Category: culture
-
Why Every Company Needs an AI Philosophy
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about that MIT Sloan piece that I shared in FF686 on how ‘Philosophy Eats AI’. The piece argues that three branches of philosophy are already embedded in every AI deployment whether leaders recognise it or not: teleology (what should AI models achieve?), epistemology (what counts as knowledge?), and…
-
How to be interested (Part Two)
In Part One of How to be Interested I wrote about the value of intellectual curiosity and humility in an increasingly algorithmically curated and AI-mediated world. It was a call to be more deliberate about optimising our signal to noise ratio in a world where a cacophony of AI-content is at risk of drowning out the pearls…
-
Systems and Empathy
Way back in 2017 (crikey) I wrote a report for the IPA on the Future of Agencies. One of the key frameworks that I used described how agencies could succeed in the future by focusing on combining systems (which I defined as data, technology, efficiency, delivery at scale) and empathy (human insight, creativity, relational connection). Given…
-
How to be interested (Part One)
I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a post on the value of intellectual humility and curiosity in this post-truth, algorithmically-driven, AI-everywhere world. When I got started on the draft I ended up going down lots of rabbit holes, which left me with too much to write about in one post. So I’m going…
-
AI, creativity, and lived cultural philosophies
When I gave a talk to a group of creatives and production agency leaders earlier this year I tried to articulate the reasons why AI would, for a while at least, struggle to capture the indefinable essence of a human-generated work of high creativity. Dr Rebecca Marks (in her wonderful article on art in the age…
-
How streaming has changed music
Was it Marshall McLuhan (or Winston Churchill or John M Culkin) who said: ‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us’? After last week’s post on what the end of the silent movie era tells us about inflection points in the creative industry, subscriber Tom Goodwin dropped me a note commenting on how streaming had completely…
-
Productive and Generative learning
I came across Tony O’Driscoll’s ideas around productive and generative learning via Robert Guidi’s LinkedIn post which seems to have stirred up quite a bit of debate in the comments about the future of AI learning & development. Anyhow, I was interested in the delineation which Tony makes: Productive learning is about efficiency and applying…
-
The Art of Noticing
‘Interesting isn’t a personality type, it’s a set of habits and a way of seeing the world‘ Russell Davies The other day I came across this extract from Russell Davies’ book Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. In the post Russell writes about a talk he gave years back on ‘How to be interesting’: ‘The way…
-
The power of silence
I loved this video that Johnnie Moore shared, which is a clip from the brilliant BBC show The Assembly. The premis of the show is great – a renowned actor/personality gets interviewed by an audience of neurodivergent, autistic and learning disabled people. In the clip the questioner is at first paralysed by nerves and shyness…
-
On Mastery
One of the most thought-provoking things that I read over the past week was John Durrant’s notes on the book Mastery, by George Leonard (thanks to Johnnie Moore for the link). Worth reading the whole thing of course but they were so good that I wanted to capture some of the more interesting take outs…