Antonym: Chaotic Drift Edition
Antonym: Chaotic Drift Edition
Five minutes to read, an indefinite period of following the threads.
Dear Reader
Happy Father’s Day, if that applies to your territory and/or worldview.
Me? I take the Homeric approach and am busy self-celebrating while I write this on Daddy’s Day Eve.
Mediocrity is not enough
Last week, the FT’s Lex section discussed the tangled problems at Credit Suisse—of which, like me, you were probably unaware until now—and coined the beautiful phrase “chaotic drift” to describe it. In his round-up of that week’s commentary, Head of Lex Jonathan Guthrie said:
We have seen chaotic drift before at Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Rolls-Royce, to name just three businesses. The symptoms are serial disasters generated by leadership failures and an entitled workforce. Each might, in isolation, be deemed exceptional. This is how corporate PRs try to explain them. Shrewd investors instead perceive a pattern generated by a damaged culture and ineffectual management.
Now you’ve heard of chaotic drift, you will spot it all over the place. That’s the wonder of labelling concepts. Certainly it applies to the current UK government—Partygate, bodged Brexit treaties and designed cruelty to asylum seekers all reek of “leadership failures and an entitled workforce”. But that one’s almost too easy. Where else can you see it? Answers on an encrypted equivalent of a postcard will be considered for future editions of Antonym.
The FT’s original Lex column’s sub-headline on the Credit Suisse piece is devastating too:
Swiss bank must accept that replacing a culture of recklessness with one of mediocrity is not enough
Ouch.
Quote of the week: “avoid the pretence of knowledge”
Good strategies for a radically uncertain world avoid the pretence of knowledge – the models and bogus quantification which require users to make up things they do not know and could not know.
— Mervyn King and John Kay, Radical Uncertainty
A reminder that just because you put a number in an objective doesn’t make it measurable or useful in any way. “Reduce chaotic drift by 75% within two quarters,” would be an example.
A tale of two ads
Advertising, like death and taxes, is a fact of life. You can pay to avoid them, delay them, but short of moving to a remote island and going off the grid they are inevitable.
Here are two ad campaigns that put themselves in my way over the past couple of months. There’s something in the contrast that I like.
For a month or so I couldn’t make it to work or anywhere else in Brighton or London without being confronted by enormous pictures of Piers Morgan, some with the strap line “I’m back. Love me or hate me, you need to hear me.” Or some such.
Morgan is being presented as a marmite figure, but he’s more like a case of nits. Once a mildly toxic case starts going round you have to just hold your nose and start the treatments to get rid of it. [Late addendum: according to Private Eye Talk TV viewing figures are so bad Jim Davison is making jokes about it on GBNews, an extremely low audience extremist channel in its own right.]
On a lighter better note, here’s a Ben & Jerry’s bus stop in Brighton seafront. It brightens the place up. It’s fun. It’s something people will photograph and share. Even a relative cynic like me.
Going back to Piers though (sorry), you will notice the poster above was at street level. So…
Marvin & the paranoid chatbot
Google employee Blake Lemoine was suspended after going public with a claim that the company’s chatbot AI LaMDA was sentien, backed up with transcripts of his conversations with the alleged machine intelligence.
The interesting thing is not whether it is or not, but that we have to have the discussion. For the first time in history a company has had to categorically deny that a machine is self-aware.
Brian Gabriel, a spokesman for Google, said the company rejected the idea that LaMDA could be considered a person. “Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns . . . and has informed him the evidence does not support his claims,” Gabriel said. “He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient, and lots of evidence against it.”
— Google chatbot is sentient, says worried worker | News | The Times
The idea of a team of “ethicists and technologists” deliberating over whether software is self-aware makes me think both of a medieval papal councils and the Voight-Kampf tests in Blade Runner, which investigators use to work out if someone is human or a machine trying to pass as human.
This is a good moment for us to invoke AI pioneeer Marvin Minsky:
"No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either." — Marvin Minsky
And:
MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, declared: “The legend of the single Self can only divert us from the target of that inquiry. …[I]t can make sense to think there exists, inside your brain, a society of different minds. Like members of a family, the different minds can work together to help each other, each still having its own mental experiences that the others never know about.” — Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
By the way, if you had written the above as science fiction, would you try to get away with a character called Blake Lemoine who blogs as “Cajun Discordian” and that the spokesperson—or voice on earth—of Google would be Brian Gabriel? Any editor would be pleading with you to make a little less on the nose…
(Why) I like to move it
These are four desks I worked at for more than half an hour in one day at Brilliant Noise’s offices at Plus X Brighton. Two in our own offices and two in the common areas. It’s a big reason I like (a) hotdesking and (b) working in a shared workspace building. I can move and sit down and it’s like starting afresh on a piece of work.
It’s called the novelty effect. Among its other manifestations in the world, it means that new medical treatments are perceived as superior to old ones by patients and new technologies often deliver a bump in productivity that is not always sustained as the newness wears off.
Palettes
One of the things I admire and slightly envy about graphic designers is their obsession with colour palettes. Not just nice colours, but how they relate to one another, complement and build a feeling. Two things that let me dabble in this are the lovely Instagram account colorpalette.cinema (pictured with a scene from the wonderful JoJo Rabbit)—takes an image from a movie and picks out the colours—and Coolors, a website that’s mostly free that lets you make up your own palettes by giving you random ones and then pick out colours you like and then suggesting alternatives around those. If you dabble in design, then you can copy the references of the colours or screenshot and sample them to use in your own work.
This week I’ve been…
Reading
Bad Actors, by Mick Herron
Still enjoying this very much. Lovely prose, great characters and a plot that pulls everything together nicely.
The Supernova Era, by Cixin Liu
I adored The Three Body Problem trilogy and this could be his best book since. Liu is a writer of ideas, and unlike any other writer I know. Reading him I sometimes get a sense of cognitive whiplash as he suddenly spins you in different directions. Where a format like Black Mirror will take an idea and run with it, Liu takes an idea and walk with you around it and then into it and then—oh look!—show you another mind-twisting concept inside it.
The Supernova Era is a grand idea that begins on a biggest scale — a star close to our solar system obscured by a dust close becomes a supernova, showering everyone with deadly radiation. Only children under 13 can recover, everyone else has a year to live. What will the world do? Well China, for one, is going to get organised.
The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, by Richard Rumelt.
Rumelt’s previous book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is a modern business classic and the best place to start for anyone wanting to understand strategy. It is hard to follow a book as important as that, so I’m interested to see where this goes. The opening sections are promising, with Rumelt using his experience watching expert climbers in France as an analogue for strategic focus is just a lovely bit of writing:
Sometime later, I see a talented climber work through the crux. To get off the ground, she toe-dances up about three feet and presses a finger of her right hand into that small dent. Using that amazingly poor hold, she swings her left heel over her left arm to cam on a tiny ledge, gaining support from the muscular tension in her body between her right finger and left leg. She arches her back to match the angle of the roof and extends her left hand to a small indent on the edge of the roof, large enough for one finger.
This is where most people fall off. Pulling straight up will put her chest against the lip of the overhang and push her fingers off the tiny grips. For the next move, hanging by a finger or two on each arm, she swings a bit in and then out … then snaps upward into space, clearing the edge, and slapping her left hand onto a round hold the size and shape of a half cantaloupe. Hanging onto the smooth round hold with finger strength and friction, she swings her leg up to press her right toe into a small indentation in the rock and then is finally able to use leg strength to reach a small niche. Another lunge, an invisible toehold, a mantelshelf, and she is on the top. Watching, my palms sweat.
This is a book about strategy, by someone I admire and trust already, but the above is a great example of Steven Pinker’s observation that with writing: “style builds trust”.
Watching
Only one show really on my radar this week...
We Own This City (Now TV). Completely gripping to the end, this true story of police corruption and the systemic failings of the War On Drugs (declared 50 years ago, by the way) is as good as you’d expect from the makings of the wire. Jon Bernthal’s portrayal of the vile Sergeant Wayne Jenkins is a career best performance.
Writing
I’ve been revisiting how we give good feedback at work this week. The notes will form up into a letter to my company, summarising the main points. I wrote a letter like that every day during the first year or so of the pandemic and I’d like to bring that format back, perhaps not daily.
Thanks for reading…
That’s all for this week folks. Thank you to everyone giving feedback — I’m enjoying writing these very much.
Antony
P.S. A couple of other links…
Using fiction to find your strategy | HBR
Article by some consultants who use design fiction as an approach for getting their clients to think strategically about less obvious possible futures. I like the approach of using analogies, science fiction and looking at “extreme users”. Even if you get it wrong, it sounds more fun than some planning methods.
The world gets weirder. The Economist last week had its cover designed by AI–an image generator similar to the DALL-E 2 system we’ve been talking about for the last six weeks.
Top Gun and the disappearing Taiwanese flag
War boi
The founder of Oculus is working on next generation Ai-supported drone warfare weapons in tech company partly funded by Peter Thiel. Taking the concept of gameification right to the battlefield
Marrying Luckey’s past and present, there’s also a complex simulation tool that melds Lattice with a video game engine from Carbon Games, a studio Anduril acquired in 2019. It’s intended to let DoD run thousands of rapid “what if” scenarios on how conflicts could play out, viewable both with VR goggles and on regular screens. It also helps Anduril decide what hardware to build next.
Huge “foundation Models” Are Turbo-Charging AI Progress | The Economist
Persuasive piece that we are on the edge of a revolution in thinking machines—but we don’t know what that revolution will be (it is possible that the machines know and just aren’t telling us).