Andrew Davis

Hey everybody. Nice to see you all here.

So, are we on? We're going. My talk is — let me go back — "Forget AI: What the World Needs Most is NI." So I'm not going to talk about AI much. There's a lot of buzz about AI, you know what it is and so forth. I'm going to skip straight to establishing the definition of intelligence because we need to ground ourselves in some basics.

So intelligence is the ability to perceive and remember; to apply that knowledge to adapt to a particular environment.

NI means natural intelligence. So NI is the opposite of artificial intelligence, but the term was actually created by the artificial intelligence community to describe the intelligence created by nature. So the intelligence of animals and human beings — so this is natural intelligence.

So I have the opportunity at my job to work with an NI system. It is actually the most advanced computer on the planet. So: 86 billion parallel processors, 100 trillion network connections, holographic data storage, autonomous decision making, and if this was not enough, it's also sustainable and energy efficient.

So I wanted to share a network diagram of the NI system that I primarily use at work. It looks roughly like this.

A quick scan of the audience indicates that a lot of you seem to work with the exact same networking equipment.

So the capabilities that natural intelligence delivers to a living being are these: the ability to survive in the short term; the ability to thrive in the long term; the ability to reproduce, which also includes reproducing ideas and inspiration and so forth, which is kind of transcending the self in time; and the ability to collaborate, which is transcending the self in space. When we talk about culture and leadership, effectively what we're talking about is collaboration and transcending the self in space.

We are actively involved in stress testing the world's natural intelligence. You've probably heard about this. Our big challenge is: how can we use our own natural intelligence to survive the 21st century and ensure that AI is serving the greater good? And this is something that only NI can do. AI cannot itself take care of these things. We need to prove that we have the intelligence to survive and thrive and collaborate and so forth.

And to do that we need to defend against three attacks on NI. So the kinds of things that can undermine our natural intelligence are different from the kinds of things that can hack an IT system, a technical system. They include these three things: craving — this is something that doesn't affect computers. It affects humans very much. Fear doesn't affect computers; it affects us very much. And ignorance.

So these three. I was looking for a picture to represent craving. This is the best I could come up with. I think it covers everything. It's the sense that there's something out there that if I just get it, I'll feel better, I'll get happy and so forth — this sense that happiness is outside of ourselves.

Fear follows quickly behind craving. In fact, the more craving we have, the more fear we have because we're afraid of not getting the things we want. We're afraid of losing the things we have. So fear has a huge impact, a huge influence in our psychology and all the discussion about psychological safety.

So those two, craving and fear, they're two ends of the emotional spectrum in our mind. But there's a more subtle kind of hack or attack on our natural intelligence, and this is ignorance. This doesn't just mean not knowing. It specifically means critical gaps in the intelligence that we need, or beliefs that are wrong or mistaken.

And the challenge is that our beliefs are hard to dislodge. If we have a mistaken belief, because we actually crave certainty: I want to know what you're like, and I want to know what you're like, and, "Oh yeah, I know that place and that book," and so forth. I crave knowing what's going on, and we mistake our beliefs for reality. And it's happening all the time, continuously mistaking our beliefs for reality, which is where we get this idea: go and see, right? Check our beliefs against direct observation.

I'll leave you with these three tips for a healthy NI. First of all, simplify. Second, calm. And third, reflect.

So simplify: we want to make everything as simple as we possibly can, right? Internally, externally, just to help us to think. This goes a long way for us.

Calm: we need times of quiet in our mind to be able to think clearly, restore the health of our natural intelligence.

And reflect: this is Harry Potter looking in a magic mirror, seeing not just himself but his parents. It's like if we look inside, we see all of society manifesting inside.

So, there we go.