#knowledge age

In yesterday’s post I summarized the 2010s as fighting past battles that keep us stuck in the industrial age.

The agenda for the 2020s should be about inventing the knowledge age instead. The suggestions here draw heavily on my book World After Capital. 

So without further ado, here are six key areas to work on in the 2020s.  

1. FIGHT THE CLIMATE CRISIS

If we don’t get on top of the climate crisis, nothing else will matter, so I am putting this one first.

Read: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells; Facing the Climate Emergency by Margaret Klein Salamon (pubs in April, pre-order now)

Do: Join or support Extinction Rebellion, the climate movement with the clearest theory of change rooted in non-violent direct action.

Start or join a climate solution startup. There are many people working on innovative ideas, ranging from the here and now of tree planting to the moonshot nuclear fusion with lots in-between.

Offset your carbon footprint. The road back to 350ppm or less of CO2 in the atmosphere will be hard, but a start is to take your known emissions and help offset them, for example using Project Wren.

Fund: If you have lots of money, invest in nuclear fusion now. We need many shots on goal (separate blog post forthcoming). But lots of ways you can fund the fight against the climate crisis, including supporting Extinction Rebellion, and signing up for or even setting up community solar. As for venture funds, there is tons to back and we are starting to do so at USV (blog post on that coming soon). Finally, we badly need more geoengineering research and that is poorly funded at the moment.

2. DEFEND DEMOCRACY

Too many people seem to believe that we can accomplish major change only by reverting to some kind of autocracy. But even if democracy is messy, tyranny is never the answer.

Read: Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor; On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Do: Vote. Far too many young people are not voting and then are somehow surprised that the election outcomes don’t reflect their interests. If you are anything other than a lawyer, but particularly if you are a scientist, run for office.

Fund: Contribute to Andrew Yang’s campaign. He’s the only presidential candidate not stuck in the industrial age. Support Represent.us to get rid of corruption in US politics.

3. PROMOTE UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

Universal basic income (UBI) is a cornerstone policy for getting out of the industrial age into the knowledge age. UBI is no panacea but it breaks the job loop which currently has people trapped.

Read: Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman; Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King Jr. 

Do: Volunteer for Andrew Yang’s campaign. Andrew is the only presidential candidate supporting UBI.

Fund: In the US, you can support the Economic Security Project and in Germany Sanktionsfrei and Grundeinkommensbüro.

4. FOSTER DECENTRALIZATION

Read: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb; Bitcoin Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto

Do: Buy some bitcoin. Use or build decentralized apps (on systems such as Blockstack, Algorand, ARweave, Filecoin, etc.) Move away from Google, Facebook, Amazon wherever you can and use alternatives such as Duck Duck Go. Note to self: I should have used IndieBound links for all the books throughout this post.

Fund: Open source projects via Open Collective. The blockchain foundation layers are coming along nicely, now there is lots of need to invest in decentralized application development (for example, list of Blockstack apps).

5. DEVELOP MINDFULNESS

Read: The Conscious Parent by Shefali Tsabary (even if you don’t have children — just substitute parents or friends or employees); A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine

Do: Develop your own mindfulness practice (if you don’t already have one). Doesn’t matter what it is -- for some people it is yoga, for others running. Breathing exercises is what works for me.

Fund: Research into psychedelic drugs. This may seem like a non-sequitur, but it seems that these do offer a crucial shortcut to experiencing egoless states.

6. RESUME LEARNING

Read: Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto; Free Learning by Dani Grant

Do: If you have children, homeschool them. Commit to learning something new yourself.  If you are an entrepreneur, start a freelearning company -- here is a list of ideas.

Fund: Support free content via Patreon, e.g. the amazing Numberphile videos on Youtube. Donate to University of the People, a tuition free US-accredited school run by volunteers.

On each of these I am excited for feedback from readers, including suggestions for what else to read, do, or fund. 

Of course there are many other things you could do to advance the knowledge age so please contribute those also -- getting out of the industrial age is a massive multi generational project. 

Let’s get going!

Planes fly differently from birds. Cars move differently from horses. And computers think differently from humans. That had always been my assumption but if you needed more proof, Google’s AlphaZero program, which had previously shown novel ways of playing Go, has just learned how to play chess incredibly well. It did so in 24 hours and without studying any prior games. Instead it just played games following the rules of the movement of pieces and learned from that.

I encourage everyone to check out the technical paper on Arxiv, as it contains many fascinating insights. But today I want to focus instead on a key high level implication: Computers are not constrained to learning and thinking like humans. And for many, many tasks that will give them at an extraordinary advantage over humans. Just like mechanized transport turned out to be superior to horses in almost all circumstances.

Our big brain that was shaped by the forces of evolution is a marvel in its complexity. But it has evolved to let us deal with a great many different scenarios and try as we might, we cannot apply more than a small fraction of our brain to a specific problem (such as playing chess). And even then our speed of learning is constrained by extremely slow clock cycles (see my previous post about AlphaGo).

AlphaZero’s success should be a startling wake up call. When we developed motorized transport, we went from 25 million employed horses in the US in 1915 to 3 million by 1960 and then we stopped tracking as the number fell further. We now have the technology to free ourselves from the ridiculous demands on humans to spend their lives as machines. We can have computers and robots carry out many of those tasks. We can be free to excel at those things that make us distinctly human, such as caring for each other.

Earlier this week at WebSummit in Lisbon I gave a talk about my favorite topic: our need to get past the Industrial Age. The result of the US Presidential Election is the strongest evidence yet how urgently we need to come up with a more coherent view of the future, or we will have demagogues lead us back into the past. 

New Post has been published on http://mindtomind.com/your-life-what-can-be-worth-that-much/

In Your Life, What Can Be Worth That Much?

Living and working with passion: why it matters so much …

  Passionate individuals Achieve.

Passionate individuals Perform.

Passionate individuals Inspire.

  Imagine tapping into your extraordinary talent and energy each working day. Picture the growth, the rewards and the results.

Sadly, not many people are passionate about their work. Think what are you passionate about? Yet, if business is to thrive in the 21st century, leaders must create an “extra-ordinary” level of commitment from their people. A commitment based not only on the mental – but one that also involves the emotional – passion.

Whilst Mind to Mind helps you to harness your extraordinary mental capabilities, we need the energy source of passion to capitalize on these capabilities.

In the late 20th century, information became the new business nightmare. Managers were surrounded, inundated – and often drowned – in information, much of it useless. So much so that electronic overload threatened. This is another reason why ZOX Pro Training is so relevant and important.

The “Knowledge Age” is passing as we rapidly head into what I refer to as the “Passion Age”. This new era will see the mastering of the difficult part of business – people issues. Physical resources are the easy part. That is why so few organizations successfully access the knowledge and wisdom and passion of their people: it’s just too hard.

Passionate performers make no distinction between labor and leisure, education and recreation. They simply pursue their vision with a commitment and energy sustained by their passion. Do you know what does it mean to have passion!

Effective leaders and performers understand the principles of motivation, that’s a given, but motivation and passion are not quite the same. One is a reactive process, the other a proactive one. Managers, coaches or corporate mentors all motivate, certainly, but this is achieved externally. One can encourage a person to be motivated, one can even teach them how to be motivated, but passion comes from the soul.

  The Pain-Pleasure Equation

Leaders who want to access the passion and knowledge of their people must first understand the major drivers of human behavior, the pain-pleasure equation. It’s simple to define: how much pain is an individual willing to accept for a future pleasure?

Consider sportspeople and musicians: they are willing to undertake years of what is at times painful training because of the promise of pleasure that inspires them. Now translate that level of passion to your own life and to your organization:

1. What benefit will employees derive from contributing their passion and knowledge to the business?

2. What pain or disadvantage will employees reduce in their own lives by doing so?

3. What is the present pain that blocks employees from contributing their passion and their knowledge?

4. Can employees clearly see the pleasure they will gain from contributing the passion and knowledge and facing, or experiencing, the pain of doing so?

5. Is the pain of contributing passion and knowledge greater than the pain of being “safe” in a low performance environment?

The successful builders and leaders of tomorrow’s world-class businesses and lives will be those with a strong empathy-based style, who create a passionate, results-driven, working environment. Tell me examples of passions in life.

Charles B Kovess

  Charles B Kovess LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., MAICD, MAITD

Australasia’s Passion Provocateur

Certified Speaking Professional

The shift from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age can be tough. Individuals may have lost their jobs in the process, be worried about losing their jobs, or simply realized that their current jobs are unfulfilling.

When dealing with difficult changes and realizations, it is easy to fall into the scarcity paradigm. Those in the scarcity paradigm believe that everything has gone wrong, that the economy is bad, that they have no resources or connections and that they are not qualified for the positions they want.

Those in the abundance paradigm, however, see the tough economy as an opportunity to present solutions to the many problems organizations are facing, they know that no one else has their unique set of skills, and they know that if they can't get the job they want, they can create one. A large amount of the greatness of an individual's career depends on the type of thinking that governs their mentality, which is why maintaining an abundance paradigm is so important.

The answer to a person's cause lays in their response to the following question:

* What is the job that needs to be done, the job that only they can do?

There are two key mindsets that individuals have to follow in order to discover their cause and get the job they really want. The first is to become a volunteer, not an employee.

Rather than thinking about getting a job, people should think of themselves as volunteering for a cause. A job description is external and largely impersonal, whereas a cause is internal and connects deeply with the individuals who actively decide to volunteer for it.

Volunteers are also never fired. They are too passionate, dedicated and energetic to be let go.

Volunteers can ensure their utility by coming up with solutions to problems that their employer faces on a recurrent basis.

The second key mindset is to become a solution, not a problem.

Many people searching for jobs believe that opportunities are growing scarcer by the day, and this is simply not true. Many of the organizations that claim they are not hiring will most certainly hire an individual who comes up with a solution to a problem their company must solve.

Most of the résumés that are submitted go into a black hole, never to be seen again. This is because most résumés follow the same, bland format and bring nothing new or interesting to the table.

To combat this, applicants need to become a knowledge worker and do large amounts of research on the company they would like to work for. They should find a problem the company has that they can propose a viable solution to.

Seeing a solution to an organization's problem in a cover letter is incredibly effective at impressing future employers because the individual is actually demonstrating their talents and abilities, rather than plainly listing them out. Once a job interview is lined up, instead of going for the regular job interview question and answer session, individuals should conduct a "Needs-Opportunity" presentation.

This presentation should identify the gap between the current state of the company and it's desires outcome, (i.e. the company will be taken from X to Y within a specified time frame). The presentation should then describe the means by which the solution will be accomplished.

The goal of the presentation is to start a conversation with the employer that demonstrates how much the individual knows and the ways in which they can help the company. After the interview has taken place, applicants should write a thank you note and attach an article or website address for further reading on the topic of discussion in order to further continue the conversation.

However, the presentation must be done in a respectful and helpful manner. If the applicant comes across as arrogant and threatening, they will be very unlikely to hear back from the organization.

On the whole, if an organization sees an applicant as an effective solution to one of their problems, they will value that individual, regardless of the economic climate.