Four For Friday | Oct 25 2024
LF145 | Longevity vs healthcare, collective intelligence, AI weather predictions, McKinsey on gen AI + AI tip of the week.
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
HLTH conference: Tension between healthcare and longevity
I wrote a post at the HLTH conference about how most of what the longevity innovators are looking for is pretty much the polar opposite for today’s healthcare business. Lots of other issues raised at the event, in which every other conversation ended up being about AI.
The So What? Beyond the superficial, the longevity agenda is about empowering people to manage their own health, and stay out of the health system for as long as possible.
HBR on Collective intelligence in the workplace
A useful framework with three ways in which collective intelligence can be used in the corporate environment.
The article starts off with the observation that when people think they’re ‘augmenting’ teams with AI to improve overall performance, they’re actually often just automating lower level tasks, which may end up losing to a loss of skills and hurt the talent development pipeline.
Augmentation doesn’t avoid automation, it simply hides it, usually in some lower-level information gathering or decision-making task. For example, when organizations use a generative AI assistant to augment the task of writing product descriptions for an online store, they might be automating the task of writing first drafts. This automation replaces human intuition, expertise, experience, and reasoning with whatever the AI system decides is appropriate, and may still lead to negative effects such as deskilling. The better approach is to “use AI to increase the collective intelligence of the entire organization”. Collective intelligence is defined as “the shared intelligence that emerges from collaboration, collective efforts, and competition.”
The article suggests this has three elements:
Collective Memory: Enhance individual ability to learn and act on opportunities. This is about a common, pooled data store to allow everyone to learn from others, and also ensure skills aren’t lost as we outsource tasks to AI.
Collective Attention: Shaping how individuals and groups process information. AI can help guide the allocation of attention by streamlining communication, optimizing schedules, workflows, and to-do lists.
Collective Reasoning: Help groups align their goals and priorities. AI can help improve the group’s capacity to align members around shared goals and priorities by providing summarization and analysis of individual viewpoints.
The So What? AI can cultivate and accelerate an organization’s collective intelligence, amplifing this important value driver.
AI as a tool to reduce impact of extreme weather
A slew of new technologies can be helpful in adapting to our new more challenging climates; the likelihood of hurricane related power outages is likely to increase by 50% for example. The article covers a startup, Rhizome, who’s building a model to more accurately predict the impact of hurricanes, and a recent White House roundtable on the topic.
Rhizome’s data points come from “thousands of hurricane-related asset failures and what caused them can show utilities their long-term risks from hurricanes, helping them figure out where to harden poles, move power lines underground or cut vegetation.” The company’s goal is to “project how many future potential hurricane-related outages will be reduced per dollar of utility investment.”
The So What? It seems like there are hardly any areas in which AI is not going to be impacting, and this area is one way to respond to critiques of AI’s own growing energy footprint.
McKinsey on enterprise adoption of generative AI
The adoption of generative AI by employees, as hackers and tinkerers, is much faster than by management. This is a rare example of Big Tech benefitting wages rather than capital. I expect this has been the subject of a number of urgent meetings inside McKinsey, given that’s not what their clients are asking for.
This report suggests ways that corporates can move from “individual experimentation to strategic value capture”. i.e. make this magic fairy dust benefit the bosses and the bottom line too.
It suggests a few core activities:
Taking a domain-specific approach, e.g. software development, marketing and customer service, which may cut across existing organizational boundaries.
Putting people at the center - by understanding their talent’s priorities and creating processes which serve their team (Hallelujah!)
Create new formal and informal ways to adapt and refine - essentially building in a learning improvement flywheel.
The So What? AI as a potential force for good for both wages and capital.
Bonus - AI Tool of the Week
Pika - make videos out of a simple prompt.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen