Do not believe anything ever again.
It is getting increasingly difficult to educate our kids with more technology today.
“So you ask Google a question in whichever language in the world, what did Google answer with? It said, look, there seems to be 104 million sites on those. You can read all of them and make up your mind what the truth is. It's your truth. 2023, you switch on ChatGPT, you ask it a question, what does ChatGPT tell you? One answer. And that one answer is completely positioned as the truth."[1]
Google used to be the default when searching basically for anything in the world. You would type a few key words in the search bar and a hundreds of seemingly unlimited entries would show up, allowing you to choose what are the most appropriate results. You get to decide what is right and wrong with a buffet of choices.
Today ChatGPT and a host of other blackbox AI-powered agents that claim to be more "efficient" narrows these to a few easy to view and choose options. Machines might have gotten smarter and more precise in being able to guess what the user wants. But that isn't always necessarily accurate or correct.
Humans learn more effectively by making mistakes[2], which improves their ability to appraise a situation or be a better judge of character. Errors and pain build resilience and values, allowing us to make wiser decisions. Some go through it more than others. And wisdom is something that tells you to go ahead or hold back on doing something even if most of the indicators show otherwise.
Being able to act resolutely in a seemingly irrational sense is not in the rulebook and big data model of machine learning.
Just like the news: That one headline event that took place, will come out in varying undertones when published in the Financial Times, SCMP, Straits Times, the Chinese news or any other platform across the globe. Nearly all media is propaganda. And digital media in its various forms (X, Weibo, Telegram, etc) is simply just a more entertaining way of putting ideologies into the minds of the masses.
Just because something is widely reported in the media doesn’t mean that it is necessarily the right thing.
A kid that watches Instagram growing up as compared to another watching Douyin will be imbued with very different values and perspectives of how the world works. And with virtual reality pushing the limits in technology, it will get increasingly hairy to differentiate what is real and not real.
As adults, most of us have had the benefit of accumulating enough scars to know what's good or bad for us, and therefore make informed and wise decisions. With enough brainwashing, even adults can be persuaded to bend their will and choices. What more can be said of the impressionable minds of kids?
These days, with so many avenues of searching for information on the Internet, deepfakes and curated content being pushed to our devices, how do you then train young people to tell real from fake and discern right from wrong?
How do you give them enough life experiences at an early age - and not just what they can read off books and the Internet - without permanently damaging their minds, instilling them to think on their feet independently, so that when they grow up and read the headlines or listen to someone talk, they will pause and ask, "Is that really the case?"
"Do not believe anything ever again. Because the idea of asking a question and getting one answer for it is by absolute certainty not true." - Mo Gawdat
Limitations.
Years ago when I was just a young freshly minted investment banker at a social gathering, one of my older friends casually commented,
“I am not young anymore and can’t stay up to work the long hours like you guys, I have to sleep before midnight.” - an unnamed friend who was in the forties then
Coming from an environment and work culture where all-nighters were worn like a badge of honor and people grab a few drinks after work before getting home after midnight, this was inconceivable.
Perhaps more inconceivable was the fact that fast forward nearly two decades today, I still push the hours.
Since then, my work has evolved from being somewhat 90% confined to facing the monitor at my desk in Singapore, to mostly city-hopping, meeting and talking to people, while working out of hotels and on the move.
I am not particularly proud of the long working hours and suitcase life, but these were part of the deal when I took on the job.
As hectic as it sounds, I enjoy what I do in general. It was only in recent times that the frequency of falling sick had increased to the point that I start to question the limits of my body and ask, “Is it time to really slow down?”
No more executive roles.
Regardless of how we define and stereotype the characteristics of each generation of youngsters, the unspoken rite of passage that transcends time and industry is: Newbies and those fresh to the job, will first do the number crunching and leg work before being handed more important stuff.
It is a proven way for businesses to manage operational risk. Call it modern day apprenticeship.
This is similar to how food recipes are handed down across generations, just like the 90-year old uncle who makes the char kway teow that people religiously queue up for at the hawker centre in Singapore.
When left to a pair of unseasoned kitchen hands, the quality of the char kway teow recipe gets compromised, because no one makes a better plate than the old man himself who adds just the perfect amount of ingredients in every serving.
Execution excellence and mastery are forged and nurtured by simply doing something over and over again, for a very long time.
But unlike char kway teow, most white collared roles will not expect you to do the heavy-lifting after a certain number of years. In large organisations, some will even consider it criminal to ask a senior person to run execution.
The idea is once you push the forties and fifties, the nature of work tends to involve leading from the benches rather than from the trenches. There is a valid argument for succession and redundancy planning, but the main point was: Provide more counsel and less execution leadership. Managing grunt work is best left to the young foot soldiers.
I recalled a conversation last year over a working lunch with an ex-senior partner at a top consulting firm.
At the peak of his career, he socialised the idea of retiring into a corporate role to his higher up. This was at the onset of his late forties. The response that came back was, “Just remember, there are no more executive roles after your fifties”. And since then, I have kept this religiously in mind at every turn at the workplace.
[1] The Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival: https://www.instagram.com/sharjahef/
[2] "Making mistakes while studying actually helps you learn better" - Science Daily