The Download
A Weekly Roundup of Perspective-Altering Ideas
I publish research notes and excerpts from my upcoming book Perspective Agents here on Substack. You can sign up to discover more about hidden factors changing our view on leadership and daily life. Research notes, new agents, and relevant news from Perspective Agents are also posted on Twitter/X.
💡 Ideas Informing Perspective Agents
My post last week explores traits necessary to lead through—and benefit from— disruptive periods. It introduces the "Slasher Ethos," a leadership style that blends guardian, guide, pioneer, and innovator instincts into one. This archetype, evident in headliners like Deion Sanders and Taylor Swift, shows traits of convicted leaders leaning into technology, political, and social change. We need more exemplars to learn from to lead differently. The depth and range of different, unfamiliar currents are vast, as reflected in the following chart. Read more on leading into unknowns here.
🧑🏻⚕️ LEADING MINDS
Changing Forces Favor the "Cognitive Elite"
In the paradigm-shifting book The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg look at the revolutionary impact of advanced technologies on social structures. Published in 1999, they warned leading institutions and nation-states face a decline in relevance, to be displaced by digital powers granting individuals unparalleled sovereignty and financial autonomy. They predicted new power dynamics would benefit the 'cognitive elite,' those able to discern novel patterns and master internal biases to act on them.
Turns out, Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s views were quite prescient. A study from the Rotman School of Management investigated biases blunting new potential. Led by behavior economics professors Sandro Ambuehl and Shengwu Li, the study meticulously examined how exposure to new information impacted beliefs. Using a prediction game, participants were tasked with making estimations about the state of the world using signals with varying information accuracy.
Most participants sidestepped highly accurate information. Instead, they gravitated toward data that, while potentially less accurate, aligned with their pre-existing beliefs. Here, the comfort of familiar perspectives overshadowed the potential for better understanding and discernment.
The study, among many investigating ‘Rational Inattention,’ probes into how we’re wired to think. Do we use new information to reinforce existing beliefs or to expand them?
Read the study from Harvard and the Rotman School of Management.
📈 CHARTING AI's SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACT
Data Shows Widespread Impact of AI on Business
The AI-Index report, commissioned by Stanford's Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), offers a panoramic view of AI's trajectory. The report reviews trends, investments, and implications across business sectors. Their key findings found:
Surging Demand for AI-Related Professional Skills. The index shows a significant uptick in the demand for AI-related skills across almost every industrial sector. This trend emphasizes the increasing integration of AI capabilities in traditional and non-traditional sectors, highlighting its cross-industrial appeal and importance.
Health Care Sector Leading in Investment. The sectors receiving the heaviest investment to date show areas where AI's potential is most acutely recognized:
Medicine and Healthcare: With an investment of $6.1 billion, it underscores the potential for AI-driven innovations to revolutionize healthcare, from diagnostics to patient care and drug discovery.
Data Management, Processing, and Cloud: Close behind with a $5.9 billion investment. For data to be realized as “the new oil,” AI's capability to manage, process, and utilize it effectively is of paramount importance.
FinTech: $5.5 billion indicates the transformative potential of AI in the financial world, encompassing areas from automated trading to fraud detection.
Investment in AI Showing Positive Financial Impact. The distinction between those who invest in and adopt AI and those who don’t will become stark. Companies leveraging AI have seen measurable cost savings and new revenue growth.
Workers Realizing Tangible Benefits From AI. Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot aren’t just conceptual or restricted to AI specialists; they practically assist workers across sectors now. Daily applications of AI show a boost in productivity and simplify tasks across a range of professions.
Legal Challenges on the Rise. The legal sector is at the center of AI's growth. Spanning ethical boundaries of AI, privacy and bias concerns, and escalating litigation, AI's impact on law is growing by the day.
The Stanford HAL AI-Index can be read in full here.
💵 GENERATIVE AI MEETS INVESTOR RELATIONS
Should CEOs Delegate Earnings Calls to Bots?
Researchers from the Northeastern D'Amore-McKim School of Business examined the influence of AI on corporate communication and investor actions by comparing executive and chatbot responses during earnings calls.
Introducing a novel metric, the Human-AI Difference (HAID), the study highlighted disparities between corporate executive answers and those from several Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. The findings revealed that LLMs could effectively forecast executive responses.
The study's pivotal discovery was the sway of communications on stock price change. Specifically, when executives provide answers that diverge from predicted chatbot responses, they impact stock price movement (up and down). Matt Levine of Bloomberg suggests: "If earnings are bad, you should have ChatGPT do your earnings call, but if they're good, you should do it yourself."
💣 INFORMATION WARS
AI Bot Nets To Redefine Online Interaction
RAND warns generative AI's widespread reach poses a new national security risk, amplifying the potential for malicious influence through social media. According to RAND, we’re likely to see a surge in AI-powered influence operations that target the core principles of democracy. Further adding to the concern, Large Language Models (LLMs) now demonstrate autonomous decision-making. Unlike previous operations, where bots required explicit instructions from human teams, advanced models and agent networks will generate content and govern end-to-end systems without human intervention.
RAND's research suggests that the power and scale of autonomous bot nets will reshape online interactions. Beyond national security threats, the same concerns apply to corporate and brand communications.
🪩 BREAKING THE AI HYPE CYCLE
DeepMind Co-founder: People Underestimate the Coming AI Wave
Despite massive hype (and handwringing) around AI, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman thinks we're underestimating its significance. Promoting his book, The Coming Wave, he spoke to MIT Tech Review on where we are in the cycle of AI deployment.
According to Suleyman, the journey of AI started with classifying data, using deep learning to differentiate and categorize various inputs. We're now in the generative phase, with people and AI systems together creating novel data from existing data sets through platforms like Midjourney and ChatGPT.
He says the big revolution comes in the upcoming cycle, the interactive phase. Imagine conversing with an AI instead of screen-tapping. What might this look like? You convey a need or high-level goal, and the agent accesses collective intelligence to act on it. It interacts with other AIs, coordinating a diverse set of inputs to deliver the result. The output may span financial reporting, innovation exploration, or vaccine development. This capability and interface shift to chat will make static web pages and hyperlinked information feel woefully inefficient and archaic.
Suleyman said, "We're transitioning from static tech that follows commands to dynamic tools with agency - a transformative moment many might underestimate. This isn't just tech evolution; it's a historic leap for humanity."
Read the interview in the MIT Technology Review
🎙RELATED 'UNTHINKABLES' IN THE NEWS
Engineers are working on thought decoders to read your mind. AIs beat Wharton MBA students on an innovation test (by a wide margin). A new term is popping up in the business press: FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete). The space industry is growing faster than the available talent to sustain it (which might soon be the case for all industries). Google is testing AIs that offer life advice. Thanks to AI, surge pricing will "eventually be everywhere." Instagram co-founders are now"recasting news" with its updated Artifact app. An AI-generated fake Drake/The Weeknd song was disqualified for a Grammy. TikTok fined €345m over children's data privacy. Vegas casinos are still reeling from massive cyberattacks. NYPD is using drones to monitor backyard parties. Ads for AI sex bots are flooding Instagram and TikTok. Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, has a hologram at AT&T stadium; you can “meet him” for $55. And ending on a lighter note…AI may soon allow us to speak with animals.
CLOSING THOUGHT
"A great deal of valuable energy can be expended building up moral defenses against one's time. The same energies could be more usefully spent in seeking to discover the shape and tendencies of the age." -- Marshall McLuhan
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