Weekly Link Roundup #65
Keep climbing the value chain and DO look back.....
So I posted this little question to LinkedIn asking for examples of the use of #AI and #ONA (Organizational Network Analysis) specifically around organizational learning efforts. Please hit that link to see all the replies but this one hit me (in a good way):
Now I’m lucky enough to have met Gianni through the Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations meetings. If you don’t him though (you should - he’s that combo of really nice and wicked smart), he is currently (among many other things), the Head of Design Innovation, Collective Intelligence Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The answer got me back on track thinking about how L&D can move up the value chain. Maybe one way is to focus less on building courses and more on building networks that can actually help create the learning organizations that Peter Senge envisioned: “…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.”
Extending Minds with Generative AI: I love this article for a few reasons. First, Andy Clark is a genius and the world needs actual geniuses now and not people trying to build the next unicorn app. Second, because it adds nuance to the doomsayers predicting that AI will spell the end of independent thought. Here’s one - did you know that Plato thought that writing was harmful? From his play Phaedrus, speaking of writing - “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” ~Phaedrus. Clark puts fears like this in the context of not understanding that humans - since the invention of language, writing, and even gestures have been extending their cognitive spheres through technology. Big jumps happed with radio, TV, PCs, the Internet, the Web, cell phones, laptops and of course now AI. Viewed from Clark’s angle, AI is another step along this familiar path of extending our cognitive reach.
I will say, if we go back to almost all these except AI, one looming difference is that never before have so few players, outright owned the means of producing this extension and never before have those corporate owners, had the ability and willingness to exercise so much editorial control over what flows into that extension. We don’t need to fear AI’s impact on cognition - that’s not to say we shouldn’t argue and debate about its best uses but what the real fear should focus on is that unprecedented level of control that can exercised over what we will be able to see. > > THIS is more in line with where I’d focus my concern: What happens when artificial intelligence quietly reshapes our lives?
Humans as 'luxury goods' in the age of AI: Read the whole article and subscribe to Sangeet Paul Choudary’s excellent newsletter, but this is what I’ve been saying about the impact of AI in L&D:
Pokemon Go Made Niantic Billions. Now It’s Ditching Gaming For AI: Did Pikachu just train some huge, spatial model? “In March, Niantic made a bombshell announcement: the developer of Pokemon Go — once the biggest mobile game ever in the U.S. — is abandoning games to go all-in on AI. It has sold off its game development business to Saudi-owned game maker Scopely in a $3.5 billion deal and rebranded itself as Niantic Spatial. Instead of building augmented reality games for mobile phones, it will develop artificial intelligence models that analyze the real world for enterprise clients.”
Change Management Requires a Change Mindset by April Rinne: This keeps coming up so I’m going to keep posting this article by April. Read her quote and the article but for me, the heart of the matter is to stop thinking of “change” as a discrete event that will begin and end and move to a mindset with change as a constant > > “The problem lies not with any particular process or framework, but rather in what these management tools exclude, especially how we feel about a given change or unknown, and whether we have developed our mental muscles for uncertainty.”
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is okay with reinventing the bus: Gosh and gee whiz - I’m sure happy for Dara that he’s cool with taking an idea like public transit and re-focusing it on shareholder maximization. One is a service, typically provided by a city, county, or region and one is a way to make money. I’m not making a value judgement here but I am loathe to see more and more things that are provided as government services get privatized. Government could of course do better but its main goal is to provide the service. It’s literally the fiduciary duty of a company to maximize the ROI of its investors. Don’t get those twisted.
What Sam Altman Told OpenAI About the Secret Device He’s Making With Jony Ive: I’m well aware that I’m no Jony Ive or Sam Altman but I just can’t for the life of me understand WHY, when I’m wearing a smart watch, carrying an iPhone and a laptop, and maybe even AR-enabled glasses - where in that physical life is there room for another device? AI can be built into all of those things - I don’t know why I’d want to externalize into another object, that which is already in the others > > “The Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users from screens. Altman said that the device isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.” > > THIS just feels like the smarter play: By putting AI into everything, Google wants to make it invisible.
Turn Your Website Into an AI App Using This New Microsoft Project: If you don’t see how this will impact L&D and KM, then I don’t know what to tell you. Remember, when you read this story - this is the worst, least useful, and hard to implement that this tech will ever be. “Microsoft’s open project unveiled on May 19 called Natural Language Web, or NLWeb, can transform websites into fully functional, AI-driven platforms. NLWeb enables users to query websites using natural, non-technical language — functionality that is similar to Microsoft Copilot.”
What GenAI Tools Can and Can’t Do for Presentations by Nancy Duarte: The heart of the message > > “What makes a presentation message resonate isn’t just clarity. It’s connection. And that comes from human skills — not AI outputs.
Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry: Sometimes they just say the quiet part out loud. I mean it’s a brilliant example of how tech thinks - we can build apps and AI to change the world but no way we can figure out any kind of permission structure. That’s a bridge too far. > > “I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.” See also: Extracting memorized pieces of (copyrighted) books from open-weight language models.
Hochul Apologizes to Native Americans for Boarding School Atrocities (gift link): Good for her. > > “Gov. Kathy Hochul traveled to the territory of the largest Native tribe in New York State Tuesday to apologize for the atrocities committed at the long-closed Thomas Indian School, where Native children were systematically stripped of their culture and language and subjected to abuse.”
Google just leapfrogged every competitor with mind-blowing AI that can think deeper, shop smarter, and create videos with dialogue: There’s a lot - and I think these advances got eclipsed both by the Ive/Altman announcement and the sheer number of advances.
Google's free NotebookLM AI app is out now for Android and iOS – here's why it's a day-one download for me: 100% I’m installing this app.
The Best Fiction Books: The 2025 International Booker Prize: I keep telling y’all that’s its never been more important to read fiction - it builds a cognitive muscle we need more than ever. I know which one I’m starting with > > On the Calculation of Volume - “This is a tricky book to summarise. Basically, an antique book dealer finds herself trapped within a single repeating day and she slowly figures out what she can take from each repeating day and what she cannot. It is a very quiet book that conveys an intense sense of time being lived.”