The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.

"The true secret of happiness lies in taking a..." - William Morris quotes from BrainyQuote.com

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

William Morris Quotes

Mind map creator Tony Buzan coined the term ‘mind map’ to refer to a diagram that has a branch or root-like structure radiating from a central image on the page, and which uses lines and color to show relationships, groupings and connections between words, ideas and images. A mind map helps students think clearly and ensures that a range of possibilities are considered, encouraging thinking outside-the-box.

What is a mind map?  

Tony Buzan’s recommendations include: using a landscape format; starting with a central image to represent your topic or theme; using curving lines to add main branches to the center and then connecting these to smaller branches; using single words and images; and adding colors for aesthetic and organizational purposes.

How to make a mind map

Single words are unlikely to express an idea adequately. As you think though possibilities, it is likely that you will want to jot down whole phrases and brainstorm possible ways of beginning or approaching a subject. Intentions and possibilities should be clear to someone else who reads the mind map at a later date.

Guideline - 1

Images should be sourced first-hand (i.e. drawn or photographed yourself) or clearly referenced, and should be integrated within the mind map in a visually pleasing way

Guideline -2

The appearance of the mind map is crucially important. This is likely to be one of the first things an examiner sees when opening your sketchbook – first impressions count.

Guideline-3

education

Learning & Education

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Creating mind maps 

Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life because life, worship and religious duties are inseparable in Hinduism. A devout Hindu lives upon earth religiously, feeling the presence of God in every aspect of his life, and worshipping Him uninterruptedly in the sacrifice called life. It is difficult to say where his worship begins or ends in his daily life.Hinduism is not considered a religion, because it does not fit into the common definition of a religion. It does not have a founder, nor does it have a particular scripture or sacred text which is universally followed by all Hindus.

Hinduism Isn't a "Ism"

It is traditionally known as Dharma, which is considered eternal (Sanatana) because God is its source and support, which he reveals through Brahma, the creator God at the beginning of creation for the order and regularity of the world.The eternal religion of God is practiced not only by humans but also by gods, demons and other celestial beings. Even Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva practice it and exemplify it through their words and deeds. Hinduism has no founder, because God is its founder, preacher and teacher. He is also its upholder and savior.

Sanatana Dharma 

Whenever Dharma declines, he personally incarnates to restore it, or manifests partially in some forms to revive it. Hidden within the layers of Hinduism is an eternal wisdom, whose source is God himself.Since the duties of God define human life upon earth and determine his fate and destiny and since they are inseparable from it, Hinduism or Hindu Dharma is more appropriately called a way of life. Hindu scriptures make it abundantly clear that when a person lives for himself he incurs sin, whereas when he lives for God or in the service of God he attains liberation.

A Way Of Life

e life of a human being upon earth is not for his enjoyment but for service to God. When people engage in selfish actions they accumulate evil and remain bound to the cycle of births and deaths, whereas when they offer the fruit of their actions to God they remain pure and become free.

In other words,

Thus, Dharma or Godly duty is deeply interwoven into the life of a Hindu the way nerves are interwoven into the organs of the body. In Hinduism, it is difficult to separate a person from his Dharma. It is also difficult to say where life ends and where religious practice begins, or vice versa. The practice of Hinduism is not confined to the performance of sacrificial rituals, observation of Sacraments (Samskaras), ritual or domestic worship, going to temples and pilgrim places, uttering mantras or praying, but to the whole life.

Justification why for a devotee of God Hinduism is a way of life

It begins from the time one wakes up and continues even in deep sleep where one is said to remain in a state of self-absorption. Dharma, which is the collection of divine duties, is at the center of human life, and life is the means to practice it and manifest it in the being and in the world.In the following discussion, we will examine the reasons or the justification why Hinduism is a way of life rather than a mere body of rituals, religious observances and doctrines, and why Dharma is central to its tenets. In doing so, we must acknowledge the diversity of the people who practice Hinduism.

In truth, Hinduism is a way of life only for a few who are pure, committed to their faith and deeply integrate its tenets into their lives. For the rest, it is mostly a concept, an ideal or a mere talking point.. The Isa Upanishad begins with the declaration that all this is inhabited by God, and everything belongs to him.

Purity Is Surity

What it means is that you cannot claim ownership of anything in this world because you do not own anything. Nothing belongs to you. You are a mere guest in the universe of God, and you can only enjoy your life in his name. You live in God, supported by God, nourished by God and protected by God. Hence, a devout Hindu forsakes all worldly possessions and lives in constant reverence to God as the provider and the sustainer. He lives with restraint, expressing his gratitude as a way of life for all that he enjoys or derives from God.

1. God is the true owner of all things. Therefore, one must live in gratitude.

According to the Vedas the world is made up of God only. It is part of his body, which has been sacrificed by Him for creation. He is hidden in all and pervades everything. A devout Hindu knows that since he is pervaded and enveloped by God he lives in His constant presence, and he is never separate from Him both from within and without. He sees Him everywhere and in everything. Therefore, he worships Him numerously in numerous forms as a way of life, seeing Him in everything and treating alike all as His forms, aspects or manifestations.

2. The world is a sacred place filled with the presence of God. One must see him everywhere and in all things.

Both the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita affirm that all actions arise from God only.We merely share his duties and responsibilities and cannot claim the doership,or the outcome of any action.Knowing it, a devout Hindu does not take credit for his successes or failures.He performs his duties without desires and expectations,renouncing doership and offering the fruit of his actions to God only.Further, he knows that he is his best friend when he lives responsibly and his worst enemy when he indulges in evil.Hence,he constantly remembers God as he performs his obligatory duties as an offering a

3. All actions arise from God, the real doer. Hence, all actions must be offered to God, taking no credit for their outcomes.

For a devout Hindu life is a sacrifice, in which he is the sacrificer as well as the sacrificed, and God is the final recipient of the sacrifice. Therefore, he lives with detachment, offering his every breath, thought and action in the service of God and dedicating himself to His cause. In the sacrifice of life, he offers his mind and body for the order and regularity of the world, taking no credit for himself and holding on to nothing.

4. Life is a continuous sacrifice, in which one becomes an offering (bhakta) in the service of God.

Whether he lives as a householder seeking the four aims of human life, or as a renunciant pursuing his liberation, he conducts himself with this sacrificial attitude as a way of life, with his mind fixed on God.

Our scriptures clearly suggest that you are neither the mind nor the body, but an eternal, indestructible, transcendental Self. A devout Hindu knows that God lives in him as the lord of his body, as much as He lives outside as the lord of the universe. Therefore, he cultivates detachment towards his name and form and remains centered in his spiritual identity, with his mind stabilized in it. He also strives to keep himself pure, living righteously and renouncing worldly pleasures,

5. You are an eternal Self. Therefore, you should live responsibly, without losing sight of your spiritual identity and higher purpose.

knowing that his body is the city or the temple of nine gates where God resides and which he cannot defile with evil thoughts. Hence, spiritual awareness of the Self becomes a way of life for him.

Hinduism acknowledges that all beings are equal, despite the diversity in their names and forms. They all possess the Self, which is eternal, indestructible and immutable, and which transmigrates from one body to another during rebirth as it is bound to the cycle of births and deaths. Thus, for a devout Hindu the world is God’s playground, in which He appears as many. Since he sees Him in others when he interacts with them, he is undistracted or untroubled by their presence or their diversity. Instead it helps him stabilize his mind in the thoughts of God and remain in His constant presence.

6. All living beings embody souls. The same Self is hidden in all. Hence, one should always see the Self in all and respect all forms of life.

Whether he goes to a temple or stays at home or engages in worldly actions, he is never separate from God and never forsakes his reverential attitude. For him, worship becomes a way of life.

People, who lack discretion, engage in desire-ridden actions, which produce karma and lead to their bondage,ignorance and delusion. Karma is not resolved until its causes are fully understood and arrested.The idea of performing actions without desires for their fruit and offering them to God as a sacrifice, this is the essence of karma sanyasa yoga. Action means any mental, physical, voluntary or involuntary action, including those which are performed by the organs in the body.Since one cannot live without performing actions even for a moment, karma yoga becomes a continuous practice.

7. Karma arises from desire ridden actions which in turn leads to bondage. Therefore, one should constantly be on guard and live responsibly.

Human life is precious and a unique opportunity to work for liberation. Only after innumerable births does a person achieve the noble birth of awakened soul in a pious family and finds favorable conditions to work for his liberation, having realized that he has suffered enough in the mortal world and needs to find a permanent release. Therefore, he assiduously works for his self-transformation and engages in selfless actions, studying the scriptures, engaging in religious discussions, austerities, rules and restraints, the practice of meditation, contemplation and self-absorption. And way of

8. You are a bound soul and not free. Hence, you should continuously strive for liberation and take no chances.

Dharma is central to Hinduism. Living for the sake of Dharma is also the essence of Hinduism. Dharma in its highest sense means a set of duties which are derived from God and which God himself performs as part of his eternal duties as the creator, sustainer and destroyer, which why Hinduism is known as the eternal religion or Sanatana Dharma. Some of his duties are meant to be performed by humans also upon earth as part of their obligation and as a service to him.

9. The purpose of human life is to express Divine Will and uphold the eternal Dharma (Sanatana Dharma) of God upon earth at all times.

Performing those duties and manifesting the divine will in the mortal world are inseparable from human life. It is their highest purpose. Hence, for a devout Hindu upholding Dharma is a way of life and the means to liberation.

One is never separate from God, and therefore one is never separate from the ideals and qualities which God represents. For the humans who seek liberation, God is the role model. He sets the standards and the framework so that they can follow his example and stay free from sin and karma. An incarnation of God also serves the same purpose. Each incarnation sets an example for humans to learn from him and emulate him in their personal lives, as the divine souls who repeatedly incarnate in their microcosms from birth to birth.

10. Expressing your devotion to God by doing his duties upon earth as your own, without desires and expectations, this is the end of all the yogas.

Thus, for a devout Hindu devotion to God and contemplation of upon his virtues, qualities and manifestations become a way of life on the path to devotion.Through its insistence upon selfless Duty (Dharma), Hinduism suggests a way of life to facilitate the purification and liberation of the embodied souls (jivas), who are caught in delusion and ignorance. Belief in God, belief in soul, belief in karma, belief in the possibility of liberation through devotional worship and the practice of yoga are deeply ingrained in the minds of Hindus.

They help them to cleanse their minds and bodies and express the highest and the best which is hidden in them. Although the mortal world is subject to dualities, delusion and other impurities, human life is not insignificant, but an opportunity to express the will of God through selfless action, purity and devotion. One is expected to live upon earth, making them as his or her guiding principles.

And For Me God is none other than you. The different and Vibrant Weapons of Different Gods mean The Different Vibrant Potential in within You. Everyone is Different in His way But his End Actions ( Offerings )should only be for Truth The Real Truth.We all Are One And Simultaneously Different.

What I SAY:

This essay lists ten reasons why Hinduism is considered a way of life rather than a religion.

philosophy

Philosophy

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

exerciseandfitness

Exercise & Fitness

Ten Reasons Why Hinduism is a Way of Life

“Every artist was first an amateur”

“Creativity takes courage”

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up "

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it”

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

These are some famous quotes by famous artists everyone should know .... 

For most people, beginning of a new year seems like the perfect time to begin work with enthusiasm and new inspirations. And yet, after a festive season ends, artists often find that getting back into an effective working regimen is an uphill struggle. That spark, which normally makes the creative process a joy is not

problemsolving

Problem Solving

communication

Communication

creativity

Creativity

5 Famous short Quotes About Art !

Strong communication and teamwork are at the top of the list of interpersonal soft skills. Employers have filled many entry-level technical responsibilities with software as digital transformation and automation sweep practically every industry. Employees that can work well in a team, solve problems creatively, and multitask are now being prioritized.

What do employers want most from job candidates today? 

Although you may not be able to exhibit soft skills on a résumé, you might include a certificate or accreditation that demonstrates your commitment to maintaining those skills. Employers will appreciate seeing your desire to learn and improve if they're searching for employees who can grow and advance with the organization.

Committed To Continuous Improvement 

Going into autopilot and answering each question as if you were reading it from a script is a difficult but common event in many interviews. People become apprehensive because they want to make sure they say the proper things and avoid appearing unprofessional. It's a normal reaction, but interviewers will frown upon it. When you react to questions on autopilot, you may appear stiffer and more forced than when you respond to inquiries and engage with people in the workplace.

Record Yourself Answering Interview Questions

The STAR technique is a narrative strategy that begins with a discussion of the issue's context and obstacles, the task or responsibility one held in the circumstance or in overcoming the difficulty, the action they did to solve the situation, and the outcomes. The action and results will be the most telling aspects of the story, so emphasize how your soft skills, such as communication and teamwork, contributed to overcoming a hurdle and creating positive results.

Tell your story with the “S.T.A.R.” method

Demonstrating soft skills in the job search has never been easy, and it's more difficult than ever now, given the virtual nature of the world and the predominance of remote interviews. Employers are looking for employees who can help their companies develop and expand in the future, therefore it's more vital than ever. To stand out, show that you are committed to learning and improving, practise expressing your actual personality, and convey a story that goes beyond your résumé.

Final Words

Your next boss will look for you to demonstrate these attributes during your interview.


career

Career

Show off coveted soft skills when applying for jobs

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself and be lenient to everyone else."

Self-Discipline and Character

In the second chapter of "No Excuses!" By Brian Tracy, he discussed the relationship between having a character that encouraged growth and discipline. He said that developing a character is a great business of life and the honor of character is the greatest achievement of social and business life.

There are a series of virtues or values a person of character possessed, mainly courage, compassion, generosity, temperance, persistence, and friendliness. However, integrity is the most important because it determine the depth and the strength of your character. Also, integrity is the value that guarantees the other values.

Virtues

“Nothing at last is sacred except the integrity of your own mind.”

Tracy said that the only way that we can develop our character is by exerting willpower and not giving in to temptation. Temptation to do what is easy and expedient rather than what is correct and necessary.

Willpower

Be mindful of the people you surround yourself with, because they affect your attitude and influence your personality or character. It is always important to identify the people who are investments and bills to you, as it will improve the way you live your life and change or improve the environment you expose yourself to.

Environment

<ol><li>Study the values you admire </li><li>Emulate the people you most admire</li><li>Practice the values you respect</li></ol>

Develop Your Character

<ol><li>Your Self-ideal - what you most admire in others and most aspire to possess in yourself. It is important that you have clarity and not be indecisive or confused since successful people are clear about who they are and what they believe.</li><li>Your Self-Image: Your Inner Mirror - you always need to remember that people tend to accept you at your own evaluation of yourself, at least initially.</li><li>Your Self-Esteem: How Much You Like Yourself - take note that the more you see yourself as a valuable and important person, the more positive and optimistic you will be. </li></ol>

Structure of Personality

Your self-esteem is largely determined by how consistent your self-image, which shapes your personal behavior, is with your self-ideal, or your vision of the very best person you can possibly be."On the other hand, the more you like yourself, and others, the more they like you in return.

Self-Ideal, Image, and Esteem

Answer these questions when temptation is just around the corner:<ol><li>“What’s important here?”</li><li>“What kind of a world would this world be if everyone in it was just like me?”</li></ol>

Always Do The Right Thing

Whatever you dwell upon grows and increases in your life.			﻿

Law Of Concentration

What one quality would I like people to think of when my name is mentioned, and what could I do to ensure this happens?

Question To Contemplate On

Here, I shared the nuggets I learned on the Chapter 2 of the book "No Excuses!" by Brian Tracy. Having self-discipline is so important to me to be consistent on my track and stay on it and this chapter helps me to focus on my character to become more disciplined. I hope this helps you and have a nice day ahead!

Includes sections on self-discipline and personal success; business, sales and finances; and the good life.

books

Books

You don’t need to have been born under a lucky star, or with incredible wealth, or with terrific contacts and connections, or even special skills...but what you do need to succeed in any of your life goals is self-discipline. Unfortunately, most people give in to the two worst enemies of success: they take the path of least resistance (in other words, they’re lazy) and/or they want immediate gratification: they don’t consider the long-term consequences of the actions they take today. No Excuses! shows you how you can achieve success in all three major areas of your life: 1. Your personal goals. 2. Your business and money goals. 3. Your overall happiness. Each of the 21 chapters in this book shows you how to be more disciplined in one aspect of your life, with end-of-chapter exercises to help you apply the “no excuses” approach to your own life. With these guidelines, you can learn how to be more successful in everything you do—instead of wistfully envying others who you think are just “luckier” than you. A little self-discipline goes a long way...so stop making excuses and read this book!

Brian Tracy is Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations.He has consulted for more than 1,000 companies and addressed more than 5,000,000 people in 5,000 talks and seminars throughout the US, Canada and 55 other countries worldwide. As a Keynote speaker and seminar leader, he addresses more than 250,000 people each year.Brian has studied, researched, written and spoken for 30 years in the fields of economics, history, business, philosophy and psychology. He is the top selling author of over 45 books that have been translated into dozens of languages.

Brian Tracy

No Excuses!

Setting goals can transform your life. Goals can help you get in shape, improve your finances, learn a new language, or finally launch that business. But goal-setting can also leave you miserable. Burnout, stress and disillusionment are high on the list of potential side effects.

Why Setting Goals...?

For over four decades, psychologist Edwin Locke has been central in research on goal-setting. His research has three consistent findings:<ul><li>Setting goals improves performance.</li><li>Hard goals improve performance more than easy ones.</li><li>Specific targets work better than simply trying to “do your best.”</li><li>Thus the best goals to set are those that demand effort from you, but you’re confident you can achieve if you put in the effort.</li></ul>

1. Aim for Hard, but Believable

One way to calibrate this is to set smaller goals (think 30 days) and track your success rate. If you’re under 80%, try setting a more achievable target. If you’re over 80%, try something a little more ambitious.

2. Use the 80% Rule

A stressful deadline to come up with a creative solution can hurt. The goal itself occupies so much space in your working memory that you have little left to try out new possible solutions. In these cases, you’re better off in a relaxed state with minimal distractions.

3. Deadlines Are Poison for Creative Problem-Solving

A common suggestion for goal-setting is to visualize success. But visualizing failure might work even better.

4. Visualize Failure

Should you tell other people about your goals? Surprisingly the answer is sometimes no.

5. Keep it to Yourself (At Least to Start)

Why do we procrastinate? The common perception is that procrastination is caused by perfectionism. People who need to do everything perfectly waste time getting started

6. Break it Down and Make Yourself Accountabl

Much of the stress and disillusionment people experience with goals comes from setting ones that aren’t truly their own. When we work on the goals of other people, goals we feel pressure to achieve but don’t actually want, the result is often misery.

7. Set Goals You Want to Achieve (Not Just Those You Feel )

Hello Beautiful people today we are gonna discuss about How to set goals and achieve them in significant ways.....

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

timemanagement

Time Management

The Science of Achievement: 7 Research-Backed Tips to Set Better Goals - Scott H Young

Becoming a <a href="https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/want-to-be-a-smart-leader-in-hybrid-work-age-start-by-doing-these-4-things-daily.html">smart leader </a>is ultimately an inside job -- it's who you are at the core of your being, not what you "do" from a prescribed list found in the latest <a href="https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/3-business-books-you-need-to-read-in-2022.html">management book </a>.To lead smartly means leading with emotional intelligence, which may be surprising and rare in itself. It takes skill, heart, and head, but any leader willing to learn and grow is capable of it. Here's a quick roadmap to starting on your path of practicing smart leadership:

Smart Leader

Research has found it to be a solid framework for acquiring knowledge. We all know having a growth mindset is a good foundation to keep learning, and it takes curiosity to do that.Not only is curiosity key to the learning process, it's also great for overall life satisfaction, according to science. In fact, other people are more easily attracted and feel socially closer to individuals that display curiosity.

Lead with curiosity

One of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence, self-awareness may be the most important skill for a leader to master. <ul><li>And it's arguably the most important attribute for a leader who wants to create a culture of growth and development.</li><li>With self-awareness, you can probe your emotions in any given situation to understand what you're feeling and why. </li><li>This is key for understanding how to appropriately respond, rather than impulsively react to a situation going south.</li></ul>

Lead with self-awareness

The tendency for many leaders is to hear the good ideas and opinions of others but only truly consider their own. It is a theme that points to a lack of good listening skills. <ul><li>To reverse course, the path starts with accepting feedback.</li><li>Every good business leader has a coach who will give them honest feedback and help them improve and push themselves. </li><li>It helps to create a culture of openness and transparency, and to establish trust and awareness at the organizational level.</li></ul>

Lead by accepting feedback

3 surprising secrets of smart leadership✓

teamwork

Teamwork

3 Surprising Secrets of Smart Leadership (Which Many Don't Practice)

We make decisions using systems that rest on ancient evolutionary gifts. The last 50 years of behavioral science have established that, in a way, the brain can be thought of as two brains: a fast-thinking brain and a slow-thinking brain. This idea was popularized in Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow .

Human Behavior Is Pattern-Based 

The fast-thinking brain is the one we’ve had for around 30 million years. We have aspects of it in common with primates and monkeys, and it is the system that allows us to make rapid decisions without having to talk it through or blow any calories. This system allows us to make all kinds of decisions, like what food we’re going to eat, what people were going to trust, and which dangers might slide into our lives.

The Fast-Thinking Brain

The other brain is the slow-thinking brain, which is a much more recent development in evolutionary terms. It’s probably only about 70,000 to 100,000 years old. This is the system that we use to make creative, cautious, rational decisions, and it’s super glitchy, according to the people who study it. It’s the system that we use to invent things like law and art. It’s also central to what we think of as being human. Researchers have discovered that we use our fast-thinking, instinctive brain most of the time, but we think we’re using our creative, cautious, rational mind most of the time.

The Slow-Thinking Brain

Pattern-based behavior turns out to have everything to do with using our fast-thinking brain. When you put that brain under pressure and starve it of some essential information, it makes all kinds of decisions in ways that we can predict using formulas. Those predictable patterns in human behavior make us ripe for exploitation by pattern-based systems like AI.

Pattern-Based Behavior And Pattern-Based Systems - Us And AI

Companies are using AI to predict patterns you don’t even know you have. You can experience this in many ways in your day-to-day life. If you let Spotify recommend a song to you, it will probably do a pretty good job. If you watch a YouTube video, the next one the platform recommends will probably be one that you would be interested in watching. There’s almost no category of technologically-driven company that isn’t trying to predict what you will do next, and they’re increasingly using AI for that purpose.

Systems “See” Patterns Where Humans Don’t

This deployment by companies is taking forms we never saw coming. It’s not just being used to recommend a song or a video you might like; it’s being used to recommend who gets a job, who gets a loan, or who gets bail. In theory, all of these things can be done by a pattern-recognition algorithm.

From A Song And A Video To A Loan And A Bail

The problem is that those algorithms are not as smart as we think they are, and we basically get addicted to using them. Through over-reliance, we would approach a place where we won’t know how to make those decisions without that kind of system involved, and those systems are going to shape our behavior in invisible ways that we will irresistibly follow.

Patterns On Top Of Patterns

AI is really just an ability to take an unstructured set of variables, a big mess of data that a human being could never take the time to look through, and find patterns. It will discern that if X and Y conditions are met, then Z outcome is probable. Take, for example, a system that distinguishes between dogs and cows. Let’s say you’ve got a room full of dogs and cows, and you ask the AI system to distinguish between them. It would find whatever variables it could that best predict the difference.

AI Is A Lot Simpler Than We Think

What’s missing from so much of the talk about AI is understanding how simple its process is. An AI might look at dogs and cows and find the easiest variables to distinguish between those two categories, such as size or basic behaviors, and so it renders a verdict. It says this is a cow, and this is a dog . The problem is we humans look at that and think, wow, this thing is amazing. It’s a dog and cow expert!  But the truth is, it doesn’t actually know anything about dogs and cows. It only knows the bare minimum information it needs for picking patterns that allow it to tell the difference.

Telling Cows From Dogs Isn’t Exactly Genius

This is true no matter what you throw at an AI system. If you have an AI system trying to determine which person in a photograph is most likely to be a security threat, it’s going to use the same comparatively stupid way of drawing a distinction that it might use to draw a distinction between dogs and cows. Yet when you ask the makers of an AI system how their algorithms know the difference between these two things, the creators may not know. They are not legally required to know, and it’s not a technical requirement for the system. They don’t really know how their AI works most of the time.

Knowing Is Being Able To Explain. AI Can’t Do That. 

In many surveys, it’s been shown that leaders of companies who rely on AI systems to make important decisions don’t care how it works because it works well enough. Combine all that with the fact that we humans are prone to believing the verdicts of systems we don’t understand, and you wind up in a dangerous situation. We take, on faith, the verdict of relatively simple systems that no one is able to actually look inside.

Judging Is Forming An Opinion. AI Can’t Do That Either. 

When Jacob Ward speaks to people who want to deploy AI for socially beneficial reasons, they complain that their clients—the museums, governments, and social service agencies that could benefit from AI—don’t have the money or the sophistication to deploy it.

Good AI Is Perfectly Possible, But Money Tends To Ruin It

For instance, one researcher was telling him that if someone gave him an AI system and access to all of the birth certificates issued in the United States each year, he could specifically identify which apartments need to be stripped and repainted to avoid lead poisoning of millions of children a year. It would be an incredibly useful purpose to put AI to. The trouble is, nobody’s making money taking lead paint out of buildings.

Benefit Is Good. But Profit Is Better. 

People are deploying AI to do things like figure out which movie script is going to be the most successful with an audience, or mediate between parents who are fighting over child custody. Those are both real uses of AI. There is an experimental system coming out that guides the conversational style between customer service agents and their clients, as well as guiding conversation style between colleagues. AI is being deployed predominantly for financial gain, but likely its greatest use could be for nonprofits.

The Real Uses Of AI Prove That

When we think about our fast-thinking brain and our slow-thinking brain, consider that nobody makes money selling to your slow-thinking, creative, cautious, rational brain. They want to sell to your ancient, instinctive, snake-detection system. They want to trigger your fast-thinking brain to do something unconsciously and instinctively. That is a huge part of how people are making money, and especially making money off of AI.

Which Mind Would You Be More Successful Selling Something To?

It is always going to be the case that AI can make us money and save us time by being deployed on a problem. There is no guarantee that it would solve the problem in an ethically viable way, but it could make a problem easier to deal with, like require fewer employees. All sorts of benefits can accrue when you sic AI on a problem.

AI, Like Our Fast-Thinking Brain, Is Certainly A Fit Fixer

As one federal judge put it to Jacob Ward, you could make the act of entering a guilty or not guilty plea far easier than it is now by deploying AI. Right now, you have to go to court, enter a plea in person, and jump through all sorts of hoops. Even though you could make that far more efficient, such as a right-or-left swipe on a phone, you don’t want to do that. The system is designed as it is in order to trigger your slow-thinking brain. You are made to stop and think about it.

But We, Like Our Slow-Thinking Brain, Are The Only Fit Judge

There are all sorts of examples of ways we could make modern life more efficient. We could make it more efficient to figure out who to arrest, who gets a job, and who gets a home loan. But should we? Maybe instead we should encode some inefficiencies, some fundamental human values, that make the difference between our ancient, instinctive selves and our modern selves who are trying to create law and rationality and art and justice. In order to be the best version of ourselves, we may need to push back against technology that is trying to make money off the people we never intended to be.

We Need To Learn Our Patterns And Preserve Our Inefficiencies

The most obvious patterns in our behavior—patterns an algorithm will use to make decisions about what's best for us—are not the ones we want to perpetuate.

Technology journalist Jacob Ward shares 5 key insights from his new book, The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

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