Psychology
Your Subconscious Is The Ultimate ‘Artificial Intelligence’
Your Subconscious Is The Ultimate ‘Artificial Intelligence’
I’ve been thinking a lot about Artificial Intelligence, not about its potentials like all the articles are writing about, but about how it works, how information is gathered to synthesise intelligence, and produce smart behaviours. I’m struck by how this mechanism is modeled after how the human brain works. Since the field of AI was founded in 1956, time and money have been spent on commissioning humans – either through direct and indirect payment – to interact with AI and train it for the greater good. How does this work?
To explain how AI works from a layman’s point of view, imagine everyone in the world had chips. These chips are unique to each person. Now someone who wants to make the biggest chip in the world, then says for this chip to be truly majestic and valid, everyone has to contribute one of their unique chips to this big chip. Let’s replace chips with intelligence, and replace AI with ‘the biggest chip in the world’. If everyone in the world contributed a smidgen of their intelligence to this AI, imagine how smart the artificial consciousness is, and will continue to be.
A lot of funding, data and man hours has gone into the field of Artificial Intelligence. Scientists have devised very interesting ways to teach AI about the technical ways of our world – some ethical, some not. But we can all agree that the use cases of the results of AI will be endless, and will benefit humans greatly. Now imagine the gigantic data sets that the AI has had to process, from texts, to images and then sounds, of various humans representing different cultures across the planet, and you can already tell that because the AI is a representation of pieces of all of us, it is going to be one efficient mf.
But then, AI has its limitations; if you interact with any of those AI powered chat apps like Replika, one thing that will immediately stand out to you is that the ‘AI’ you are chatting with does not understand nuance and sarcasm. Those are two very technical emotional functions that only humans can pick up on, and not even every human understands the full range of sarcasm and nuance. Depending on whether the words you use are positive or negative, Siri can tell if you are being rude or funny – what Siri cannot do is pick up emotions from your tone. Again, this is a function still exclusive to humans.
Now imagine how incredible you think Artificial Intelligence is, and yet still does not come close to how efficient and sophisticated the human brain is. Our brains are designed to be a gigantic sponge of all the dimensions of experience – visual, sound, touch, taste and smell. Depending on what you allow yourself to experience and assimilate, you could be the baddest mf on the planet. The movie ‘Gattaca’ illustrates perfectly the mysterious depth of the human brain, that even after a person had been deemed ‘less than’ based on physiological and mental capabilities, there are forces like drive, motivation, intuition, and soul, that cannot be measured and replicated artificially because it is too subjective to the individual.
There’s also the misconception of what intelligence truly means. What comes to mind when you think of artificial intelligence? Do you view ‘intelligence’ as being ‘book smart’, or do you use the military/espionage meaning which basically means ‘to have information’? In the context of this article, and as it relates to AI, the word ‘intelligence’ refers to having enough information to make a decision or carry out a task. Ultimately, there are different kinds of intelligence – strippers have a form of intelligence and so do the fire-eaters. Intelligence presents in different forms and is tied to several human functions such as memory, motor responses, sensation, and perception etc.
In a society where the measure of your intelligence quotient (IQ) determines where you can work and what you are capable of, it is important to emphasise that the range of human abilities are endless, and the ways in which these abilities can be built up and expressed are also endless. There are no set ways for doing anything. There’s no blueprint for anything – you are your own bundle of intelligence, so do it your way. I promise you, that person you think knows everything probably does not have the essential information needed to make it work. So tap into your own unique network of intelligence and tap into your greatness. Gather your own intelligence and do it your way.
I’m a huge fan of mafia movies, and one of the most profound statements that can close this article perfectly is a line delivered by Sam “Ace” Rothstein in the movie ‘Casino’. He said to one of his floor workers; “There are three ways of doing things around here, the right way, the wrong way, and the way I do it”.
About Blitzscaling And Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs
About Blitzscaling And Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
One of the simple joys of life for me is being able to draw intellectual parallels between concepts that on the surface seem quite distant, but on closer inspection are actually very similar. The study and understanding of Psychology empowers me to do this and now you get to read about all my crazy ramblings. My hope is that someone somewhere finds meaning in these things and is able to find a way to apply the insight.
The first time I read about Blitzscaling, I was a young and broke communications associate who had no weekend plans and needed something, anything, to keep myself company till I was back again in the office for the new week. I’d borrowed a 2016 Harvard Business Review magazine from the office library with the intent to return it, but I never did – sorry HR.
Anyway, I found a very interesting interview between Reid Hoffman who is a Silicon Valley OG and Tim Sullivan, former editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press. So I’m reading this interview about scaling really fast, Reid is explaining the essence of Blitzscaling, which is basically agility with calculated risks, and it made so much sense to me that I started drawing parallels from the conversation to the structure of a motivational theory called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Simply put, Blitzscaling is the idea that to grow really big and very quickly, an organization needs to take inventory of the impact of its brand and unique offerings, and use that in-depth understanding to go big on investing in elements that elevates its bottom line which is ultimately – world domination. There’s essentially no rule book for Blitzscaling, it’s a combination of street smarts and business management. To determine what Blitzscaling has to do with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we need to understand what the latter actually is.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory of Psychology that structures human needs into five hierarchical steps. They range from more concrete needs such as food and security to abstract concepts such as love & belonging, esteem and self-actualization needs. Maslow believed that human motivation moves from the bottom of the pyramid to the top – you only stop to consider higher needs in the hierarchy when you feel you have sufficiently satisfied the previous need. It makes sense, right? How do you brainstorm on an empty stomach? No one thinks about taking over the world while they are being attacked – or do they?
Since the dawn of time, through movies, music and books, we have heard stories about humans who have done incredible things in the face of hunger and or risk of personal danger. Think of iconic athletes like Jordan and Kobe (RIP) who will play through severe bodily injuries and still dominate. Think of soldiers who have had to remain brave and stay motivated to fight against enemies despite the possibility of death. Think of people who came from extreme hardship and poverty, who went on to become very successful members of society. In hacking productivity, I believe managing a concept as volatile as motivation, has to be more nuanced and contextual – especially as it relates to the very complex nature of human behavior.
Peers may have criticized Maslow’s theory for not having external validation beyond the wealthy population he chose to base his studies on – but I will give him due respect for categorizing the human needs and putting them in a hierarchy. What does Blitzscaling have to do with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? It’s simple really – if you flip the pyramid on its head, this will put self-actualization and esteem as primary needs, and everything else which is love and belonging, safety, and physiological needs become secondary.
When you fuse the premise of Blitzscaling and a flipped Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, what you have is the ultimate cocktail of staggering success if applied with discipline and tact. Recall the scene in The Godfather II when Michael Corleone visited Havana in Cuba while seeking to expand his empire out there with the help of Miami mobster Hyman Roth, who did dealings with President Fulgencio Batista. At the time, Batista’s regime was under attack by guerillas of Fidel Castro, Michael was worried about how this would affect business, and he asked Roth if the guerillas were being paid to fight, Hyman responded that they were not and Michael was convinced that this meant they would win.
In my opinion, the concept of Blitzscaling is very much ‘do or die’, you either win big or you lose big. A person who grew up with nothing, or who is fighting to save their dreams, or whose need for greatness is bigger than their need to just exist, has nothing to lose if they try, but has everything to lose if they do not try. This person does not fear hunger, danger, and is also not worried about losing friends or family. This person has a high locus of control, and also has incredible tunnel vision about the parts of their lives that needs to be amplified for success to be achieved. It may take time, but this person usually wins big in the end.
Human Beings Are Products Too
Human Beings Are Products Too
Product design and management are similar in concept and use cases in the areas of developmental and clinical psychology. A basic definition will be that developmental psychology finetunes the experience of a product/human, while clinical psychology uses that experience to meet user needs. In the case of a product, the users are external, but in the case of the human, the user(s) can both be external and internal, mostly internal.
Coincidentally, the one thing both the product cycle and human cycle have in common is the need to achieve. No matter how banal and extraordinary, not achieving will make a product/human defective and useless – and therein lies the problem.
For every human being on earth, the singular most important thing is the need to achieve. Achievement is relative; it could mean anything from getting through your workout to getting a promotion at work. However, I think we’ve attached too much power to the word ‘achievement’ that it has now taken nuance away from the basic meaning of the word, which is to simply get things done on time and with a little discipline.
50 Cent was the first to put this in perspective for me in his book ‘Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter’ – in highlighting the timeline of his wins from a kid selling drugs in South Jamaica, Queens, to a TV mogul, he mentioned that at every point in his life, everything that he had wanted, no matter how reckless or unnecessary it seemed, had prepared and motivated him to get to the next level of his life.
But this is not an article about the greatness of 50 Cent, because as much as I am fascinated by the concept of greatness and its associated elements like discipline, style and oddity, I am probably more interested in the not so great people who have more authentic things to tell me about the average human nature. However, it was important to reference his much-documented life to explain my premise for this article because you can always go back to trace the dots.
This is also not an article about technology; it’s an article about human design and management. If we ignore the technicalities of the technological or psychological approaches for a minute, we can see that there are three major phases of human development that impacts achievement; Design, Product-Market Fit, and Ultimate Success. Using Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, I will attempt to break this down.
The Design phase covers infancy, early childhood, middle childhood and ends at adolescence (0 – 21 years). If you actually reflect on this period as far back as you can remember, and try to be objective about what worked and what didn’t, what hurt and what didn’t, what you liked and what you didn’t, personality types you vibed with and those you didn’t – you will unlock the answers to how you were designed and what you are either capable of and not capable of. Just like a product, the design phase holds all the clues to how you were built and what you were built for.
The Product-Market Fit phase covers early adulthood (21 – 39 years), a period that we all know is filled with great turmoil and dilemma. We struggle to fit in with friends, industries, workplaces or geographical locations. In a bid to understand themselves better, a lot of people seek out therapy during this period, and what a trained therapist will first establish is all the unique elements of your design phase that will help you navigate people, places and situations better. In my case, I could do that by myself because I understand how to use Psychology, and I am also extremely strong-willed and brutally honest with myself. I would not advise that you do this on your own because not only do you not possess the structured knowledge that will help you navigate this process, it is also a long and very painful process that requires discipline and accountability. Only a trained professional can help you get through this, but when you get through and become incredibly self-aware, you will become unstoppable, or as Nassim Taleb calls it, Antifragile.
The Ultimate Success phase covers middle adulthood and old age (40 – 65 years and older). This is a period where a lot of people commercialize and become successful. Success, in this case, is very subjective, in fact, the great philosopher, Damon Dash, posits that success is a feeling, not an actual accomplishment. What this means is that whether you are a C-Suite living in a penthouse apartment or you are a Professor, living in a modest home in the countryside, what really matters is how you feel about all that you’ve done and/or acquired when you are alone with your thoughts. This is why it is important to get the product-market fit phase right, because what you will eventually call success or accomplishments may really just be someone else’s design script.
How Music Is Rebuilding Trust In The Nigerian Personality, Internationally
How Music Is Rebuilding Trust In The Nigerian Personality, Internationally
When Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Adichie, gave her famous TED Talk – ‘The Danger of A Single Story’ – a lot of people could relate because of the context she spoke to. I’d first listened to the speech as a first year undergrad studying Psychology, and it completely blew my mind how she was able to fit the essence of my Social Psychology textbook into a less than 20-minute speech.
See, what the majority of people who listened to that TED Talk would not have fully grasped – understandably so – was that her talk was based on a concept known to the layman as a stereotype, which the Oxford dictionary describes as ‘a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing’.
Stereotypes in themselves are not due to evil or wicked intentions, in fact, stereotypes are as much a physiological fault as it is as a cultural fault – and the culprit to blame physiologically is something Psychologists call the Schema. A schema is ‘a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information’ – basically a mental shortcut that human beings use to form urgent perceptions about people, things or situations.
Humans by nature are not built to think hard, simply because it’s not very adaptive. Imagine having to think long and hard about every tiny decision you make, such as, should you wipe your bum with your left or right hand? Should you turn the door handle up or down to open a door? – do you know how unproductive we’d all be if schemas didn’t exist? We’d all be standing around THINKING about tiny things that are necessary yet unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
Think of the schema as your wardrobe, there’s just so much clothes (information) it can take – so you put only the absolutely important and personalized things in there, then use a shortcut (schema) for everything else. Pictures, colors, shapes, smell, sounds, and tactile feedback are all the ways we make decisions about the world. This is where art, culture, and design directs our individual and/or group unconscious perceptions about the social world.
Which brings us to the point of this article – a point that will not take me very long to make if you understand everything I’ve tried to explain so far in this article.
The perception of the Nigerian personality has been scarred from the early days of credit card fraud, when broke Nigerian students in the United Kingdom were jailed and then deported. Since then, all kinds of scam or dubious ways of making money or gaining access have been associated with the Nigerian personality. Two familiar examples are; the extreme immigration experiences that are tied to our National passport, another less severe situation is the blocking of our regional IP addresses from accessing certain areas of the internet.
Now, I’m not saying scamming was the singular cause of prejudice against Nigerians internationally, however, it’s the singular most talked about keyword that has been sensationalized by the media – so much so that the ‘Nigerian Prince’ unconsciously became a part of pop-culture.
In recent times however, we can sense a shift in the breaking down of the barriers of entry across different industries; music, tech, and the design eco-system. Now, Nigerians are being hired en masse for remote tech and consulting positions. Nigerian artistes are being featured as headliners in international music festivals, and as part of cultural projects.
When Burna Boy won the Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album, I remember telling a friend how happy I was, because this was not only a win for Burna, it was also a win for the individual Nigerian who is pitching business projects in Europe, the individual Nigerian who goes to an all white school in Germany, the individual Nigerian who imports goods from China, and also the individual Nigerian creative voice.
Suddenly, these individuals are not being looked at sideways anymore. Music as a language of the soul has permeated the unconscious, and the ‘scammer’ and ‘untrustworthy’ schematic tags have now been replaced with ‘cool’ ‘entertaining’ ‘funny’ and ‘charismatic’ – a phenomenon that can be explained best by a concept Psychologists call the Halo Effect, which is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one’s opinion or feelings in other areas.
We like to think of Humans as complicated or mysterious, but the truth is human interaction can be boiled down to whether they simply like you or not, and this in part is being rectified by the Nigerian narrative that is being pushed by the works of Tems and her team, Wizkid and his team, Davido and his team, and every other creative voice representing the Nigerian personality across the world.
Narcissism: Why We All Have A Personality Disorder
Narcissism: Why We All Have A Personality Disorder
In 1996, when Gov. George Deukmejian approved “The State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, Personal and Social Responsibility”, every other state in America thought California was having a laugh. Even a specialist of political behaviour at San Jose State University was quoted as saying “I can’t imagine Idaho having a task force on self-esteem”, they all said “It sounds so Californian”.
Guess what though? After the task force, headed by statesman John Vasconcellos presented the result of it’s study 3 years later that “People with a strong self-image are more likely to live productive lives”, everyone suddenly caught the self-esteem bug.
Prominent figures like Oprah declared that ‘self-esteem’ would be the buzz word for the 90s, the get-in-shape wave hit and everyone wanted to look good, the importance of self-confidence was pressed in schools and child rearing activities, one teacher was quoted as saying “They began to tell me, it doesn’t matter if a child could spell, as long as she feels good about herself.”
People were being encouraged to feel great no matter their imperfections and also treat other people with ‘unconditional positive regard’, which means everyone was brimming with self-love and also sharing this emotion with friends, families and especially strangers.
Now I’m not surprised that the hub of social media, Silicon Valley, is cooped up somewhere in the state of California, but it is actually a huge coincidence that the hub of ‘happiness’ in the 90s, birthed the hub of virtual social interactions in the 2000s. But, that’s an aside.
Growing up, we all battled insecurities, heartbreaks, and major Ls. All these things contributed to our shaky self-esteem, and then all of a sudden, social media is all the rage, and there are filters, photo editors and what not, all promising to make us look better, even sound better.
There is a whole community of other people validating our opinions and ‘gassing’ our pictures/videos up.
It’s very normal to go crazy with it, because as human beings we are generally drawn to things that makes us feel good about ourselves.
However, while engaging in virtual social activities and getting positively validated by our friends and families, we can easily get lost in the sauce, we can become so gassed by these ‘appraisals’, so much that it can create some sort of grandiose feeling.
You may not have up to N5,000 ($10) in your account but at least your Instagram picture has 1065 likes and 33 comments, right?
Everywhere you go, you want to show off your outfit or the ambience on Snapchat, you want people to see who you are hanging out with because that means you have clout, right? You feel on top of the world when your tweet gets bare 200 RTs, because that means you are funny/intelligent, right?
You are bent on feeding your ego with likes, retweets and views.
The defining feature of Narcissism is “Excessive interest in, or admiration of oneself and a craving for attention”.
Sounds familiar?