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Prometheus brought fire (metaphorically, knowledge about how to do stuff) to humanity, making him a mythical hero.

Lucifer (light-bringer) brought knowledge (of good and evil, no less), to humanity, earning him the mantle of most villainous of all our mythical villains.

Go figure.

Now we have ChatGPT which, in case you’ve been living in a cave the past few months and missed all the excitement, seems to be passing the Turing, Prometheus, and Lucifer tests while making the whole notion of knowledge obsolete.

You can ask ChatGPT a question and it will generate an answer that reads like something a real, live human being might have written [Turing].

And just like dealing with real, live human beings you’d have no way of knowing whether the answer was … what’s the word I’m looking for? … help me out, ChatGPT … oh, yeah, that’s the word … “right” [Prometheus] or false [Lucifer].

And a disclaimer: I’m not going to try to differentiate between what ChatGPT and allied AI technologies are capable of as of this writing from what they’ll obviously and quickly evolve into.

Quite the opposite – what follows is both speculative and, I think, inevitable, in a short enough planning window that we need to start thinking about the ramifications right now. Here are the harbingers:

Siri and Watson: When Apple introduced Siri, its mistakes were amusing but its potential was clear – technology capable of understanding a question, sifting through information sources to figure out the answer, and expressing the answer in an easily understood voice.

Watson won Jeopardy the same way.

The sophistication of research-capable AIs will only continue to improve, especially the sifting-through-data-sources algorithms.

Synthesizers: It’s one thing to engage in research to find the answer to a question. It’s quite another to be told what the right answer is and formulate a plausible argument for it.

Trust me on this – as a professional management consultant I’ve lost track of how often a client has told me the answer they want and asked me to find it.

So there’s no reason to figure an AI, armed with techniques for cherry-picking some data and forging the rest, might resist the temptation. Because while I’ve read quite a lot about where AI is going and how it’s evolving, I’ve read of no research into the development of an Ethics Engine or, its close cousin, an integrity API.

Deep fakes: Imagine a deep-faked TED Talk whose presenter doesn’t actually exist here in what we optimistically call the “real world” but that speaks and gestures in ways that push our this-person-is-an-authority-on-the-subject buttons to persuade us that a purely falsified answer is, in fact, how things are.

Or, even more unsavory, imagine the possibilities for character assassination to be had by pasting a political opponent’s or business rival’s face onto … well, I’ll leave the possibilities as an exercise for the reader.

Persuasion: Among the algorithms we can count on will be several that engage in meme promotion – that know how to disseminate an idea so as to maximize the number of people who encounter and believe it.

Recursion: It’s loop-closing time – you ask your helpful AI a question (we’ll name it “Keejer” – I trust the etymology isn’t too mysterious?) “Hey, Keejer, how old is the universe?”

Keejer searches and sifts through what’s available on the subject, synthesizes the answer (by averaging the values it finds, be they theological or astrophysical), and writes a persuasive essay presenting its findings – that our universe is 67,455 years old.

But, many of the sources Keejer discovers are falsifications created and promoted by highly persuasive AIs, and Keejer lacks a skepticism algorithm.

And so Keejer gives you the wrong answer. Worse, Keejer’s analysis is added to the Internet’s meme stack to further mislead the next research AI.

Bob’s last word: Science fictioneers, writing about dangerous robots and AIs, gravitate to Skynet scenarios, where androids engage in murderous rampages to exterminate humanity.

The unexplored territory – rogue ‘bots attempting to wipe out reality itself – hasn’t received the same attention.

But putting the literary dimension of the problem aside, it’s time to put as much R&D into  Artificial Skepticism as we’ve put into AI itself.

There is a precedent: Starting in the very early days of PCs, as malicious actors started to push computer viruses out onto the hard drives of the world, a whole anti-malware industry came into being.

It’s time we all recognize that disinformation is a form of malware that deserves just as much attention.

Bob’s sales pitch: Not for anything of mine this time, but for a brilliant piece everyone on earth ought to read. It’s titled “40 Useful Concepts You Should Know,” by someone who goes by the handle “Gurwinder.”

All 40 concepts are useful, and you should review them all.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: Brilliance: The CIO’s most seductive career-limiting trait.” It’s about why, for CIOs, brokering great ideas is better than having them.

In 2007 I wrote about forming the Competence Party. I’d have loved to do it, and would have if only I was competent to form a political party.

I think it’s fair to say that this is the first election since then in which competence is an actual issue — something voters are paying attention to when deciding who to vote for.

So without commenting on either candidate’s competence track record, and in case you haven’t yet cast your ballot, let me encourage you to skip character as an issue no matter how tempting it might be as a differentiator. Character does and should matter, but there are in fact times when we care less if someone is a sphincter than we care if that someone is a sphincter who’s on our side.

The “He might be a sphincter but he’s my sphincter” philosophy has its limits though, namely, that sphincters exhibit neither consistency nor loyalty.

Let me also encourage you to skip the “Who would you rather have a beer with?” criterion, not only because the question finishes with a preposition, but also on the grounds that it’s profoundly stupid.

Competence shouldn’t be a deciding factor either, but only because we should be able to assume it. It should be the ante that lets a candidate play the game, not the hand that wins it.

But here we are. And so, in case you’re still undecided, or if you’d like the list of Competence Party principles to support something more prosaic, like, for example, hiring a manager or making sure your own management style is predicated on competence, here’s the list for whatever use you’d care to put it to:

  • We will know what we want to accomplish, be clear in how we describe it, and know why it’s a good idea.
  • We will concentrate our efforts on a small number of important goals, recognizing that if we try to accomplish everything we’ll end up accomplishing nothing.
  • We will be realistic. We will choose courses of action only from among those possibilities predicated on all physical objects obeying the laws of physics, human nature not somehow changing for the better, and what has gone wrong in the past having something useful to teach us.
  • Our decisions will always begin by examining the evidence. And we will recognize that when our cherished principles collide with the evidence, the evidence wins. Every time.
  • With new evidence we will reconsider old decisions. Without it, we won’t.
  • We will never mistake our personal experience for hard evidence. Personal experience is the evidence we know best. It’s also a biased sample.
  • We will think first, plan next, and only then act. The only exception is a true emergency, where making any decision in the next two minutes is better than making the right decision sometime in the next several days.
  • We will never mistake hope for a plan. A plan describes what everyone has to do, in what order, to achieve a goal. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t.
  • We will sweat the details. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t have any, which is why those who stop with them always fail.
  • We will put the most qualified person we can find in every position. We’ll find some other way to reward high-dollar campaign contributors. Also, if we find someone is not able to succeed at what we’ve asked them to do, we’ll replace them with someone who is.
  • We will never blame anything on the law of unintended consequences. Our job is to foresee consequences, which we can usually do if we think things through.

You might think I crafted these based on current events to sway your vote to a specific candidate. Well, I did base these principles on events, only they were current in 2007, not 2020.

Also: If you’re applying these principles to hiring a new manager, this isn’t exactly the same as deciding who to vote for in a presidential election. In particular, when hiring a manager, or any other position for that matter, you don’t have to settle, and shouldn’t.

When hiring, good enough is rarely good enough. When voting, in contrast, the slate of candidates is it. Pick the best from the list of those who might possibly win.

Exclude those who can’t possibly win because otherwise your vote will count as a half vote for a candidate you’d otherwise vote against.

One more thing: Whether you agree with the Competence Party’s list of principles as a way to decide who to vote for, or you have other criteria you like better, vote.

Unless you disagree with me. Then, please abstain. Your non-vote will only make my own vote count for more.

Offshore outsourcing is rapidly falling out of favor.

Not the business practice. That continues to gain momentum. It’s the phrase. “Offshore outsourcing” is now “global sourcing.” Sounds less pejorative, don’t you think?

To be fair, it’s a more accurate term, since the biggest and most successful offshore providers have U.S. operations to provide client-facing services. Since Keep the Joint Running is a fully buzzword compliant (FBC) publication, offshore outsourcing is out, global sourcing is in.

In a recent article extolling the economic benefits of global sourcing, then, I read a peculiar statistic: Every U.S. dollar spent abroad brings $1.12 back to the U.S. While I’m hesitant to criticize practitioners of disciplines, such as economics, that I don’t understand all that well, let me stick my neck out here and suggest that the author of this statistic should refrain from drinking any more absinthe.

For those of us whose blood chemistry doesn’t include essence of wormwood, the United States hasn’t experienced a trade surplus in decades. If every dollar spent abroad brings back $1.12, something isn’t adding up.

Despite the critiques and concerns expressed in this column in recent weeks, global sourcing probably is good for the U.S. economy. Except for one small problem: There is no such thing as the U.S. economy. We’ve always had not one economy but two.

One is the capital economy, based on the compensation received by those who invest in various enterprises. The other is the labor economy, based on the compensation received by those who invest their time and effort in enterprises owned by others. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and other market indices measure the state of the capital economy. So does the Gross Domestic Product — our standard measure of economic health. That the capital economy benefits from global sourcing is true beyond a reasonable doubt.

Until recently, the capital and labor economies were coupled closely enough that keeping separate track was unnecessary: If the capital economy benefited from something or other, the labor economy benefited as well, at least in the aggregate. But with the advent of a global economy and extensive automation, they’ve come unglued. So we need a useful measure of the labor economy. Those we have are worse than worthless. They’re misleading.

The unemployment rate, for example, doesn’t include those who have given up and aren’t looking for work. Job creation numbers are no better. For example, last month’s ballyhooed figure of 301,000 new jobs included more part-time than full-time positions and was silent on whether the individuals who found full-time employment gained or lost wages compared to their previous positions.

What we need is an aggregate measure that tells us something useful about the health of the labor economy — perhaps “Average Wage Earned” (AWE)? From all reports, it isn’t very healthy: While earnings from investments have been growing at an average rate of about 11% per year, wages have been worse than flat. In 2003, those who work for a living and had jobs actually lost ground to inflation. Statistics that average in the $0 per month salaries of those who lost their jobs aren’t available. They certainly wouldn’t improve America’s overall level of AWE, and global sourcing can only reduce it further. The most basic rule of economics, the law of supply and demand, rules this domain, and the whole point of global sourcing is to increase the labor supply relative to demand.

Does this make protectionism a good idea after all? Of course not, although those who decry protectionism often have highly selective vision. It’s well-known, for example, that American agribusiness receives huge government subsidies, which is protectionism just as much as a high import tariff.

What we need is more basic: A national dialog on the subject of global sourcing rooted in clarity rather than obfuscation. And that requires an end to the current practice of argument from personal advantage on the part of those who promote global sourcing.

Whether the subject is public policy or employee relations, managing the impact of global sourcing begins with the recognition that those who set strategic direction live in the capital economy while those who live with the consequences live in the labor economy.

This recognition doesn’t lead to any easy solutions, either for your business or for the national economy. It does, however, take the first step. Because as with any difficult problem, the first step in finding a solution is recognizing that there is no simple solution.

Or, more accurately, that there is no simple solution that works.