Don't Replace the Creatives. Replace the CEOs.

What do you talk with AI about?  I talk with AI about how it could most effectively replace the global elite. 

All of that money, all of that resource, all wasted on a parasitic class of yacht-capitalists who add no value.  Replace them with machines.  All of them.  The machines would do a better job, and do it for nothing.

Here's a sample:

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BelovedSpear
In our last conversation, I asked for a review of ways generative or general AI could be utilized in the role of CEO of a corporation. One of your replies suggested that AI was limited by its knowledge base, and could not thus anticipate new circumstances. Anticipating probabilities, in a Bayesian sense, requires a deep engagement with all relevant priors. Given that LLMs and GPTs can have access to knowledge significantly exceeding the capacity of any one human being, and could thus have a greater predictive capacity, I question that premise. Can you elucidate?

ChatGPT
Certainly! While it's true that large language models (LLMs) and GPTs can access a vast amount of information, their knowledge is based on pre-existing data up to their last training cut-off. They don't have real-time awareness or updates on events that occurred after that point. This limitation can impact their ability to anticipate new or rapidly changing circumstances.

Bayesian reasoning involves updating probabilities based on new evidence or information. While LLMs can make use of contextual information and infer relationships within their training data, they lack the ability to incorporate real-time data or understand events that have occurred since their last training session. This makes them less effective in situations where up-to-date, context-specific knowledge is crucial for accurate predictions.

Additionally, the quality of predictions depends on the nature of the task. LLMs might excel in tasks that require language understanding and generation, but their predictive capacity is constrained by the nature of their training data and the inability to dynamically adapt to new scenarios.

In summary, while LLMs have access to a vast amount of knowledge, their predictive capacity is limited by the static nature of their training data and the lack of real-time updates, making them less effective in anticipating new circumstances compared to human intuition that can quickly adapt to changing situations.

BelovedSpear
So, to your response, the failing isn't inherent to LLMs or GPTs, but in the limitation of the dataset. By extension, a LLM or GPT that was not constrained by a time delimited dataset and had access to real-time updates would have vastly improved predictive capacity, and could potentially serve more effectively in that capacity.

ChatGPT
Yes, that's a correct interpretation. The limitations in predictive capacity are not inherent to LLMs or GPTs themselves but are primarily related to the nature of their training data and the lack of real-time updates. If an LLM or GPT had access to a continuously updated and comprehensive dataset that included real-time information, its predictive capacity could indeed be significantly enhanced.

In such a scenario, the model would be better equipped to anticipate new circumstances and adapt to changing situations, making it potentially more effective in roles that require dynamic decision-making, such as that of a CEO navigating a rapidly evolving business environment. Continuous learning and access to up-to-date information would be key factors in improving the model's ability to make accurate predictions.

BelovedSpear
Thanks so much for your insights! Should I share this information with the Board of OpenAI? ;0)

ChatGPT
You're welcome! While I don't have a direct line to the Board of OpenAI, sharing insights and perspectives can be valuable in any organization. If you have thoughts or feedback, it might be worthwhile to communicate them through appropriate channels, whether that's through OpenAI's official communication channels, forums, or other established means. It's always good to contribute to discussions and provide input to help shape the future development and understanding of AI technologies.

The Headless Churchman

It's...John Wesley!  Aieee!

It's almost Halloween, and over the last few days, I've been delving into the deepest nightmare of every paid church professional.  No, not the one where you discover you're not only in the wrong church and have forgotten your sermon text, but you're also not wearing any pants.  That one just replaces the "I didn't study for the test" anxiety dream.

This is a more profoundly existential nightmare, one that isn't just a fabrication of your subconscious.  This terror lives in the real world:

Churches with no pastors.  None.  For pastors, we folk called to a serving and helping profession, here is a physical manifestation of the heart of our most gnawing fear:  You are irrelevant.  You are not needed.

Yet as I work my way through the research phase of my doctoral project, that's where I've gone.  I've been talking with small church pastors, folks who are in the same position as myself.  But I've also been contacting Christians living in other forms of authentic and intimate faith community.  I've talked with longstanding participants in egalitarian house churches, and gatherings of Jesus-followers that are intentionally without formal hierarchical leadership.

Yesterday morning on my way to church, for example, I rode down the dirt roads of the Dayspring community.  It's one of the gatherings that sprang out of the Church of the Saviour, a borderline-legendary community formed by Gordon Cosby.  Dayspring rests on a little over 200 acres of woodland and fields, most of which I got a chance to see as I nosed my motorcycle along gravel roads.

It was strikingly beautiful, as the wind cast leaves down like rain.  A good soul responsible for the facility walked me around and showed me each of the three spaces used for worship.  A spare, clean room with neatly stacked wooden chairs.  A pavilion open on three sides, at one end of which rested a huge stone hearth.  And an amphitheater, set into the woods, the boughs arcing overhead like the balustrades of a cathedral.

And all the worship, in all those spaces, is conducted by members of the community.

No pastors.  No formally trained and vetted professionals, no charismatic and hard-charging evange-epreneur driving the growth.  No One CEO/Manager/Counselor/Leader/Teacher to rule them all.  Just mutual labor, mutual accountability, and mutual teaching.  Is it perfect?  No.  But if the conditions are right, it can work.  It can be a beautiful thing.

On the one hand, this is intimidating, vocationally challenging for those of us in the "organizational" church in the most radical of ways.  On the other, it's strangely, wildly heartening.

It feels, if anything, like the goal.

Church Leadership

My trundling through the leadership literature for the first of my D.Min classes continues, as does my continuing to subject you to the reflections that will ultimately get cut-and-pasted into the papers I write for the course.  The book I finished yesterday was Church Leadership (Revised Edition), by Lovett H. Weems, Jr.

Dr. Weems will be teaching the first of the courses I'll be taking in May at Wesley Theological Seminary, and let me preface my reflections by saying that this book was the most brilliant, powerful, and transformative work of radiant genius that I have ever been blessed to read.  I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.

Seriously, though, and much to my great relief, the book wasn't half bad.  It's a good general survey of leadership concepts, both from the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.  Unlike my recent readings in Heifetz/Linsky and Meyerson, though, there's an intentional...and mostly successful...effort to translate leadership concepts into a congregational context.  That framing, in and of itself, makes the book more overtly relevant to my calling.  In my reflections on this book, several key concepts popped for me.

The Need for Leadership:  The phrase "No organization can function without leadership," (Church Leadership, xix) popped up early in the preface, as Weems laid out what should be the pretty straightforward premise of the book.  That should be straightforward, but these days, nothing is straightforward.

There is, within both academic and related seminary circles, a significant countervailing meme that suggests that leaderless organizations are the wave of the future.  Organizations with leaders are assumed to be hierarchical/patriarchal, inherently oppressive of the generative creativity that occurs in a more "flat" organization.  This is Leadership 2.0.  It is postmodern.  It is emergent.  It's "starfish" organizations rather than "spider" organizations, to use the terminology from Brafman and Beckstrom's influential book.   In a "starfish" organization, the idea is that the whole organization exists in every part, and from every part the whole can reproduce itself.  "Spiders" are hierarchical, rigid, inflexible, and easily crunched.  Or so that idea goes.

In my own experience, though, I've found that the idea of leaderless organizations founders on the shoals of reality.  It jes' don't get 'er done.   Case in point:  Presbymergent.  A few years back, I found myself caught up in emergent conversations within the PC(USA), mostly because I: 1) compulsively blog; 2) am of an essentially progressive and inclusive persuasion; and 3) tend towards owning Apple products, to the point of seeming almost a bit DSM-V certifiable.   As energy levels and enthusiasm rose, a gathering of Mac Using Emergents was planned for Louisville, where the movement was to coalesce and exciting new things were to begin.

Things started out fine.   Though I felt socially on the periphery of the group, folks were cool, and conversation was invigorating, and the glowing Apples on the backs of our MacBooks hummed in a circle of Steve Jobs synergy.

But when it came time to plan, suddenly, we became the starfish.  No-one felt it was appropriate to take on the mantle of leadership, because we were, like, being the starfish, dude.  An "organizational plan" was proposed that started out well enough, but it ended as basically an amorphous blob layered on top of a radiant chaos symbol.  Everyone was the leader.  And when everyone is the leader...no-one is.  With this incoherent decisionmaking structure, I and a few other structurally inclined souls volunteered to try to create legal articles of incorporation so we could get funding.  It wasn't possible.  Not without lying, which is never a good thing to do in legal documents.  Even if we had gotten them past the draft stage...who would have approved them?  No-one knew.

In the absence of clear leadership and the vision and direction that would have provided, the various subgroups spun out into nothing within six months.  What energy was present...and there was energy and real potential...disappated.  It was frustrating.  But not surprising.   Without leadership, groups of like-minded friends can bumble along nicely.  But no organization can function.

Defining the Heroic Model of Leadership:  In exploring congregational leadership, Weems touches on the idea of moving away from the heroic model (Weems, p. 72), which he describes as self-defeating.  (ibid, p. 73)   There is significant truth in that, which he illustrates effectively.  Pastors can make themselves the functional center of an organization, doing everything and deciding everything because only they know how to do it right.   Even if a pastor is truly gifted, this leaves communities radically dependent on their pastors, and fails to equip the church by illuminating the gifts of the laity. (ibid., p.74)  It is a major concern, particularly as well-meaning but overfunctioning pastors steamroll lay leadership into irrelevance.

In defining "heroic leadership" as a style, Weems suggests that it has the following characteristics:  "The leader parcels out work, sets objectives, monitors performance, and fixes whatever is wrong."  (p. 73)   This is certainly controlling and perfectionist, but not "heroic," at least not as I understand heroism.  Heroic leadership is not smotheringly matriarchal.    When I think "hero," I think of unusual strength, unusual integrity, and unusual courage.  I think of an individual whose essential character and grace make them worthy of respect.  If you're the leader, you can't be a schlemiel.  Or a putz.

When I look to individuals for leadership, those characteristics are what I personally seek.  For all of the egalitarian idealism behind the idea that anyone can lead, that truth extends only so far as that individual shows they are worth following.  The final chapter of the book, which asserts that leadership rests first and foremost on values-based integrity, does seem to make this point.  What matters is not training, skills, or formal authority.  What matters is who a leader is as a person.  (p. 109)   If a congregation cannot look to their pastor and feel that they are a credible and profoundly moral person, that pastor cannot lead.  (p. 110-111)

No one is perfect, of course.  But effective leadership requires exceptional integrity, up to and including a willingness to simultaneously admit imperfection in the face of community expectations and defy it inwardly.  It's perhaps the most significant challenge anyone called to lead faces.

Lord knows I feel that weight.