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You can understand the world around you better, only if you let your mind jump into the wilderness beyond data.
We are living in Knowledge Economy, that is, we use our knowledge to create things. To create knowledge, we have specialized in every aspect of life. First, we had doctors then they split in two: internal medicine and surgical medicine. Then new specializations came under both, then under specialty we have seen medical doctors only specialized in one or two diseases.
Not just Science or Technology. Businesses created incredibly complex structures to benefit. First, we had sales people. Then we divided them into sales and marketing. Then Marketing split into communication, branding and direct marketing then internet came, digital marketing was born. That is not enough today, that was 15 years ago. Now we have countless specialties under digital marketing: SEO marketing, Email Marketing, Performance Marketing, ASO Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, geo-marketing, real-time marketing, do you want me to continue? you get the idea.
As we go deeper into the rabbit hole, we created new knowledge after new one, and to handle that we created new specialties around them. Knowledge economy is all about growth through creating new knowledge. This knowledge driven specialization built incomprehensible organizational structures. And knowledge economy is now operating over that delicate structure to harvest returns from its investment: the intricate networks of human intelligence. We will talk about knowledge economy and its dynamics in the future videos, if you don’t want to miss, subscribe my channel now.
But for the time being, keep this in mind:
Knowledge economy seeks growth,
Growth is driven by creating value,
A new value is created by innovation,
and innovation is the output of human intelligence.
End of Specialization for Human Mind
Then, knowledge economy gave birth to AI. All those specialties, capabilities, networks we built through our entire life are now threatened to become useless. Because AI will do any specialty task better than you do, once it is trained with the entire related knowledge. That’s an existential crisis for our generation. Suddenly, we found ourselves talking about how AI will leave us unemployed and it’s just the beginning of AI Economy. One day the capital was human intelligence, the next day capital is artificial intelligence.
A lot of people are suggesting that AI will leave you unemployed unless you escape the specialist trap and become a generalist and learn how to learn continuously. I, partially, agree with them. There will be an opportunity window for being Generalist between ANI and AGI. ANI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence, is what we currently have as the technology, it focuses on doing tasks following a given instruction by imitating human behavior yet specialized only in one area. Artificial General Intelligence, on the other hand, is what every big tech company wants and currently investing in. Goal of AGI is to teach machines to understand human emotions, beliefs and thought processes, not an imitation and to perform any type of smart task, that is not just specialized, meaning no instructions given, just like a human. Experts agree that we will see AGI in our life time, be it either in 5 years or 25 years. I would bet on 20 years, because we are still not sure about how we create beliefs and thoughts, brain is a mystery to us. Another reason, that may delay a full grown AGI, is the fact that advanced robotics is lagging well behind the current AI leap. Yet, we might see some practical AGI based on current belief theories, who knows.
I think, It is safe to say that being a generalist can help you work your way out this economic transition at least for the next 15 to 20 years. Probably, as ANI become better, some specialist tasks will be handed over to it and eventually we might expect that ANI’s capability will be enhanced to perform all required specialty tasks. Not all specialties will have the same pace to transform., but in 20 years or so we will see it is performing all tasks in most of the specialties. Considering the dynamics of Knowledge Economy, I might speculate that first specialties and tasks to be transitioned into AI Economy will be based on a couple of criteria, like:
Tasks that are not well performed by human but if done properly will have the highest return
One example that comes to my mind first is performance marketing and its subdomains. Because
it’s a highly complex area in growth marketing and it can be really time and money consuming to find an optimal.
Some of the current top AI developers are META and Google who also own the marketing platforms. They have capacity and capability to built ANIs to perform some optimization.
Another criteria will probably look to the tasks that are well performed by human but takes to much time to complete, so by shortening it AI can create value.
for example, business tasks requiring too much data handling like auditing financial records or data cleaning or quality inspections. Actually there exists some machine learning algorithms that perform some part of these tasks today.
The final criteria can be utilizing some ANIs developed for performing one or couple of tasks in one area to perform in other specialty tasks with minimum required change because of the similarity in their nature. This cuts the development costs and may yield good return.
Escape the Trap
So, how one specialist can turn themselves to a generalist within this transformation?
In the next few months:
Look for tasks that are not well performed in your business and tasks that take too much time and create inefficiencies in your organizations.
if you have capability or have resources to bring a capacity together, go for developing your ANIs for those tasks.
if not, try to avoid being more specialized in those areas. Find yourself another one.
However, for the next 20 years:
I highly suggest you incorporate Life-Long Learning philosophy into all aspects of your life. Learning is about curiosity. And one cannot learn to become curious, it is intuitive. Anyone and everyone living in this world have their own curiosities maybe some of them have not come across yet. One cannot become curious out of pure necessity however it is true that its driving forces are usually the desire to know, understand and solve. You have to look around to find yours. For me, it is to understand formation of our mental models and ways to change them to create value for all.
Here is your first 3 steps to become generalist, a useful framework that I merge into my everyday life for the last 7-8 years or so
Experience everything around you consciously. For 2 reasons: It helps you to discover your curiosities and to collect as many as possible data and information from the world around you.
For the events that triggered your curiosity, channel what you have already collected and known into DIKW funnel, which I will explain in a moment, to construct an Iceberg model using your current specialty
Define your data, information and knowledge gaps out of your specialty to improve your construction skills and form a learning activity to grasp the knowledge you need.
As you start learning new things, you will unlock new curiosities of yours and you will build your own generalist style rooted on your specialty, unique to you.
So, let’s unfold the framework step by step, beginning with what conscious experience is.
Conscious Experience
This topic is actually a rather complex one and there exists an entire literature and academic research about it and I’m neither an expert nor a researcher on this topic. However, I try my best to explain.
Experience in general terms is the processing an input and creating an outcome as an action or interaction and recording everything in between to your mind, body and soul. And it is entirely a subjective phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the outside input, but it is all about how we processed, reacted and stored everything.
Conscious experience is specifically the processing and recording of an interaction, not action. Action is more related to unconscious experience.
What is conscious? That’s another hard question to answer, but let’s only look for what is helpful for us to operate this framework. We all have 2 minds constantly working together for our survival. Kahneman called them System 1 and System 2. 1 is operated by our unconscious mind and 2 is operated by conscious mind and second one is activated by attention. However, we do not know much about the attention mechanism itself yet there are some categorical events that nudge the attention, like seeing unfitting numbers or words, calling out your name, or profession, or a problem that you have, etc.
So, conscious experience is triggered by an input that nudges our attentions and processes it through a relevant mechanism during our interactions operated by our conscious mind as well as creating and storing outcomes.
For a quick example: Assume that you were on a trip last week and now you are driving to your home from another city, and after a very long straight and empty road, there is a traffic light ahead, and as you get close to it, it turns to red. Suddenly you are alert and you are supposed to react within the range from taking a full break to a gradual slow down depending on how close you are. During that very long driving session, your unconscious mind was handling the driving task, of course you were not unconscious but due to lack of triggers (no cars, no turns, no traffic lights), your conscious mind does not need to intervene unconscious mind to take any decisions. Your mind was simply in autopilot mode. Once the traffic light changes to red, suddenly a trigger is received by your eyes and based on your knowledge and previous experiences your brain tells you to stop, at that very moment your conscious mind takes the driver seat and alerts all your 5 senses to collect as many data as possible from the surrounding. It simultaneously processes all data received, like your distance to light, your speed, controlling are there any pedestrians or cars around the crossroad, car’s response to your reactions etc. and decides how to slow down in a very brief moment and acts. That part of your ride is your conscious experience, the process and performance of your action are stored back to your experience pool and will be used as a quick guide for your next drive.
Ok, what is DIKW and Iceberg? and how they are related to conscious experience?
DIKW and Iceberg
DIKW or DIKIW is a model used to explain human understanding through creating a hierarchy among Data (D), Information (I), Knowledge (K), Intelligence (I), although some sources omit this step from the model, I believe it is relevant for us to talk about and finally Wisdom (W). It’s usually shown as a pyramid, but unorthodox to common representations I like to visualize it as a funnel.
Think of a funnel that represents our understanding process. Insert layers of filters that help you to strain value. At the top of the funnel, there is data, collected through means of various elements from the environment you are in. Then, this data is processed and analyzed to generate a valuable Information, then we internalize this information as our knowledge to guide our decision mechanisms which, in the end, creates a form of intelligence through restructuring our mental processing and finally we strain the very essence in the form of wisdom [1].
If you have noticed,
Data-Information and Knowledge is all about past. That you collected data, you processed and analyzed them to extract an information and then you internalized it as your knowledge which in the end fed into your intellect pool through restructuring your mental processing. These are all happened in the past.
The intelligence is about now. It starts at the moment your attention is grabbed. You use your intelligence to pull your intellect, update it with the newly given piece of information or data and create a reasonable action through recalling your wisdom and then collect the reaction from the other side and iterate the same cycle until the interaction ends.
Thus, Wisdom is about future. You learn from your experience; you note the important lessons to update your intellect by modifying your mental process to enhance your future decisions.
Let’s continue with the same driver example but make it a little more exaggerated to present this flow better for you. You were driving through a very long, straight and empty road and you are closing to a crossroad with a traffic light. It’s incredibly bright sunny day and you have no sunglasses. There are 4 white buildings at each corner of the crossroad, and they block your full sight. And there are 2 cars on one side, let’s say blue and white cars. Blue one is visible from the angle you look; white one is a little behind blocked by the building and both are waiting to pass. You have 5 meters away from the traffic lights and suddenly your light turns into red. Your attention is triggered, your conscious mind immediately jumps into driver seat, and hits the break hard without a second thought and starts to process data from the environment. It captures the blue car, checks the possibility of car slowing down successfully to prevent a crash by using their intelligence recalling all the relevant knowledge, calculates everything and predicts it’s not going to work so recalculates again to create another action, decides to turn to prevent a crash but, damn, the invisible white car is there and there’s no time to process another iteration to escape and you hit the white car, fortunately no injuries.
This flow kind of represents the funnel in operation which can help you to understand the construction, yet it still tells you the half of the story.
The complementary part is Iceberg Model.
In system thinking, we use Iceberg model to cascade down the reasoning behind any investigated event. It simply recalls a metaphor that tells you that there is more to know below what you see.
Assume this is our iceberg. What you see at the top is an event occurring, illuminated by the sunlight, visible to your eyes. Just under it, we have have patterns and trends, not readily visible but once you are very close to the iceberg, you can see some sunlight shedding a piece of it, signaling to you that there is more below the surface. If you wear your goggles and diving suit and dive into the ice cold water, you will see the underlying structures or I like to call them systems behind the patterns. And if you have capacity to go even deeper what you will find at the bottom of the iceberg is the mental models that created those systems.
OK, let’s elaborate our example further. The next day you’ve come to work, and a huge pile of tasks are waiting for you, at lunch time you are telling the traffic accident you caused to one of your colleagues and then he tells you how clumsy he was during the last week while you were on vacation. This complaint brings your attention and later that day you heard that one of the managers resigned when you are away. And now you have 3 different events that might represent a pattern and you start to think whether workload might be one of the reasons for your accident, because your mind was so full in the last 6 months, you urge to take a little break to calm your mind but maybe it was not enough. You and your team have been working on four projects expected to be delivered to your clients this week. Actually, in the last 6 months you are dealing with a rain of projects, rather than having 1-3 projects running at any time.
At this point, if this issue kicks off your curiosity, you start to wonder why this is happening and questions are popping in your head. Do management team aware of the burden? Why didn’t they negotiate the deadlines with clients? Is this the way of working now? Are there any inefficiencies in my work or in our processes? How to find and solve them? If not, will they hire more people? At that very moment, your mind weights the challenge you are facing and if your skills do not match up with the weight of the challenge, your first instinct starts to tell you that you can't do anything about this. If you listen to this, you will reject the herald of a new journey that will lead you to become a generalist but probably you will look for your way out by searching for a new job. However, if you accept the challenge, you will unlock a new learning path and you will stack new skills that will help you discover and understand the underlying structures that cause this issue and if you continue to investigate you will be able to reveal some mental models that created those structures. When you draw the entire picture of systems, you will explore possible interventions to solve problems and maybe you persuade your organization to try some of them. And maybe they can’t be useful that much in the end, but all these new skills and understanding will help to construct your new generalist version.
Through my journey, I have encountered many issues and each time I prioritize learning from them rather than simply running away. If you like to explore underlying structures, systems and mental models, and ways to intervene those structure, wait for my future videos I will talk a lot about them. And if you don’t want to miss, subscribe my channel now and hit the bell button to get notified.
Before closing, I’d like to clarify some potential confusions on how to decide to dive in. You need to understand and answer these 3 questions honestly before accepting the herald:
1- Are you curios enough to become strictly inquisitive about the issue you are in?
2- If you are sure about your curiosity but still listening and approving your first instincts, Is it because of your insecurities or because of other priorities in your life?
and 3- Do you have shinny object syndrome?
Honestly, these are hard questions to answer. If you can answer the first question yes and third question no, just dive in and go with the flow. You will see it is so natural and just to be in the water. For the other cases, Let’s leave them for now to be explored in future as this video is getting too long already.
However, one final note: Please, do not just dive into the depths of every iceberg for the sake of being generalist. You need to accept the complexity and one’s inability to understand everything. Your curiosity matters most because it will provide you the energy required. Check your curiosity.
It is always good to experience world around you consciously and collect data and information, learn from them and interpret some trends or patterns you see. They will increase your intellect and help you find your natural curiosities. And yes, constant use of conscious mind might cause you fatigue, but frankly do you have any better option? If you are not experiencing, what are you doing at all?
As Shams Tabrizi once told “Instead of resisting to changes, surrender. Let life be with you, not against you. If you think ‘My life will be upside down’ don’t worry. How do you know down is not better than upside?”
Thank you.
[1] (PDF) DIKIW: Data, Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom and their Interrelationships (researchgate.net)