CELL: Consortium for the Equations of Life and Living Systems

I’m the founding Advisor for Collective Intelligence and Design Science

Founding Advisor

Totally on Board

Totally On Board (TOB) is a unique new service for early-stage entrepreneurs/founders. The five partners of TOB are VENTURE CATALYSTS who work with start-ups to accelerate growth, build strong cultures, set up operational excellence and exceed milestones.

Partner

Tufts University

Visiting Scholar

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Senior Advisor & Executive Coach

Hireguide

Chief Community and Impact Officer

Autodesk

Research Fellow Emeritus

MAYA Design

Chairman

President and CEO

Elan Communications

Cofounder/VP Vision-Strategy

Giltspur, Inc.

Director of Design

Mickey McManus is a pioneer in the field of strategy, innovation, pervasive computing, human-centered design and education. He holds 12 patents in the areas of connected products, vehicles, and services. He is a leadership coach to high-potential executives, a senior advisor at BCG, and research fellow emeritus at Autodesk.

At Autodesk he was a key member of their corporate strategy, future of learning, and strategic foresights teams and helped pioneer and build their team of c-level visiting fellows. While exploring creative authoring tools he helped them explore how teams would use creative AI, embedded sensing and generative design tools to explore a vastly larger landscape of potential solutions, and close the loop between designing, making, using and evolving the things and places that make up our physical world. He co-created their learning engine initiative where machine learners help human learners thrive over their lifetimes.

He was the CEO and later chairman of MAYA (now a foundational part of BCG.X), one of MAYA's startups is now a part of Nielsen, another is a part of General Dynamics Mission Systems, another formed the basis of Idealab NYC, and the educational institute, LUMA Institute (now the underlying co-creation operating system for Mural) has taught over 70,000 people globally how to co-create with people and make the right thing, right.

Mickey co-authored Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology (Wiley 2012). The book is a field guide to the future, where computing will cease to be confined to any particular "box," but instead be freely accessible in the ambient environment. John C. Abell, former New York Bureau Chief of Wired and founding editor of Reuter.com noted that, “With Trillions authors Lucas, Ballay and McManus belly up to the bar alongside futurists Alvin Toffler, Kevin Kelly and Arthur C. Clark, offering a vision so compellingly argued you’ll only be surprised if it doesn’t happen.”

Trillions was awarded the Axiom Gold Award for best business book about technology and the Carnegie Science Award in the Science Communicator category.

During Mickey’s tenure as CEO at MAYA the company won numerous Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) awards for product innovation, was selected multiple times as a top 20 “best small company to work for” in America by Fortune, Inc, and Entrepreneur magazines and spun-out, launched, or incubated five new MAYA organizations.

It’s the weekend and I realized recently, when some young folks came by, that they had never seen an original Macintosh 128k in real life. Or tried one out. So I unboxed one of my vintage ones so you could see one in all its glory! Enjoy.
#throwback
#computerhistory

Mickey McManus

Mickey McManus is a pioneer in the field of collaborative innovation, pervasive computing, human-centered design and education. He holds 12 patents in the areas of connected products, vehicles, and services. He is a leadership coach to high-potential executives, a senior advisor at BCG, and research fellow emeritus at Autodesk's Office of the CTO.

Mickey co-authored Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology (Wiley 2012). The book is a field guide to the future, where computing will cease to be confined to any particular "box," but instead be freely accessible in the ambient environment. John C. Abell, former New York Bureau Chief of Wired and founding editor of Reuter.com noted that, “With Trillions authors Lucas, Ballay and McManus belly up to the bar alongside futurists Alvin Toffler, Kevin Kelly and Arthur C. Clark, offering a vision so compellingly argued you’ll only be surprised if it doesn’t happen.” David Brin, physicist, futurist, and author of Earth, The Postman, and The Transparent Society said, “Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce.” 

Trillions was awarded the Axiom Gold Award in 2013 for best business book about technology and the 2013 Carnegie Science Award in the Science Communicator category.

During Mickey’s tenure as CEO at MAYA the company won numerous Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) awards for product innovation, was selected multiple times as a top 20 “best small company to work for” in America by Fortune, Inc, and Entrepreneur magazines and spun-out, launched, or incubated five new MAYA organizations. While exploring design science and complex system authoring tools at Autodesk he helped co-create the learning engine initiative where machine learners help human learners thrive over their lifetimes.

Senior Advisor and Leadership Coach at BCG; Co-Author, Trillions; Visiting Scholar at Tufts University, Research Fellow Emeritus, Autodesk, Founding Advisor for collective intelligence and design science, CELL.

I think I have a worthy successor to the Turing test or any of the other benchmarks for AGI. 

It’s a trope many will recognize from a retired naval officer who fought against fascism in WW2 & strangely also coined one of the key brand names stolen by an entitled manchild for an LLM in current ai hype on a social platform that goes by the name of a formerly chatty bird, but has now become a rabid nazi. 

Aside, I’m guessing the ghost of the author would fight efficiently and die gallantly to kill said abomination, so humanity has a chance. 

Let’s assign a point for each demonstrated action below. 

I’ll believe you have AGI when you can at least do this. 

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
- Robert Heinlein (from Lazarus Long in Time enough for Love).

Bonus points if you can demonstrate doing it with the energy usage of a primate instead of rebooting three mile island!

For those following along I unboxed my old Mac 128 earlier today (see previous post) and here I startup Sim City 1.1 from a floppy disk (that’s that weird icon you sometimes see on a computer screen. Inside the little cartridge that I put in the front slot of the Mac is an actual disk of thin floppy plastic covered in iron oxide! From the times before you could just connect your brain implant to the web by thinking about it).

Although I like Heinlein’s definition better (see my previous post about “Time Enough for Love”), this new paper is quite good. I’ll flag a few categories that the current models fail at. Commonsense: 2%, Culture: 0%, Science: 2%
Please let’s not be fooled by the hype.
#genAI
Link in comments…

Justin! So good. Fun to see you in action with my favorite advanced thinking tools:)
Justin Knecht Mark Tippin and the whole MAYAn community are necessary right now more then ever!
#toolsforthought
#makingwithpeople

Design Leadership • Product Strategy • Remote Collaboration

Design isn’t a straight line.

It’s loops of learning.

People often criticize the Double Diamond for being too linear.

But what if we simply drew it differently?

🎥 Here’s how I reframe the Double Diamond as a 2×2.

Models are useful, but they’re still representations.

The real learning happens when you put them into practice.

In our Project Definition Masterclass, you’ll move from representation to reality, and prep your own project for continuous loops of learning.

🔗 Grab you free spot→ https://lnkd.in/e8t_GzQm

If you’re in Seattle in November this looks like a serious and fun workshop about being more intentional about our future—->  https://lnkd.in/gReXkPaz
#futures

One of my favorite team mates in coaching and a true inspiration is Amanda Sourry! For a very cool insight into peer coaching watch the short clip below (see if you can spot the other one in the video who talks too much:)
If you need executive coaching in your org, I can attest the whole team is amazing ask Katie Lochhead, she can connect!
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 
#lifelonglearning

Executive coaching doesn’t stop when the coach leaves the room. In fact, some of the most lasting transformations come from what happens afterwards - when leaders begin coaching each other.

In the sixteenth edition of Coaching Conversations, we explore the power of peer coaching - small groups of senior leaders who meet regularly to listen, ask better questions, and support one another’s growth.

When leaders shift from telling to asking, from solving to exploring, they don’t just build capability, they build culture. A culture where curiosity and connection sustain progress long after the formal coaching ends.

Watch the full episode to learn how peer coaching can become one of your organization’s most powerful tools for transformation.

#Leadership #CoachingCulture #Transformation #PeerCoaching #CoachingConversations #BCGU

I feel like I can think of all sorts of ways to use this approach to spin up a futures effort to “poison for good” foundation models. Maybe a little bit like how Wesley prepared for Vessini poisoning him by taking little bits of it every day. I need some The Long Now Foundation thinkers to help with this! I’m sure nothing can go wrong.

Chief Heretic and Founder @ radical✦

Another day, another LLM vulnerability: The team at Anthropic (the folks behind Claude) showed that a small number of samples is all it takes to poison an LLM of any size.

> "As few as 250 malicious documents can produce a 'backdoor' vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size or training data volume. […] Even though our larger models are trained on significantly more clean data, the attack success rate remains constant across model sizes."

What this means in practical terms is that large language models can be fairly easily backdoored; all it takes is a small stash of malicious documents in the training set. As AI companies are gobbling up data left, right, and center, it is close to impossible to ensure training data isn't tainted.

↗ https://lnkd.in/ggiD6VHn

If you’re into embodied cognition & applied robotics check out the Edge of Now. It’s going on October 29th/30th in Newport Beach. PS I’ll be sharing some advanced research on how goal directed atoms bits minds and joules come together and things and places, wake up.
#deeptech
#ionsmeetelectrons
#primordial
https://www.eon.events

Sovereign AI and sustainable computation for indigenous communities?
Say more…

https://lnkd.in/gZV5yzPN

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