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PART 1
How to Escape the Corporate Lizard Brain: The True Role of AI
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Chapter 1
Purpose of AI: Naming and Shaming the Corporate Lizard Brain — One Meeting at a Time
1.1How Us Frail Humans Can Make Peace with AI
There is a part of the brain known as the limbic cortex that neuroanatomists have attributed as the seat of emotion, addiction, mood and lots of other metal and emotional processes. Amygdala, the part of the limbic system that is responsible for primitive survival instincts such as fear and aggression, is also called “The Lizard Brain” or “The Reptilian Brain”. This is because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function1 (see Figure 1.1).
The lizard brain is the reason you’re afraid, the reason you don’t do all the art you can, the reason you don’t ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.
The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.
The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.
The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.
— Seth Godin2
Figure 1.1:How us frail humans can make peace with AI: Ditch the lizard brain and embrace algorithms.
In Barbara Tuchman’s 1961 book titled, The Guns of August, the best sentence in summarising the failure to plan for a long World War I among other wrong moves was as follows:
“The disposition of everyone on all sides was not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.”3
She has also identified a historical phenomenon which she terms “Tuchman’s law”, which has become known as a psychological principle of “perceptual readiness” or subjective probability”4:
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening — on a lucky day — without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
— Barbara W. Tuchman5
In other words, sensational and exaggerated events are what people like to read, and therefore events are depicted as general and pervasive. Negative aspects of things are often played up in history and news while chroniclers tend to forget the positive aspects of crucial events. For example, the failures of startups are a blast over the media while the successes of the impactful few are rarely reported or chronicled in small print.
Psychologists have also studied many similar cognitive bias situations, such as groupthink,6 fear of authority, lack of imagination and hyper-rational (Figure 1.2). The term “groupthink” was first mentioned by William Whyte,7 and later Irving Janis8 developed the theory of groupthink to describe the faulty decision-making that can occur in groups as a result of forces that bring a group together. Mental health professions consider the severe fear of authority as a form of social phobia. Albert Einstein once said that the unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
A failure of imagination is when something seems obvious to those in the know, predictable (particularly from hindsight) and yet no provision is made for the undesirable outcome. If the individual does not have the ability or refuses to extract the details of previous experiences and assemble them to create an imaginary event, then there is a lack of imagination. Such a lack of constructive-episodic simulation has linkages to old age and the involvement of recalling other types of memory. Hyper-rationality is a defense mechanism against all that is threatening and causes unease. It describes the situations that rationality carried to the extreme and beyond rational limits.
On the other spectrum, Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a different view of independence, logical, transparent, ever-changing, relentless, and emotionless. With carefully designed self-learning and AI tools, a variety and complete set of methodologies minimize or overcome cognitive biases when applied to real-world situations.
Figure 1.2:Cognitive bias: I MUST BELONG. I can’t fail. Polite is good. Boss knows better. Yesterday predicts tomorrow. Data confirm my view.
Technology can do good and also do harm depending on ethical standards driven by people. AI has a good chance of being a foundation for technology to overcome human frailty if governed by ethical rules and regulations.
Figure 1.3:Foundation for human frailty: Immediate desire creates perception — desire for $, pleasing, pleasure, pals, perspective, predictability.
Different types of biases (see Figures 1.3–1.5) will lead to different effects but mostly negative. What followed from the four biases is fear of judgement, fear of failure, fear of the unknown and fear of the irrational. This leads to quitting, hiding, procrastinating and freezing — hardly the outcomes that any corporates or individuals are looking towards. This seems to be the most common observation of modern-day management, especially with the emphasis on conflict of interests and fiduciary duties. It is almost a foregone conclusion that without any technical expertise in the board or management, the “right” thing to do is not to do anything. However, AI has much to contribute.
Figure 1.4:Types of bias...
