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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

• The original promise of tech—democratization, decentralization, and positive disruption—has been perverted through addictive algorithms, profit extraction, centralized ownership, exponential energy usage, labor exploitation, and abstraction from human-scale needs and realities

• The era of “move fast and break things” without requisite care, ethics, responsibility, or wisdom must be over

• Biased algorithms, hallucinations, weaponized bots, intentional deception, fragmentation, mass disinformation, and despotic control could make AI a force of unimaginable destruction and even reduce the capacity of nations to function

• Yet there is also massive hope: AI, blockchain, decentralization, robotics, synthetic biology, and more offer the promise of scalable, sustainable, inclusive, and democratic solutions to some of our biggest societal challenges

• To realize the promise of Web 3.0, that Web 2.0 failed to deliver, tech must be designed to promote social coherence over alienation, reduce not exacerbate structural injustices, stimulate oxytocin over dopamine in the brain, and regenerate and not degenerate people and planet

• Introducing ten principles, or "design lenses," for technologists, innovators, entrepreneurs, and impact investors to unlock the promise of Responsible AI and Regenerative Technology

• Do AIs really think, learn, or understand? 

• What are the differences between artificial intelligence and. human intelligence?

• Why AIs face major challenges in being genuinely creative and innovative

• What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and can it even exist?

• The emerging science of human thought and the role of emotions and sensory bodies in human thinking: interoception and somatic intelligence

• If machines cannot have feelings, will they ever be able to think?

• Data vs. computation vs. prediction vs. knowledge vs. wisdom vs. embodied wisdom

• How can AI help us connect vast streams of data to solve for major social, ecological, and individual problems?

• What is AI better at than humans— and what does this mean for the Future Of Work, Leadership, and Business?

• We are in a “world between worlds” that is dominated by what has become known as the polycrisis, which contains existential risks to our species and our planet

• Why the disenchantment, mechanization, extraction, and atomization of the world characteristic of modernity has depleted our ecological, social, and psychological resources 

• Smarts are necessary but not sufficient to build regenerative futures—they biologically reduce our capacity for care and compassion

• The next stage of individual and societal development must be sourced as much in relational qualities (reciprocity, caring, interdependence) as rational qualities (intellect, analysis, instrumentalizing)

• We need to find "right" relationships with nature, self, communities, and society

• This requires a synthesis between rationality and relationality, nature and technology, narrative and science within leaders and within socities

• We can only unfold regenerative solutions to the polycrisis through deepening, integrating, and embedding in our leadership and business models embodied wisdom

• Embodied wisdom is what unlocks pathways to harness technology for good and recalibrate capitalism so that it works for all life on the planet

• Many struggle in relationships, whether with themselves or with intimates, families, kids, parents, clients, co-workers—or with nature and community

• This impacts not just individual happiness, meaning, and belonging—loneliness, isolation, and alienation are an epidemic—but fragments teams, businesses, nations, and our species

• Society prioritizes the rational over the relational and undervalues caring—it doesn't appear in GDP figures

• Under-developed relational intelligence blocks innovation, corrodes trust, depletes social capital, undermines collaboration, and disintegrates nations

• This shows up most dangerously in undiagnosed personality disorders—estimated at 5-20% of the population—that drive coercion, manipulation, con-artistry, and demagoguery 

• By upgrading our relational intelligence and transforming our relational fields—often fragmented by developmental trauma—we unleash interdependence and co-creation, the soil within which seeds of regenerative futures take root

• We can’t get to a regenerative economy and society without a revolution in our relationships, inspired by the mycelium and the rhizome

• Wellbeing is mission-critical for all serious execs and entrepreneurs—without it, toxic stress, overwhelm, and burnout will occur, which dimnihish effective sense-making and decision-making, team safety and happiness, and innovation outcomes

• A Cambridge-educated medic, Nick has crunched 100s of research papers and has identified nine pillars of wellbeing and regenerativity: from sleep to social connection

• Yet leaders and entrepreneurs must also realize that true well-being cannot be achieved without corresponding advances in wisdom—otherwise wellbeing becomes a glitzy band-aid for deeper issues in our self-awareness, wholeness, and consciousness  

• Breakdowns, life  crises, mood swings/disorders, and relational failures—as well as societal issues like the climate crisis—are likely to keep plaguing us until we take inner development seriously

• Like martial arts, the cultivation of wisdom and lasting wellbeing takes daily practice, using both intrapersonal and interpersonal processes to unfold more clarity, compassion, and coherence in the face of disorder and degeneration

• Wisdom, when fully embodied and embedded, informs all the choices we make, the business models we operate, the way we manage, pay and rewards our team etc.

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