if you wanna go far, go together

A man in a suit, covered head-to-toe, showed up at my front door the other day. I had been wondering for the last week where the bees swarming my front porch lamp had come from, and it all made sense when he pried away a hive that had formed a few yards away. It was emergence in action.

Emerging what now?

I’ve been thinking a lot about sociology and language this month. Perhaps I could trace the seeds back to a happy hour where a linguist and cognitive scientist joined and piqued my interests further.

Let’s start with emergence. Reducing this complex concept to a sentence is difficult, but it essentially is the act of patterns arising from a system—bees forming a hive, ants marching on their hills, birds in formation, and a school of fish. I learned about Unanimous during my happy hour, a company that uses “swarm” intelligence as a technology to help groups arrive at a consensus or at least amplify group intelligence.

I love this application of AI. It is a modern myth to think that any one person is more intelligent than a group. Is the internet not built upon collective intelligence? How else can we use AI to become more aware of new perspectives? How do we make stupid things…not stupid?

If you want to dive even deeper into this rabbit hole, this article posits what a similar phenomenon could look like over time within civilization, breaking it down to six levels: fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, and nature. I’m still digesting this myself, but if you’re into systems thinking, then this is for you.

Let’s Go

Are you familiar with Lee Sudol, the Go player who famously lost to an AI player named AlphaGo? Neither was I until I read The MANIAC. The book is a work of fiction, written beautifully, that takes inspiration from fact and illuminates what it would take for the super geniuses of the modern era even to come close to superintelligent machines (spoiler: it would drive any human to the brink of insanity).

While the book’s name refers to the acronym for the origin of all modern computers, it highlights some interesting figures, such as John Von Neumann, a pivotal figure in the nuclear age. The story of Lee Sudol alludes to the fear surrounding the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and how it might take over humanity, rendering our own intelligence useless.

To that, I’d say nuclear weapons were not dreamed of by machines but by men. And who dreamed up artificial intelligence?

A linguistic mood

I can’t be the only one feeling the swings of fall. As much as I love the season, it also brings with it an air of uncertainty.

Last week, I drove across the border for the first time. Crossing back from Tijuana felt like being in a vortex, a liminal space where time held still. I was shocked to see entire economies spring up around the port of entry, with people selling everything from food to statues to Ozempic. This only further highlighted the inequality of the city and its passersby.

It evoked a particular feeling in Spanish known as the subjunctive. Its taught as a verb tense, but is more of a mood. It is how you express hypothetical situations and outcomes. Some examples could be: If I were to…, I hope we can…, unless they do this…

In English, the subjunctive is not conjugated (when the verbs change) as dramatically as in Spanish. The subjunctive is one of the last verb modifications students learn in Spanish because it is challenging to conjugate and understand when to use it.

I found myself speaking the subjunctive often during this trip to Mexico. Maybe this further romanticizes the language I believe to be the most beautiful in the world, but I love that this expression of desire, doubt, and unreality is ingrained into the words of this culture.

It is not unlike this season we may find ourselves in. As your year winds down, I hope you embrace the weird and wonderful the last couple of months have in store for us.

If you are in LA and like education and tech, you should…

come by my happy hour on Monday, October 15, to learn about AI Opportunities in EdTech as part of LA Tech Week!

I’ll be cohosting with my friend Carl, who also writes about the Edtech industry.