Building an AI roadmap, value from AI advisors, AI and strategy, and being capable of all ideas

📖In this issue

• Course: Building an AI Roadmap

• World Economic Forum report: The most important skills will be human skills

• The conditions for AI advisors to add value to high-stake decisions

• In an AI world, generalist skills become more valuable

• Christian Stadler on AI in strategy, open strategy, AI in the boardroom, and capabilities for strategy

• Borges, AI, and being capable of all ideas

💡Course: Building an AI Roadmap

In November I went over to the LinkedIn Learning studios near Santa Barbara to record my Building an AI Roadmap course. They do a great job on the production, and it’s now out.

I’ve packed a massive amount into 67 minutes, please check it out if this is a topic of interest. I have another course on AI-driven business model innovation coming out in a couple of months.

🧠🤖Humans + AI

The most important skills will be human skills

The most important skills today and in the next years will be human capabilities: critical and analytic thinking, resilience, leadership and influence, overlaid with technological literacy and AI skills to amplify these human capacities.

World Economic Forums Future of Jobs Report
Analysis and discussion of skills section of report

The implications of the rapidly evolving LLM price-performance frontier

This delightful paper explores the many ways that human-horse relationships can be useful in how we think about AI. The powerful metaphor evokes trust, training, feedback, shared decision-making, asymmetric relationships, and long-term commitment, and among other common attributes.

Original post (subscription for full post)
Commentary and analysis

The conditions for AI advisors to add value to high-stake decisions

AI advisors in high-stakes situations don’t always add value. A new paper provides a useful framework and empirical evidence on how to maximize the value of AI advisors.

The Value of AI Advice: Personalized and Value-Maximizing AI Advisors Are Necessary to Reliably Benefit Experts and Organizations
Summary of article insights

In an AI world, generalist skills become more valuable

"Our findings reveal that AI enhances general human capital (cognitive abilities and education) by facilitating adaptability and idea integration but diminishes the value of domain-specific expertise."

Augmenting Minds or Automating Skills: The Differential Role of Human Capital in Generative AI's Impact on Creative Tasks

🎙️This week’s podcast episode

Why you should listen

Christian Stadler is one of the world’s leading experts on strategy, and author of the bestselling book Open Strategy. He has been delving deep into the application of AI in strategy and shares some fabulous insights.

💡Reflections

Borges, AI, and being capable of all ideas

Did Jorge Luis Borges predict the path of humanity? Will we become capable of all ideas? It seems in the realms of the possible. What would that mean?

While I was on holidays recently I read “The Overstory” the extraordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Powers. While the usual summary of the book is “it’s about trees” (which is true), it encompasses far more.

One of the core characters is a developer of software, games, and immersive worlds. He is guided by the quote from Jose Luis Borges:

“Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.”

As it happens I wrote a post last year, Jorge Luis Borges and the impact of AI on human creativity about the Borges story in which this line appears, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

One interpretation of Borges’ quote is that he anticipated a future in which human cognition evolves to the point that individuals can comprehend at one moment all ideas that exist.

If we extend the development of AI and brain-computer interfaces, this seems in principle conceivable.

But here we come across the true Borgesian nature of his quote: if we are capable of all ideas, we must encompass not just every idea, but the contradiction of every idea.

Certainly today, in a world of increasingly polarized and segregated ideas, we need everyone to be able to be capable of not just their own ideas, but other ideas, overcoming divides and opening ourselves to the full spectrum of human experience.

The extraordinary expansion of ideas and thinking that today’s emerging AI enables, when used in the best possible way, offers us vast potential.

But we need to be fully open-minded to be capable of all ideas, and the potential of human thinking.