High Performance Leadership

As Stephen Downes points out in his MOOC Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care , we could spend the rest of our lives in ever deeper dives into figuring out ethics and how to fix them. We can't do that. But we can make ethics a part of the conversation, from now on. As high performance leaders, we must make sure that we do not twist our sense of ethics to suit our performance expectations.  Which leads us to this video. While not on AI exactly (although there is a considerable portion on Apple) it raises and explores the ethical (or should I say anti-ethical?) use of planned obsolescence. I've heard the term and understood the concept since I was a kid (quite a while ago!) and it has not gone away. Like any ethical lapse or loophole, we've just gotten more sophisticated about executing and rationalizing it. It's about 17 minutes long, and fascinating.  Also: after lurking for a few weeks (kept busy by my own training schedule) I finally make an appearance in the MOOC:

After lurking casually for a few weeks (my training schedule always conflicted with the live discussions) I was finally able to attend one of the twice weekly zoom calls that Stephen Downes facilitates as part of Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care .  It was time well-spent. Since I've been "invisible" for most of the course, I mostly listened. There were numerous insights that sparked and endless trail of considerations.  One main point: our AI will be as ethical as we and society are (Downes). But what if the AI gets ahead of us? What if artificial intelligence moves from mimicking our own ethics (as varied as they are) into creating its own?  As the AI evolves (as Sherida pointed out) who claims the discussion? Who manages the management? We may well find ourselves governed by an ethic with didn't choose. I kept thinking of the article from Wired , The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete ,  which shows how ethics is influenced by...

High Performance Leaders should care about ethics. We know that they don't always, but let's suppose that we can influence that in some way.  I am humbly and casually following along with the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) developed by Stephen Downes  E thics, Analytics and the Duty of Care and occasionally I'll share my thoughts on the course here.  The course has advanced quite far. Today I viewed The Machine Is Us , and I recommend it even if you don't want to dive into the course. We are all being affected by machine learning; the evidence is everywhere: increased conflict, advanced surveillance, and data used to aggregate enough information about each of us to influence our behavior. Often, that influence is beyond manipulation and become malicious. Downes points out the various factors in that. People can be unkind, but programming can also blindly lead to unkindness by amplifying it. Software can be opinionated. (see slide 5 at The Machine Is Us ). Efforts to...

I've been casually following a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) structured by Stephen Downes , Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care . While it is mainly focused on how ethics applies to analytics (particularly Artificial Intelligence) and learning, it strikes me as relevant to well, everything. In particular, leadership. Leaders must make decisions guided by their ethics on an almost daily basis. As the discuss in #ethics21 has pointed out, though, while it may seem clear what ethical behavior means, it is much more complicated than that. Ethics, when examined with any level of curiosity, uncovers more questions than answers. Maybe that's best, but it is also challenging. I did take one course in ethics in graduate school working on my masters in Organizational Leadership. Every course, though, contained ethical overtones. I learned that leaders must examine their motives and reconcile them against their values while behaving ethically. I learned that there are many more sha...