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Google chief measurement strategist Neil Hoyne about the impact of generative AI on employees and the workplace. Excerpt: "AI is often framed as a technological advancement, but Puntoni believes its real impact is in how humans adapt to it. The conversation needs to move beyond Silicon Valley and into the domains of business schools, social sciences, and workforce development to understand AI’s role in shaping the future of work. AI is unlikely to fully replace most jobs; instead, it will redefine them. Just as photography evolved with digital tools, professions will adapt by integrating AI into workflows. Understanding which aspects of work are identity-driven versus utilitarian can help individuals navigate this shift without feeling threatened." Related from Wharton Also related from IBM CEO

Conversation: does religion have an innovation (in its "products, services and/or marketing") problem? Excerpt: " The death of Pope Francis last Monday has prompted believers, agnostics and atheists alike to reflect on the role of religion in daily life. Religiosity in the Western world has been waning for years, particularly among young people. About half of Americans born since the 1980s say they seldom or never attend religious services. Yet, 83 percent report believing in God or a universal spirit. What explains this disconnect between personal belief and organized religion? On the latest episode of “Impromptu,” columnists Drew Goins, Molly Roberts and Shadi Hamid discuss their different religious upbringings and what, if anything, faith can do for us in the 21st century. Shadi: Well, we have to understand that our religions were originally revealed in very different contexts. Prophets, whether it’s the seventh century or before Christ, were speaking to people with patriarchal values. Naturally, religions have to speak to people where they are. I think this is where it’s important to distinguish between what can be changed within a religion and what is eternal. And I think patriarchal practices are something that can be updated and changed. Molly Roberts: I think it’s difficult to answer what’s eternal or intrinsic to a religion and what’s not. I remember even at my Reform temple, when I was going to get bat mitzvahed, my mom wasn’t allowed up on the bimah. So we had to do it at the synagogue downtown, which would let my mom on the bimah. That you can’t allow a Christian woman up on the bimah is a pretty core tenet of Judaism — again, core enough for my really Reform temple. I don’t know whether that’s something that is core to Judaism or whether that’s something that needs to change. I think that’s why some people get turned off: They look at a religion and decide that it’s just not for them in this day and age. Shadi: That’s right. Ultimately, these are personal questions. We all decide what we think in our own faiths is unchanging versus changeable; I think this is the push and pull of being an American religious person. We have a strong tradition of individualism, that the individual should always be searching and seeking and finding their true self. But at some point, you should try to be found — otherwise it’s never going to end. That’s where the structures of religion can be really important. We are living in a time where Americans, especially young Americans, are increasingly lonely: high levels of depression and mental illness, deaths of despair. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong in our society. I’m a believer that religion can help people find their way — give them the kind of meaning, purpose and belonging that they’ve been lacking."

From sowing doubt about childhood vaccines to appointing fringe researchers to lead bogus studies, Kennedy is advancing the anti-vaccine agenda he swore he didn't have. Excerpt: " During his confirmation hearing to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to distance himself from his notorious reputation as the country’s most infamous anti-vaxxer. He said he supported the measles vaccine, despite writing in a 2021 book that Americans had been “misled” into “believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective.” He promised to support the childhood vaccine schedule, despite casting doubt on the long-term safety of that schedule in his 2023 book . “I believe that vaccines play a critical role in healthcare,” Kennedy said. “All of my kids are vaccinated.” Kennedy’s doublespeak was at least enough to land him the job. Now that he’s in it, though, Kennedy has continued apace with his just-asking-questions approach to undermining vaccination in America. Kennedy’s attacks on vaccines were apparently so swift and so disruptive that in late March, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official quit the agency in a fiery resignation letter . “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers,” Dr. Peter Marks wrote to the FDA’s acting commissioner."

Scientists in disagreement Excerpt: "Consciousness may be a mystery, but that doesn’t mean that neuroscientists don’t have any explanations for it. Far from it. “In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we don’t need more theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham. If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise to subjective, inner experiences, you can check out Adaptive Resonance Theory. Or consider Dynamic Core Theory. Don’t forget First Order Representational Theory, not to mention semantic pointer competition theory. The list goes on: A 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness. Dr. Ferrante belongs to a group of scientists who want to lower that number, perhaps even down to just one. But they face a steep challenge, thanks to how scientists often study consciousness: Devise a theory, run experiments to build evidence for it, and argue that it’s better than the others. “We are not incentivized to kill our own ideas,” said Lucia Melloni, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. Seven years ago, Dr. Melloni and 41 other scientists embarked on a major study on consciousness that she hoped would break this pattern. Their plan was to bring together two rival groups to design an experiment to see how well both theories did at predicting what happens in our brains during a conscious experience."

What could happen next, and will we see it coming? Excerpt: "A conversation about the factors that might slow down the pace of AI development, what could happen next, and whether we’ll be able to see it coming. Ajeya Cotra: I'm interested in something you mentioned in your recent paper and on Twitter — the idea that the external world puts a speed limit on AI development. With applications like self-driving cars or travel booking agents, you need to test them in real-world conditions so they encounter failures they can learn from. This creates a speed limit in two ways: first, you have to wait to collect that data, and second, people may be reluctant to be guinea pigs while the system works out its bugs. That's why we're currently creating narrower, more specialized products with extensive code to handle edge cases, rather than letting AI learn through trial and error in the real world. Is that a good summary of the concept? Arvind Narayanan: That's mostly correct, with one clarification: I don't think we'll always need to manually code for edge cases. The handling of edge cases can be learned, but that learning will often need to happen within real organizations doing real tasks — and that's what imposes the speed limit."

You might benefit from this "focus challenge" More "10 minute challenges"

Do we still mean it? Excerpt: " I was worried it wouldn’t happen this time. But it did. When I arrived back in the United States after a trip abroad, the immigration officer said to me, “welcome home.” It’s such a small thing, really. Two words uttered casually by a government official doing his job. In the grand scheme of political upheaval, it hardly seems worth mentioning. And yet, those two words contain multitudes. They represent something profound about American identity that persists despite our best efforts to destroy it. The officer didn’t say “you may enter” or “proceed.” He said “welcome home.” This is what nations are made of." Related: then there's those words upon our beaming statue in New York's harbor: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

We've unlocked discoveries and management of the world within our bodies, why are our governments now reversing this progress? Excerpt: "We know how to prevent disease, “but the choices individuals and societies have made,” Mr. Levenson writes, make it much harder to do so. We may shudder at the Victorian doctor who refuses to take responsibility for a hundred dead mothers, but we should feel the same concern over decisions to cut vital programs that help us track and fight disease. “Wielding our distinct form of technological smarts,” Mr. Levenson writes, “without being aware of what the invisible world of life can do makes us more vulnerable, not less.” If we want to preserve the victories accumulated over two centuries against the worst killers of the microbe world, we must rebuild public-health systems, monitor disease, protect and fund science, and recognize that we are not the only “actors.” We are also acted upon by the tiny creatures all around us." Related book Related thoughts later within this commentary

Josh Bersin's thoughts Excerpt: "We are entering a year of political change, economic disruption, and changing labor markets. As I discussed recently ( The Tumultuous Year Ahead ), the world is experiencing talent shortages in front-line and blue collar work ( US unemployment remains at 4.1% ) while white-collar employment is softening. CEOs are investing in AI in a quest for productivity and workers are asking to be retrained . And many core values (diversity and inclusion, pay equity, remote work) remain challenging. Companies believe that AI will transform their business, so investment in technology is exploding. Yet as history tells us, this “trillian dollar AI-based re-engineering” effort is about people, not technology. As the research points out, the AI revolution, as exciting as it feels, is all about redesigning the way we get things done. And that lands in the laps of HR: how we redesign, reskill, and redeploy people in a world of highly intelligent systems. Understanding The Superworker and The Superworker Company Let’s start with the basics. Companies are filled with business processes, tools, and job models designed around traditional people-centric work. Every job function, from sales to marketing to manufacturing, has been designed around the old-fashioned job families of the past. In other words, we’ve run our companies as “people machines.” We design a set of jobs and job families, then hire, train, and promote people to grow. This model creates a sprawling company filled with skills challenges, people wanting promotion, and fragility as the business goes through change. The digital revolution, which defines the last 27 years of transformation, did speed things up. It automated many processes and opened up the ideas of self-service, e-commerce, and direct consumer transactions. But it didn’t fundamentally change how companies are organized: rather it accelerated the processes we had. Suddenly, with AI everything is different. As the most intelligent and data hungry technology ever, AI stands to integrate and redefine every business process and “superpower” every employee. And this shift, toward copilots, agents, digital twins, and intelligent platforms, forces us to rethink how we’re organized, what we do, and what we define as a “job.”

The jobs, they are a'changing Excerpt: Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers. According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work . Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging —an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis. What’s going on? I see three plausible explanations, and each might be a little bit true. Somewhat related

One perpective from Hidden Brain (audio and podcast) Description: Searching for the answer to a deceptively simple question: why is the brain divided? Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains why popular distinctions between the “left brain” and “right brain” aren’t supported by research. He argues that one hemisphere has come to shape Western society — to our detriment.

Empathy is more than we often consider Excerpt: " In an interview earlier this year with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk quipped that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He seemed to blame it, in part, for the decline of America’s cultural vitality. He said he believed in empathy but cast it as being “weaponized” by the woke. For all his derision of empathy, Mr. Musk is quite good at employing it for his own needs. In fact, I’d argue he’s one of the most effective empathic operators in modern business and public life. Though we often think of empathy as synonymous with kindness, that isn’t entirely accurate. Empathy is not the same as compassion. At its core, empathy is the ability to understand others’ perspectives — what they feel, what they think, what they fear, what they want. That understanding can be wielded in service of a greater good. Or it can be exploited, as Mr. Musk himself was arguing. In psychological terms, empathy is not a singular skill — it comes in different forms. As researchers have shown , affective empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) is distinct from cognitive empathy (the ability to understand what others feel). Many people have both. Others, like narcissists and sociopaths , often possess only the latter, if they have empathy at all. And this is where things can get dangerous." Related book Related study