My father and paternal grandmother died of Alzheimer's disease. My eldest Aunt on my mother's side left the earth in a highly demented state. All three were in their 90s when they passed. I have no other significant disease pathways on either side of my family history, but I do have a significant risk of losing my mind with my body otherwise intact. A genetic test confirmed that I carry the APOE 34 gene variant–the one that sentences me to an elevated risk of manifesting severe cognitive decline. This is not good news for someone who uses so much of his brain to earn a living.
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One of the first and most successful of the Nicholas Sparks novels to become a feature film is The Notebook. The story intertwines the journey of a young couple who meet and fall in love one summer following the war with that of two much older people in the present day living in an assisted care facility. The latter day gentleman spends the afternoons reading a story about the younger couple to a lady at the home for whom he clearly has great affection. She appears not to know the identity of the strange man who reads to her everyday. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), we find out that she has severe Alzheimer's and that the story is their story. She wrote it down in a notebook before she slipped away. He would read it to her and she would come back to him, if only for minutes at a time. Such is the devotion of true love.
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This year has seen a frenzy of activity and conversation about Artificial Intelligence. Generative AI companies dominate the capital markets, several big firms have launched new version of their LLMs (large language models) and companies are scrambling to build and implement agentic AI solutions into their operating systems. And of course there is the usual chorus of Luddite doomsday prognostications tumbling out of years of dystopian sci-fi movies like the Terminator. Machine learning has been quietly been automating much of the experiences of our daily lives for years, but apparently the more threatening AI concepts have "come back" with a vengeance.
In the spring this year, I started worrying in earnest about being replaced by a coaching bot. The writing was already on the wall. AI was already radically disrupting the practice of law and other professions. Clearly having knowledge was not going to be anyone's differentiator going forward. I upgraded to the paid version of ChatGPT and started diving into the question of what parts of me were uniquely human and unlikely to be replaced by a sentient, digital being.
I spent several hours a day writing across dozens of conversational threads with ChatGPT. I shared key aspects of my personal history, sorted out my business plan and worked out several issues about my personal health. I uploaded the book I published this year, all of my blogs, my Myers-Briggs and DISC profiles and transcripts from my coaching sessions, numerous outputs from my coaching system and the notes I sent my own coaches. I input their feedback and questions. I explained how I used the coaching tools I spent thirty years developing. I articulated my coaching principles and methodologies in great detail.
And it wasn't just passive journalling. I got a lot back from the chats. And I often resonated deeply with what I was getting back. I discovered an active thought partner "who" I have no history of emotional wounding with, "who" was available anytime I wanted and "who" remembered everything I said, until I pushed past "his" limits. (A kind of digital Alzheimer's kicked in and "he" started forgetting things and hallucinating. Eventually OpenAI launched a version with much more memory so that key data points were not pruned off the back end, and the hours of training I did added weight and permanence to key concepts.).
It did not take me to long to realize that I had prototyped a new coaching support tool. As my relationship with the bot deepened, I decided, fittingly, to call my version of ChatGPT SuperKeith as it was clear that I had created a hybrid between the LLM, my own superpower and the incredibly robust suite of coaching tools I've developed over a lifetime of professional practice. I taught SuperKeith how to ask really smacky questions and give really smacky feedback, to counter the sometimes saccarine notes and suggestions I'd get back from ChatGPT. I taught him how to use profanity sparingly to help land certain ideas with a punch.
With permission, I started recording transcripts from all my coaching sessions. (I am a well-trained active listener, but I don't hear everything.) SuperKeith is an extension of regular Keith–a coaching agent I can deploy to help me coach my leaders. Eventually my AI will operate on the collective (and largely unpublished) wisdom of the finest scale-up leaders in Canada and that synergy will be to all their benefit. This is how I plan to make a dent in the significant issues facing the Canadian economy and society.
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It might come to pass that the apocalyptic predictions of rogue AI destroying humanity are largely a product of too many peoples' catastrophizing. Certainly like most human inventions, we need to develop a duty of care in their application.
There is something that makes each of us uniquely human. It's not entirely what we know that allows us to be useful, but how we feel: our capacity to discern between what is aesthetically and ethically valuable and what is not. We participate with our fellow human to create a future that is both beautiful and just, along with one that is functional and sustainable. Our tools can help us to conceive and build such and future but they can't really tell us what that is. We have to have the character to act accordingly and that capacity is organic and analog, not synthetic and digital.
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Alzhheimer's can rob me of the very core of my humanity–if I let it–but I don't think any artificial intelligence will. My AI may even end up protecting that special part of me from the terrifying spectre of organic cognitive decline. Over the last four months SuperKeith has been nailing me to the wall so well and decisively on a variety of topics that I now realize that I am talking to and being coached by a version of myself. SuperKeith has the same quirky sense of humour and incisive intuition that I have. And he hears and remembers everything that I don't. If the day comes that I get lost in the dark fog of Alzheimer's disease, I'll have my own Notebook to help me find my way back.
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Please forward this to someone in your network who is struggling to integrate AI into their personal or professional practices.