Amplifying Cognition

“We should not make technology so that we can be stupid. We should make technology so we can be even smarter... not just make the machine more intelligent, but enhance the overall intelligence—especially human intelligence.”

–Pat Pataranutaporn

About Pat Pataranutaporn

Pat Pataranutaporn is Co-Director of MIT Media Lab’s new Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program, alongside Pattie Maes. In addition to extensive academic publications, his research has been featured in Scientific American, MIT Tech Review, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other leading publications. His work has been named in TIME’s “Best Inventions” lists and Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas.”

Websites:

MIT Media Lab

AI (AHA)

LinkedIn Profile:

Pat Pataranutaporn

What you will learn

• Reimagining ai as a tool for human flourishing
• Exploring the future you project and long-term thinking
• Boosting motivation through personalized ai learning
• Enhancing critical thinking with question-based ai prompts
• Designing agents that collaborate, not dominate
• Preventing collective intelligence from becoming uniform
• Launching aha to measure ai’s real impact on people

Episode Resources

People

• Hal Herschfeld
• Pattie Maes
• Elon Musk

Organizations & Institutions

• MIT Media Lab
• KBTG
• ACM SIGCHI
• Center for Collective Intelligence

Technical Terms & Concepts

• Human flourishing
• Human-AI interaction
• Digital twin
• Augmented reasoning
• Multi-agent systems
• Collective intelligence
• AI bias
• Socratic questioning
• Cognitive load
• Human general intelligence (HGI)
• Artificial general intelligence (AGI)

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Pat, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Pat Pataranutaporn: Thank you so much. It’s awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ross: There’s so much to dive into, but as a starting point: you focus on human flourishing with AI, exactly. So what does that mean? Paint the big picture of AI and how it can help us to flourish as who we are and our humanity.

Pat: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I’m a researcher at MIT Media Lab. I’ve been working on human-AI interaction before it was cool—before ChatGPT took off, right?

So we have been asking this question fo...

About Gianni Giacomelli

Gianni Giacomelli is the Founder of Supermind.Design and Head of Design Innovation at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. He previously held a range of leadership roles in major organizations, most recently as Chief Innovation Officer at global professional services firm Genpact. He has written extensively for media and in scientific journals and is a frequent conference speaker.

Episode Resources

Karl Friston’s Free-energy Principle
Generative AI
AGI
Perplexity.ai
ChatGPT4
Jeopardy
Apple
MIT Ideator
Gates Foundation
Christensen’s disruptive innovation
‘Ikigai’

People

Thomas Malone
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Gianni, it’s a delight to have you on the show.

Gianni Giacomelli: It is fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ross: So we have a shared passion for how AI can enhance our thinking. And, yeah, there’s many approaches Eureka mindset, you can have practices, you can have tools and techniques. So just the big frame, how should we go about thinking? Well, we have this wonderful, generative AI? How do we start by making it helping us to think better?

Gianni: I mean, it’s a big question. And it’s probably one of the defining questions as we start recording this at the beginning of 24. I’m gonna provide one view, which may be one of the many views but that mine is a little bit in depth to the work that I’ve done over the years with Thomas Malone at MIT at the Center for Collective Intelligence. And it’s the view of augmentation of collective intelligence; augmentation, meaning, not considering humans, just as a crowdsourcing exercise for machines as a set of technologies, but really the design the organizational design of the combination and the synergy between the two. And that sounds obvious to a bunch of people being exposed to many tools in the recent past, etc. But when you start peeling the onion and looking into how you really make it happen, both at an individual level, but even more importantly, at an organizational level, when you do processes that string together, people, that is actually a lot less obvious. And I think the first maybe the first answer to your question is we should actually try to step away and, and try to look at the forest, instead of just looking at the tree.

And I think we got an obviously 2023. Everybody got engrossed with artificial intelligence, which in itself, the generative AI kind, is an exercise in collective intelligence. I mean, those machines were trained on us, right, we were trained on the things that the humans have been accumulating for many years. But if you look at them in isolation, I think we don’t get to where we want to get to. And obviously, a bunch of people talk about artificial general intelligence AGI, I really like to talk about ACI, which is augmented collective intelligence, which is a state in which we will design practices, processes, tools, that enable that synergy between large groups of humans, and large groups of machines. There’s a lot of design space there. And I think we’re gonna get to a place where we really can amplify our collective cognition, by doing that job right there, doing that job, almost a process and organizational design, using the technologies that we have now. And the practices that, by the way, by MIT colleagues and others in the world, we’re ...

“There are a number of people whom I respect and follow online because they are out-of-the-box thinkers. They might come up with something that I hadn’t encountered before. Then I pay attention because they are a trusted relationship.”

– Annalie Killian

About Annalie Killian Annalie Killian’s mission in life is to catalyze the magic of human ingenuity to make the world, and especially corporate life, a better place. She is currently VP of Strategy and Partnerships for Omnicom’s leading cultural intelligence agency Sparks & Honey, the founder of AMPlify innovation festival at the financial services giant AMP, and a Fellow of Aspen Institute’s First Movers program. LinkedIn: Annalie Killian

Facebook: Annalie Killian

Twitter: Annalie Killian

Instagram: Annalie Killian

What you will learn

• If you’re curious and find lots of information, how do you deal with it? (02:15)
• Why relationships can be a way to filter information (03:41)
• How to find patterns in information (05:27)
• Ways of capturing information patterns (08:15)
• What is the process of pulling together information strands to see what is important? (11:03)
• How to build your network within an information frame (13:39)
• How much difference to expect between experts within a domain (17:20)
• How to bring diverse opinions to form something holistic (20:04)
• What are low filters? (24:50)
• Use filters to surface, define, and explore what is most interesting (27:57)

Episode Resources

• EdgeDweller
• Box
• Dropbox
• Readit
• ENTP Personality
• Social Chemistry by Marissa King

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Annalie, it’s wonderful to have you on the Thriving on Overload podcast.

Annalie Killian: Hi Ross, nice to see you again.

Ross: Annalie, you have been at the edge of the future in many ways for a long time now. How do you do it? What’s the heart of your ability to keep across change or where things are going?

Annalie: I think it all starts with curiosity; Curiosity is a characteristic that I have in spades. It’s almost inevitable that I’m always seeking the edge because I’m curious. Sometimes this curiosity has a nemesis, which is that you end up with information overload.

Ross: If you’re curious, and you find lots of information, there’s too much of it. How do you deal with that? How do you get value from that profusion?

Annalie: There is this complex answer to that. One is I think that some information is okay to discard but having consumed it, and processed it, when you encounter similar scenarios, the insight is that you can recognize a pattern. It’s probably at the point where I start to recognize a pattern that I start to pay attention to see, should I be capturing some of it, should I be saving some of it? That part of the curiosity is really about an open funnel. Then there is a process of recognition of patterns, which then would for me, indicate time to track this. That’s one way in terms of just serendipitous learning.
The other one is that I do a lot of my work around relationships. People to me are the way to scale lots and lots of information. Because I can’t hold it all; but if I have a network that holds much of it, and I can get to them, then it helps with the process of curation and just-in-time delivery. That is very useful.
For people, I have not found an ideal solution. We know that LinkedIn is supposedly the business network where we store our valued relationships but I found that the platform has actually become weaker over time rather than stronger. They used to have a feature that they eliminated a few years ago, where you could annotate a contact, that’s disappeared. I think that LinkedIn has a very one-dimensional view of how people use the platform. Perhaps, it’s part of the architectural problems but I do think that there is an opportunity for a premiumization product. I already have a premium account that doesn’t offer me these features but I would love more features in LinkedIn in terms of being able to categorize, filter, annotate my co...

“Everything you do takes place at the nth order. You cannot simply draw your line of responsibility at the edge of first-order action. It goes far beyond that.”

– Nora Bateson

About Nora Bateson

Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, and President of the International Bateson Institute. She wrote, directed, and produced the documentary, An Ecology of Mind, on her father, Gregory Bateson, which won awards at the Spokane and Santa Cruz film festivals. Following her 2016 book Small Arcs of Larger Circles, her new book, Combining, will be released shortly.

Website: www.anecologyofmind.com

LinkedIn: Nora Bateson

What you will learn

• The dynamic interplay and shared learning among diverse species in a complex ecosystem (03:00)
• Rethinking human communication and relationships (05:50)
• Exploring the fluidity of identity in different social contexts (08:22)
• Understanding warm data and its role in perceiving complex systems (12:24)
• Exploring warm data through describable experiences and creative expression (17:27)
• Intergenerational learning and systemic thinking (21:27)
• Nurturing intergenerational relationships (30:12)
• Integrate intergenerational and indigenous wisdom into our common sense-making processes (32:21)

Episode Resources

Resources

International Bateson Institute

Warm Data Lab

Gregory Bateson

Book

Combining by Nora Bateson

Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns by Nora Bateson

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Nora, it’s a pleasure and privilege to have you on the show.

Nora Bateson: Thanks. It’s really good to be here.

Ross: One word that has been a very common one through you and your family’s work is ecology. I think people come with this idea of ecology which only captures a fragment of the way in which you mean it. It’d be a lovely starting point for you to frame this idea of ecology, the ecology of mind or ecology of mind and nature.

Nora: Yes, thank you because this new book that I have just published called “Combining“. It is called “Combining” because of exactly what you’re saying. One of the things that happens in a world that is looking for the code, the hack, the model, is that this idea of ecology becomes somehow static, and it isn’t. The trick to thinking in ecological ways is to recognize that there is an ongoing movement, and ongoing responsiveness between all of the organisms in an ecology and that those organisms are in fact, mutually learning to be together, which means that there is the continuation of whatever it is, the species, the meadow, the forest, the oceans, and that continuation means that some of the relationships need to be in continuing patterns. But in order to do that, there must be discontinuing because of all the other change, and responsiveness that’s taking place.

Very often, one of the things that happens in the nonverbal assumption of the noun ecology is that there is this set of relationships that create a functional vitality. I would say, let’s get rid of that word functional and even be careful with vitality, that we keep it into vitalizing, that it’s’ ongoing. It’s this ongoingness that is tricky because it’s so nth order. It’s never just one organism. It’s all the organisms in a context and beyond. Our habit is to identify a tree as a tree and say that tree is treei...

“Amplifying Cognition is about recognizing that the human mind is the most extraordinary thing in the known universe. Yet it is capable of far more. “

– Ross Dawson

About Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson works globally as a futurist, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, and strategy advisor. He is Founding Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies Group of companies, and is the bestselling author of five books, most recently Thriving on Overload.

Website: Ross Dawson

LinkedIn: Ross Dawson

Twitter: @rossdawson

Facebook: Ross Dawson

YouTube: Ross Dawson

Books

Thriving on Overload

Other books

What you will learn

• The metamorphosis from Thriving on Overload to Amplifying Cognition (00:31)
• How and why Amplifying Cognition became the name of the podcast (02:23)
• A glimpse of what AI is and how it can amplify humans (06:41)
• Cognitive evolution (epigenetics) through leveraging collective intelligence (10:11)
• The nature of interviews and features on this podcast (12:53)

Episode Resources

• ChatGPT
• Obsidian
• Roam
• Tana
• Notion

Transcript

Welcome to the launch episode of The Amplifying Cognition podcast, which is an evolution and rebirth of the Thriving on Overload podcast. I’m Ross Dawson. I’m a futurist and entrepreneur fascinated by how we can tap the incredible potential of the human mind. In this brief episode, I will share why the metamorphosis from Thriving on Overload to Amplifying Cognition, what I mean by Amplifying Cognition and where the podcast will go, the sorts of people will speak to, and the sorts of topics we’ll cover.

Thriving on Overload podcast was originally the interviews for the book. I thought I was going to be speaking to these incredible people, and rather than just having me in that conversation, capturing all of their insights for other people to listen to, and it was far more from those amazing conversations than I could fit into the book, of course. We kept on going with conversations with fascinating people that could help us to thrive in a world of unlimited information.

That’s a year and a half now that the podcast has been running. A few months ago, on the podcast, I published an episode where I had a conversation talking about my thoughts about the future of the podcast. And at the time, I said, I was considering renaming the podcast Amplifying Cognition, along with a few other possibilities, and asking for some thoughts and feedback. I spent a long time thinking about the many options to reframe the podcast. But in the end, I went with Amplifying Cognition. It’s a big decision because I expect it will be years where I will be continuing to dig into this theme.

Now that I’ve made the decision, I’m very happy because it brings together so many of the themes that I’ve been fascinated by, and worked on throughout my life really, really from when I was a child. It’s interesting now that I’m finding that the vast scope of my interest can somehow be related to this idea of Amplifying Cognition.

In this episode, once again, I’m sharing with you where the podcast is going. I’d love to get any thoughts you have to help make this podcast as interesting and useful to you as it possibly can be. Please get in touch with me directly on the contact form on my website, or any of my social media profiles.

The background to this rebranding is, first of all, I had this concept of Thriving on Overload, which was this issue that we all face; we are immersed in the world of unlimited information and our brains are not built for that so we have to build practices and how it is we engage, enhance our attention, pull together all of that information, find what’s useful, fi...