Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best. It also enables you to draw a blueprint for what it takes to get extraordinary things done. You can share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation here.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession, to drive peak performance.
Being Human in 2035 – How Are We Changing In The Age of AI?
This engaging and incisive report, ‘Imagining the Digital Future’ from Elon University, offers valuable insights into the specific capacities and behaviours that will have both positive and negative impacts on humans due to the rapid adoption of AI in society and its applications.
You can read the entire article/report here.
AI Regulation In The US, Vibe Coding And Click To Cancel Hits Home.
In the Forrester What It Means Podcast, three emerging hot topics are being discussed. While AI regulation is being discussed in many forums, two important topics are worth listening to and learning more about from this episode:
Vibe Coding: This method, popularised by Andrej Karpathy, aims to accelerate development and make app creation more accessible. It is a software development approach where developers use large language models (LLMs) to generate code from natural language prompts, focusing on the overall functionality rather than writing every line of code manually. Is it here to stay, or how will it evolve over time is something to think about. If you are in software programming or have a team developing products, you may want to experiment and get your team up to speed on the ‘vibe coding’ way of building applications.
Click to Cancel: A US court struck down the ‘click-to-cancel’ rule designed to make unsubscribing easier. For many of us who have subscribed to many subscription products and services, we know how difficult it is to opt out of the subscription. Also, we know how businesses misuse subscription terms and conditions, and unleash many ways to keep the relationship and payments going. One can be sure that this will come up again with new amendments and become a law in many countries. Brands and companies need to prepare themselves for a ‘click-to-cancel’ era and find a way to meaningfully engage with their customers.
You can listen to the entire episode on:
Outsmarting AI With Dr. Po-Shen Loh, Carnegie Mellon University.
Prof. Po Shen Loh is a Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and is also the Winning Team USA Coach for the International Math Olympiad. Prof Po Shen Loh speaks about what it will take for each one of us to be relevant at work with the increasing adoption and penetration of AI into many things that we as humans will experience.
It is an excellent 45-minute video to watch. Here are a few takeaways that are not only eye-opening but will make you question some of the long-held assumptions and beliefs about learning and education. And will force you to consider alternative ways to think and get things done.
“Our next generation needs to learn how to do deep questioning…”
“A lot of young people, unfortunately, have the goal of trying to just do well in school, get into a famous university and then afterwards get a great job that they don't have to work super hard, but they can earn lots of money. Those jobs are the direct target of AI.”
“MIT… is looking for things like how well do you interact with other students, interact with teachers, work well independently and with a team, and other things too, like warmth of personality, etc.”
“I think everyone does need to learn how to think mathematically, think logically and then combine that together with the human side or emotional side.”
“We find people in high school who are really good at math, and then I hire professional comedians and actors to teach them how to be interesting”.
You can click on the above link and watch the entire video.
Combine Logic + Emotion.
Prof. Po Shen Loh’s work is really groundbreaking and powerful for two reasons. Here’s a math professor, a subject that all of us know requires logical and rational thinking. Yet he talks about the importance of adding the human and emotional side to better understand and solve such problems. In fact, he goes on to reiterate why it is crucial for people who teach or do maths to be ‘interesting’, not just intelligent! The other vital point he makes is that AI is targeting all the work where you don’t need to work extremely hard, but you are still able to make substantial amounts of money. He also discusses developing the skill that will be important for everyone in the future—the skill of ‘deep questioning’.
What happens when people think only logically?
When you are stuck only in logical thinking, which is what most schools and education systems train us for, you tend to think and behave in the following manner:
You become overreliant on perfect data and an ideal world around us.
Take a linear approach to thinking and solving problems, forgetting that you are dealing with humans and their emotions, which is a vital factor in how things get done.
You tend to put too much emphasis on thinking ahead of feelings. Antonio Damasio puts it very succinctly - “We are not thinking machines that feel, but feeling machines that think.”
This, therefore, leads us to overlook things like emotional intelligence, empathy, social context, and cultural nuance, which can build a certain amount of rigidity and expectation of certainty in the events that happen around us. But life and how people behave or how events unfold is not logical, which is primarily driven by ‘either/or thinking.’ But what you really need is ‘both/and thinking’, and therefore, strong logical thinkers struggle with ambiguous and paradoxical situations, which is what the world puts them into. Logical thinking alone cannot decode how events will unfold or why people behave the way they do. Tomorrow’s competitive advantage for humans will be more and more about not just ‘fixing defined problems’ but ‘solving undefined problems interestingly.’
When you incorporate an emotional component into your thinking, it adds incredible power to your approach to understanding and solving problems. Aristotle, the well-known Greek philosopher, laid out an interesting ancient framework called ‘Phronēsis’, which you can use to beat the ‘logical thinking’ rabbit hole you usually get into. Phronēsis emphasises on ‘Practical Wisdom’ as a bedrock to thinking, where you don’t rely on just factual, theoretical and technical knowledge but apply, on top of that, reflection, judgement and deliberation to how you act and make decisions.
When you integrate ‘logic+emotion+intuition+empathy+context’ in your thinking, this is a relatively irreplaceable skill that AI can never match. Even in a non-AI world, this was always important, but its importance has accelerated rapidly with AI becoming integral to our daily lives and future endeavours.
The ‘Deep Questioning’ capability that Prof. Po Shen Loh spoke about can be developed only when you begin to start thinking about how you think.
You must strive to add ‘Interestingness’ to your ‘Intelligence’.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
AI is bound to positively and negatively impact humans’ cognitive and social traits over the long term. We need to be aware of each of these and prepare ourselves for them effectively as individuals.
LLMs are fundamentally changing the way software application code is written. Are you or your teams adopting Vibe Coding in your application development?
Learning ‘deep questioning’ as a skill will be key to outsmarting AI in the future.