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And the courage to change the things we can.
The story goes that a young student came to a great meditation teacher in order to learn. The master invited him to join him for some tea. The master poured the tea, quickly filling the young student’s cup. But, once the cup was filled, he carried on pouring. The frothy tea washed over the lip of the cup and cascaded down all sides, splashing over the table in a growing pool of green tea. “Stop!” Cried the student. “It’s full already.:” The master did as he was asked and explained: “So, you see, you cannot pour more into an already full cup.”
I imagine all of our cups feel pretty full at the moment. The incessant flow of highly caffeinated stories on politics, technology, and other issues designed to capture our attention leaves us intellectually and emotionally exhausted. If we are to do things that make a difference, we must empty our cups instead of fretting about things we cannot do.
One of the biggest challenges we face is that our cups are filled with the equivalent of a fire hose. In a very short period, knowledge has been organised and presented in ways that make much of what we have learned in terms of process obsolescent. In an education system that values certification over creativity, we now have synthetic processes that get better grades than we do. Working with ChatGPT, Gemini, Notebook LM, Deepseek, and others has taught me that the world has changed.
It has been coming for a while. The 1956 Dartmouth Conference, organised by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, is considered the birth of AI as a field and is where the term “artificial intelligence” was first officially used. I was five at the time.
It is another example of what I think of as the GTS syndrome (Gradually, Then Suddenly). Azeem Azhar calls it ‘The Exponential Gap”. It means different things depending on the context, but broadly speaking, it refers to a situation where one thing is improving or growing exponentially while another is not keeping up, creating a widening disparity over time. By the time we notice the gap, it’s too late.
We must empty our cups of the contents we have allowed to become stale because they no longer serve us. We can now instantly summon all our knowledge (as we understand it in the West, at least) and process it at postgraduate level by asking the appropriate question.
When it comes to data, known unknowns and even unknown unknowns have nowhere to hide.
And therein lies the problem. For years, we have been gradually focusing on a very limited set of STEM skills at the expense of the humanities, and we have suddenly ended up realising we have forgotten how to think creatively and ask the questions that matter. We have gradually moved data to the centre of our thinking, suddenly finding we have created technology that can think in data better than we can, and find ourselves stranded as to our roles.
Replete with knowledge, starved of wisdom
As we empty our cup, we must refill it with a different form of sustenance that nourishes the parts of us that can harness AI, not be subject to it. `
The exponential that has been building for the whole of my lifetime has reached an inflexion point, and the widening gap it is creating exposes the fault lines in our economies and societies.
In three short months, our complacency regarding the stability of our social systems has been shattered as America goes from the foundation of international economics to its prime source of fragility.
There is so much to consider.
How we harness the Arts and Humanities to feed our imagination.
How we sit comfortably with the ambiguities these changes are visiting on us.
How we make generative storytelling as crucial as data analysis.
How we create joy in our work. (who do you know who really enjoys their job for its own sake?)
How we harness and value the potential contribution of all our generations.
How we put money in its proper place as means, not end, and regard grossly excessive wealth as unacceptable as the inequality created by the worship of it.
It starts with what we pay attention to. The highly charged information we are fed, from the obscenity of conflicts to the parallel obscenity of watching billionaires play in space, prime our emotions, and when we are unable to do anything about it, make a significant contribution to the record levels of stress and mental illness we face.
It is a time for starting our days with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
Paradoxically, it became prominent when it was printed on cards and distributed to U.S. soldiers during the Second World War when that country's relationship with the world was somewhat different from today. It has become central as a mantra for those in recovery from addiction.
It seems appropriate today as an approach for New Artisans. we are not about Scale, Unicorns, or any of the other excesses of the dark side of capital.
Our aspiration is simple: Courage to change the things we can.
In this interstitial, liminal, magical space between eras, we must identify the things we can change and summon the courage to start, however small that might be.
It starts with conversations with people we choose to trust, emptying our cup and refilling it with something that feeds our soul as much as our more material needs.
I’ll leave today with a small thought experiment. If you could access all the knowledge you need, what is the single question you would ask, the answer to which might most influence your future?
Every Wednesday evening, at 5:00 pm UK, we meet to discuss what we’re noticing, thinking and starting. If you’re on the Mighty Network, you’ll have an invitation. If you’re not and would like to be, drop me a message:
I meant to answer your question before the 5 pm session, but I ran out of time. Now, it all seems a bit weird, considering the Kasanoff piece you shared.
My single question would be: "What are the most consequential relationships between being and time in the context of the environment that we humans share with all living things?"