Signals and Field Notes #1
Learning and Innovation Observed
Start here - aka What newcomers might want to know about this effort.
Beyond the balance sheet: Human capital as an asset: Huge h/t to Marc Ramos for pointing me at this article. My thoughts…’L&D needs a seat at the table’, or ‘we can’t track the impact of what we do’, or ‘L&D is the first to get cut when times get tough’…pardon me, but blah blah blah. I don’t mean to denigrate those efforts or minimize their import but I want to point out is the fact that you’re starting into these discussions, already behind. From the article > > “Here’s a pop quiz: Where does human capital appear on the balance sheet? Go on, take your time. I’ll wait. The unfortunate reality is that human capital does not appear on the balance sheet. It appears in your profit and loss statement, and at best, it shows up as an expense line represented as a sum of your compensation and benefit costs plus the costs of your training programs.” Now think about what that means for L&D. We ask for budgets so that we can improve (to a sometimes uncertain degree) the performance of….liabilities. You don’t invest in costs. You reduce them.
Another article I’m a fan of is this in HRB from 2019 > > The Problem with Accounting for Employees as Costs Instead of Assets: This is the crux > > “U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is an outdated and inadequate tool for documenting the behaviors of the modern corporation. Companies report detailed information about their capital investments but have almost no reporting requirements related to human capital….This lack of reporting on human capital discourages effective investment in workers for at least two reasons. First, what is not measured cannot be rewarded….Second, because of the failure to carefully and systematically document investment in human capital, there is little evidence that these investments pay off. Managers’ big concern is related to that definition of an asset. Companies do not own their employees, so training an employee risks making that employee an attractive target for competitors.” Doesn’t that remind of the old joke about “what if we train them and they leave? Well what if we don’t train them and they stay?”
I’m also reminded about the speech Bill Gates gave in 2005 to the National Education Summit. Gates argued that “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.” He wrapped up by arguing that “It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them. But first we have to understand that today’s high schools are not the cause of the problem; they are the result. The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college – and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.” He closed by arguing “it can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them. But first we have to understand that today’s high schools are not the cause of the problem; they are the result. The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college – and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.”
The system isn’t broken, its functioning exactly as designed - actually exceeding its capacity. So we can’t fix it, we need a new design. GAAP principles are based on double-entry bookkeeping (hundreds of years old) and cost accounting (created during and following the Industrial Revolution). GAAP isn’t received wisdom inscribed in stone, we can change it to reflect our current reality. The only question is do we have the will to do so? In a world grappling with AI and the future of work(force) (you need to hear that in the “In a world” voice), we are confronted by an increasingly urgent need to change some of our fundamental operating principles to meet this new reality.
See also > > Human Capital as an Asset: An Accounting Framework to Reset the Value of Talent in the New World of Work (World Economic Forum White Paper link).
In the ’90s, Wing Commander: Privateer made me realize what kind of games I love: Look, I know almost no one reading this ever played this game but this quote is soooo worth the article > > “The story that matters in Privateer is the story I am telling myself in my head. To this day, the games I most love offer at least a taste of that experience.” > > I know I’ve said it before but I’ll keep repeating it - human learning has been going on since humans. Older than nations, older than fire - in fact, we had to be learning creatures to figure fire out. So yes, the modern world is changing and fast but humans change much more slowly. The ways in which we have been hard-wired to learn, also change much more slowly - we’ve just hidden them under systems and technologies and acting like we invented learning with instructional design. I am convinced that games and game design are among the powerful tools in that learning toolbox of humans stretching back beyond pre-history. So when you see me post items about games and/or game design, know that to me, I’m calling on some of the deepest and oldest patterns that humans use to learn. Just think for a moment about how you, as an instructional designer, would build learner agency into your work. See also:
I love both these and hope she writes more:
The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
The Rise of Computer Games, Part II: Digitizing Nerddom
Furious AI Users Say Their Prompts Are Being Plagiarized: This is not an argument about generative AI but is a signal that is just dripping with irony. I mean, will we see lawsuits about prompt ownership? Can you copyright a prompt? If I create a prompt while employed by one company, can I use that prompt at my new job? > > “Move over, Ship of Theseus — there’s a new paradoxical thought experiment in town. Some power users of generative AI have grown so comfortable with their new tools — especially image-generating ones — that they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology wasn’t based on the work of human artists that had been ingested without consent.”
How To Scale NotebookLM: NotebookLM is one of the most useful AI tools out there. Now thinking about how you’d scale the impact of a whole team using that tool gets interesting > > “In explicating this feature set and tool interface, Trung characterizes the Advanced Notebook Manager as a “dedicated Notebook management view” where users can keep everything straight. “You spend far less energy managing notebooks, and far more energy actually thinking, reading, and connecting ideas,” Trung writes. “Whether you’re working with ten notebooks or a hundred, everything stays predictable and easy to navigate. And that sense of calm matters more than speed when you’re doing long-term research.”
Decoding black box AI with human-readable data descriptions and influence: Don’t role your eyes. When I say that AI literacy will/is important, I don’t just mean how to write a good prompt. I mean understanding how these systems work and what are the differences are between different offerings. Being able to decode how they work will be key > > “A research team affiliated with UNIST has taken a different approach. Led by Professor Tae-hwan Kim from the UNIST Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, the team have developed a novel method to clarify how AI models learn by translating the training data into human-readable descriptions. This approach aims to shed light on the data that forms the foundation of AI learning, making it more transparent and understandable.”
The AI bubble – it will burst, but AI will still be here: I feel like we don’t talk about this enough - the business bubble may pop - but the tech isn’t going anywhere > > “Every so-called tech bubble history left a permanent layer of value behind. AI is doing the same, only faster. The organizations (and investors) sitting on the sidelines, waiting for a “pop”, will discover far too late that the world has stopped waiting for them.”
Anthropic expands into healthcare a week after OpenAI launched a similar product: I think this is fine and possibly important work that can address symptoms like ‘why is there so much impossible paperwork at the heart of our medical system?’ and ‘why isn’t information given to me as a patient in a way that I can understand?’ and do so clearly sooner than we’ll get to addressing the real cause behind those symptoms. “Anthropic said Claude for Healthcare is designed to reduce administrative work and help both clinicians and patients better understand medical information.” > > The signal that I’m still looking for is the release of products for consumers and patients that are firmly on and for patients and consumers.
Researchers Beam Power From a Moving Airplane Demonstration tees up new scheme for space-based solar power: Imagine if we could efficiently beam energy from solar collectors in space back to the ground. Imagine even further if this infrastructure were government-funded so that the collection of energy and getting it to the ground was govt and then the market could compete on features and pricing? > > “The test flight marked the first time power has been beamed from a moving aircraft. But the greater purpose of the flight was to demonstrate the feasibility of a much grander ambition: to beam power from space to Earth. Overview plans to launch satellites into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to collect unfiltered solar energy where the sun never sets and then beam this abundance back to humanity. The solar energy would be transferred as near-infrared waves and received by existing solar panels on the ground. But until November, no one had actively beamed power from a moving platform to a ground receiver.”
The innovative new battery on this electric motorcycle charges in just 10 minutes: Reasons why I love this Signal - 1) little company seems to have done what large companies have been struggling to do for years. I love the underdog. 2) Low cost, fast charging batteries could shift geopolitics away from rare earth mineral deposits, mirroring how EVs themselves shift the locus away from oil.
Our Favorite Home Libraries: Answering that age-old question about what I would do with my lottery winnings.
