Human intelligence

It's essentially a really clever lookup.

What is intelligence? Intelligence is basically someone or something that makes a hard problem easy.

If you went to school and you're sitting down trying to work out a problem, you look over at the person next to you, and they've made a problem look effortless... you'd say, oh my God,

that's pretty intelligent.

It's really just- It's very quick, essentially a really clever lookup.

It's a plus, and I'm not saying it's not an amazing technology, I'm just saying, but it's a very capable technology.

If you ask, and again, now we get to intelligence, kind of my field, what is intelligence? Intelligence is basically someone or something that makes a hard problem easy.

If you went to school and you're sitting down trying to work out a problem, you look over at the person next to you, and they've made a problem look effortless, you'd say, oh my God, that's pretty intelligent.

So Rebecca spent more than 20 years leading large scale transformation from operations across Asia Pacific with Volvo Group to enterprise programs at West Farmers, Microsoft and St. Vincent's.

She's the founder of Quantum Fusion, which brings human intelligence into how strategy, culture and technology work together.

She's co-author with Danielle Handley on Matthew Byrne's Fifth Revolution research program, drawing on 1500 cases of organizations navigating AI transformation.

And today, Rebecca and I are talking about the courage it takes for senior leaders to change how they lead and how work gets done, not just which technology they adopt.

And, you know, these days, Melissa, it's an AI tool, right? Absolutely.

Same thing is happening in offices everywhere.

So, yeah, that's what's pulled me towards human intelligence and being obsessed with human intelligence and that part of the change.

So before we move on to human intelligence, and I know that's really the lens for your work today, and thank you for sharing that story.

Yeah, it's a weird world that we live in where somehow people think that AI will be smarter than humans.

Human intelligence could never, ever be measured.

Consciousness, as we know it, doesn't live inside our human body.

It's around us.

Now, you don't want to use the word consciousness, but there is definitely a kind of intelligence there.

Whether you want to call it human intelligence or not, it's not human intelligence.

But then again, a dog's intelligence isn't human intelligence either.

And we assume they're conscious.

I'm kind of wondering.

Please, he would've killed for that technology.

But that technology has convinced us, and even the CIA has noted this, over the last couple of generations, from the millennial generation sort of moving down, the CIA is less and less able to recruit people who actually wanna go out and do what used to be called human intelligence.

You know, where you show up in a place, you give a person a cigarette, and you have a conversation with them.

You know, sales.

Yeah.

They are less and less able to recruit individuals who are comfortable doing that because technology has convinced people, this started with the internet, by the way, and went to scale now with drones, reconnaissance, that they don't need to do that.

And yet, the best military, uh, tactics are executed by strategies that involve human intelligence, and the example that proves the rule, I've mentioned this on this podcast before, Mossad, Israeli Mossad, had a listening station that helped turn out the lights in Tehran before the Americans bombed the Iranians, like eight months ago.

And by the way, they had a listening station in Tehran running human intelligence for the last five years that the Iranians didn't even know about, right next to where the Republican Guard headquarters were.

I mean, I've written a book with a quantum physicist friend of mine titled The Singularity Paradox, where we talk a lot about hacking biology and chemistry and building biological substrates.

And we have created what we call artificial human intelligence.

So we will become it, right? And then you get into all these reflections all the way up to, you know, as, um, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hammerhoff had introduced a microtubule in the brain that you're probably familiar with and all these three things that happen.

So I agree with you.

And so I continued in that path.

And so I worked in corporate America in a variety of different organizations, both in management, not in management, helping leaders, executive coach, all of that kind of stuff, and then eventually started my own business now, Human Intelligent Workplace, where my philosophy is one of helping leaders help themselves, and that in the era of AI, we need HI, human intelligence.

Um, with...

There's extensive research, as you know, Michael, um, and, and writings and so forth, and I've contributed to that where I've lately, uh, my last book was called The B.O.S.S., Behaviors of Smart Supervisors, where I talk about there's five roles leaders play.

... there's a bunch of trends.

I study trends, and I go, "What are the implications for your organization, Michael, if these, if you believe these trends are taking place?" So I had already had some experience in writing but- Um, and then wr- wrote a couple of fiction books.

But this one was sort of, I'm gonna say my, not my pinnacle, but the thing that brought my whole life's work together because I've been working on leadership development and helping leaders through leadership development workshops, through speaking engagements, through executive coaching and so forth, that I said, "I need to put this in a book where they actually have an instrument where they can assess how is their organization doing when it comes to maintaining a human intelligent workplace." Um, and, and th- that's kind of what brought me to, as much as I read about leadership and business and this and that and the other, I need to contribute.

And as a matter of fact, if you go out there and google definition of leadership, there's thousands of them out there.

We still have this, uh, civilization and all of this world of humanity.

お釈迦様から五千年、あ、五千年ぐらいたっ-経った、この人類がね。うん。あの、お釈迦様がおっしゃった、あの、現象世界だということを、人間はこの知性で、あの、イン-イン、本当に、えー、インテリジェンス、あの、うー、あー、ヒューマンインテリジェンスでこの世界、宇宙のあり方を把握しちゃったというね。

And so, you know, it's been several thousand years since, uh, the Buddha Shakyamuni, uh, lived on, uh, Earth.

Um, but, uh, here over this whole time, we have just been, uh, forming this human civilization.

It depends, and I think this is Father Spitzer's thing, it depends how it's used.

Like anything else, there's no, the great thing about Catholicism is there are no limits to where human intelligence can go.

God does not limit it.

The whole teaching of the church says if you're gonna spend your intellectual wealth exploring, then these are places we've already looked and they don't work.

with the complex realities of the contemporary world.

We should cite the article that we have referenced a few times throughout this episode.

I think it's just called Differences Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.

Ironically, you can just Google it.