- Can leaders motivate employees whose work can be done by AI? Bloomberg thinks so: “Hariharan[, a mathematician who spent two years on a project that AI did in 5 days,] is already working on both parts of the job. He spent months after the scoop cleaning up the machine’s proof, turning its cryptic output into something a person could read, and he says he pulled a real if modest amount of understanding out of the work. His next project will not be a formalization. The next theorem he formalizes, he told the Times, he wants to have proved himself first. Hariharan has found his stick and rudder. You have to help your people find theirs.”
- There’s not a narcissism epidemic, writes Joseph E. Davis: “Whether we like it or not, each of us must discover or author (and revise as necessary) our personal identity and project it in such a way as to make it intelligible to strangers. Few, if any, of our life choices will be made by default. The task is ours and necessarily involves a self-referencing orientation and acts of self-assertion. Does it also lead to self-fascination and indifference to the general good?
“We now even speak of a moral duty, enforced by our institutions, to make choices based on self-interest—my life, my future, my happiness. The old moral sources served to restrain the pursuit of self-interest, with the good defined primarily in terms of wider community benefit. “Now, instead,” to quote the psychologist Roy Baumeister, “people are free to do what is best for themselves individually, with a clear conscience because of the presumptive moral duty to the self.
“We might call this new duty a self ethic. It is less an ideal than an adaptation to our loss of cultural guides to action. It reflects the paradoxical way that self-realization has become an organizational requirement. Given its imperative of an optimal self, we can see why this self ethic might be confused with a narrow self-love or disregard for others. …
“The effects of our predicament do not promote grandiosity or the assertion of some imperial self. Something like the opposite seems to be the case. Studies going back decades suggest that self-image and “ego strength” have declined over time, while reported feelings of emptiness, uncertainty, and inadequacy have increased.4 Though largely unreported in the press, efforts to replicate the original claims for a “narcissism epidemic” have failed [see here]. And all the comparing that people do on social media does not boost self-confidence but undermines it.
“Narcissism is not a helpful category. If anything, beleaguered or demoralized might be better terms for the effects of our self ethic at the individual level.”