June 30, 2025
Good morning! We received a delicious drenching of rain last week — a tenth of an inch beyond 3″ in our yard. And then still another inch Saturday night. And still more last night.
Were you invited to Venice? Did you go?
Faster than the speed of light — and therefore, faster than artificial intelligence… Get ready for it — on the Feast of Benedict, no less: Superman!
- Remember when almost everyone received — and read — and paid for — at least one ink-on-paper newspaper?
- And, though I have no idea what the pain point was when all of a sudden it started costing too much and a few houses on the block quit the paper.
- Delivering it was no longer remembering who wanted it inside the door or in the bushes, but rather remembering the few houses still getting the paper.
- And then all of a sudden, it tanked… almost everyone quit… and then it was an unstoppable avalanche.
- And then the few had to pay for the many — and that didn’t work for long.
- According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than one percent of United States citizens pay to receive news.
- Many more than that receive it in a whole variety of ways, of course, but fewer than one percent pay for it.
- Because I’ve always wanted to be part of the one percent, I just renewed my subscription to the Minneapolis Tribune, among the nation’s better papers.
- The rate of obesity among adults in the United States has more than doubled in the last 25 years — from about 18% to 42%. (+133%)
- Around the world, obesity is an increasing problem, also (no pun intended), but nowhere is it as dramatic as the U.S. (Global Health Observatory/ McKinsey, 2025)
- Meanwhile, as you might expect, there is an ever-increasing shortage of health care workers almost everywhere — 10.2 million worker shortfall worldwide. (Ibid.)
- Raise your hand if you are willing to live without electricity — or, without as much electricity as you currently use.
- Remember when we marveled at how large the room had to be to hold one computer that could perform simple math functions?
- And now, we marvel at the size of mega-computer platforms that perform quadrillions of those functions each nano second?!
- Beware the coming age.
- “The swift expansion of data centers contributed to a $9.4 billion increase in costs on the U.S.’s biggest electric grid…
- … beginning in June (2025), this higher expense will appear on utility bills across a wide swath of the U.S.
- One recent report finds total electricity costs increased by 180%, largely because of data centers…” (Bloomberg)
- “Training artificial intelligence tends to require very large data centers — with the capacity of hundreds of megawatts.
- That takes a lot of computer capacity and a lot of data.” (Sachdeva)
- I asked the googles to find me information about artificial intelligence… it found 14,100,000 documents in less than a second… I had guessed it would be more than a million.
- Initiating this search was rather quaint, old-fashioned, akin to searching an encyclopedia not so long ago.
- Before that, the card catalogue… remember? Or, how about an E.R.I.C. Search for your dissertation? (Education Resources Information Center)
- The thing is, artificial intelligence has already gone beyond the generative phase and has entered the agentic
- (I didn’t know what that meant, either.)
- If generative artificial intelligence was the young child, the agentic manifestation might be an unpredictable adolescent.
- Generative artificial intelligence sliced through those 14 million documents to give you one (probably accurate) answer.
- It was (is) like your dog fetching the paper, but now your dog not only fetches the paper, s/he reads it, internalizes each of the stories, and offers a solution to all of the problems.
- In some cases the agentic artificial intelligence robot might start working on those solutions before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee.
- So, here’s the latest as I understand it: Your team at work might include both humans and bots; i.e., robots — in other words, agents from the artificial intelligence world.
- Out on the leading edge of this transformative tsunami are hyper-intelligent and uber-intelligent robots (not humans) who will be interactively engaged in your work.
- As you collaborate, plan, and problem solve with your team, the agentics might have the best — and fastest — answers.
- Whew!
- Did we say this was all going to happen fast?! (Be sure to read Harari’s Nexus.)
- “I do think of it as a workforce. This is a workforce that will conduct end-to-end processes, replacing many tasks being performed today by the human workforce. It will augment the tasks a human workforce is performing to help make it better, faster, more efficient. Some companies out there are even promoting this notion of a zero-FTE department—an entire function fully performed by an agent. Then you have on the side humans in the loop controlling or monitoring what these agents are doing. Putting philosophical debate aside, I think we should think of agents as a parallel workforce for all intents and purposes.” (Amar, 2025)
- You probably learned how to conduct a meeting by watching someone else do it.
- Hopefully you were mentored by someone who was good at it.
- There IS a science to it — and an art.
- Experts suggest there are four different kinds of meetings and that each has a distinct purpose.
- The daily check-in = Quick <5 minutes, fact-focused, stay standing, don’t skip these important daily meetings
- The weekly tactical meeting = ~45 minutes, review metrics, plan, keep it sharp and focused, avoid strategic-level discussions
- The monthly strategic meeting = ~2 hours, come carefully prepared (agenda), one or two topics, think big, review data, debate, make long-term decisions, end with directions set
- The quarterly off-site vision reset = ~1 or 2 days, team cohesion, bold decisions, recharge (Haria, 2025)
- Bullish or bearish on the economy?
- “We conducted a targeted survey in May (2025) to understand how tariffs are shaping consumer concerns and behaviours…
- … we found net sentiment dropped 32%… while inflation remains consumers’ top concern, tariffs have quickly risen to second place…
- … consumers may explore a range of personal financial behaviours to protect their pocketbooks.” (Coggins, Etc., et al., 2025)
- Counterpoint: “Even among consumers who say they’re concerned about rising prices, more than one-third still plan to splurge…
- … especially those in Brazil, China and the United Arab Emirates.” (Pasnas)
- And, juxtaposed: Wall Street is setting records. Do you have it figured out?
