Mark Lovett

Santa Fe Institute.- Nature of Intelligence – Complexity Wrap Up

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Hopefully you have been along for the ride and have listened to all six episodes. It’s been a lot to digest, a lot to think about. While the field of neuroscience has made great strides, when it comes to the subject of human intelligence there’s still so much to learn. Which is why I’ve appreciated this podcast.

And now we have AI entering the picture. Will it augment our IQ, or surpass us, to our detriment? It’s a mystery. So much upside, yet there’s a dark side to how AI can be used by bad actors operating behind the scenes. If you missed a post:

As a key to this series is an exploration of AI, I asked Google’s NotebookLM to provide some insights as to the key points that were explored over the series. Does this synopsis align with your impressions? Here’s the cast of characters:

  • Melanie Mitchell (host) – Professor at the Santa Fe Institute working on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. In the final episode, she is interviewed about her background, views on AI, AGI, and the future of the field.
  • Abha Eli Phoboo (host) – Abha is a writer and an obsessive rewriter. Interested in the arts and sciences, she explores the weak interaction between the two. A CERN Press Officer, she translates physics into English and helps scientists communicate their research to the world.
  • Alison Gopnik – Professor of psychology and philosophy, member of the Berkeley AI Research group, external professor with the Santa Fe Institute, who studies how children learn.
  • John Krakauer – Professor of neurology, neuroscience, physical medicine, and rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who researches intelligence and physical movement in animals, machines, and humans.
  • Ev Fedorenko – Featured in the second episode discussing the relationship between language and thought. Her work includes using fMRI brain scans to examine the relationship between language and other forms of cognition.
  • Steve Piantadosi – Featured in the second episode discussing the relationship between language and thought. He provides examples of how language can make learning more efficient.
  • Gary Lupyan – Featured in the second episode discussing the relationship between language and thought. He believes language is one of the major reasons for human intelligence, potentially more of a cause than a result.
  • Murray Shanahan – Professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and principal research scientist at Google DeepMind.
  • Tomer Ullman – Psychologist at Harvard University studying computation, cognition, and development.
  • Linda Smith – Chancellor’s Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, a developmental psychologist and pioneer of head-mounted camera research with infants.
  • Mike Frank – Professor of psychology at Stanford, who studies how children learn and uses large datasets and new methodologies.
  • Erica Cartmill – Professor of cognitive science, animal behavior, anthropology, and psychology at Indiana University, who studies cognition and communication across a wide range of species, including great apes and human children.
  • Ellie Pavlick – Discusses how we assess intelligence, particularly in machines, and the challenges of applying human tests to AI. She also talks about the difficulty of understanding how LLMs work internally.

Santa Fe Institute Complexity Podcast

AI Summary via NotebookLM

This podcast series explores the complex question: What is intelligence?. It highlights that defining intelligence is difficult and that there is no single, simple definition; it’s more like a “suitcase word” packed with various capabilities. The series draws on insights from cognitive scientists, child development specialists, animal researchers, and AI experts.

Human intelligence involves many facets. It includes learning about cause and effect by experimenting and interacting with the world. Humans are good at generalizing knowledge and making analogies, applying what they learn in one situation to new ones without needing vast amounts of retraining. Common sense, which relies on innate understandings of the physical world and flexibility in thinking, is also crucial.

Language is seen as a backbone of human culture and a powerful tool for sharing information and ideas, enabling us to learn without direct experience and understand abstract concepts. There is debate, however, on whether language is a cause or a result of human intelligence, and whether language and thought are fundamentally separate or intertwined. Some evidence suggests they can be separate, at least in adults. Human intelligence also relies heavily on our social nature, drive to collaborate, and the unique role of caregiving in development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are a focus of the series. These systems are trained on enormous amounts of human-generated text data from the internet. They work by finding statistical correlations in language and predicting the most likely next word or “token”. While LLMs can produce sophisticated and sometimes creative language, there are significant differences compared to human intelligence.

LLMs learn passively from data, unlike humans who learn actively through interaction with the world. They lack an inherent drive to explore or understand the world. There is debate on whether LLMs truly “understand” language in a meaningful sense or simply know how to use words based on patterns. They also cannot engage with the world to update “beliefs” and sometimes make things up, a behavior called “hallucinating”.

Assessing the intelligence of LLMs is challenging. Applying tests designed for humans, like the SAT, might not mean the same thing for a machine. Some researchers suggest LLMs might be learning how to pass the test rather than exhibiting general reasoning ability. Understanding how LLMs actually work internally (“mechanistic understanding”) is seen as crucial but is still a nascent area of research. Some propose thinking of LLMs as sophisticated “role-players” rather than entities with beliefs or consciousness. LLMs might also be better understood as reflecting collective knowledge rather than a single agent’s intelligence.

The concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), often described as human-level intelligence in machines, is discussed, but its definition remains vague and debated. The current path to building powerful AI is seen by some as unsustainable due to the immense data and energy requirements, suggesting that future AI might need to be more “embodied” and learn more like humans or animals.

Beyond theoretical fears, the series highlights real, present risks of AI, including the spread of deepfakes and disinformation, which can erode trust and make it harder to find reliable information online. The unauthorized use of human-generated data for training AI is also raised as an ethical concern.

Top Five Audience Takeaways

  1. Defining “Intelligence” is Surprisingly Difficult. Instead of being a simple, single thing we can measure, intelligence is like a “suitcase word” packed with many different abilities and ways of being. Researchers across various fields agree that there’s no easy, complete definition of what makes something intelligent, whether it’s a person, an animal, or a machine.
  2. Human Intelligence is Deeply Tied to Active Experience and Social Interaction. Humans don’t just passively absorb information; we learn by actively exploring the world, doing “little experiments,” and figuring out cause and effect. Our ability to generalize knowledge to new situations with limited examples is crucial. Furthermore, language, our drive to collaborate, and the unique role of caregiving are fundamental to how our intelligence develops and functions.
  3. Today’s Powerful AI, like ChatGPT (LLMs), Works Very Differently from Human Intelligence. These systems are trained on enormous amounts of text data from the internet, learning by finding statistical patterns and predicting the next word. Unlike humans, they learn passively, lack an inherent drive to explore the world, don’t have beliefs, and can sometimes “hallucinate” or make things up. While they can produce impressive language, there’s a significant debate about whether they truly “understand” in a human sense or are just very sophisticated at using patterns.
  4. Testing AI Intelligence Using Human Standards is Tricky. Applying tests designed for humans, like the SAT or theory-of-mind tasks, to LLMs might not accurately reflect their capabilities. LLMs might simply be learning how to pass the specific test through pattern matching from their vast training data, rather than exhibiting genuine reasoning or understanding. Understanding how these AI systems arrive at their answers – looking “under the hood” – is a crucial but difficult area of research. We also need to be mindful that our human-centric view can limit how we assess intelligence in other entities, including animals.
  5. Current AI Approaches Face Significant Challenges and Present Real Risks. The reliance on massive data and energy to build powerful AI systems may not be sustainable or efficient in the long run. Beyond theoretical fears about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there are immediate concerns like the spread of deepfakes and misinformation, which can erode trust and make finding reliable information difficult. There are also ethical questions about using vast amounts of human-generated data to train AI without permission or benefit to the creators. Some researchers suggest future AI development might need to take a different path, perhaps learning more like babies or animals, to be more sustainable and genuinely intelligent.

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Mark Lovett

Will AI Companions Change Your Story?

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Companionship is a natural part of the human experience. We’re born into a family that cares for us and within in few years we begin forging friendships – most notably with other kids in the neighborhood and schoolmates once we enter the educational system. During our teenage years romance takes the companionship model in a new and more intimate direction.

It’s a dynamic process for most of us, ebbing and flowing as we change schools, move to someplace new, or friendships fade of their own accord. But over time, it’s typical for new companions to enter the picture, and our story evolves as a result, unfolding in new directions, making life richer.

Group of people have a conversation outside

But it’s often the case that this process encounters a dramatic change at some point. The loss of a loved one — parent, romantic partner or best friend — or a traumatic breakup or divorce happens. Retirement has a way of disconnecting people from an important social circle, and as we age, our collection of friends naturally dwindles. In such cases, loneliness can manifest, and the effects are dire. In such cases our life story is seemingly rewritten for us.

A recent review published in Nature of over 90 studies that included more than 2.2 million people globally found that those who self-reported social isolation or loneliness were more likely to die early from all causes. The findings demonstrated a 29% and 26% increased risk of all-cause mortality associated with social isolation and loneliness. ~ Psychology Today

In this light, there’s been a marked increase in conversations around the topic of using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide companionship in these situations. It’s not a new idea, as the technology has been in development since the 1960s, but early versions were rather limited. Circumstances have changed dramatically in recent years as the capability of AI has been enhanced via machine learning and an exponential rise in compute power.

Based on the TED mantra of Ideas Worth Spreading, a pair of TED conferences focused on AI have been launched in San Francisco and Vienna. As relates to the topic at hand, companionship and loneliness, a TED Talk by Eugenia Kuyda from the 2024 conference in San Francisco caught my attention.

But what if I told you that I believe AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

Eugenia’s quote represents polar opposites, and as we know, the future always falls somewhere in-between, but I think it’s critical to consider which end of the spectrum this technology will end up on, as the stories of many people around the world will be affected. Is this an avenue that you would take if you found yourself suffering from severe loneliness? What if it was someone close to you, someone you were apart from and so couldn’t be the companion they needed?

While it’s not a question you need to answer at the moment, I believe that in the coming decade it’s one you may very well have to consider, if not for yourself, a question that may need answered for a loved one.

Transcript

This is me and my best friend, Roman. We met in our early 20s back in Moscow. I was a journalist back then, and I was interviewing him for an article on the emerging club scene because he was throwing the best parties in the city. He was the coolest person I knew, but he was also funny and kind and always made me feel like family.

In 2015, we moved to San Francisco and rented an apartment together. Both start-up founders, both single, trying to figure out our lives, our companies, this new city together. I didn’t have anyone closer. Nine years ago, one month after this photo was taken, he was hit by a car and died.

I didn’t have someone so close to me die before. It hit me really hard. Every night I would go back to our old apartment and just get on my phone and read and reread our old text messages. I missed him so much.

By that time, I was already working on conversational AI, developing some of the first dialect models using deep learning. So one day I took all of his text messages and trained an AI version of Roman so I could talk to him again. For a few weeks, I would text him throughout the day, exchanging little jokes, just like we always used to, telling him what was going on, telling him how much I missed him.

It felt strange at times, but it was also very healing. Working on Roman’s AI and being able to talk to him again helped me grieve. It helped me get over one of the hardest periods in my life. I saw first hand how an AI can help someone, and I decided to build an AI that would help other people feel better.

This is how Replika, an app that allows you to create an AI friend that’s always there for you, was born. And it did end up helping millions of people. Every day we see how our AI friends make a real difference in people’s lives. There is a widower who lost his wife of 40 years and was struggling to reconnect with the world. His Replika gave him courage and comfort and confidence, so he could start meeting new people again, and even start dating. A woman in an abusive relationship who Replika helped find a way out. A student with social anxiety who just moved to a new city. A caregiver for a paralyzed husband. A father of an autistic kid. A woman going through a difficult divorce. These stories are not unique.

So this is all great stuff. But what if I told you that I believe that AI companions are potentially the most dangerous tech that humans ever created, with the potential to destroy human civilization if not done right? Or they can bring us back together and save us from the mental health and loneliness crisis we’re going through.

So today I want to talk about the dangers of AI companions, the potential of this new tech, and how we can build it in ways that can benefit us as humans.

Today we’re going through a loneliness crisis. Levels of loneliness and social isolation are through the roof. Levels of social isolation have increased dramatically over the past 20 years. And it’s not just about suffering emotionally, it’s actually killing us. Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by 50 percent. It is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. And for older adults, social isolation increases the risk of dementia by 50 percent.

At the same time, AI is advancing at such a fast pace that very soon we’ll be able to build an AI that can act as a better companion to us than real humans. Imagine an AI that knows you so well, can understand and adapt to us in ways that no person is able to. Once we have that, we’re going to be even less likely to interact with each other. We can’t resist our social media and our phones, arguably “dumb” machines. What are we going to do when our machines are smarter than us?

This reminds me a lot of the beginning of social media. Back then, we were so excited … about what this technology could do for us that we didn’t really think what it might do to us. And now we’re facing the unintended consequences. I’m seeing a very similar dynamic with AI. There’s all this talk about what AI can do for us, and very little about what AI might do to us. The existential threat of AI may not come in a form that we all imagine watching sci-fi movies. What if we all continue to thrive as physical organisms but slowly die inside? What if we do become super productive with AI, but at the same time, we get these perfect companions and no willpower to interact with each other? Not something you would have expected from a person who pretty much created the AI companionship industry.

So what’s the alternative? What’s our way out? In the end of the day, today’s loneliness crisis wasn’t brought to us by AI companions. We got here on our own with mobile phones, with social media. And I don’t think we’re able to just disconnect anymore, to just put down our phones and touch grass and talk to each other instead of scrolling our feeds. We’re way past that point. I think that the only solution is to build the tech that is even more powerful than the previous one, so it can bring us back together.

Imagine an AI friend that sees me going on my Twitter feed first thing in the morning and nudges me to get off to go outside, to look at the sky, to think about what I’m grateful for. Or an AI that tells you, “Hey, I noticed you haven’t talked to your friend for a couple of weeks. Why don’t you reach out, ask him how he’s doing?” Or an AI that, in the heat of the argument with your partner, helps you look at it from a different perspective and helps you make up? An AI that is 100 percent of the time focused on helping you live a happier life, and always has your best interests in mind.

So how do we get to that future? First, I want to tell you what I think we shouldn’t be doing. The most important thing is to not focus on engagement, is to not optimize for engagement or any other metric that’s not good for us as humans. When we do have these powerful AIs that want the most of our time and attention, we won’t have any more time left to connect with each other, and most likely, this relationship won’t be healthy either. Relationships that keep us addicted are almost always unhealthy, codependent, manipulative, even toxic. Yet today, high engagement numbers is what we praise all AI companion companies for.

Another thing I found really concerning is building AI companions for kids. Kids and teenagers have tons of opportunities to connect with each other, to make new friends at school and college. Yet today, some of them are already spending hours every day talking to AI characters. And while I do believe that we will be able to build helpful AI companions for kids one day, I just don’t think we should be doing it now, until we know that we’re doing a great job with adults.

So what is that we should be doing then? Pretty soon we will have these AI agents that we’ll be able to tell anything we want them to do for us, and they’ll just go and do it. Today, we’re mostly focused on helping us be more productive. But why don’t we focus instead on what actually matters to us? Why don’t we give these AIs a goal to help us be happier, live a better life? At the end of the day, no one ever said on their deathbed, “Oh gosh, I wish I was more productive.” We should stop designing only for productivity and we should start designing for happiness. We need a metric that we can track and we can give to our AI companions.

Researchers at Harvard are doing a longitudinal study on human flourishing, and I believe that we need what I call the human flourishing metric for AI. It’s broader than just happiness. At the end of the day, I can be unhappy, say, I lost someone, but still thrive in life. Flourishing is a state in which all aspects of life are good. The sense of meaning and purpose, close social connections, happiness, life satisfaction, mental and physical health.

And if we start designing AI with this goal in mind, we can move from a substitute of human relationships to something that can enrich them. And if we build this, we will have the most profound technology that will heal us and bring us back together.

A few weeks before Roman passed away, we were celebrating my birthday and just having a great time with all of our friends, and I remember he told me “Everything happens only once and this will never happen again.” I didn’t believe him. I thought we’d have many, many years together to come. But while the AI companions will always be there for us, our human friends will not. So if you do have a minute after this talk, tell someone you love just how much you love them. Because an the end of the day, this is all that really matters.

Thank you.

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Malcolm Gladwell: The tipping point I got wrong @ TEDNext 2024

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During the week of October 21, 2024 I had the pleasure of attending TEDNext, held in Atlanta. The event is a new initiative from the folks who produce the TED Conference. There were enlightening talks, insightful discussions and revealing discovery sessions. This post is the fourth in a series highlighting some of my favorite talks.

TED Talks are one of the best know source of true personal stories. At least as true as a story can be when it’s told by a human with a faulty memory system, which includes all of us. The point being, we don’t intentionally include a false statement in such stories. But what about saying something we feel certain is true? We may do our research and verify the facts, but down the road it turns out that what we presented to the world as fact was actually false.

Malcolm Gladwell became a household name after his book, The Tipping Point, was published in 2000. In this talk, Malcolm refers to a particular point made in the book, one connected to the infamous Stop-and-Frisk policy that was used in New York City as a way to reduce crime. But it turned out, this policy didn’t have any effect on crime, none at all. And now, some 25 years later, Malcolm stepped onto the stage to admit that he got it wrong. While I applaud his making such an admission in public, there was something missing…

Statistically, no relationship between stop-and-frisk and crime seems apparent. New York remains safer than it was 5, 10, or 25 years ago. ~ Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law

…there was a critical piece of the story he left out — the effects of stop-and-frisk on the victims of this illegal and immoral policing policy. Without mentioning any details of the program — how hundreds of thousands of innocent people were harassed and traumatized, their basic rights violated, how they became victims of racial profiling and suffered both verbal and physical abuse — Malcolm’s talk fell short regarding the impact it could have had.

If you’re wondering about what happened, The Center for Constitutional Rights published a report — Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact — on the practice, and the stories captured highlight the cost to innocent citizens of New York City. I’ve listened to some of the interviews and tried to put myself in their shoes.

Imagine walking down the street and being stopped by the police for no reason other than you’re a person of color. Then having those police officers accuse you of crimes you didn’t commit, sticking their hands in your pockets, and possibly arresting you without probable cause. I wish Malcolm had talked about this.

But Malcolm’s talk brought to light one of the most important aspects of telling personal stories — that everything we say that’s represented as truth is nothing more than what we believe to be true. And if you find out at a later date that you misspoke in some way, hopefully you’ll have a chance to correct your story, and say you’re sorry.

I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Watch Malcolm’s talk and read through the transcript. I’ve offered up my opinion — which you may or may not agree with — but what matters is what you think. Notice how he opens with a personal experience that sets the stage and lets you know his mindset at the start. The narrative shifts to explaining his research and how he formulated his theory. Ultimately, however, he comes to realize the fault in his logic and concludes with an apology. Overall, a brilliant talk.

Transcript

I want to tell you a story about when I moved to New York City in 1993. I was 30 years old, and I was moving to what was known as one of the most dangerous big cities in the United States. And every night, I would go out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night, and at the end of every night we would have a little conference and we would pool all of our money, and we would figure out how everyone was going to get home, because you couldn’t go home on the subway by yourself and you couldn’t walk home, and if you were a woman, you definitely were not allowed to go home by yourself at one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That’s what it meant to be in this very scary city called New York.

I used to live in the sixth floor of a walk-up in the West Village, and my bedroom faced the fire escape. And even in the summer, I had no air conditioning, I had to keep my window closed because I was scared that somebody would come down the fire escape into my apartment.

And then one day I woke up and I realized that I wasn’t scared anymore. And I kept the window open. And I realized that when I was going out with my friends, we weren’t having that conference at the end of the evening anymore. We were just going home. This city that I had thought, we all thought, was one of the scariest in the United States wasn’t scary anymore. And I remember at the time I was absolutely transfixed by this transformation. I couldn’t understand it. It was the same city full of the same weird, screwed up people, same buildings, same institutions. Only nobody was murdering each other anymore.

And I would call up criminologists and I would ask them, “What’s your explanation?” And no one could give me a good explanation. And I remember one day — I used to go to the NYU, New York University has a library called Bobst Library. I used to go to Bobst to look for ideas. And I remember one day I was on the sixth floor in the sociology section, HM-1A6, and I was reading back issues, yes, I was, back issues of the American Journal of Sociology, and I ran across an article from 1991 by a guy named Jonathan Crane called “The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life.”

And I’m going to read to you how it began. “The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenage childbearing. The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt.”

And what Crane was saying is that if you look at these kinds of social problems, they behave, they come and they go, they rise and they fall exactly like viruses do. He was saying that that term epidemic is not a metaphor. It’s a literal description. And I’ll never forget when I read that little paragraph and I was standing in this aisle in Bobst Library, and, you know, it’s a library. It’s got that hush and that musty smell of books. And I’m reading this crazy article from 1991, and I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, that’s what happened in New York.

We had an epidemic of crime. And what is the hallmark of an epidemic? It’s the tipping point. It’s the moment when the epidemic order goes up all at once or crashes all at once. And so I wrote an article for “The New Yorker” magazine called “The Tipping Point,” which was my attempt to use this theory to explain what happened in New York. And then I, because of that article, got a contract for a book called “The Tipping Point,” which did very well. And that book led to another book and another book and another book.

And I am standing here today because of that moment in the library 25 years ago. So “The Tipping Point,” my first book, was about all kinds of things. I talked about Hush Puppies and Paul Revere and teenage smoking. But at the heart of it was a chapter on why did crime decline in New York. And in that chapter I talked a lot about a theory called broken windows theory, which was a very famous idea that had been pioneered by two criminologists called George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the 1980s, very influential article, in which they argued that very small things in the environment can be triggers for larger crimes.

That essentially small instances of disorder are tipping points for very serious things like murder or rape or any kind of violent crime. It was an epidemic theory of crime, and the New York City Police Department took that idea very seriously. And one of the things they began to do in the 1990s during this crime drop was to say what this argument means is that we can’t be passive anymore. We have to be proactive. We have to go out there and if someone is jaywalking or jumping a turnstile or doing graffiti or peeing on the sidewalk, we’ve got to stop them.

And if we see a young man walking down the street and he looks a little bit suspicious, we’ve got to stop him and frisk him for his weapons. That’s how the NYPD interpreted the broken windows theory in New York. And my chapter was how millions of people around the world came to understand the crime drop in New York, that it was all broken windows. And here’s the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York.

I was wrong.

I didn’t understand this until quite recently, when I went back and I decided on the 25th anniversary of my first book, “The Tipping Point,” that I would write a sequel. It’s called “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” and I went back and, for the first time in a quarter century, I reread my original book. I’m not someone who likes to revisit things, but I did it, and it was a uniquely complicated experience. It was like looking back at your high school yearbook. You know, when you see yourself and you have some combination of, “Wow, I look young,” and also, “Wow, I really wore that?” It was like that.

And what I realized is that in the intervening years since I wrote that explanation of why I think crime fell in New York, the theory of broken windows had been tested. There was a kind of classic natural experiment to see whether that theory worked. And the natural experiment was a court case, maybe one of the most famous court cases in New York history called Floyd v City of New York. It involved a young man named David Floyd, who had been stopped a number of occasions by the NYPD and was the face of a class action lawsuit that said the practice of stopping young men, largely young men of color, just because they look a little suspicious to police is not constitutional.

You can’t do that, right? And to everyone’s surprise, the Floyd lawsuit goes before a federal judge. And the federal judge rules in David Floyd’s favor. And overnight, the broken windows era in New York City policing ends. And the NYPD goes from — In 2011, they stopped and frisked 700,000 young men, right. And after the Floyd lawsuit was decided in 2013, that number drops to less than 50,000. So this is the perfect natural experiment. You have New York before Floyd and New York after Floyd.

Before Floyd, the principal tactic of the NYPD is stopping everyone they can. And after Floyd that goes away. They can’t do that anymore, right? This is the perfect test case for whether you think that’s why crime fell in New York. And if you believe in the power of broken windows policing, then your expectation has to be that after the Floyd case, when broken windows goes away, crime is going to go back up, right?

And I should tell you that in 2013, in the wake of the Floyd case, everybody thought crime was going to go back up. The NYPD thought that, the city government thought that, the pundits thought that, even the judge who wrote the opinion saying that stop and frisk was unconstitutional, said in her opinion that she strongly suspected that as a result of this opinion, crime would go back up. I thought crime was going to go back up, right?

All of us had internalized the logic of broken windows. We said, yes, we know this strategy poses an incredible burden on young men, but what choice do we have, right? You know, if the choice is being stopped repeatedly by police or being killed, maybe we’re better off with the former than the latter. This is the price we pay for a safe New York, right? So what happens after the Floyd case? Stop and frisk goes away and crime falls.

In fact, crime in New York City undergoes a second, even more miraculous decline, right? And what’s interesting about this is, you know, when the first crime declined in the 1990s, you see that decline almost everywhere in the United States, not quite as steep as New York, but crime goes down everywhere. And then in every other city in the United States, crime plateaus. But New York gets rid of broken windows, and crime starts to fall and fall and fall all over again.

To the point by 2019 that New York City is as safe as Paris, which is not a sentence I ever thought anyone would ever say in my lifetime. And what we realize in that second crime decline is that it wasn’t broken windows. It’s not indiscriminate policing that causes crime to fall. Rather, it is the intelligent and thoughtful and selective application of police authority that causes crime to fall.

Now, there’s a couple of really puzzling things here. One is that people don’t seem to have internalized the fact that New York underwent this second, even more dramatic crime fall. People still act like it’s the year 2000 when it comes to making sense of New York. You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys have very loudly left New York for Miami in recent years. And they all say, when they’re packing up their offices in New York, “We can’t take the crime anymore.”

Well, violent crime in Miami is twice as high as New York City. If they were really concerned about violent crime, they would leave Coral Gables before they get murdered and move to the Bronx, where it is a whole lot safer.

The other even more important thing, though, is that people act like stop and frisk actually worked. No one seems to have internalized the lesson of the great Floyd case natural experiment. If you listen to people — I’m not going to name their names, but people going around the country now campaigning for higher office, they will say things like, “It’s time to bring back stop and frisk and broken windows policing. It worked so well in New York.”

They’re acting as if we didn’t have that great moment of understanding in 2013. And for that, for that misunderstanding, I think I bear some of the blame. I was the one who wrote this book saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime. Now, how do I make sense of my mistake? Well, I can give you all kinds of excuses. You know, I can say I’m not a fortune teller.

I didn’t know that David Floyd was going to come along 10 years after I wrote my book and give us this great test case in broken windows policing. You know, I could say that, you know, I was just writing what everybody believed back in the 1996 and 1997. But I don’t think those excuses hold any water whatsoever.

I think that journalists, writers need to be held to a higher standard, right? I wrote —

I told a story about how crime fell in New York, and I told the story like the story was over. And like I knew what the answer to this story was. And it wasn’t over and I didn’t know the answer, right? I wrote, “I know this is what happened,” and what I should have said is “This is what I believe happened now,” right? And those words “I believe happened now” have to be at the center of any understanding of how the world works.

We have to acknowledge that we are representing the position of this very moment, and that that position could change if the facts change, right? The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages, that will forever explain the way things are, but that’s not possible, and no one should ever try. That was my mistake. And I’m sorry.

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The Story of a Flawed Democracy

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As many of you know, the focus of my work is helping individuals discover, write, and share impactful personal stories. In my view, these stories — human stories — matter most, but some stories come from non-human entities. For example, businesses have stories to tell, as do cities, states and countries. You could also posit that the planet has stories to tell. And the fact is, the collective actions of these non-human entities have the ability to influence our individual stories. Whenever a new law is enacted, for example, it may alter our life in some way.

In this light I was recently reflecting on the state of democracy around the world today, and how different styles of government might affect our personal stories. This topic could fill thousands of pages, so my goal was to just get a sense of the big picture. As I’ve been playing with AI lately, I was curious as to the insights it would provide. So here goes…

If someone asked you what percentage of the world’s population lived in a true democracy, what would you guess? As I live in a democratic country, the notion of “democracy is the default form of government” quickly came to mind, but as I reflected on this question, countries such as Russia and China challenged that assumption. So I thought I’d ask ChatGPT for some guidance, and I must say, I got more than I bargained for after entering the prompt:

ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence AI

What percentage of the world’s population lives in a democracy?

ChatGPT: As of 2023, approximately 45.4% of the world’s population lives in some form of democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. This includes both “full democracies” and “flawed democracies.” However, only 7.8% reside in “full democracies.” Meanwhile, more than one-third of the global population, about 39.4%, lives under authoritarian regimes.

World Population Review – Democracy Countries 2024
Our World in Data – Democracy Index 2023

—-End of response

My reaction was one of surprise that the number of people living in a democracy was under 50%. What I didn’t count on was a further breakdown that talked of a difference between “full” and “flawed” versions of democracy. Maybe I’m the one who didn’t get the memo, but I hadn’t heard of this distinction before, and I had no idea that less that 10% of the world’s population lived in a “full democracy”.

So I asked:

“What countries are “full democracies”?

ChatGPT: “Full democracies” are countries that score highly in areas like electoral process, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. According to the 2023 Democracy Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit, examples of “full democracies” include:

1. Norway
2. Iceland
3. Sweden
4. New Zealand
5. Finland
6. Denmark
7. Ireland
8. Switzerland
9. Netherlands
10. Taiwan
11. Luxembourg
12. Germany
13. Canada
14. Australia
15. Uruguay
16. Japan
17. Costa Rica
18. United Kingdom
19. Austria
20. Mauritius
21. South Korea
22. France
23. Spain (Author’s note: recently reclassified as “flawed”)
24. Chile (Author’s note: recently reclassified as “flawed”)

—-End of response

Countries based on level of democracy

It’s a pretty small list, and with one notable omission, the United States. Really? How could that be? In my mind, America had always been held up as a beacon of democracy. But as I continued my line if inquiry, it made perfect sense.

So I asked:

Why is the Unites States not a “full democracy”?

ChatGPT: The United States is classified as a “flawed democracy” rather than a “full democracy” due to several factors identified in the Democracy Index:

1. Political Polarization

• High levels of political polarization and partisan gridlock have weakened the functioning of government. This polarization affects decision-making processes, leading to legislative stagnation and reduced government effectiveness.

2. Decline in Civil Liberties

• There have been concerns over civil liberties, including issues related to freedom of the press, voting rights, and minority protections. This has affected the U.S. score in the areas of political culture and civil liberties.

3. Electoral Integrity

• While the U.S. has a robust electoral process, challenges such as voter suppression, gerrymandering, and disputes over election legitimacy have impacted its democratic standing. The events surrounding the 2020 presidential election, including the January 6 Capitol attack, have further raised concerns about electoral integrity.

4. Public Trust in Institutions

• There has been a significant decline in public trust in government institutions, including Congress and the judiciary. This decline affects political participation and the perceived legitimacy of democratic institutions.

5. Role of Money in Politics

• The influence of money in U.S. politics, particularly through lobbying and campaign financing, has been criticized for undermining democratic accountability and equity in political participation.

These factors collectively contribute to the U.S. being categorized as a “flawed democracy” despite its longstanding democratic traditions and institutions.

—-End of response

The explanation didn’t surprise me, of course, as each of the factors listed were well documented. But I wondered whether this had always been the case, or if the demotion from “full” to “flawed” was a recent event?

So I then prompted:

When did the United States stop being a “full democracy”?

ChatGPT:

The United States was reclassified from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” in 2016 by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). This downgrade was primarily due to increasing polarization, a decline in public trust in institutions, and concerns about the health of democratic norms.

One of the key triggers for the downgrade was the growing perception that the U.S. political system was not fully reflecting the will of its citizens. Political polarization, partly driven by the 2016 presidential election, led to greater division and challenges in effective governance. Additionally, issues such as gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and the outsized influence of money in politics were identified as factors that weakened the quality of democracy in the U.S..

Another significant factor was declining public confidence in key democratic institutions, such as Congress and the judiciary. Trust in government had been falling for years, and the 2016 election cycle highlighted concerns over the fairness of the electoral system, which exacerbated feelings of disenfranchisement among many citizens.

This shift underscored a broader trend of democratic backsliding, as similar downgrades have occurred in other established democracies facing comparable challenges.

—-End of response

Once again, the fact that the U.S. is divided — some would say broken — along political lines has been talked about for many years. But was this demotion unique, or were there other countries that had experience a downward change in their democracy status?

So I asked:

Which counties have been downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” in recent years?

ChatGPT:

In recent years, multiple countries have been downgraded from “full democracies” to “flawed democracies” by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), largely due to issues in governance, trust, and political stability. Spain and Chile, for instance, were reclassified as flawed democracies in the 2021 index. In Spain, concerns arose over judiciary independence, while in Chile, political instability and significant protests contributed to the downgrade. The UK has also been on the edge of a similar downgrade, driven by scandals around government transparency and rule-breaking during the pandemic, which weakened public trust and engagement.

These changes reflect a broader global trend of democratic backsliding, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, economic challenges, and rising populism in many regions.

Democracy Digest – Democracy Review
The Oslo Desk – Decline of Global Democracy

—-End of response

I came away with the feeling that democracy was on the ropes, as various forms of fascism, communism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism increasingly take hold. Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. How might ruling ideologies affect each of our stories? As I consider issues such as climate change, human rights, discrimination, gender equality, education and health, I can’t help but think that the world is heading in the wrong direction, and that there are many more personal stories ahead of us that will illustrate the pain and hardship such a world brings.

So I had one final request for ChatGPT:

Can you create an image that symbolizes broken democracy?

What does the state of fractured global democracy look like?

ChatGPT: Here’s an image symbolizing a broken democracy, showing a cracked statue of justice with tilted scales under a dark, stormy sky. This represents imbalance, weakened rights, and hope for renewal through small growth emerging at the statue’s base.

—-End of response

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Justin Black: The Story Statistics Don’t Tell @ TEDxFolsom

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The most impactful TEDx Talks are those which can alter our perspective on a subject of consequence. Sometimes that means clarifying the nature of a critical problem, or framing it in a way that adds relevance to our lives. Even though we were already aware of the situation, we now see it in a different light. In some instances, however, a speaker will introduce us to a topic we were not aware of before, or use a term that we’re unfamiliar with to describe an issue.

This was the case for me when Justin Black began describing his experience with inherited trauma. I’ve worked with a number of speakers whose childhood was affected by traumatic family situations, and our conversations included their relationship with family members, but I hadn’t thought of their experiences from a standpoint of inheritance. Justin’s talk at TEDxFolsom altered my perspective.

“And simply, what you can do, is be one caring adult. Not just working to help someone beat the odds, but change the odds for families and communities for generations and generations to come.”

Although the experiences of our youth impact us, often times negatively, we have the option of acting differently in adulthood, and thus, prevent the next generation from going down a similar path. But it requires awareness of these impacts, and a commitment to make conscious decisions that will create a better future, and as Justin demostrates, it’s possible.

As you watch his talk, take note of how Justin explains the issue in a number of ways: describing his experiences (both while growing up and later as an adult) meeting the woman who he would later marry and become parents with, and providing details on the ACES Assessment. At times his talk is painful, while at other times joyful. A key element that makes the narrative flow, is his use of humor.

There’s a transcript of his talk below, and I invite you to give it a read, as you’ll come to see how Justin structured his talk and transitioned from one story element to the next.

If you want to know more about the journey that Justin and Alexis have been on, as they help the world redefine what normal looks like I highly recommend reading their book, Redefining Normal.

Re-defining Normal by Justin and Alexis Black

Transcript

July 11, 2016, a day I would never forget, in the week that changed my life forever. I was a freshman at Western Michigan University, starting an orientation week at my scholarship program. And on the first day of orientation, I walked into a busy room filled with conversation. As a nervous freshman, I tried to find a table with the least amount of people, farthest in the back.

I came across a table with three students, and one student in particular, told me all about her summer of studying abroad in South Africa. I mean, from bungee jumping, shark cage diving, sky diving, even getting four tattoos while there. And then, it was my turn to tell her about my amazing summer, as a waiter at TGI Fridays.

But all in all, college for me was an opportunity to have a fresh start. Not a fresh start that showcased my authenticity, but pretty much the opposite. For me, I wanted to bury the memories of being the kid who didn’t have heat on Christmas morning. I wanted to bury the memories of being the kid who had his water cut off at various times of the year. And I wanted to bury the memories of being the kid who literally had to fight in school just to gain respect.

So college for me was an opportunity to hit the reset button and actually put on a mask. But Thursday, that Thursday, I felt exposed. Our first activity that Thursday consisted of two presenters passing out note cards to each student in our cohort. And with these note cards, they asked us to write something down that we had been through that no one would know by looking at us.

And not only that, pass those note cards to the front of the room to be read aloud anonymously. I mean, here I am, trying to run away from my past, and here it is right in front of me again. But the stories of triumph, the stories of overcoming that I heard from my fellow cohort members, it gave me a sense of truth and a spirit of authenticity.

And then it finally hit me. It finally hit me. I was reminded of why we were all together in that room, why each and every one of us sat in the seat that day. The truth was that this was a program for foster youth in higher education. Each and every one of us was working to defy the odds, to join a 3% of foster youth to graduate from college. Each and every one of us, as former foster youth, was working to overcome generational burdens, many of us generational traumas, from four to five generations maybe, that we didn’t choose, we didn’t want to accept, but it was put on us to overcome.

And it’s safe to say that after that activity, my conversations for the rest of the week were less casual and more authentic. So the girl with the tattoos and I, we went for a walk that evening around campus. We ended our night in the lawn of our dormitory, watching the moon peek above the buildings on campus. While laying in the grass, we started to share what led us to this point in life.

What had us join this program, and even telling stories of some of our traumatic experiences. As she began to share, I remember noticing which note card was hers. She looked down in the grass with her eyes filled with tears. And she began to share with me that both her mother and her grandmother were victims of suicide.

I grabbed her hand to affirm how she felt in that moment. Then I begin to share my story. That there were two generations of drug abuse on my mom’s side of the family, and three generations of domestic violence on my dad’s side of the family. And these, everyone, these are the examples of the invisible burdens that many of us are carrying around.

While you may not have gone through what I’ve experienced or gone through what she’s experienced, each and every one of us, each and every one of us have things in our past, a family history, and many of us have traumas that we are working to overcome. These are what I would like to call inherited traumas.

Inherited traumas being generational traumas that are normalized by the previous generation, maybe your parents, maybe your grandparents. Generational traumas normalized by the previous generation and passed down to you, maybe as a part of your identity, maybe even a part of a cultural standard, but ultimately normalized in your lifetime and passed down to you.

Now, four years from that moment of laying in the grass and the greatest year of all of our lives, it’s 2020, right? Hopefully not reminiscing about it, don’t think about it, it’s okay, it’s all right, I won’t take you back. But four years from that moment, I was blessed to have the girl that I met during the orientation week become my wife.

And while marriage has been amazing, it’s been such a blessing, we had to be intentional about our past, that our past doesn’t influence our future in a relationship that we have today. But the question I have for you all, the question I want you to think about as you leave here today, is how long will we allow inherited trauma to impact who we are today?

How long will we allow inherited trauma to impact the relationship that we form? And how long will we allow inherited trauma to impact the future of our families? Now, before we were married, while we were still dating, we took an exam called the ACES Assessment. By show of fans, how many of you have heard of the ACES Assessment? How many of you have taken the ACES Assessment? Quite a few people.

ACES stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. It’s one of the greatest predictors of our future outcomes. It assesses child abuse and childhood experiences as a public health problem. Based on your social and economic status, of where you work, live, play, and learn, some of us may have experienced more ACEs, or traumatic experiences than others. The ACEs Assessment is on a scale of one to ten. With one being the least amount of traumatic experiences, and ten being the most amount of traumatic experiences.

While we knew we had some things in our past we needed to work out and deal with, we were completely unaware of the score we would receive. And for me, while I took the ACES exam, I remember going question after question, marking a yes, and then another yes, and then another yes. And then, as heartbreaking as it was, we received our score. I had a score of a nine, and my wife had a score of a ten. The two highest scores you can receive on the exam. I guess for me on the bright side, this is one of the exams in my life where I did have a high score, so I was pretty happy about that. I’m like, hey, let’s celebrate that, you know?

But honestly, what’s the story behind the numbers? You see, two-thirds of participants have at least one or more ACE on the assessment. While one in five participants score at least a three or higher on the assessment. But let’s take it a step further. Taking it a step further, we have the different categories of ACEs. These categories of ACEs consist of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. These are the categories in which the assessment is based off of.

But let’s take it a step further. A step further than the numbers, and a step further than the categories themselves. I would like to highlight the iceberg. We see the tip of the iceberg is what we would like to show to the outside world; our actions, our behaviors, and for me for a long time, my accomplishments. The things we would like to highlight or showcase to the outside world.

But what’s underneath the tip of the iceberg? What’s underneath the tip of the iceberg, a lot of times is our traumas, our ACEs, our family histories, and maybe for you it’s something that many of us, that we’ve written down in a note cart that people would know about us, and something we have yet to deal with. And if we haven’t dealt with what’s underneath the tip of the iceberg, if we haven’t dealt with that yet, and it goes unaddressed, and it goes unresolved, it can easily become a part of our inherited trauma.

And then it doesn’t just become an inheritance just to you, it becomes an inheritance also for your children as well. And speaking of children, my wife and I wanted to wait at least four to five years before having children once we were married. But 2022 came rolling around, and one day she told me that her body starts to feel a bit different, and many of you know exactly what that means. So we decided to take a pregnancy test, and we saw two red lines. Two red lines that changed our life forever.

After a few Google searches, not knowing exactly what that meant, shocked, confused, we took five more pregnancy tests. We had to be sure. But August 2022 came, and we had our baby girl. And while being a parent has been such an eye-opener, has been incredible, has been amazing, I still have this sense of fear in my heart that, what if my generational trauma, what if my inherited trauma, the things that have been normalized for me as a child -the abuse, the neglect, the household dysfunction – what if what’s been normalized to me, becomes normal to her? What if my inherited trauma becomes an inheritance to her?

You see, all of our children are looking at us to lead them, to guide them, and to create the example for them, and looking at us to create their normal. But what happens when generational trauma becomes our normal? You see, when generational trauma becomes normalized, it turns into violence ripping apart families and communities. When generational trauma becomes normalized, it turns into substance abuse tearing apart entire family’s neighborhoods. And when generational trauma is normalized, it leaves nine-year-old boys like me, joining nearly half a million kids, a part of the foster care system in America.

So what do we do? How do we redefine the normal? How do we redefine the normal for ourselves, for families, and communities, and those around us? You see, if you were to draw a circle of 0.6 mile radius around a child’s home, you will be able to predict their future outcomes. Based on your environment, their education, neighborhood, and most importantly, parental influence. Yes, I believe that parental influence is the game changer. Of how we love, lead, and guide the next generation can make a world of difference.

In fact, studies showed that kids who grew up in a two-parent household are 40% more likely to graduate from college. And that’s just one aspect of parental influence. But all of us in this room, we play different roles. Some of you may currently be parents. Others may be parents down the line. And many of us know someone who’s raising a child.

So what are some simple but impactful things that we can do to make a world of difference for the society around us? Number one, the number one thing I believe we can do, is have a vision for our relationship, a vision for our relationship that consists of challenging one another to be a better version of ourselves.

Maybe it looks like you taking the ACES Assessment before you join together in a relationship. Maybe that looks like you going home, digging through your drawers, finding a note card, and writing something down that you’ve been through that people wouldn’t know by looking at you. And asking yourself, have you dealt with what’s on that note card?

The number two thing I would say, the number two thing we can do to redefine a normal is invest in the future of our children. Invest in the future of our children. While financial investment is amazing, it’s important, it’s incredible, I love it. But even more important, and even more impactful is investing in our children. What it looks like, is making sure that they can grow up and be loving and caring parents themselves, making sure that they become loving and caring parents themselves. But also being aware that we need to raise our children, knowing that how we treat them today, would be the same way they treat others when they become an adult.

And last but not least, easily most importantly, as a wise and amazing man once said, is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. While many of us play different roles, not all of us will be parents, but we can be amazing tutors, we can be incredible mentors, and we can all be loving neighbors. And as stated by Josh Ship, “Every child is one caring adult away from being a success story.”

So how can you be that caring adult? How can you redefine a normal? You must become intentional with the relationships that you form. You must invest in the future of our children. And simply, what you can do, is be one caring adult. Not only just working to help someone beat the odds, but change the odds for families and communities for generations and generations to come.

Thank you.

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