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Recent View from the Prairie Articles

February 2024

Systems Are Unfair

"It's not fair!", cries the child and the child is right. No matter how well we design a system, that system will be unfair. We will have systemic unfairness no matter what we do including systemic racism, systemic sexism, and systemic agism. The important thing is finding ways to mitigate the unfairness, offer ways to go around the system, and allow for mercy in judgement. The worst thing we can do is to make the system absolute and require "mandatory sentences", require only test scores, or require skin colors. Any "unfairness" is also an opportunity for the savvy entrepreneur.

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Bring Clarity

The most important thing a leader can do is to bring clarity to a situation. Life in naturally complex and people get overwhelmed with the complexity. People also get lost when they lack information about what is really happening to them. This is why someone who gives simple answers can lead them. Unfortunately, most simple answers are wrong. Clarity is not about giving simple answers. Because we can't know everything, we can give clarity based on what we know and our own values while always being open to learning something that will change that clarity.

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January 2024

Buzz about Artificial Intelligence

There is a lot of buzz around Artificial Intelligence. There are multiple platforms available. There are versions that will let you ask all sorts of questions or give it a lot of prompts to write text or code according to what you want. But AI is only as good as the average of data it was trained on. That means that those chat AI systems are "average systems" not "expert systems." AI expands people's capabilities. It does not replace people when you need an expert. AI is best used in combination with a trained human. As a society, we desperately need to learn how to identify when AI has generated political ads or other creative works so that we don't believe them.

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The "Coding Revolution" is Over

For several years, politicians and educators have been pushing coding training. That is no longer a viable route to income. The AI revolution is making most of those coders obsolete. Many of the people now graduating from coding camps will find themselves on the streets unemployed. We need people who can think.

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December 2023

Computer Systems will Fail

A lot of people are putting their trust in the new AI systems. In reality, all that we can be confident in is that eventually these systems will fail. The failure point is not in the systems themselves, but in the people. Users will always push systems past their safety points. People will always misuse tools. Human beings will make systems fail. No matter how good a computer system is, humans will use that computer system in ways that it was not intended for.

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Principles over personalities

A number of organizations operate on personalities. Each organization certainly has a style which some will call a personality. But the issue is when personalities determine direction for an organization instead of asking what is the right thing. Personalities are more likely to cause problems than solve the real issues. Personality driven organizations often get filled with "yes men" who protect that personality from reality. Well run businesses operate on principles.

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November 2023

The Aura of Truth

A businessman signs papers stating that his property is worth far more than it really is. Because he confidently asserts that his ideas of worth are reality some people actually believe him. A TV commentator pushes his own ideas and as long as he acts confident, people take his word. We have a problem with truth. Assertiveness and confidence are no longer enough to be true. For too long, authorities have assumed that their confidence was sufficient to have them be believed. Today, we need more ways to test for truth. Each time that we have a new technology that cuts the cost of publishing, it has required new ways to test for truth. The new AI tools are spitting out tons of falsehoods, but doing it in language that makes it sound as if it were truth.

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Do we really want to be seen?

A businessman put his name on his company and on many of the buildings used by that company. Now, the company is at risk and he might lose control of his company and his name. There are risks to putting our names or our faces as the public image of the company. When we want to move on, we might lose control of the use of our name or face.

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October 2023

Taking a Stand on Social Issues

Between wars, social strife, claims of climate change, and even whether to vaccinate, many people want businesses to take a stand on many different issues. We have to be very careful about what issues to take a stand on. Taking a stand on social issues is likely to divide our customers and we need to be careful to take a stand at the right time and for the right reasons. It is vital to identify which issues fit our values and which stands even need to be communicated to the outside world. People who grew up reading that "with great power comes great responsibility" are demanding businesses use their great power for good.

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AI Hallucinations

The lawyer, Steven A. Schwartz, used ChatGPT to pull together his filings for a federal court in Manhattan. Unfortunately, the filing contained six cases that did not exist. ChatGPT made them up. Two researchers asked ChatGPT to write a paragraph on osteoporosis and to further explain what it wrote. It provided five references. Yet, none of those papers existed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) "hallucinates." It makes up data. It can be wrong up to 70% of the time.

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September 2023

Is The Organization Correct?

Do you ever wonder why this meeting even was called? Is that pad of paper filled with doodles? So many times, a meeting is set up and it continues to meet long after its purpose is over. In the same way, much of corporate organization persists long past it's "due date". Some people even consider the organization more important than the people it is supposed to be serving. It can be time to blow up the organization structure and find new ways of getting things done. Just because an organization has been in existence for years or centuries doesn't mean that it is the correct organization for today nor does it mean that people in the organization are correctly guiding it.

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Past results no guarantee of future

During World War II, some Pacific Islanders experienced both Japanese and Allied soldiers using their islands and sharing their material wealth. Once the war was over and the soldiers left, some islanders tried to bring back the wealth by cutting new landing strips in the jungle and imitating people in control towers. It didn't work. What worked in the past often doesn't work again in the future and efforts to make it work can prevent future success. The past can imprison the future.

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August 2023

Authority or learner?

In 1907, George Soper tracked a series of typhoid fever outbreaks to the cook. He was certain that she caused the diseases and approached her in all the confidence of the professional who knows the answer. She reacted strongly to his attitude and it took government action to put Typhoid Mary into quarantine. Being a "professional" is not always the best way to get things done. It can feel good to be "the expert" and have people look up to us. The danger is that we can easily slip into

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Financial Bubbles Unpreventable

Every so often, western society has a financial bubble. Ever since the Tulip craze in Holland, people have wondered how to prevent such bubbles. A study by the University of Miami shows that one of the deep causes of a bubble is a lack of knowledge by the buyers. This has profound implications for financial regulators. Bubbles are created by people gambling without knowledge and piling on in the fear of missing out on a "sure bet." Such gamblers do not want to know more. If a bubble could be prevented by more knowledge, then a solution would be

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