“Rem tene, verba sequentur.”
Grasp the subject and the words will follow. When Cato the Elder uttered these words 2300 years ago, they made perfect sense. The world had a tangible order to it, an almost primal energy bound by the emerging chains of Roman civilization and forged with an imperial cadence of measured progress that would at once unify, modernize and codify the Western World for centuries to come.
Those words embodied the essence of Empire. Study, focus and learn, and then one might master the telling of a thing. For he who can best speak about a matter can shape how people react to that matter, how they perceive and digest it, and therefore influence and control it. But what if the subject is beyond understanding? What if there is no catalogue of knowledge to study, no record to examine? What if it is so alien in aspect, that grasping it in all dimensions of impact is simply not possible?
Enter AI, or in the words of Ethan Mollick, a “non-human co-intelligence.” It bears saying again….non-human. And just like that, for the first time in Human history, it's no longer solely human history.
So how do you master a subject which defies the rational experience of your existence? How does one wrap a cohesive framework of understanding around something that has never existed before and has no theoretical limitations? How indeed?
Sentient Weekly is grounded in the practical. How do we adopt AI? How do we use it in business? What should organizational leaders focus on “grasping” so that they can effectively craft the narrative of adoption? And yet, one cannot simply divorce the practical applications of emerging co-intelligence from the fundamental philosophical questions that arise organically from its creation and use. What IS intelligence? What IS sentience? Where does humanity end and artificial intelligence begin when, after all, that intelligence is only, at least initially, a product of our own minds and philosophy? How do you, as a leader, plan around AI into the future when that future has just become a wild west of asymmetrical growth and capability?
These are some of the many questions that we will explore here at Sentient Weekly. Like so many great changes of the past, these questions will be answered in the doing. Unlike so many questions of the past though, Artificial Intelligence promises a radical asymmetry in how it will develop, be adopted and alter our lives. A guarantee that whatever you believed before about the road to the future, that road now branches into a vast array of potentially limitless paths.
Together, we will embark on those paths, a journey of practical application and philosophical understanding. A brave new world lies before us, an undiscovered country upon whose nascent fields men and women will author a story of failure and fame.
As we take the first steps into that new world, we should expect that we WILL make mistakes. We WILL get it wrong sometimes. But in the end, we will arrive together in a place we cannot yet conceive, but that we believe will be a better world than we one we left behind.
