Category Archives: Wicked Solutions

9 Minds for the Future

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5-minds-for-the-future2Howard Gardner misses 4 mindful intelligences when he talks about the 5 Minds for the Future that he believes are “the specific cognitive abilities that will be sought and cultivated by leaders in the years ahead”.

Mr. Gardner’s list:

The Disciplinary Mind (DM): the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.

The Synthesizing Mind (SM): the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.

The Creating Mind (CM): the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena.

The Respectful Mind (RM): awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups.

The Ethical Mind (EM): fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.

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Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

But this is a scientific model of the world: an idealized model of a civilized world of thinkers atop the hierarchy of civilization. It is not the world we live in. Not the world our children face:

A warming world, with melting ice caps, ice-free polar seas, and an interrupted tropic-arctic ocean heat conveyor belt. A world of sea-level rise, and drowned cities, and desperate populations. A world of rising starvation and denuded oceans. And refugees and internment camps. This is the world that every one of our grandchildren face. A world needing additional forms of Mindfulness if we are to succeed in restoring the biosphere.  Here are four to add to the mix:

KanjisenkiThe Warrior Mind (WM): combining strategic, tactical and artistic sensibilities. Miyamoto Musashi is the archetype. And my personal example is a US Marine. A man whose best friend died on the battlefield. A man who honoured that friend by not forgetting, and instead helping to set up a foundation for wounded warriors in his memory. This is a mind that frames its actions with honour. We need this mind.

The Profiting Mind (PM): looking for ways to earn profit in all its forms (financial, triple bottom line, personal). We need minds like this, too. To re-frame capitalism so it works for every species that inhabits the Earth.

The Earth Mind (EaM):  awareness of and appreciation for differences among different species of the earth, human and non-human, and the interrelatedness of all species in the biosphere we call home. We need this mind, too. Because this mind recognizes that all of us are one connected system that is failing because we have brought the ecosystem out of balance.

And the Horizon Mind (HM): The capacity to not just imagine the future, but to re-frame that future to make it better, and figure out the way from here to there. We need this mind to see where we could go, and to cut away every old way of thinking that got us into the hole we are now.

At times, I wonder if a Horizon Mind–and Horizon Intelligence–synthesizes all of the others? And whether Horizon Intelligence is both singularly personal and the collective intelligence of our species?

And whether Horizon Intelligence develops like this . . .?

When our children are born, they look out upon a strange and scary place.

All thinking is internal . . .

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The questing mind moves out from that internal space

Learning to involve sensory feedback: a mother’s breast milk, being singed, standing and falling, toy-making and using and breaking. Shitting and stinking, and eating boogers, and saying “No!”.

A sensory (feeling-seeing-scenting-tasting-thinking) feedback loop . . .

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But then, the questing human mind extends that feedback loop.

And here are the interesting questions . . .

Does the questing mind extend that feedback beyond others (mum, dad, sibling, grandma, the family dog) to wider horizons? Seeking to frame the horizon as a future that can be re-framed, changed, to whatever we want it to be;

This “horizon re-framing mind” — this Horizon Intelligence–perhaps it is the vista-seeking mind that makes our species gain the bigger perspective?

 

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And perhaps, it is Horizon Intelligence that synthesizes all of the other intelligences into one? Making the sum of the parts that which makes us aware? That makes us planners and doers of our own destiny?

 

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And if so, is it this intrinsic quality of thinking-being-contemplating-doingness that Information Technology kills? The “thrumming guitar pluck”, the quiet humming golden thread–that IT muffles and snuffs out?  The missing quality that we cannot replicate?

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Are we losing our Horizon Intelligence?

And if we are, are we becoming the Artificial Intelligence we should be afraid of?

— David Huer

Images:

5 Minds for the Future: Book Cover via Amazon Books:
Calligraphy by Miyamoto Musashi. Public Domain: Mr. Granger
Los_Angeles_Pollution: Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
All other images and artwork: © 2015 David Huer. Photo is of Sombrio Beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Cutting DeepMind’s data error/loss rate

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skascience_darkenergy_300dpi (2)I have been reading about Google’s DeepMind “Neural Turing Machine” at [link] MIT Tech Review and have a suggestion regarding the loss rate:

(Quote:) The DeepMind work involves first constructing the device and then putting it through its paces. Their experiments consist of a number of tests to see whether, having trained a Neural Turing Machine to perform a certain task, it could then extend this ability to bigger or more complex tasks. “For example, we were curious to see if a network that had been trained to copy sequences of length up to 20 could copy a sequence of length 100 with no further training,” say Graves and co.

It turns out that the neural Turing machine learns to copy sequences of lengths up to 20 more or less perfectly. And it then copies sequences of lengths 30 and 50 with very few mistakes. For a sequence of length 120, errors begin to creep in, including one error in which a single term is duplicated and so pushes all of the following terms one step back. “Despite being subjectively close to a correct copy, this leads to a high loss,” say the team

Could we assign a positive value to each error and a negative value to each absolutely correct copy, and then develop a reducing error rate from the positive value rate?

Also, would Synomal Superpositional Clouds (SSCs) help assign high value to errors? There is writing about SSC’s here.

The learning brain experiences the wicked problem of survival every moment — and for this process perhaps error-minimizing may be more important than exact copying?  

by David Huer

Image by space-science-society

Rethinking BC Hydro’s Site C

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Site C’s “Big Dam/Big Lake” design promises irrevocable damage but might go ahead. Is the civil engineering Code of Ethics a root cause for this wicked dilemma?

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BC Hydro’s proposed $8 billion dam will expropriate and flood 80 km of forests, farms and homes, and 7,000 acres of Class 1 and 2 agriculture land—ignoring impact to farming, and animal migration corridors, while strip-mining the local tax base that communities need to provide public services.

Could a new conversation solve this wicked dilemma?

BC Hydro is chock-full of iron-ringed civil engineers who pride themselves on being able to create a great solution.  Could we challenge them to find new thinking and the latest technologies to build a better solution?

And then to ask…if BC Hydro can get equivalent power value with a sustainable solution, but refuses to change the existing Site C plan, are civil engineers being required to focus on a Big Dam solution vs. a Sustainable Energy solution (energy in all its forms)?

Premier Clark courageously introduced the Community Contribution Company (C3) framework to give companies a legal framework to pursue a “wider-society” approach: “Designed to bridge the gap between for-profit businesses and non-profit enterprises, this innovative business model is the first of its kind in Canada. C3 status allows entrepreneurs in B.C. to pursue social goals through their businesses while still generating a profit and providing investment opportunities to like-minded investors.” 

Should BC Hydro become BC Energy? And can we require all Crown Corporations to follow the C3 framework? Can we find the same all-Party courage to reflect these new responsibilities – with an upgraded APEG Code of Ethics for C3 Corporations?

For example, using the C3 Code of Ethics option, could one option be a revised Site C in the Moberly River side valley?  Are there better civil engineering solutions? 

Moberly River marine aqueduct

Concept: Moberly River marine aqueduct across the Peace Valley (Google Earth x3 vertical exaggeration)

sir-adam-beck-stationOntario’s Sir Adam Beck Station obtains water through a canal from the upper Niagara River.  Could Site C obtain sufficient head supplied with a pipeline or canal from the Peace Dam to a Moberly River head-pond?

  • • Separating industrial/commercial traffic from Peace River’s ecology
  • • Aqueduct connection between Fort St. John and the headpond
  • • Creating a riverboat/rail tourist season with access to Williston Lake
  • • Using daily-night cycle of demand fluctuations to:
    • o Move water at low cost to top-of-slope reservoirs
    • o Supply irrigation waters to river terraces
    • o Supply barge locks

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Or do we need Site C, if it makes more ecological sense to obtain the same hydro-electric production . . . by building a reservoir in the headland depressions east of Williston Lake’s W.A.C. Bennett Dam; with hydroelectric spillways falling to the Peace River above and below the lower Peace Dam?

— Dave Huer

CONCEPTS 1, 2 & 3 ILLUSTRATED BELOW:

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dhuer-site-c-revisioning-oct2014-p2Original behance.net PDF concept here