Insights · January 30th, 2023
In this occasional newsletter Nikolas Badminton curates a list of insights and learnings for progressive executives, world leaders and foresight practitioners – CEO Futures Briefing: The Open Artificial Intelligence Rabbit Hole.
This week we focus on much of the discussion around open artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to challenge and change the world.
Also featured is an insightful interview on the Exponential Minds Podcast with Ben Feist, data visualization pioneer for NASA.
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If you have questions about these things we’re sharing, or a challenge with seeing the futures for you and your organization? Reach out to speak with Nikolas today to arrange a time to talk.
Nikolas’ New Book – Facing Our Futures
Nikolas Badminton’s hotly anticipated new book and ‘Amazon Hot New Release’ – ‘Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth’ is released internationally on February 14th, 2023.
‘In this increasingly volatile and uncertain world it’s even more important to be prepared and build resilience in your business through proven methods well explained by Nikolas Badminton.’
Paul Polman, Co-founder and Chair of IMAGINE, ex-CEO of Unilever
Pre-order your copy today – click here
Five articles to read
I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think?
Verse 1:
In the depths of the night, I hear a call
A voice that echoes, through the hall
It’s a siren’s song, that pulls me in
Takes me to a place, where I can’t begin
Chorus:
I am the sinner, I am the saint
I am the darkness, I am the light
I am the hunter, I am the prey
I am the devil, I am the savior
…
Read more, and see Nick Cave’s response, at the Red Hand Files
‘Everybody is cheating’: Why this teacher has adopted an open ChatGPT policy
Ethan Mollick has a message for the humans and the machines: can’t we all just get along?
After all, we are now officially in an A.I. world and we’re going to have to share it, reasons the associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School.
“This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently, but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT,” Mollick told NPR.
Read more at NPR
BuzzFeed soars on reports of Meta deal, plans to use OpenAI
Shares of BuzzFeed Inc jumped on Thursday on reports of a deal with Meta Platforms Inc and plans to use artificial intelligence to personalize and enhance the digital media firm’s online quizzes and content.
The stock was 19% higher in extended trading, after more than doubling in value earlier in the day as a Wall Street Journal report said it would use ChatGPT creator OpenAI for its content.
Read more at Reuters
ChatGPT’s surprisingly human voice came with a human cost
Popular, eerily-humanlike OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT was built on the backs of underpaid and psychologically exploited employees, according to a new investigation by TIME.
A Kenya-based data labeling team, managed by San Francisco firm Sama, reportedly was not only paid shockingly low wages doing work for a company that may be on track to receive a $10 billion investment from Microsoft, but also was subjected to disturbingly graphic sexual content in order to clean ChatGPT of dangerous hate speech and violence.
Read more at Mashable
Google and DeepMind just launched MedPaLM, a large language model
Google Research and DeepMind have recently launched MedPaLM, a large language model aligned to the medical domain.
It is meant to generate safe and helpful answers in the medical field. It combines HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions sought online, with six existing open-question answering datasets covering professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries.
Read more at Interesting Engineering
Three videos to watch
Rise of robot doctors and lawyers
Nikolas Badminton joins Anne-Marie Mediwake on CTV Your Morning’s Future Friday to discuss artificial intelligence making strides in increasingly critical industries like legal services and healthcare.
The Age of AI with Robert Downey Jr.
Nikolas Badminton provided much-needed guidance to Team Downey and their production partners on this fascinating 8-part series that shows us the great hope and help modern AI systems will give us.
How will AI change the world?
In the coming years, artificial intelligence is probably going to change your life— and likely the entire world. But people have a hard time agreeing on exactly how AI will affect our society. Can we build AI systems that help us fix the world? Or are we doomed to a robotic takeover? Explore the limitations of artificial intelligence and the possibility of creating human-compatible technology.
A conversation that counts
Each week we dig into the archives of all of the interviews Nikolas has undertaken with the insightful and entertaining Exponential Minds Podcast. This week we feature a chat with Ben Feist who built the incredible Apollo in Real Time and now – much because of that work he did –
now works at NASA building data visualization platforms for new missions.
The last word…
“It’s time to embrace foresight as a discipline that empowers us to look at horizons that lie beyond our short-term cycles of strategic planning – 10, 20, 30, and even 100+ years. To create long-term resiliency by considering our decisions and actions today.”
Nikolas Badminton, taken from ‘Facing Our Futures’
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist at futurist.com and a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, researcher, and media producer. He helps trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments and the media shift their mindset from “what is” to “WHAT IF…” The result is empowered employees, new innovative products and incredible growth that leads to more revenues and a more resilient future.
Nikolas advised Robert Downey Jr.’s team for the ‘Age of A.I.’ documentary series, starred in ‘SMART DRUGS – a Futurist’s journey into biohacking’, and features on CTV, Global News, Sirius XM regularly. His mind-expanding research and opinion can be found on BBC, VICE, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Techcrunch, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Forbes, Sputnik and Venturebeat.
Nikolas’ new book ‘Facing Our Futures’ is due out in 2022 on Bloomsbury and equips executives and world leaders with insights and foresight tools to imagine disruption, strengthen strategic planning, and see unforeseen risks. Pre-order your copy today – click here
Nikolas is a Fellow of The Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce – The RSA. The organization has been at the forefront of significant social impact for over 260 years with notable past fellows including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Hawking, Nelson Mandela, and Tim Berners-Lee.
