Smart System: Nature and Sustainable Societies with Art Murray

It was October, 1993. To Art Murray, these were exciting times. He'd just arrived in Moscow and saw firsthand the artillery damage to the Russian Parliament building, a.k.a., “The White House,” from the constitutional crisis which happened a few weeks earlier. He was invited to speak on the new "information economy." But the audience’s reaction surprised him. "What good is all of this information if you can’t act on it?" they asked. They were confirming what he’d already concluded years earlier - that knowledge (deciding what action to take) was far more valuable than information alone. He returned to the U.S. and launched Telart Technologies, now Applied Knowledge Sciences, Inc. Building upon over a 25 years of knowledge and experience, AKSciences helps clients around the world capture and grow their corporate brain trust and become knowledge-sharing enterprises. Clients have included: the Pan American Health Organization; Abu Dhabi Police HQ, Western Region Development Council, and General Secretary Executive Council; Lockheed Martin; the US Air Force; US Army Research Laboratory; Willis Towers Watson; World Trade Center Dulles Airport; and many others. Much of this body of work has been published in several books, including “Deep Learning Manual: The Knowledge Explorer’s Guide to Self-Discovery in Education, Work, and Life (2016),” and “Building the Enterprise of the Future: Co-Creating and Delivering Extraordinary Value in an Eight-Billion-Mind World (2018),” along with the decade-long series “Future of the Future,” published by KMWorld Magazine. Through his many seminars and workshops, Art has shown hundreds of executives how to compete in a complex, rapidly-changing world. Specialties: Transforming traditional organizations into knowledge-sharing enterprises; human deep learning; building and curating e-bodies of knowledge; organizational knowledge governance. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1944183 Gibson Affordances Art Murray LinkedIn News Release India Ministry of Education India

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
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(01:02):
These design conversations
bring you people's experiences
from all over the globe in the field
of knowledge management, nonprofit work, and innovation.
Hello, everyone. I'm Art Murray, and I live

(01:25):
way out here in the Blue Ridge,
in a nice quiet place. Matter of fact,
our we're on a dirt road,
and I have to walk half a mile
just to get to my mailbox. That ought
to give you an idea.
But, we do knowledge work out here. One
thing probably is important to know is my
whole life, I've suffered from a very debilitating

(01:46):
condition.
It's called, obsessive compulsive learning disorder.
It's the uncontrollable
urge
to know everything there is to know about
everything.
So that condition, which I've had all my
life,
led me into
by various twists and turns

(02:08):
into the artificial intelligence lab
in the early 19 eighties, which just newly
opened up at George Washington University.
And I was given the opportunity to enter
the doctoral program
in that artificial intelligence lab. And as you
know, artificial intelligence has many flavors, many facets,
and I fell into because of my condition,

(02:30):
naturally
and quickly gravitated
into the sub branch of AI called knowledge
engineering.
I hope everybody has some mentor they can
point to. For me, the mentor was my
doctoral advisor, doctor Barry Silverman.
In my master's program at George Washington,
I actually majored in environmental

(02:51):
and energy management,
and he was the head of the environmental
management and energy management program at George Washington.
And he said, what do you wanna do
your doctoral research in? And I said, oh,
same thing, energy and environmental
management.
He said, no. You don't. And he said
artificial intelligence.
And I no. None of us had any

(03:11):
none of his students had any idea.
And,
I attribute
success I have today. I attribute to him.
And when I did my dissertation defense,
and he ran us through the ringer,
but then when we went in front of
the committee, we were ready. So to doctor
Barry Silverman, I take my hat off. He
was my mentor, and

(03:32):
everything that he taught me, I carry forward
to today. We've picked a pretty interesting concept
to kick around today. You know, it's just
so bizarre how
little bits and advances in humanity in different
worlds.
Our talk today is how does organizations
of government,
of a country,

(03:53):
establish
a smart
society?
Meaning that it is enabled
to advance itself
to a degree with public utility, public use,
public
design
of a smart
design.
Art, you wrote an interesting article that really
grabbed my eyeballs,

(04:13):
and I loved it. So let's talk about
that. Can you tell me what a smart
city is or smart country is? Well, let's
start with smart city. I'm glad you brought
that up because I wanna dispel
where people are
heading in that regard,
and it's probably taking
a not an optimal direction.

(04:34):
Smart cities are a pretty good concept that
a lot of people know about, and and
I've been involved personally in smart cities for
decades now. I wrote a column in KM
World called the future of the future. I've
written that for almost 2 decades now with
over a 110 articles.
I tend to be kind of ahead of
the game, which you have to be if
you're writing a column like that. So smart

(04:54):
cities, the notion was
use technology
to wire everything up so that you optimize.
I've done a lot of work
with Russian scientists.
They even cut their teeth back during the
old Soviet Union days
where they were focused very much on cybernetic
idea.

(05:15):
They were probably pioneers in the notion
of a smart city. They didn't they called
it a cyber city or cybernetics.
Machines would optimize and control everything,
the flow of food, the flow of energy,
the flow of traffic,
logistics,
everything from a to z.

(05:35):
All the moving parts,
basically, of a societal
being or a societal state. Right. If you
wanna think like a vehicle,
outside the car or inside the car or
under the hood. Just all the parts of
everything. Exactly. So first of all, grab and
identify them,
then model
how they operate. That's getting into engineering.

(05:56):
And then integrate them, stitch them all together
so that you've got this nice, smooth functioning
thing where everything's kinda taken care of and
optimized.
That's the notion of a smart city. Here's
the problem
with that. First of all, you take the
humanism out of it. So
right away,
one of the errors
that can happen

(06:17):
when you have that kind of mindset
is you're mechanizing
something
that is a society.
A good example is synchronizing traffic lights. Okay.
We know that's a good thing because you
know how irritating it is when you traffic's
backed up and then the light changes green
and 2 cars go through and then light
changes ready. Boom. There's where, you know, obviously,

(06:38):
you want some good optimization
that technology can provide.
When you move beyond that and move now
to the people and society and how they
interact Mhmm. You don't want that because
one thing I wanna make clear, and this
is important because a lot of people are
missing this now with the bright shiny object
of AI Mhmm. Grabbing everyone's attention.

(07:01):
I don't care. Artificial
intelligence, computers
are computational
systems,
and it's important to notice the difference between
computational systems
or artificial systems and natural systems.
There is nature. Mhmm. Humans
are natural systems. They are biological

(07:21):
in nature.
If you wanna go deep into the structure,
they are stratified in nature, just like quantum
physics.
They are not deterministic.
You cannot engineer humans in society
and natural
systems.
They require
freedom
to allow
emergence,

(07:42):
and Gibson's it gets a little bit scientific
on you, you can look it up, Gibson's
affordances,
right,
to try and enable the proper affordances
to let natural evolution
take place and enable that and nurture that,
versus
the traffic lights and all that other stuff,
they're best handled

(08:04):
by computation.
Yeah. Yeah. We need to separate. Right. So
let me on IBM's website dated November 2023,
what is a smart city?
A smart city is an urban area where
technology and data collection help improve quality of
life as well as the sustainability
and efficiency of city operations.
When I read that definition of what a

(08:26):
smart city is, it's not really talking about
the population a whole lot.
It sounds like more utilities
and, like you're saying, street lights and,
electricity grids and water grids and sewage and
all those things
that are systems
that would be smart to have Correct. Smart
stuff on. Your mass transit Correct. All that

(08:46):
sort of thing. So smart city does not
really address
the humanoid
component of that system
because that's all tech. That's all man made.
So these are smart city is for man
made stuff. Good good way to distinguish it.
Yes. So the human part, that's out of
this loop anyway.
That's what we're gonna talk about today.

(09:08):
Because the article that you wrote that I
read in KM World was all about how
India,
soon to be
reverted back to what it was called before
it was colonized,
and I can't say the word. So I'll
wait for you to say it. But India
is really focused on building a progressive society
that looks at opportunity

(09:29):
in a lot of different ways other than
just man made systems. Right. And the name
from the ancient times is Bharat.
So that has the we we don't, in
English, don't use the h, the breath yeah.
We don't breathalyze
a lot of our consonants. So it's b
h a r a t, Bharat.
And what does that mean exactly? Yeah. Bharat

(09:51):
means knowledge, in in search of light and
knowledge,
believe it or not. So that was the
name of their their country. Their part of
the world
back in the ancient times
was called search of light and knowledge. Can
you imagine that having it the name for
your country? Wow.
That's amazing. And a huge body of literature

(10:11):
was built
during that period
and verbally passed down for more than 10000
years, and only in the last 5000 years
was then put into writing.
The trouble there is a lot of those
writings,
just like any ancient scripture, whether it be
Judeo Christian or the Quran there, they all
tend to be looked at in today's modern

(10:33):
society as mythology,
But, no, they were writing about deep meaning
and deep connections
that they observed in nature. Because think about
it. Now a good side topic, we're talking
about now cities, today's world,
everything's connected, digitized. Right? Go back 20000 years.

(10:55):
Nothing. None of that stuff. Didn't even have
pencil and paper. Okay? How the heck did
they generate? How did they develop awareness
of and their connection to nature? They did.
They had to naturally
form and develop. Well, I mean, on that
level, I I would presume
that
in that aspect, you're born of nature in

(11:16):
nature. You're not separate
or separate. Exactly.
So that was all you had to work
with, and you had to use your memory.
Yeah. Because you couldn't even write anything down.
So you'll notice a lot of the ancient
scriptures, documents, whatever you want to call them,
tend to be canticles and songs, and that's
how you pass things down from 1 generation
to the next. And so a lot of

(11:37):
the ancient writings from ancient Parat
are indeed verses and songs
and chants. And that ability
creates or at least that toolset is that
their knowledge transfer was embedded in voice
meant there was intergenerational
overlays
throughout that kept everything sustained.

(11:58):
So you had intergenerational
contact constantly in order to help strengthen the
knowledge flow. Correct. It was a combination of
knowledge preservation and perpetuation.
Remember the game you play as kids in
a circle? You pass the message, secret message
from 1 kid to the next. And by
the time it comes around, it's totally garbled.
So they understood that there was a culture

(12:19):
there. All they did, all this certain group,
and that's why they, you know, they have
the cast system and the Brahmin caste. Part
of the Brahmin caste were called pundits,
and all they did was memorize
that scripture.
Every inflection,
every syllable
had to be sung and chanted

(12:39):
perfectly be for that reason. The the the
secret circle game. Mhmm. It had to be
that was the only way they could preserve
it. So there was knowledge preservation going on.
It's just amazing that it was preserved for
those 1000 of
years. At the same time, new knowledge was
being generated. They began to evolve knowledge. You
know, they understood

(13:00):
that the Earth was was not the center
of the universe. You know, the sun was
at the center, and Earth and the planets
were spinning around.
They were into astronomy long before Copernicus and
Galileo.
I'm talking 1000 of years before.
They preserved the knowledge they had and then
built upon it. In everything you've just
really laid out here, the history of this

(13:22):
land and its way of thinking is deep,
and it's wide.
I wanted to search and see what looked
like now.
I go to the Indian knowledge systems division
website.
They got knowledge repository,
all all kind the government of India, Ministry
of Education.

(13:43):
Is this new idea or maybe it's not
a new idea, but they're reclaiming
what they were is what it kinda sounds
like.
What are they doing to engage the population
of their country
to prepare themselves better for the future? Because
the the word that comes to my mind
is future proof. Right. Well, one area, definitely,

(14:03):
everybody's interested in is sustainability because
we have kind of devolved
into a consumption
oriented
economy
where we just consume, consume, consume, and then,
you know, waste gets just gets tossed aside.
And by the way, not just India. Right?
There's,
every
continent has its indigenous

(14:25):
populations who were doing similar things. They had
similar stories and similar
connection to nature.
Thankfully and very wisely,
the current Indian government is
saying, let's revisit,
reawaken,
and go back to our heritage, our ancient
heritage,
and, you know, build upon that, reawaken that,

(14:48):
and see how we can apply it to
today.
Because we've probably gone too far in the
direction of
consumption technology,
and we know it's not sustainable.
We're gonna eventually use up all these resources
that we're digging out of the ground and
crunching away and then throwing away when we've
used them for 5 minutes or to 5

(15:10):
years or whatever.
And you see the electric cars that are
being trashed already. They're junkyards piled up with
old electric vehicles already, and electric vehicles are
something new. Part of the driver is simply
getting the population to realize, number 1,
we cannot continue on this current consumption
type of course.

(15:30):
It's not sustainable
economically
and environmentally.
Number 2, let's go back and take a
look at what we did before we had
all this technology. We got along quite well.
We've survived for tens of 1000 of years,
you know, a 100 1000 of years. And
then how can we bring the 2 together?
Now we get back to that smart cities
idea. So

(15:51):
understand that there's a balance.
We need to have a combination of human
and technology, human and machine, human knowledge and
machine knowledge,
human intelligence
and machine
intelligence.
But the technology has been evolving like crazy.
Moore's law, exponential growth. Yep. But what about
us humans? So let's look and say, hey.

(16:13):
We've got an innate
capacity
in our human
neurophysiology
to sense what's going on around
us and then make sense out of it
and then take action in alignment with nature.
Let's awaken that. Pick up maybe where the
ancients left off.

(16:35):
Start
growing that. In that voice, this is exactly
where I'm seeing
so going back to the Ministry of Education
Government of India
under their vision
and objectives,
this is what it says from their website.
And this is the Indian Knowledge Systems Division.
The vision of the Indian Knowledge Systems Division

(16:55):
of this organization in the Ministry of Education
is to rejuvenate
in mainstream
Indian
knowledge systems
for the contemporary
world.
The objective of the IKS division,
the Indian knowledge systems division,
is to completely
decolonize

(17:16):
Indian mind
by generating interest in healthy critical reverence
for the unbroken
knowledge traditions
of Bharata
for the welfare of the world.
Now that is putting
exactly
the the point on this is very
strong for what I just read. You know,

(17:38):
they're not saying to keep up with tech
trends or digitization
or all the things that are usually said
about strategies of advancing
societies or organizations.
They are bringing back everything you just said
from what I just read. They are bringing
back the importance
of
the things that existed long before a lot

(17:59):
of this stuff,
but they wanna make it contemporary. They wanna
update. They wanna bring it to the future
somehow.
Right.
Right. Because now you get the best of
both worlds.
Think, back in ancient Parat. They were isolated
just like China was isolated from the world,
just like the Aborigines of Australia were and

(18:20):
even in the Americas. Right? All isolated, not
connected,
and that was fine. They evolved and developed
and preserved that knowledge.
Now we've got the opposite. We've got this
massively interconnected
globe where we can instantaneously
talk with anybody on the Earth. You know,
8,100,000,000
minds with the capacity to connect to one
another, bring these two worlds together, and, hopefully,

(18:43):
that bringing some of that ancient wisdom here
will help us will guide us in the
right direction because as you can see,
and I think it's silly to some extent,
but there's some realistic aspect to it. You
know, the singularity
and and AI and machines taking over. Yeah.
Machines will take over if we allow them.
And in many cases, we are. Our education

(19:05):
system today just think the alpha generation,
they basically get everything they know by asking
chat gpt. Hey. I've got a question. No.
Just ask chat gpt, and there's the answer.
So you do so we're we don't wanna
go down, yeah, we don't wanna go down
that path too far. We sorta step back.
But I will say, as a antagonist to

(19:25):
this concept, is that the laggards will always
lose.
The laggards will always lose.
Those who are fighting progress, those are fighting
Sure. You know, with the emotional
response of, oh, people are losing their jobs
or, oh, we've been doing it like this
for 300 years.
Okay. There's gotta be a balance there. But

(19:46):
I think getting back to what you talked
about with the
human being the center,
I hear what you're saying where technology has
over advanced us in some degree to extract
ourselves out of being human.
Out of all those things that have been
around for a 100000 years of how people

(20:06):
communicate
and learn
and share and develop relationships,
will it just augment?
Will all of this technology
find a balance? I just saw
a piece about a a tech company in
New York City
that had built and was testing. It's not
FDA approved yet.

(20:27):
For folks that had, from the neck down,
paralysis, they could not use their arms.
They could speak, but that was about it.
So they put in something in the brain
that was a processor
to receive thoughts
and then a embedded piece could then communicate,
connect them to a device.

(20:48):
Now that bridge that we're gonna cross where
human and technology
combine
is gonna be the next big step and
they're doing it now. They're testing it and
they they talked to the folks that were
using it that had no other way they
could. So they were showing using like a
mobile device.
A guy could correspond with people through thought.

(21:09):
It was just mind blowing. So we are
not far from a merge point, I think.
I think when we get into the wetware
where we can upload things and upgrade things.
How do you keep the human
element
in this societal,
like the Indian knowledge systems,
where they are not

(21:30):
promoting one over the other. One thought that
came to mind,
you have a good example there, ensure
where somebody is incapacitated,
and and there's certainly a tremendous need for
applying technology to help people
regain normal livelihoods. Right?
Even that that brain interface that you talked
about would be extremely helpful. So, yes,

(21:53):
augmenting someone's capacity where it is for some
reason
inhibited.
Yes. That's an extreme benefit.
What we don't want to see happen, though,
I believe, is
just having everybody get one of these say,
hey, get these brain implants and you can
just sit in your couch
and think about something, and your robot will

(22:14):
bring you your beer and your pretzels. Now
wait a minute. Why are you saying that's
bad? What? Why is that bad?
There you go. Just imagine. Did it just
extrapolate
that? We're already suffering health. You know, we
have type 2 diabetes running rapid and all
that sort of stuff because of our lifestyle.
Yeah. My point is, yeah, just be aware

(22:34):
of the boundaries,
for the for the proper situation, of course.
Leverage technology to the greatest
extent, but do not become the techno do
not become techno do not become the borg.
Rather but still, let me emphasize,
we are not evolving
our neurophysiology,

(22:54):
which has the capacity to evolve. If you
believe the old psychology
used to say, you know, we're using 10%
of our mind, and and that's probably you
know, some purse we're using some percentage of
our mind. So my point that I try
to drive is while Moore's Law is racing
ahead to our great benefit
in the silicon side Mhmm. We should be
doing the same thing on the human side.

(23:17):
There we go back to okay. How did
these ancient Rishis
how did they inculcate,
acquire all of this incredible wisdom of the
movement of the planets
and of the elements
and of all the forces of nature? They
knew all that stuff. How
they were attuned.

(23:37):
That kind of got lost along the way.
In addition to what we're doing here in
technology, let's put some effort into
reclaiming and then
evolving
our innate capacity as humans. Can you imagine
then what kind of world we can create
if we do that? Don't you think that
most humans in this day and age
would not equate the human system as a

(23:59):
system?
They would say, well, it's just people. You
know, there's no system there. It's just people.
Right? Because they don't have any societal training
on what it used to be like 200
years ago that not to say that's a
general statement, but certain ethnic groups have different
human
human connections
than others.
That is a trait

(24:21):
that adds depth and context to a social
structure
that, as a society,
we do not have.
So let's go back to college.
All your 1 zero one classes, all your
first level classes
should how to be human and be in
a relationship with the rest of the humans,
be a class right next to technology course

(24:42):
or kilometers course, or
to talk about systems.
I would go a step further because, yeah,
you're using a keyword there systems, but here's
again where we make the break.
When you say systems to most people,
you're boinging into the cybernetic
world. Right? The technical systems
or the deterministic
kind of systems, the engineered systems.

(25:04):
K? And that's backed into the traffic light
kind of thing.
There's the other system
that is the
ICAST
intelligent
complex adaptive system.
That is the natural system different from a
computational
system. So, again, I I make I make
that distinction. I've gotta hammer that home. Yeah.

(25:24):
And, yeah, and, yeah, good idea in terms
of revamping and and reforming
our education
curricula.
Blend those 2. Understand that, hey, there's this
natural system,
ICAST, an intelligent complex adaptive system
that behaves
in far different ways and has far different

(25:44):
characteristics. It has, you know, emergence
and other attributes
and other behaviors.
That is one type of system. Well And
then we have this other deterministic
technological
computational
systems on the other side. But I I
think part of how the human framework got
to where systems were subsets,

(26:05):
kinda like what we're talking about here, instead
of a very inclusive but exclusive system like
anybody that's taken any biology courses,
You know, you've got nervous system. You've got
respiratory system. You've got all these
separate tracks
that create a human.
But we've not taken a look at what
does it take to create a society as

(26:28):
a human, as a in a societal level
engagement. Yeah. Again, though here. Let me go
a little bit deep on you. Please.
And and I I'm still harping on natural
versus computational.
Where our medical even our our medical science
has made the error,
we've tried to

(26:49):
make a a static model
of the human body. Mhmm. Yeah. All these
systems you described. So you go to any
anatomy book or through any medical program, it'll
be all a static
model
of the leg bones connected to the thigh
bone. I will say there's one medical field
that is counter to what you're saying, and
that's osteopathics.
Doctor of osteopath is more of a holistic

(27:11):
looking at the human. Sure. So and and
and so there's a good example
of where
going in the right direction
versus the static model
going into something more much more natural. Right.
Yes. Alright. So The other point well, the
other point one more point I was gonna
make. Yep. You really get into neat stuff.
The cell itself is an entire city. So

(27:32):
if you wanna model a smart city, look
at the cell,
the single
human cell,
which has, you know, energy coming in. It
has an energy transformation.
It has waste disposal. It has a little
septic system in there. It has, you know,
all kinds of
then you go to tissue, then you go
to human tissue, you go to human organs,

(27:53):
then you go to the organism,
and then you go to the family,
then you go to the village, you go
to the city, you go to the state
province, you go to the nation.
And guess what? You can go all the
way out to the edge of the universe.
And that's getting a little deep.
This is what those ancient Rishi's did. And

(28:14):
if you dove into their
work, which is now captured and written,
you see that that that was the view
that they had of the world.
I I want to just emphasize that because,
you know, you're you're asking a very good
question about the coming back to societal
issues in society.

(28:34):
Nature has left clues all over the place
for us. We just need to uncover them,
rediscover them, and then begin to
rediscover how to apply them. And when we
do that, we're we've become very misaligned with
nature
and we need to become go back into
alignment with nature. And that's one way to
do it from the innermost

(28:56):
to the outermost, and you'll see all the
same. From the world economic that for deep
how's that for deep with you, man. I
How's that for deep knowledge? Telling you, the
World Economic Forum from 2017
has an article here called, these are the
10 best countries for skills and education.
I'm not gonna go on what they used
for rating,
and it's fairly dated. But number 1

(29:18):
in the world
is Norway. 2nd, Finland.
3rd, Switzerland.
Number 4, United States. And then it goes
Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Slovenia,
and Austria. Now it's interesting to me, and
I wanted to bring this into the discussion
because we've talked about attributes of people

(29:39):
and countries and governments and societies.
It all boils down to developing
the human
skills, education.
There's gotta be an apropos level of the
population that has an IQ of around here
in order to get to the next lily
pad.
And I also pulled up the the United

(30:00):
Nations had a
global index
on knowledge. The global knowledge index, and the
last one they produced
was 4 years ago. So, apparently, that's fallen
off the radar for the United
Nations. And I try and understand how the
globe
should be looking and rating how they look
at their knowledge, how they develop and use

(30:21):
their own knowledge. I certainly agree with revisiting
how we even define and look at and
and rate
knowledge. That needs to be totally
maybe even totally revamped.
That I agree with. You know, if you're
gonna rate
one of the markers, I would think you
would wanna know for a country or nation
or whatever you wanna call it, How much
skill and, you know, where skill and education?

(30:42):
I think we're we're focusing education,
overweighting education.
You know, the needs of today are, you
know, STEM. Right? S t e m. So,
sure, that's gonna weight heavily in any institution
like the World Economic Forum in ranking countries
in most regard. But if we back up,
a better way to look at it is
and, you know, there it's not just IQ

(31:04):
now. There there are different kinds of intelligences.
Some people have it as many as it
doesn't. So the important thing there is every
individual
has some innate capacity,
and we're not all equally smart in equal
areas, and we shouldn't be. There's your real
you want real diversity.
The the diversity is really inside.

(31:24):
Let's look at the different diversity
of our innate capacities. People have a natural
inclination
toward artistic
kinesthetics
and and and mathematics and science and and
you know? So let's look at that. Yeah.
Find a way to
better understand
our differences, our our true diversity. What what

(31:45):
distinguishes us? What are the true measures of
diversity
that we can have a better and use
the word holistic,
where we can take into account all of
those
innate capacities
and then blend them together
in the most effective way?
Now we're launching a new
stage of evolution. So in the Global Knowledge

(32:06):
Index, what they rate and what they look
at by country,
I'll read them to you, see what you
think. So the Global Knowledge Index produced annually
since 2017 is a summary measure
of tracking the knowledge performance of countries at
the level of 7 areas,
namely
pre university
education,
which is I think is a great indicator,

(32:27):
doesn't have to be university.
Technical and vocational education and and training,
higher education,
research,
development and innovation,
information and communications
technology,
economy,
and the general enabling
environment.
Now some of those are kinda wide. Buckets
are wide there.

(32:47):
What do you think is missing out of
that? Just based on our conversation Oh, I
see. I I would say there's nothing about
social maturity, social,
Right. Unders you know? Yes. Being a human.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Just plain old, good old emotional intelligence.
But everybody wants to measure the easiest thing
they can measure. How many degrees do you

(33:08):
got? Oh, okay. That's that's good. I was
just gonna say, I advise a lot of
people who are saying, what do I major
in that sort of stuff? And it goes
back. It's a little bit trite. What's your
passion? Right? But, yeah, what are you good
at, and how can you apply that to
help make the world a better place? Simple
as that. And 9 times out of 10,
you don't need especially today,
knowledge is out there. It's available. That's that's
another great benefit of today. What what I

(33:30):
need from you is you to define for
me what your definition of knowledge management is.
I still like Alex Bennett's
version, Alex and David Bennett. It's it's the
capacity,
and and darn it. I don't have the
exact words in front of me, but, you
know, the capacity
to make choices
in varied and uncertain

(33:50):
circumstances,
something like that. Yeah, re refer to you
know, talk about ICAST. It it was, Alex
and David Bennett's book, intelligent complex adaptive systems,
and they have the best definition of knowledge
management in there. And it's something like the
capacity
to make decisions
in varied and uncertain

(34:10):
circumstances.
To put it in your words, instead of
trying to grab theirs, what are the two
top things you need to have in a
knowledge management? Yeah. Capacity is a word I
I like to use, including theirs. So in
my own words, and it's my own focus
personal focus right now
is human and machine intelligence. So the capacity
to combine

(34:31):
human and machine
intelligence
such that
your end performance
is better than either one alone.
I like that. That's very good. You have
to participate in the environment you're in. So
what you're doing is you're combining
data information and systems
and wisdom and all that, and you're bringing
it with the human element being just as

(34:53):
important as the rest of it. Now we
did actually a a study, an internal study,
where we took a problem and in specific
problem was the Boeing 737
MAX disasters,
and we were able to get the data
from that project, the internal emails, because Boeing
had to turn them over. And so now
that's public information. And what we did, we

(35:14):
cut all that documentation
and a bunch of other documentation loose on
AI systems,
and then we did, like, a double blind
study. How the AI ingest those documents and
other lessons learned documents and best practices Mhmm.
And then gave the same set of documents
to a set of human experts without the
AI tools. Right? And told each one, hey.

(35:35):
Go. What do you find here? What patterns
do you find? What problems did you detect,
and what could have been done to prevent
these disasters?
The humans found things that the machines missed,
and the machines found things that the humans
missed. So la dee freaking da.
You need both.
Okay? Yeah. That just let us and and

(35:57):
that's me. So there there you go. My
passion probably comes out. That's where I am
right now. Yeah. So I brought us to
today, what I'm doing now, focusing all of
my energy
on what is the best way to combine
human and machine intelligence
so we can do something far greater than
either one alone. So it's all gonna come
down to critical thinking and integration.
Yeah. Right. Good way to express it. Yes.

(36:17):
And critical thinking is something we have to
revive that and grow that because we're losing
that in our educational system. And and education
means, you know, kind of force feeding
facts and factoids and take exams and regurgitate
what's gonna be on the exam. That's not
learning. Oh my goodness. We gotta get back
to learning how to learn. And the critical
thinking skill is gonna only be developed through

(36:40):
defining and reinforcing cognition and comprehension. Yeah. The
idea of those skills,
it was, what, 50 years ago where expertise
was the best way to go, where you
had a narrow band, but it went deep.
In probably the last 30 years that I've
been experienced,
a generalist has just as much gold as
a specialist
Sure. In most organizations.

(37:02):
Right? I think the
combination is all hingeing on the human component
as we have pushed and pushed and pushed
the human system
and how it operates.
But building with that, anticipation
and practice.
And that's the only way you can build
critical thinking is with actual
practice.
And by the way, use the keyword there

(37:23):
in anticipation,
getting back to that difference between the natural
systems and the computational.
Natural systems have it as a innate attribute.
They are anticipatory. There's a body of research
on that, which I won't get into, but
anticipatory
is a key attribute
of natural systems, and that is a human

(37:44):
innate capacity that, again, we need to reawaken
and grow. Sounds like we have a lot
of homework to do. Sure. And we have
given the listener a boatload of things to
write down and go find out more about.
I wanna thank you, Art, for spending and
investing your time in Pioneer Knowledge Services and
our podcast. Thank you. It's great to have
my brain picked for a change, and we're

(38:04):
always picking the brains of the experts. It
isn't often that I get my brain picked.
So thank you, Edwin, for this experience. Seriously,
it's a great experience, and I appreciate it.
Any last tidbits or things you wanna throw
in that you forgot you you wanted to
say?
That's another thing a computer won't do.
Humans I mentioned humans are
stratified,
and that's from quantum physics world. That flash

(38:27):
of insight that is purely human,
in bed at 2 in the morning.
Boing. That flash of insight. Make sure you
have that notepad right next to your bed
and write it down when that insight comes
because that is something that's purely human. Sure.
That's Yeah. Bark. So that's a good note
to end on. Humans have that capacity to

(38:48):
have that flash of insight. Inspiration is still
us. And make sure we recognize it when
it comes and make the most of it.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and

(39:08):
we hope the experiences gained add value to
you and yours.
See you next time at because you need
to know. If you'd like to contact us,
please email
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