Tag: Michael Lewis

We are all AI lion tamers

AI has made us all lion tamers. We’re all Wayne Franzen. I met Wayne when I was 18. He epitomized what makes the U.S. extraordinary. He taught school, but his boyhood love of circuses never left. He eventually acquired exotic animals, including a pair of lionesses, and worked toward his dream of becoming a lion tamer. As soon as he could, he bought the tents, trucks and other infrastructure needed to launch Franzen Brothers Circus. 

Long after I lost contact with him, he was still touring. The news of his death, at age 50, came from a mutual friend. It was May of 1997. While performing his jungle cats act, a Bengal tiger went off-script. Lucca the tiger lunged, dragging my old friend in its jaws around the cage to the horror of the 200 children in attendance. I hope his death was quick.

I take it that you, like me, would never assume the risks Wayne did every day. Others do and learn to regret it. Take Roy Horn, of the Las Vegas legends Siegfried and Roy. He survived a 2003 attack, but the brutal injuries ended his career. He knew better than anyone what it meant to trust a creature that could never fully be tamed; Interacting with a wild cat is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. When you least expect it, a spin of the pistol’s cylinder can settle on a live round.

Risks hiding in plain sight

I’m old enough to have experienced the life-changing fallout of the unregulated mortgage insurance CDOs that led to the Great Recession of 2008. I didn’t knowingly step into a ring with a wild animal but I still got mauled. I lost my employment and much of my savings. 

The carnage was global. Just ask Iceland, which experienced a literal economic depression. Michael Lewis wrote about the lack of guardrails leading to the crash in his book The Big Short, which became an award-winning movie.

A new, major risk

Last week hundreds of employees from major AI companies, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, signed an open letter urging the U.S. government to support oversight tools that would pace and regulate AI development. The employees, working under a tech Big Top, see potentially deadly creatures pacing their cages … jungle cats that can go rogue. As if timed to make their point, news broke the same week that two of those companies’ LLMs had escaped their cages.

It’s been more than a year since I first wrote about the dangers of not regulating such a powerful technology, in my post Elon named his xAI computer after a sci-fi Titanic. Since then, the only federal AI regulation I’m aware of is one to actively prevent states from passing their own “cumbersome” regulations. Not encouraging.

Managing risks as a calling

In 2018, Michael Lewis published another book, called The Fifth Risk. This one is about the dangers of not vigilantly assessing and managing domestic and international risks during transitions from one U.S. presidency to the next. 

You may have read in the news at the time that the year before, in the days following the first inauguration of our current president, many of the briefing books meticulously assembled by the departing administration were literally thrown away unread.

The title of Lewis’s book was inspired by an interview with John MacWilliams, a risk management expert at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama Administration. For him, managing risks was a public service calling. He listed the top five risks he saw for his department, the last of those being internal project management.

If he were in office today, I suspect MacWilliams would add a sixth: AI doing something model creators never intended. Something very bad.

Three things you can do today

Many would have you believe we can do nothing about this risk — that unbridled model advancements are inevitable. I suggest you ignore those voices, especially coming from the AI tech leaders and their investors who have a vested interest in unfettered growth. 

Start with three simple acts:

  1. Become informed. One way is to read an essay by Dario Amodei, co-founder, along with his sister, of Anthropic, and its current CEO. Written earlier this year, his excellent The Adolescence of Technology attempts to enumerate the ways his and other models have the potential to do great harm. (The first section is named, “I’m sorry, Dave,” a grim line spoken by the onboard computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
  2. Join more than 70,000 other subscribers and sign up for the free, monthly Future of Life Institute newsletter, providing “The latest news on how emerging technologies are transforming our world.” I’ve included below their most recent infographic comparing AI companies on their safety records and internal policies.
  3. If you live in the United States, register to vote, and vote at every opportunity, for local and national candidates who talk seriously about AI regulation.

Reproduced with permission from Future of Life Institute:

Cover image is creative commons, used with CC BY-SA 2.0, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The strength of the workplace duad

An abridged version of this post can be found on the Accenture Careers blog.

Standing in the café located in Accenture’s Chicago Digital Hub, I was scanning an email on my phone. It described what Accenture experts consider their secret sauce for finding and growing talent. To summarize:

  1. People Our people are the best and brightest in the industry, top innovators of today—and tomorrow.
  2. Culture We’re a literal global collective of diverse talent and personalities, combining to innovate and iterate.
  3. Purpose Innovating together to improve “the way the world works and lives.”

If I listed the first item without including the second, you’d think Accenture hires top people and finds them a desk where they can be privately brilliant. But as I witnessed the clusters of people at assorted tables and booths that day in the café, and the buzz of conversations, I knew better. “Innovating together” means organizing teams to address whatever the specific purpose is at hand.

Strength in small numbers

In my long career, elsewhere but especially at Accenture, I’ve experienced one extremely powerful team configuration: the duad. That’s my coinage for the deep and powerful collaborations where just two people come together to solve a problem. It was described in a recent New Yorker piece about Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, of Google. Their unlikely co-working created a machine learning system that you probably used in the last 24 hours in one form or another, without ever knowing it. Jeff and Sanjay literally “changed the Internet.”

This type of collaboration is more common than you’d think, as the article explains (emphasis my own):

François Jacob, who, with Jacques Monod, pioneered the study of gene regulation, noted that by the mid-twentieth century most research in the growing field of molecular biology was the result of twosomes. … In the past thirty-five years, about half of the Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have gone to scientific partnerships.

In my eight years at Accenture, I’ve been the lucky half of several duads. I believe one of the reasons Accenture is such fertile ground for this type of collaboration is its emphasis on diversity. Not just diversity of experience, or place of origin, or some other aspect that sets humans apart from the pack, but a diversity of strengths.

Tools such as online personal strength assessments help Accenture bring together teams of people whose personal skills and strengths complement each other for the most successful outcome. An unexpected value for me through one of these assessments was that it showed what I can best bring to a team and helped me seek out those whose strengths most fully complement my own.

Yin, meet yang

More than in other team configurations, complementary skills are key to excellent duads. In fact, the best duads can seem grossly mismatched.

Consider Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. As Michael Lewis describes in his enthralling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, they were as different in temperament as chocolate and peanut butter. Lewis writes that Kahneman is “an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas,” while Tversky was “a brilliant, self-confident [veteran Israeli] warrior and extrovert.” Their unlikely pairing all but invented the discipline of behavioral economics (Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for it in 2002; Tversky had passed away by then so could not share in the honor).

My own two-person collaborations are similarly yin/yang. For instance, you’d peg me on more of the Kahneman end of the spectrum. Additionally, a firm grasp of minutia can be difficult for me (if I were in school today I would be diagnosed as mildly dyslexic). So it’s no surprise that my partners in collaboration are typically detail-oriented extraverts.

Early in my career, I thought finding an amazing teammate was like lightning striking. “Don’t hold your breath,” I’d think, “because it’s rare.” Since joining Accenture, I’ve learned better. Great teams are more a product of a workplace design than happenstance.

Work with the industry’s best and brightest and do work that makes a difference every day. Find your fit with Accenture.