driven by AI. This moment isn’t just another technological shift; it’s the end of an era.

**The Evolution We’ve Lived Through**

Whether you’re in marketing, project management, or customer service, you’ve seen firsthand how work has evolved. Remember the days when scheduling a meeting required endless phone calls and calendar coordination? Now, tools like Calendly handle it in a few clicks.

Or think about data analysis before Excel and cloud computing. Teams relied on hours of manual calculations, prone to errors. Then the internet introduced tools that made global collaboration and data management second nature.

We didn’t just survive these changes; we adapted and thrived because of them. They freed us from the mundane and let us focus on creative, strategic thinking. The same is happening now with AI—but on an even more transformative scale.

**How AI Fits Into This Evolution**

Just as the internet redefined work in the early 2000s, AI is revolutionising nearly every task we do today.

Writing a report? Tools like ChatGPT draft polished versions in seconds.
Generating a design? AI platforms like DALL-E can create stunning visuals in moments.
Sorting customer data? Machine learning algorithms uncover trends faster and more accurately than ever.

AI isn’t just about doing tasks faster; it’s about doing them better. These tools enhance our work, allowing us to focus on the big ideas that truly move the needle. They’re not here to replace us—they’re here to make us better.

**AI as an Amplifier, Not a Replacement**

What’s exciting is that AI isn’t just about automating the old ways of working—it’s opening doors to entirely new opportunities:

Content creation: Entire marketing strategies, once requiring weeks of effort, can now be ideated, drafted, and optimised using AI-powered platforms.

Recruitment: AI tools don’t just match keywords; they identify candidates based on skills, values, and potential fit in ways even seasoned recruiters might miss.

Customer support: AI chatbots don’t just answer FAQs; they learn from interactions, offering smarter, more personalised responses over time.

Much like the internet transformed us into publishers, AI is making us collaborators with tools that think, learn, and create alongside us.

**Navigating the Challenges of Change**

Change, however, is never easy. When email first arrived, many feared it would depersonalise communication. Today, similar anxieties surround AI. Will machines take over our roles? What happens to our sense of purpose if AI can perform tasks we took pride in?

But this is where our real legacy takes shape. AI isn’t about removing the human touch—it’s about amplifying it. It lets marketers focus on crafting unforgettable campaigns rather than manually crunching numbers. It enables engineers to innovate instead of getting bogged down in repetitive debugging.

The real question isn’t whether AI will change work—it’s how we’ll use AI to transform it for the better.

**Building the Legacy of Tomorrow**

When we look back on this time, it will feel as transformative as the arrival of the internet. The tasks we grapple with today may soon feel as antiquated as sending marketing mailshots via post. But our legacy won’t just be about adapting to AI; it will be about how we shaped its impact.

We are standing at an inflection point for humanity, a moment when the decisions we make today will ripple into the future for generations to come. AI is not just another tool—it’s a force that could redefine what it means to work, collaborate, and create. Whether we use it to deepen human potential or allow it to widen gaps in equity and understanding will depend entirely on the choices we make right now.

This is a time to be bold, to embrace AI not with blind optimism, but with intention and care. It’s up to us to ensure that these technologies amplify creativity, solve meaningful problems, and serve as bridges rather than barriers. The way we integrate AI today will set the foundation for how societies thrive tomorrow.

Will we lean into this change, guiding it toward progress, inclusion, and shared success? Or will we leave it to chance, missing an opportunity to truly transform the way we live and work? The tools may evolve, but the heart of our legacy lies in how we rise to this challenge—with wisdom, courage, and an unwavering commitment to shaping a better world.

As we approach this new era, the question isn’t just about how we’ll work—it’s about who we’ll become.

What kind of legacy will you create at this crossroads for humanity?

November 18, 2024 2024 Legacy No comments yet

The Legacy of Homo sapiens in the Age of AI #53 #cong24 #legacy

Synopsis:

“The Legacy of Homo sapiens in the Age of AI” reflects on the idea of legacy, both on a personal and a collective level. It begins by exploring the values we might want to pass on to future generations, such as kindness, curiosity, hard work, joy, and love. It then considers the broader legacy of humanity as we reach a defining moment in history: the creation of artificial intelligence that could surpass human intelligence. The article highlights the importance of developing AI ethically and responsibly, ensuring it contributes to human well-being. Ultimately, it suggests that humanity’s legacy will not only be measured by what we create but by how well we preserve and share the values that make us human.

Total Words

807

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. Legacy and Values: Personal and collective legacies are rooted in kindness, curiosity, hard work, joy, and love.
  2. AI’s Historical Impact: Humanity is at a crossroads, creating intelligence that may surpass our own.
  3. Ethics and AI Governance: Our species’ future depends on developing AI responsibly to enhance human flourishing.
  4. Preserving Humanity: Embedding core human values in AI ensures our legacy reflects the best of us.

About Victor del Rosal:

Victor del Rosal is Chief AI Officer at fiveinnolabs. He has worked as Director of Strategy and Business Development at CloudStrong, Irish cloud services provider, and as Head of Business Analysis for High Tech & Telecom at the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Supply Center of Excellence.

Victor is author of the book Disruption: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work, ranked #12 on BookAuthority’s Best Technology Trends Books of all time.

He is lecturer of MSc in AI for Business and other Masters programs at National College of Ireland and corporate trainer on generative AI for the UCD Professional Academy (Dublin, Ireland).

Contacting Victor del Rosal:

You can see connect with Victor on LinkedIn or see his book HUMANLIKE

 

By Victor del Rosal

What do I want my legacy to be? What do I want to be remembered for? What do I want to leave behind? These are questions we might ask ourselves. When I do, I think mostly of my children. Four answers come to mind: kindness, curiosity, hard work and joy. Ultimately, the fifth one would be the most important: knowing that they are loved.

But what if we took a step back and reframed these questions from a collective point of view: What might be the legacy of Homo sapiens?
What do we want to be remembered for as a species? What do we want to leave behind?

We have been around as a species for over a quarter million years, or closer to 300,000 years to be more precise and, according to Raup and Stanley (1978), the average lifespan of mammalian species is estimated at 1-2 million years, so we might still have a little bit longer to go. Not so fast, though, there might a ‘but’ and an ‘if’ in there…

We stand at a pivotal moment in human history. Our species, which evolved through the Great Leap Forward some 50,000 years ago gaining remarkable cognitive capabilities, is now on the verge of creating artificial minds that could match or exceed our own intelligence.

This isn’t just another technological milestone, it’s potentially the most consequential development in our species’ history. We are literally creating new forms of intelligence, something that has been the exclusive domain of evolution for billions of years.

The legacy question becomes even more profound: Will we be remembered as the species that successfully navigated the transition to an AI-enabled future, ensuring these powerful tools enhance rather than diminish human flourishing? Or will we be known as the ones who created our own successors without sufficient forethought?

Our legacy might well be defined by how we handle this transition. The decisions we make today about AI development, ethics, and governance will echo through generations, potentially affecting not just our children, but the very trajectory of intelligence in our corner of the universe.

How to successfully navigate this transformation? This is my question. We might need the kindness to ensure AI benefits all of humanity, curiosity to explore its possibilities responsibly, hard work to get it right, and a focus on joy to maintain our essential humanity.

Most importantly, just as I want my children to know they are loved, perhaps our greatest legacy as a species will be ensuring that whatever forms of intelligence we create are imbued with the values that make us human at our best.

We might be at a crossroads in the evolution of our species, and our legacy may ultimately be measured not just by what we create, but by how well we preserve and transmit the essence of what makes us uniquely, intensely, and authentically human.

November 18, 2024 2024 Legacy No comments yet

Legacy In the Digital Age #32 #cong24 #legacy

Synopsis:

A legacy has two parts – presuming you want history to record that you created that legacy. In the digital age, that is not as simple as it might seem a all-things-digital have a tendency to become obsolete over time

Total Words

981

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. A legacy is really two parts. The legacy item itself and the record of your involvement in it.
  2. Making the latter permanent is more tricky now in the digital age than it was in the paper age
  3. We have no consensus yet about how to make digital artifacts long-lived
  4. The problem is becoming more acute because “digital transformation” is mostly removing the old way. Namely, using paper versions as “ground truth” in the event that digital versions become obsolete or of suspect fidelity

About Sean McGrath:

Sean McGrath is a trainee digital curmudgeon with a 40 year career in information technology. He is an amateur musician and a keen arm-chair philosopher with a particular interest in language and epistemology. He likes to turn the latter into country songs in the style of Hank Williams.

Contacting Sean McGrath:

You can connect with Sean via email

By Sean McGrath

I suspect most of us want to “leave something behind”. We want to make some sort of a difference to something, somewhere somehow.

In addition to making the difference itself – the actual legacy – most of us would also like to be remembered for it. In other words, having a legacy requires two things:

  • the thing you want to leave behind for posterity, and
  • the record that you were the person that actually did it

The latter is often referred to as attestation record. For example a written statement that this particular Sean McGrath played a part in the thing called X (for any value of X – an invention, a construction, a work of art, a body of knowledge, an endowment fund for the arts, an old oak tree etc.). This needs to be some sort of long-lived artifact that future observers can use to find out about your legacy or to convince themselves that you are responsible for some legacy item.

Ok. But what is a “long-lived artifact” in this context?

For most of the technological era (from steam engine to space travel) we mostly think of paper books as exemplars of long-lived attestation artifact. Examples include histories, chronologies and ledgers.

We can increase the trustability of these by adding in academic/social credibility and also by giving them legal status in some cases. We typically do this with, yes, you guessed it, more paper!

All these paper-centric methods have “gone digital” since the Seventies and therein lies the problem. Making any digital artifact “long lived” is actually a very tricky proposition compared to “old fashioned” paper.

A good example of the problem is the BBC’s Digital Domesday book project from the early 2000’s. This “digital book” was supposed to last 1000 years but actually lasted just 15. The original digital incarnation is now completely obsolete. Unless that is, you happen to have a 12 inch video disc player and a BBC Micro Computer with all the right ancient software loaded. The great irony here is that the original Domesday book from 1086 can still be read today. It is housed in a museum in the UK. It was written on animal skin parchment.

We are in the midst of what is generally referred to as “digital transformation”, aka Industry 4.0, aka Digital Twins. There are many facets to digital transformation but the one that concerns us here is that we are increasingly jettisoning the concept of paper-based records. This is mostly happening without much consideration of societies need for “long lived artifacts” in order to create trustworthy repositories of knowledge.

So far, we have mostly got away with it because we have always had good old fashioned paper records that can be referred to if any “copy” in digital form becomes obsolete (“bit rot” or has questionable provenance (“digital fakes”).

This is recognized as a growing problem but no silver bullet appears to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, the AI revolution continues apace and this has made the need for reliable “ground truth” records more pressing than ever before. It is not a stretch to say that we are reaching the point where we cannot trust any digital document, any audio, any video as being real any more. AI is becoming scarily good at deceiving us and scarily good at just making stuff up.

If that wasn’t enough, there was recently a hack on the internet Wayback Machine. In principle, an attacker could take control of, say The Wayback Machine or WikiPedia and continue to serve up pages but doctor those pages behind the scenes and we would never know. Put another way, there is now a clear and obvious digital attack vector for any bad actor wishing to essentially “rewrite history”. So much for legacy!

The good news is that there are signs at last that this problem is increasingly being taken seriously. The model law known as UELMA (Uniform Electronical Legal Materials Act) in the USA for example, is encouraging governments to think through how the electronic versions of their laws can be considered “authentic”. In other words digitally introduced as evidence in courts of criminal law, in an age where there is no “master version” on the shelves of the Law Library if counsel for the defense casts doubts about its authenticity.

While all this shakes out, if there are aspects of your intended legacy that are digital in nature – including the documents-of-record that attest to your legacy – I’d suggest printing them out on preservation grade paper with non-fugitive inks and keep them in a fire-proof safe or in a safe deposit box and give your estate the keys.

November 4, 2024 2024 Legacy No comments yet

Mirror, mirror, on the wall… …should this guy get bail or not? #46 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

My contention is that even though AI (Generative AI) can’t draw a realistic hand to save its life, it is a powerful window into a reality we might otherwise not see.

Total Words

946

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. AI is not just a bad renderer of human hands.
  2. AI is a mirror that shows us truths we might not want to see, but should.
  3. The material we use to train AI is a fair representation of ourselves. And the cold, unbiased eye of AI is the perfect way to see the truths contained in it.
  4. AI can show you the truth, but it’s up to you to do something about it.

About Richard Ryan

I have worked in Advertising for approximately 30 years. I am a copywriter, which means I wrote the very words that made you choose that specific box of cornflakes, or cellphone plan or midrange server.

I work in a small, full-service ad agency in Brooklyn NY, called Something Different. What actually makes us something different is we solve your business problems with smart, plain-spoken, deeply human ideas. It what every agency should do, but sadly doesn’t.

I live in New Jersey, where I enjoy having four distinct seasons.

Contacting Richard Ryan

You can check out Richard’s personal site, and the Something Different Agency or send him an email.

By Richard Ryan

We’ve all sniggered at the oddly-webbed, six-fingered hands that AI draws for us. Or laughed at ChatGPT when it tried to gaslight a New York Times reporter and convince him to leave his wife for the program. And then there’s the Pepperoni Hug Spot commercial.

But don’t let that sideshow fool you.

I think AI is a powerful window into our reality. Or, to be more precise, a mirror. A mirror that shows us truths we might not want to see, but should.

Consider how Generative or Creative AI works. We feed it a set of things. The more the better. Things we write, draw and create. Images. Books. Letters. Scientific papers. Greek poetry. Whatever we want. And it absorbs them all. Then, using its super complicated algorithms, it “learns” what we’re showing it. It sees the patterns in what we’ve done. And then tries to recreate it. By guessing. Based on what it saw. It’s a hugely powerful trick. This way it can learn to code. Or converse in Chinese. Or if we give it millions of mammograms and medical data it can learn to spot breast cancers with uncanny accuracy

You could argue that it doesn’t actually understand anything. It’s not filtered or underpinned by emotion or beliefs or context. It just spits back the reality of what it sees.

So to my point. What does it see? Well, it was recently reported that when you ask Midjourney (which is a picture-generating AI) to create pictures of doctors, what it sends back are images of white men.

Possibly not what you’d expect, but it’s reflecting back what it has seen. It’s the truth.

What do those images tell us about our reality? Or about opportunity? Or about whether we really value diversity?

Admittedly, although it’s a thought-provoking fact, those are just pictures. No harm done. But that’s not always the case.

I said AI has taught itself to read mammograms. It’s way better and much faster than humans. It’s so good, doctors don’t quite understand what it’s seeing, or how it does it, but it has saved people’s lives. The problem is, while it’s very good at spotting cancers in white women, it’s not so good at spotting breast cancers in people of color.

That also teaches us something about our reality.

Because – just as with the doctor pictures – the data sets we’re using to train it are from real life, taken from a health care system that is biased and skewed.

The reality our AI is reflecting back at us is a reality where we don’t treat people equally. We treat some people worse.

That’s what the mirror is showing us.

In March of this year a judge in India couldn’t decide whether to grant bail for a murder suspect so he just asked ChatGPT to give him the answer. Chat GPT said the guy didn’t deserve bail because the program considered him “a danger to the community and a flight risk.” So the judge said fair enough and sent him back to jail.

Of course that’s a story of one lazy judge. That behavior would never become institutionalized, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, it could.

Right now, if you’re booked into jail in New Jersey, the judge when he’s deciding whether to send you to jail or not, has a small black box that uses risk-assessment algorithms to help him make his decision. Not quite autonomous. At least not yet. But when that AI does come on line, what data sets will be used to teach it? Whichever they are, they won’t be equitable. The data sets that comprise all the information on the US incarceration system were built up over centuries of hugely racist government policies.

So the decisions that AI will return – either go to jail or go home – will reflect and reinforce a reality that isn’t remotely fair.

That won’t be a few harmless pictures of white doctors, that’ll be someone’s life.

So the next time your AI doesn’t send you back quite what you’re expecting, don’t blame it for not getting reality right. Consider that, in its unvarnished, unemotional way, it may be getting reality exactly right.

Then, once we see that reality, consider what we want to do about it.

December 9, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet

AI, Consciousness Expansion, and Subjective Control #38 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

The impact of artificial intelligence on our perception of reality, considering existential risks and ethical concerns.

William Burroughs’ views on reality, altered through psychedelics.

State media manipulation in various countries and how it impacts on some citizen’s reality.

Call to action is for discourse about the ethics involved in evolving digital realities.

Total Words

823

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. AI could profoundly reshape our conceptions of reality if it achieves superhuman general intelligence. But we must pursue its development cautiously and ethically to avoid existential risks.
  2. Psychedelics and other techniques like meditation, ayahuasca, and AR/VR can reveal hidden depths of reality not perceivable through ordinary consciousness alone, according to thinkers like William Burroughs.
  3. We construct subjective realities through the structure of our consciousness. By expanding our perceptual modes, we can uncover new truths about the nature of reality.
  4. While we do not have absolute control, we can influence our experienced realities through intention, wisdom, and shaping both our inner and outer worlds.

About Maryrose Lyons:

I am a future focused digital operator.

A marketer and communicator, a UX designer, I have recently been enjoying considerable success helping people augment their skills using AI.

I am on a mission to help people to not get left behind.

I am excited to be back at Cong this year. I haven’t been in person since long before Covid. Can’t wait to see you all – meet new people – and have a holiday for my mind!

Contacting Maryrose Lyons:

Connect with me on LinkedIn:

By Maryrose Lyons

My research for this very interesting topic began with a book, immediately discarded for being too academic for my taste, then followed up with travelling in directions that interested me personally. I brought all of my thoughts together to Claude 2 (AI) and asked it to act like a Professor of Philosophy and ask me questions to help me get my thoughts down into some sort of coherent form.

A theme that will probably feature greatly in conversations about Reality is artificial intelligence. What happens to our perception of reality if AI achieves advanced general capabilities surpassing human intelligence? It could profoundly reshape our collective conception of reality in ways we can’t yet fully anticipate. While I’m all in on the benefits of AI, I’m also all in on the need to actively pursue the mitigation of existential risks. However, on this Saturday morning I feel quite despondent about our ability to do that. There is a genocide taking place in Palestine by the Israelis before our very eyes and we are doing nothing to condemn or stop it. How can we expect governments of the world and people to get together and respond in time to the threat posed to our reality?

A more enjoyable avenue of exploration for me was to dig deep into the writings of William Burroughs. His book “The Doors of Perception” dissolves the very notion of reality and speaks of how expanding modes of human perception can play a role in unveiling hidden dimensions of reality. Techniques like psychedelics and ayahuasca can temporarily dissolve the constructs of our normal consciousness, opening doors to deeper truths about the nature of existence, consciousness, and our place in the cosmos. I have engaged, I have seen for myself, and I believe everyone should have the opportunity to open their minds at least once!

Next I went to the control of reality, and the dark side of state manipulation of media. In places like Russia, North Korea, and China, restricting access to information and shaping narratives through propaganda controls citizens’ perceived reality in ways that support authoritarian aims. In places like USA, UK, Ireland, social media also presents a certain view of reality that supports other aims.

Finally I gave some thought to VR/AR and the role they might have in shaping reality now and in the future. More immersive AR/VR experiences may start displacing some physical/social activities where the virtual version offers clear advantages in convenience, customisation, or enjoyment. But a full replacement seems unlikely. Humans are biologically wired to need in-person interaction, touch, nature, etc. Our recent experiences during lockdowns have reaffirmed the intrinsic human need for in-person interactions and natural environments.

As a forward-thinking digital operator, I am deeply excited by the possibilities at the intersection of technology and consciousness. AI, undeniably, will play a significant role in shaping our reality.

The future remains unwritten, and it is our collective responsibility to approach it with care, precision, and an inclusive perspective.

In conclusion, our understanding of reality is constantly evolving, influenced by technological advancements, global events, and diverse cultural perspectives. As we navigate this ever-changing landscape, it is imperative to engage in thoughtful discourse at events such as this one, to consider diverse viewpoints, and to actively participate in shaping an ethical and balanced digital future.

Looking forward to meeting you all at Cong.

November 19, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet

Does my Bum Look Big in this Reality? #22 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

We spend our lives acquiring knowledge and facts. At each stage of our lives we are judged on our ability to retain knowledge and have valuable skills to trade in the world.
2023 seems to have changed our reality and machines can hide our inabilities and lack of skills? is this a good thing?

Total Words

725

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. .Reality is a very competitive landscape.
  2. We can spend our lives trying to keep up.
  3. We can choose to delude ourselves instead
  4. AI, Botox and Bots are distorting our reality and helping us play the game of delusion.

About Ailish Irvine:

I deliver workshops for Businesses and Community groups by day. By night I’m a mother of 3 on the side of a pitch wishing I had a warmer jacket and more money to move to Italy.

Contacting Ailish Irvine:

You can connect with Ailish on Twitter (x), LinkedIn and Facebook.

By Ailish Irvine

Let’s face it Reality can sometimes be a bit of a let down. For the first four years of your life you spend it in a place where your family thinks you’re entertaining, smart, fun and clever. You manage to dazzle them in play school with your ability to make great items from morla (I can’t say playdough it doesn’t sit right with me.)

Then you go to Big School and you discover that counting to 10 is not quite the superpower that you imagined it was, this place is filled with kids who’ve mastered this skill. You better get more skills quickly, could you learn one to ten in Irish?

You cruise along merrily for a few years until multiplication and long division seem to weed out a few of the competition. After you master long division you’re convinced that world domination is definitely just around the corner, Then you go to secondary school.

No No No, there seem to be clever people here too. You could keep learning stuff, there will be a few facts that sit well with you that you’d like to bring into the real world, things like consumer rights, how your body works and enough French to get you to chat up a tourist a few years later in college. Maybe college will offer something different. Oh crap the really clever ones are here.

You get to face a few harsh realities along the way, you’re not the smartest, prettiest, funniest, richest most energetic soul out there and these things can get you places.

You find a job and realise that the college education didn’t quite prepare you for it, you’re going to have to learn more stuff.

In the world of 2023 everyone is playing a game, filters, fillers and botox and avatars have given people the tools they need to navigate the world a bit more smoothly. Reality can be masked and hidden and camouflaged. Knowledge though, my thirst for you has been satiated this year like no other stage of my life. I have been given the tools to change my reality.

Reality is nearly always based on your perception and perspective, if you’re feeling confident nobody can rain on your parade. If you’re feeling unsure and sorry for yourself you will see evidence everywhere as to why you should be. If you want to believe something because it helps you get through the day then I think reality is hugely overrated. Delusion all the way I say. If you can’t do something, find a tool that will help you do it.

If you can’t draw Ai can help you and tools like Ideogram and Midjourney can help you bring ideas to life. ChatGPT and GithubCopilot can help you write code. All of these baffling until I came across PI, your personal AI assistant who can talk to you and offer life advice.

She’s quite like ChatGPT, just got a friendlier tone and she’s great for giving little pep talks.

If you ask her if you look ok she’ll probably be quite gentle.

When you sign up, this is your welcome message.

She wants to talk about whatever is on my mind, Oh poor poor PI.

So I told her about what was on my mind and asked her for a little reassurance.

Here is how I got on.

 

November 7, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet

Where’s the big idea? #63 #cong18

Synopsis:

What could happen if our ideas were focused on solving more important problems than serving the market and what will be our role in a world of artificial intelligence.

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Ideas are being stifled by the straitjacket of consumerism and the market

  2. As a result, really big ideas are in short supply

  3. Technology is likely to limit the environment for ideas even further

  4. AI could make things even worse

About Billy MacInnes:

Freelance editor/journalist/trainer Billy MacInnes is a former editor of MicroScope magazine. He has written about the IT industry, for a number of publications, for more than 20 years.

Contacting Billy MacInnes:

You can email Billy or follow him on Twitter.

By Billy MacInnes

Having read through a number of submissions to Congregation 18, the first thing I have to say is that I am impressed by how many different takes people have managed to produce on this year’s chosen topic of ideas. I had no idea there were so many things that could be said about the subject.

To me, ideas come in many shapes and sizes, great and small, good and bad, priceless and worthless, powerful and pitiful, rare and plentiful. But whatever they are, they all emerge from the same source: us. They are given form by you and me, by people down the road or on the other side of the world. How we give birth to those ideas is a product of who we are, who we aren’t, where we are, what we know, what we don’t know, what we see, what we don’t see, the prevailing culture of our time, the forces and beliefs that prevail around us and the things that surround us.

What this means is that ideas are often the product of their time and their culture. Today, our world is constrained by the forces of commerce, business, technology and innovation. Those forces act as a limitation on the scope of our ideas. For example, people spend millions of hours working on producing smartphones that are a different size with a better camera and more screen only for that effort to be discarded and superseded within a year or so – if they’re lucky. And that effort is duplicated across a number of companies producing smartphones. Every day of every year.

Imagine how much resource could be devoted to generating worthwhile ideas to make the planet a better and safer place for us if we were capable of thinking outside the box that consumerism and the market has wedged us in to so tightly. If people spent as much time coming up with ideas to counter real problems, such as world hunger, climate change, pollution, homelessness and over-population, we could probably eradicate many of them. Of course, it’s not just about ideas, it’s about turning them into reality and devoting the energy required to put them into action. But that’s the point, ideas are only the start of the journey.

The problem we face today, is that ideas on big issues such as how to save the planet and ourselves are being killed at birth or discredited and disparaged because they are somehow ethereal and don’t take account of “the real world”. Well guess what, the real world is everywhere you look when you’re not staring at your smartphone. And the real world is suffering because of a lack of ideas and action to try and protect and preserve it. Why? Because right now, the currency of ideas is profit, efficiency, cost – and distraction. Those are the areas where ideas can make money. So those are the areas where ideas, anemic as they are in the great scheme of things, are allowed to develop and grow.

Essentially, we get the ideas the market is prepared to pay for. The biggest idea today, the one that has been elevated to the status of religious belief, is that the market will create the optimum environment. If something goes wrong, the market will correct it. But if we allow the market to become the straitjacket for our ideas and actions, our creativity and imagination, what are we left with? You only have to look at the government’s feeble response to the homelessness crisis afflicting Ireland to see the result.

In an environment where the market and commerce are elevated above so much other human endeavour, what kind of ideas are most likely to be created? What ideas are likely to be favoured in a world where people and governments have ceded so much control of our today and tomorrow to market forces?

Looking at that tomorrow, what happens to ideas in a few years time (assuming it takes that long) when the application of artificial intelligence and big data generates its own insights and creates its own time and culture? Who decides what ideas are the right ideas for that age? Who sets the conditions against which some ideas are nurtured and encouraged and the rest are discarded? Human beings or AI? More importantly, who gives birth to those ideas? Human beings or AI?

Philip K Dick’s sci fi novel of 1968 famously asked Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, so perhaps we should be asking ourselves: will AI form the ideas of the future? AI might do a better job of generating ideas that help to solve the world’s real problems. But it might not. If AI‘s foundations are based on the principles of the market and it suffers from the same restrictions on imagination, creativity and vision, do we really believe those ideas will be any more effective than they are today? We might also want to ask ourselves if there’s any reason why those ideas should include us.

Which leads to another question: is there a point where the idea dies? If an idea isn’t created by a human being, can itstill be an idea? In other words, will the idea die if we die? Or will it live on through technology? An idea created by what was once an idea.

November 15, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet

While Talking to Myself in My Attic #51 #cong18

Synopsis:

Sometimes I just surround myself with boxes of my old Moleskine journals and talk out loud about old ideas. The A.I. does the rest.

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. You shouldn’t hesitate to talk out loud.
  2. Let your voice make your story into text.
  3. Read and listen to influential voices.
  4. Share your ideas through immersive experiences.

About Bernie Goldbach:

Bernie Goldbach is a drone instructor pilot and a creative media lecturer at the Limerick Institute of Technology–for the next 590 days.

Contacting Bernie Goldbach:

You can read Bernie at Inside View or tune into his podcasts at Spreaker. He uses both Otter.ai and Rev.com for teaching and learning.

By Bernie Goldbach

I’ve been in situations where my gut tells me something feels just right. And over the decades, I’ve broken down what “feels right” by what I hear, how I’m influenced by what I’ve heard, and how easily it is to immerse in the feeling.

Writing about ideas for #cong18 feels right. Moreover, it feels right to talk about my thoughts because my Notes to Self are better formed when I articulate them through my voice.

Over the years, I’ve heard myself talking about good ideas. And through the emergence of clever technology, I’ve been able to share my thoughts through podcasts and through the written word. Surprisingly, my voice feeds my typing.

I’ve started using free voice-to-text services as a method of jump-starting my creative process. I just let myself talk and Artificial Intelligence takes over. It’s so easy to ask your phone to create text as you speak. Google Voice does that on many Android handsets. I’ve taken a few additional steps and educated two other apps to the nuances of my voice and now I’m producing this written copy just by talking about it.

I use the free Otter.ai app and also the machine language Rev.com app. Once trained and then used in a quiet space, both of the apps produce text content that is better than 90% accurate.

I also talk to myself in my attic while surrounded by several hundred Moleskine journals. Each of those hard cover journals have 190 pages. I normally fill seven Moleskines every year and my collection spans the every year of the 21st century. Occasionally I will go back ten years in my journaling to see what I was thinking about then. And then I start talking to myself while Otter.ai cranks out my thoughts on screen. I feel like a storyteller in my attic during my deep dives into my Moleskine archives.

Throughout my 18 years of teaching third level students, I’ve accumulated hundreds of electronic titles on my Kindles. I don’t simply read on Kindle; I write on Kindle pages. Kindle annotations are another major source of ideas for me. It’s so easy to extract both the original text as well as the notes I’ve made surrounding key parts of books, documents, and newspaper clippings on my Kindles. I’ve created lectures and practical lab sessions emerging as ideas from those Kindle extracts.

I buy most of the content that appears on my Kindle. Those authors I read on Kindle influence me. They add to the ideas germinating in my head as I try to sort out what I really think or what sort of plan I believe should emerge from unformed thoughts.

Sometimes I sketch snippets of thoughts as four frames of a storyboard. Other times I just let my pen flow and create word clouds inside hand-drawn rectangles and spontaneous circles. I can actually feel an idea coming into the light through this tactile kinaesthetic process inside my Moleskine journals.

These ideas have to get out of my attic, be spoken to my favourite A.I., and then shared outside my private space. In my case, that means taking my unformed ideas into casual chats like #cong18.

Every year, I block out a weekend in November to visit Cong. I’ve missed more sessions than I’ve attended but if you looked at my Moleskines through the past five years, you would probably think I was in Cong since the very beginning. This year, I’m talking out loud about sharing ideas and watching those ideas form on screen. If you’re in Cong on 24th November 2018, you can hear me voice my thoughts out loud. I hope to share ideas from friends whose stories I’ve followed.

November 6, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet

Is it time to Brainstorm with Google? #35 #cong18

Synopsis:

We are seeing technology disrupt and fundamentally change our society. Soon AI will be able to suggest ideas based on insight. It will change how we see creativity, but ideas will be a precious commodity. Where do ideas come from now?

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Technology has remapped society
  2. Our notion of creativity and ideas need to change
  3. AI will one day suggest ideas based on data
  4. Ideas will be a currency that we need to invest in now to avoid disruption

About Cyril Moloney:

Cyril Moloney is a Director at Teneo, specialising in technology, with nearly 20 years in technology communications in Ireland and internationally, he has seen technology go from the back room to the good room.

Contacting Cyril Moloney:

You can contact Cyril by email , connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

By Cyril Moloney.

Voltaire once wrote ‘originality is nothing but judicious imitation’. In an age of data driven insights, iterations and reboots, are we in danger of losing the creative spark?

In a famous TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson said that we needed to re-evaluate education as we needed to teach and prepare the next generations for industries that did not exist. That was 2006;

  • Twitter was founded
  • iPhone was nearly a year away
  • Bebo was popular in Ireland
  • Facebook was two years old and was finally opening itself to the public
  • Google had just acquired YouTube
  • Cambridge Analytica was still five years from being founded

Fast forward to today and we are seeing more disruption at an ever-quicker pace. But are we seeing the ideas needed to adapt? Everything around us today, ranging from culture to consumer products, is a product of ideas coupled with intelligence.

Algorithmic Intelligence
With the coming of Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the next few years, will this be a milestone that will force us to embrace creativity and up our ideas game? At the most basic level AI needs data to analyse and will derive insights based on what has already happened. As it develops its ability to deliver insights at an exponential rate, is there room for ideas, or will we use AI as a crutch to create, safe in the knowledge that we reduce risk of that idea failing?

However, one lesson to bear in mind is that Big Data is not automatically Big Insight. Data can hide biases, be skewed or be incomplete. It may not represent the bigger picture or give you an insight that you can build on.

Ideas as Currency
Robinson highlighted that creativity is ‘the process of having original ideas that have value’
As AI and other new technologies infuse into our collective psyche, we have no concept of how it will change our society, our working and personal lives. All we do know is that ideas will likely become more valuable than money. We can bank on AI transforming job sectors and roles. With that will come disruption, but also the opportunity to create new industries around it. If you look at the car, that not only made horse drawn carriages obsolete, it created roads, service stations, and remapped societies and human behaviour in less than a century.

To that end, we will need to fundamentally reassess how we encourage, foster and support new idea generation. It may be time to rip up things we thought were certain, as we may only have a few years to adapt ideas to an ever-changing reality that will create more questions and enable new realities.

A recent Microsoft and EY report highlighted that Ireland was beginning to ramp up its AI activity, and needed investment and support. Now is the time for government, academia, business and the artist to get together and generate ideas for a society that may not exist yet and help address new challenges and opportunities that have yet to pass.

In 2004, a book called “The First Idea” suggested the development of our higher-level symbolic thinking, language, and social skills could not be explained by genes and natural selection but depend on cultural practices learned anew by each generation over millions of years, dating back to primate and prehuman cultures.

We rapidly need to create a culture of ideas and creativity if not, we run the risk of judicious imitation, something AI can already do.

October 26, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet