My AI board of advisors
Napoleonic method in theory and practice
The imaginary “board of advisors” is a familiar conceit from American success literature. I first read about the concept in Think and Grow Rich, the bestseller by notorious 1930s fraudster Napoleon Hill. Hill imagined (or claimed to imagine) himself sitting around at night with Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Napoleon Bonaparte (sic) and other luminaries — presumably discussing manufacturing methods, free cash flow, the Emancipation Proclamation, the voyage of the Beagle, how not to conquer Russia, and other essential matters.
The other Napoleon
Hill was not a trustworthy individual, but sometimes bad people have good ideas. I have always liked the board of advisors concept. It encourages you to step outside your natural thinking style and orientation, and consider situations as if you were someone else. I have used the concept for everything from career decisions to band management. (Incidentally, my band management board of advisors includes Miles Davis — he dislikes all of my ideas and regularly tells me they’re all terrible.)
This week I asked myself: if I could form my own AI board of advisors, who would I recruit for it? A board to help me understand AI’s impact on my career, on my family, on society?
While I have sometimes used Hill’s technique of conversing with the dead, in this case I decided to eschew the Ouija board and limit myself strictly to the living. I came up with a list of six:
1. Ed Zitron - British, skeptical, cranky, angry at AI, but a dogged investigative journalist with absolutely no tolerance for hype, publicity stunts, fudged numbers, or anything else you need to watch out for during a technology boom.
2. Mo Bitar - A developer, a believer, a skeptic, a comedian, a philosopher ... to act as a bridge between Ed and the rest of the board.
3. Nate Jones - A developer, an enthusiast, a content machine trying out anything and everything from the major AI players every single day.
4. Allie K. Miller - An investor, a hands-on experimenter, a business mind, a technical mind.
5. Scott Galloway - Business professor, investor, podcaster, writer, interviewer and interviewee. Not an AI expert in the least. Rather, the voice of the market on this board of mostly-techies.
6. Ted Gioia - A writer, a musician, a historian of jazz, a proponent of the great books, a critic of AI’s and the platform economy’s effects on the arts.
All of these people are complex polymaths and difficult to summarize. I’m concerned that, despite Miller and Galloway’s best efforts, the group would get regularly sidetracked and end up discussing topics like the nature of consciousness and free will. All the same, that’s OK … I’m not in this purely for the money.
Who would be on your AI board of advisors?