Learn to Fuse Human Intuition With AI.
Edition #122
The ContraMind Code
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 and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
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.
Don't Be Naive, AI Will Take Jobs
New Ones Will Be Created As Well, But There Will Be Less of Others
David Armano has worked with some of the world's most recognizable brands to help them build awareness, trust, advocacy, and loyalty. His speciality is doing these things in a constantly evolving digital context.
David poses an interesting question: The question isn’t “Can AI do it better than a human?” It’s really, “Can AI make fewer humans more efficient?”
There are some interesting points he makes:
‘I co-wrote the script with ChatGPT. My prompting was very specific, and there’s no way AI could have done it without my writing, my detailed prompts, or my brain.’
As the tools become more advanced and high-fidelity, there will eventually be fewer jobs in pursuit of speed, efficiency, and productivity.
The future is about humans working competently with AI-infused tools.
AI will never replace the human touch.
AI will always require a “human in the loop (human assistance).”
AI will automate the mundane/repetitive parts of our work, allowing us to do the more desirable parts that we want to spend more time with.
Read the entire article here.
Dr. Vatsala Thirumalai On The Biology of Movement and the State of Indian Science.
In this podcast conversation on the Inductive Economy, Dr. Vatsala Thirumalai, a distinguished neuroscientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, discusses her academic journey, the importance of imagination in science, and the critical role of mentors. She also reflects on the current state of Indian science and envisions a collaborative future with active participation from both the private sector and the government.
Here are some key topics discussed during the conversation:
What are CPGs( Central Pattern Generators)?
The origin and evolution of CPGs
How CPGs act as a window in the brain
The current state of Indian Science
What will the Indian Scientist of the Future look like?
Role of her mentors
You can listen to the entire episode on:
Apple Podcast | YouTube | SubStack
How Boredom Can Lead To Your Most Brilliant Ideas.
In this TED Video, Manoush Zomorodi talks about what happens in your brain when you get bored!
Here are some key insights she shares in this video:
When we are bored, our brain goes into default mode, and we develop the ability to connect disparate things to generate new ideas.
When we multitask, we keep switching between multiple work streams and the brain needs or uses more nutrients than normal.
A decade ago, we shifted our attention network every three minutes; now, we do it every 45 seconds!
Manoush talks about ‘The Bore and Brilliant Project,’ where people started taking control of their time. They slowly started observing and doing things they had never had the time to do before!
IBM identified ‘Creativity’ as the single biggest leadership competency needed in the future. This has been affected by the large-scale use of phones, multitasking, and switching between tasks, which leads to a poor appreciation of emotions.
Constant connectivity will not be cool in a couple of years! By doing nothing, you are being your productive self!
Click the above link to watch the entire video.
Learn to Fuse Human Intuition With AI
Fusing human intuition with AI will be the most crucial skill you will need to develop, build and excel in the future. This will most certainly help you succeed - be it at your workplace or in your personal life.
Human intuition has never been more essential and critical. According to Psychology Today, ‘Intuition is a form of knowledge that appears in consciousness without obvious deliberation. It is a faculty in which hunches are generated by the unconscious mind rapidly sifting through past experience and cumulative knowledge.’
Very often, an individual’s past experience and cumulative knowledge or information gathered cannot be documented in a structured manner as much as one believes it can be done. We lack hard data about what humans do. To add to the challenge, as technology, tools, and devices continue to take control of our lives, it seems that the sense of intuition in humans appears to be depleting over time unless deliberately developed. The reasons may be many - we don’t need to remember as many things as our ancestors did or, more recently, our last generation. We increasingly rely on external tools to take notes and store information which we think we can refer to anytime( According to World of Data - A 256-gigabyte storage capacity — commonly found in standard laptops sold today — would have cost around 20 billion dollars in the 1950s. [That’s in today’s prices]). Therefore, we don’t have to keep track of as many things as before; we also have automated reminders for anything we need to do daily, and we have unlimited access to information due to online searches or sources. This may have reduced our brain memory storage, be it family details, life events, information, memories, observation logs, etc. This has undoubtedly reduced the amount of cumulative knowledge we carry, and hence, this has vastly reduced our ability to be intuitive. Intuition stems from expertise, which relies on tacit knowledge.
Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, makes an interesting point. He talks about the top executives at the largest German firms: “They go through all the data they have—and they’re buried under data—and in the end, the data don’t tell them what they should do.”
When we compare this with AI algorithms, they use LLMs, which are nothing but computer programs that have been fed enough examples to recognize and interpret human language or other types of complex data. For LLMs to perform better and give near-accurate answers, they rely on providing the model with a suitable input prompt that contains instructions and examples of the desired task. LLMs are very sensitive to how the input is structured and provided to them, and inputs are normally provided by humans like you.
Hence, we require the right blend of intuition, which comes from a conscious observation of what is happening around you and your environment, a deeper understanding of the root cause of behaviour and responses, relying on your episodic and biographical memory, sensory perception, etc. And this then needs to be fused with external storage beyond your brain. Research shows that how you imprint external sources of knowledge or stored information in your brain can help you understand domains, people and their behaviour. Hence, you must develop the ability to see(data) and sense(intuition).
So, how do you improve your intuition:
Use focused thinking to strengthen our intuitive expertise.
Look outward, not inward.
Learn to do premortems and less of postmortems.
Cut off from your need for constant connectivity.
Find time to do nothing. Get bored.
Your competitive advantage for tomorrow is not acting on what is known. That will become available or accessible to everybody. It is about deeply getting involved, getting better consciously, and experiencing what you do. This adds a layer of deep sensing on top of what you are seeing. That will be irreplaceable in any work you do or take up in the future.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
The future is about humans working competently with AI-infused tools.
‘Creativity’ is the single biggest leadership competency needed in the future.
By doing nothing, you can be your productive self. Find time amid your busyness to do nothing.