The real issue is that many are unknowingly trapped by patterns that keep them earning income without Wealth is what you keep, grow, and own.

Symptoms of estrogen dominance: GI irregularities (bloating) Issues with metabolism Insomnia Increased belly kind, so let me be clear with you here: feeling constantly bloated, having irregular periods, excess belly

If the same issue keeps appearing, it means the system does not see what is happening inside itself.

Why Australian leaders keep putting this off There are a few reasons this keeps getting deprioritized The ones who keep treating wellbeing as optional keep wondering why retention is hard and productivity The only question is whether you're going to keep paying it the expensive way, or whether you're ready

Written by Dr. Mansi S. Rai, Public Sector Finance Researcher Dr. Mansi S. Rai is a public-sector finance researcher, author, and educator whose work spans digital taxation, economic policy, and public storytelling. She also shares insights on finance, career, and personal growth through her growing YouTube platform. History does not repeat because societies fail to learn. History repeats because systems are engineered to endure. This distinction matters. Across civilizations, empires, governments, and modern institutions, recurring patterns are often dismissed as coincidence or human weakness. In reality, repetition is neither accidental nor a moral failure, it is a structural outcome of how systems are designed, preserved, and modified over time. When examined through a systems lens, history reveals a governing principle: continuity precedes change. History as a systems phenomenon Civilizations do not reset themselves with each generation. They accumulate structure, legal frameworks, economic incentives, institutional habits, and governance norms, that persist long after individual leaders, ideologies, or eras pass. Empires rise and fall. Governments change. Technologies evolve. Yet the underlying architecture of systems remains recognizable because systems exist to stabilize complexity, not eliminate it. This is why historical outcomes often appear familiar, even when circumstances differ. The six structural drivers of historical repetition Through comparative historical analysis across political, economic, and institutional systems, six structural drivers consistently explain why history reasserts itself. 1. Interconnected power structures No system operates in isolation. Political authority, economic power, and social influence are relational. When one system shifts, adjacent systems adapt, not independently, but in response. These interdependencies create recurring cycles of expansion, consolidation, resistance, and reform. 2. Patterned human response within constraints While generations change, human decision-making occurs within inherited constraints. Incentives, risks, and rewards embedded in systems shape behavior predictably. When conditions align, responses follow recognizable patterns, regardless of era. 3. Institutional memory embedded in design Laws, regulations, and governance structures are cumulative. Amendments refine systems; they rarely replace them. Institutional memory, encoded in rules, procedures, and norms, anchors the present to the past. 4. Civilization-level behavioral constants Human ambition, fear, innovation, and conflict are constants. What changes are scale, speed, and expression? Systems translate these constants into outcomes, which is why technological progress does not eliminate historical recurrence, it accelerates it. 5. Complexity management, not complexity removal Successful systems do not simplify reality; they manage complexity. Periods of apparent stability often precede systemic stress, not because systems fail, but because success introduces new pressures that require structural recalibration. 6. System survival as the primary objective Above all, systems prioritize survival. Stability is not a flaw, it is the function. Radical reinvention threatens continuity, so systems evolve incrementally, preserving core architecture while adapting at the margins. The core insight: History repeats to preserve order History repeats not because societies are incapable of progress, but because progress occurs within boundaries. New leaders introduce ideas. New generations redefine priorities. New technologies reshape execution. Yet systems endure because they provide predictability, legitimacy, and continuity, without which civilizations fracture. This is why no government rewrites its entire legal framework from scratch. This is why economic systems reform rather than dissolve. This is why institutions evolve slowly, even under pressure. Repetition, therefore, is not regression. It is systemic self-preservation. Implications for modern governance and policy Understanding historical repetition as a systems law reframes how we evaluate institutions: Reform succeeds when it aligns with structural incentives. Disruption fails when it ignores foundational architecture. Sustainable change occurs when systems are redesigned from within, not attacked from outside. This perspective is essential for policymakers, regulators, economists, and institutional leaders operating in an increasingly complex global environment. Conclusion: The future is shaped by system-aware leadership History does not trap societies in cycles, it tests whether leaders understand the systems they inherit. Those who recognize structure can change outcomes. Those who ignore it repeat mistakes. The question, therefore, is not whether history repeats itself. The question is whether we understand the system well enough to guide its evolution. That understanding, not disruption alone, is what determines the future of civilizations. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dr. Mansi S. Rai Dr. Mansi S. Rai, Public Sector Finance Researcher Dr.Mansi S. Rai is a public service finance researcher, author, and speaker whose work focuses on digital taxation, financial governance, and the transformation of modern economic systems. Her research, published on platforms such as SSRN, explores how emerging technologies reshape nexus, apportionment, and public sector compliance. Dr. Rai is also an educator and storyteller through her YouTube channels, where she shares insights on finance, career developments, international student pathways, and personal growth. With an academic background in finance and accountancy, she is dedicated to making complex economic and policy concepts accessible to ga lobal audience. Her mission is to empower individuals with clarity and knowledge.

Place one hand gently on your belly. Inhale slowly through your nose for a count of 4, feeling your belly expand (not your chest). has been handed an incomplete map, and you've been navigating with it for years, wondering why you keep

Written by Patricia Kaulmann, Specialist for Biological Emotional Balance Patricia Kaulmann supports the balance between body and mind. She published the book "My Little Big Transformation" in Portuguese and German in 2024 and is a co-developer of HTGMusic, a supportive, energetic method with sound/frequencies. If you've thought this way before, I invite you today to develop a new perspective. The feeling of having done everything right, only to have the pain or symptom return after a while, frustrates many people. In the brain, such experiences are stored as "I'm incapable," "I can't do it," or "I've failed again." What often happens In my practice, I often heard the phrase: "I did everything, but the pain kept coming back." As a therapist, this made me both puzzled and curious. We already know that an emotional trigger initiates a cascade of reactions in the body. Many interpret this process as "I'm getting sick" or "something bad is happening now." But the body's biological laws say exactly the opposite: The system initiates regeneration and is ready to let go. However, what you're thinking right now, at this moment, is the command your brain is sending. When you think and feel something negative, your brain produces neurotransmitters and associated hormones. This increases stress in the system and thus halts potential regeneration. Conversely, when you think and feel positively, your brain reacts accordingly. The result of a positive reaction? Self-healing powers are activated. The question that then occupied me was How could I explain the experience positively in order to change this negative reaction? That was the moment I began to access my mental files and create new connections. If we have or create the wrong information within us, we react against ourselves. When we feel frustrated, we lose the motivation to continue. But it's important to remember here: Discipline leads to success, not motivation. Okay, now we can move on. A new perspective when symptoms are coming back From now on, I want you to see things differently when a symptom reappears. Body and mind block and heal together. If we look closely, the body begins to release something. More precisely, a symptom, or even several, will arise in an emotional context. All events in our lives are stored with emotion. Let's consider an explanation from Traditional Chinese Medicine. It's based on the five elements and the five primary emotions (anger, love, worry, fear, and sadness). These are essential for survival. The system wants us to survive, and that's how it's programmed. But note the crucial point: These five "primary emotions" can blend, creating subcategories. For example, frustration can be stored under both anger and sadness. Let's think mathematically: 5 emotions x 5 = 25. These blend again, and so on. Every event in life has a specific emotion stored within it. So far, so good? Now let's think further. Every emotion is linked to at least one organ (more precisely: at least one organ and one viscera, e.g., anger-liver-gallbladder). Therefore, you can have several events stored under just one primary emotion. Now comes the revelation: When an event is triggered and needs to be resolved, where do symptoms appear? If you were already thinking, "In the area linked to the primary emotion," you've now cracked the code. Meaning The solution is right under your nose, if I may say so. If you end something and the symptom "reappears," simply end it again because another old experience has been triggered and is ready to be released. So simple. So brilliant. Let go. You're living today. Why cling to the past or drag it along? Do you enjoy suffering? I'll leave you alone, okay? It's truly your decision. It's not what happened to you that's causing you suffering and blocking you, but the feeling you're clinging to today instead of choosing differently. You'll be a victim for life if you choose and behave this way. In medicine, they say that people find "advantages" in suffering. Sounds crazy, but it's true. And that's the majority opinion. Okay, I can only speak from my own experience as a therapist, from colleagues, and from books and training courses… Honest words Albert Einstein said: "Those who believe that others are to blame for their own dissatisfaction also believe that pencils make spelling mistakes." Sometimes we go through something that is "not" our fault. The Pareto principle applies here: We have 80% control over everything. Only 20% is beyond our control, and that's the external stuff. But I'm telling you in truth: No matter what those 20% were in your life, your reaction and what you do with them is 100% up to you. No excuses. No playing the victim. It might be harsh, but it's reality. As you've probably read before: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. That's not a play on words. Everyone should do that. The answer is always within you. Out there, you'll find ways to achieve what you want. You have to take action yourself; otherwise, you won't accomplish anything. Only you can heal yourself. You, like everyone else, have received the divine spark. Let it ignite. I wish you much love, the highest frequency in the world. When you love yourself and act on your passions and desires, you'll experience a different life. Yes, it will also have pain and depth. The difference? You'll be where you want to be. And by the way, one way to act is to listen to frequencies derived from amino acids, which provide your system with what you're lacking. You can find it as an app under HTGMusic. Thanks for reading. Follow me on Facebook , and visit my website for more info! Read more from Patricia Kaulmann Patricia Kaulmann, Specialist for Biological Emotional Balance Patricia Kaulmann helps people understand how they can activate their self-healing through their thoughts and emotions and how they can get rid of blockages and beliefs through emotional intelligence and energetically supported frequencies. The right mindset plays a major role in healing. For this, it is essential to understand your own body embryologically, biologically, and emotionally. This is where Patricia brings in her expertise. Everyone should have access to this information and be able to live happily.

Use shame and control as tools for keeping power. They offer affection selectively, create confusion, and keep you on an emotional rollercoaster.

behaviour, another problem remains: seeing what we do is not necessarily the same as understanding what keeps What professional situation keeps repeating despite your awareness of it? What do you keep promising yourself you will do differently once the pressure subsides? It is, "What is this leader still unable to see that keeps making the same behaviour necessary?"

Written by Annie Paraison, Founder of Love Before ALL LLC Annie Paraison, the visionary behind Love Before ALL, is a Cultural Architect who leverages over 17 years of leadership experience to demonstrate that love is a strategic necessity. She helps leaders, businesses, and communities operationalize love to optimize personal, organizational, and communal wellness and collective success. What if the most dangerous place to work for someone who believes in justice is inside a justice organization? What if the very institutions built to resist oppression are quietly practising it on their own people? This is not an indictment. It is an honest question from someone who has sat inside those rooms, felt the urgency in those walls, and watched brilliant, devoted human beings burn themselves down to the ground in service of a cause that would have benefited more from their sustained presence than their sacrifice. This article is an invitation, not a critique. It is a gentle and courageous reckoning with how we lead, how we heal, and what becomes possible when we finally decide that exhaustion is not a requirement of meaningful work. The gap between the mission statement and Monday morning Most organizations with a powerful external mission have a framed version of that mission on the wall. They put it in their annual reports and on their websites. They lead with it in fundraising pitches and board presentations. Then, more often than people say out loud, there is a quiet, persistent gap between what the mission says and what Monday morning actually feels like. That gap is not the result of bad intentions. It is the result of inherited systems. Systems built on urgency, extraction, and the belief that the cause is more important than the person carrying it. Those systems do not disappear simply because the organization's values are oriented toward justice. In many cases, they intensify because the stakes feel too high, the resources too scarce, and the need too pressing to slow down long enough to tend to the people doing the work. The data makes this visible in ways that can no longer be quietly set aside. The Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits 2024 report found that 95 percent of nonprofit leaders surveyed expressed concern about staff burnout, and 75 percent shared that burnout among staff was at least slightly impacting their organization's ability to achieve its mission. The nonprofit sector's turnover rate sits at approximately 19 percent, compared to 12 percent in other sectors. Perhaps most telling, in 2022, 22 percent of nonprofit employees lived in households unable to afford necessities like housing and healthcare. These are not staffing problems. They are relational and systemic ones, and they are costing organizations the very thing missions most depend on: committed, healthy, whole human beings. The people closest to the work pay the highest price If the burden of misaligned cultures is distributed unequally across organizational life, the research is clear about who carries the most weight. The Building Movement Project's Race to Lead survey, one of the largest datasets on race, leadership, and nonprofit work in the United States, draws on responses from over 12,000 nonprofit leaders and staff across multiple years. Their findings are unambiguous. Leaders of color reported that their pay was inadequate, their workloads were too demanding, and they were frequently called upon to represent people who share their racial or ethnic identity in ways that white colleagues were not. The Black Women Thriving 2022 report found that over 50 percent of Black women felt they did not have a shared sense of purpose at work, did not feel part of the team, and did not receive care and support from others. Black women, according to the Race to Lead report, were the most likely of all demographics surveyed, at 43 percent, to say that their race had negatively impacted their career advancement inside the very sector committed to justice. This is not incidental. It is the inherited system expressing itself. An organization can have justice as its external mission and still replicate the same hierarchies of value, the same patterns of extraction, and the same silencing of the people closest to the community it serves. Dr. Janaé Bonsu Love, writing for Candid, argues that high attrition among frontline nonprofit staff is not inevitable. It is driven by organizational conditions that leaders can address. The conditions are neither accidental nor unchangeable. This is not about blame, it is about inherited systems There is something important to name before we go any further: this article is not an indictment of leaders who care. Most of the people running mission-driven organizations are carrying enormous weight with enormous heart. They did not set out to create cultures of depletion. They were absorbed into systems that normalized depletion and called it dedication. The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change teaches that the six principles of Kingian nonviolence are rooted in love and designed as humane catalysts for genuine and lasting peace. One of those principles holds that nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people. That principle is essential here. The leaders and organizations described in this article are not the enemy. The inherited systems of control and compliance that they have absorbed are the obstacle. The goal is not to blame people for behaving like systems. The goal is to interrupt the systems with enough intention, courage, and compassion that something new becomes possible. That interruption requires a particular kind of gentleness. Not the gentleness that avoids hard truths, but the kind that holds space for them without collapsing into shame. Shame produces paralysis. Compassion produces movement. It is compassion, first offered to the self and then extended outward, that Love Before ALL has always understood as the engine of genuine organizational transformation. What the research confirms about compassion and sustainability The case for compassionate leadership is not sentimental. It is structural, and the research literature has been building it for years. A 2024 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Sustainability examined the relationship between compassionate leadership and work engagement across organizations, finding that compassionate leaders who actively engaged with their followers' needs, offered emotional support, and aligned their practice with social sustainability principles produced measurably higher levels of employee wellbeing and work engagement. The study concluded that compassion is not supplemental to organizational strategy. It is a driver of the outcomes organizations need to sustain their work over time. High trust organizations, those where leaders extend genuine care to their people, report dramatically different outcomes than their low trust counterparts. Research published by the Compassionate Leaders Circle, drawing on Harvard Business Review neuroscience data, found that compared with people at low trust organizations, people at high trust organizations report 74 percent less stress, 106 percent more energy at work, 50 percent higher productivity, 76 percent more engagement, and 40 percent less burnout. These are not marginal gains. They are the difference between an organization that depletes its people over time and one that sustains them. Gallup's 2025 data shows that employee engagement has slipped to a ten-year low, with only 31 percent of employees engaged at work, and that closing the global engagement gap could add 9.6 trillion dollars to global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The cost of disengagement is not abstract. It is the measurable result of what happens when organizations prioritize output over the people producing it. Healing is not a detour from the work, it is the work Love Before ALL was built on a foundational conviction that lasting change must begin from the inside out. The approach, Grow the Me, Grow the We, and Grow the Collective, is sequenced this way deliberately. Not because individual healing is more important than systems change, but because a dysregulated leader cannot build a regulated culture. A team that is running on depletion cannot sustain the pace of genuine transformation. A collective that has not tended to its relational infrastructure will fracture under the pressure of the very mission it is trying to carry. Healing is not a diversion from meaningful work. It is the mechanism that makes meaningful work possible over time. This is what the King Center understands in naming love as the foundation of nonviolent social change. It is what Dr. Shawn Ginwright articulates in asking whether we can heal the world without healing ourselves. The answer is no, and the organizations that are willing to take that answer seriously are the ones that last. What this looks like in practice is not a wellness program bolted onto an unchanged culture. It is a structural decision to treat the humanity of the people inside the organization as a nonnegotiable operational value. It means building repair into the workflow rather than treating conflict as a deviation. It means measuring wellbeing alongside productivity rather than choosing between them. It means creating the conditions for leaders at every level to prioritize their own self-awareness and self-trust, because self-trust is the foundation from which genuine service to others becomes sustainable. Compassion, intention, courage, and gentleness may seem like qualities that belong in a personal journal rather than an organizational strategy. But they are precisely what sustains change over time. They are what allow changemakers to stay in the work without being consumed by it. They are what create the space for people to reimagine new ways of being, of relating, and of healing inside the institutions they are trying to transform. The reimagining prompt What if we refused to accept that exhaustion is the mandatory price of doing meaningful work? What if the pace of change could be determined not by the urgency of the crisis outside but by the capacity of the people inside? What if we built cultures where the person closest to the pain was also the person best supported to do something about it? Here is what Love Before ALL believes that refusal could make possible. An organization that honors the Me inside its culture creates the conditions for staff to know themselves deeply enough to recognize when they are depleted before they disappear. It builds structures that invite rest, reflection, and repair rather than treating those things as signs of weakness or insufficient commitment. It extends to its own people the same care and regard that it extends to the communities it serves. An organization that cultivates the We inside its culture moves from a collection of exhausted individuals pulling in the same general direction to a genuine team that trusts one another enough to share the weight. Conflict is met with curiosity rather than punishment. The leader's well-being is considered as carefully as the program outcomes. Belonging is not a marketing promise but a daily practice. An organization that builds the Collective from that kind of relational foundation stops asking its people to choose between their humanity and their mission. It discovers instead that those two things were never in opposition, and that a sustained, regulated, genuinely supported person is not a less effective change agent than an exhausted one, but a more powerful one. This is not idealism. It is what the research has been pointing toward for years. It is what Love Before ALL has been building toward since 2020. An invitation to tend the people carrying the work If you are leading or working inside a mission-driven organization and you recognize the gap this article describes, this is not a moment for shame. It is a moment for intention. You did not create the inherited systems that normalized depletion. However, you have the power to interrupt them and advocate for a new way. Not all at once, and not alone. The interruption begins with a decision: that the people inside this organization deserve the same quality of care that we are committed to extending to the world outside of it. Love Before ALL exists to help leaders and organizations build that kind of internal culture, from the inside out, one relationship at a time. There are two ways you can begin the journey with us. Join the Love Before ALL (LBA) Connection Circle: Our free, 45-minute monthly session is a curated space designed to hold leaders' humanity without agenda or pitch. No performance is required. You simply show up. Request your seat here. Join the LBA Movement: Subscribe to the LBA Care and Clarity Update, our monthly resource for leaders navigating the intersection of personal wellbeing and organizational impact. Each issue includes a reflection tied to our monthly theme, a conversation from the Talk to Me podcast, and practical tools you can begin to practise the same week. Because love is not simply an idea or a sentiment. It is a strategy we live by. The people carrying the hardest work deserve to feel that love from inside the organizations they have given their lives to sustain. Join the movement Connect with Love Before ALL: Annie's LinkedIn, YouTube Channel, LBA Blog, Talk to Me Podcast Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Annie Paraison Annie Paraison, Founder of Love Before ALL LLC Annie Paraison is the visionary behind Love Before ALL, a consultancy optimizing wellness through the power of relationships. A proud Haitian-born leader, she journeyed from New York City to Vanderbilt University, igniting a passion for harnessing human potential and building "Beloved Community." With over 17 years of leadership experience and an Executive Master of Business Administration (MBA), she challenges the status quo by proving that love is a rigorous life and business strategy. She ensures no leader has to choose between impact and well-being by supporting the transformation of unconscious patterns into conscious compassion. Grounded in faith and guided by hope, Annie is committed to a world where personal and collective success are inextricably linked. Sources referenced: Givebutter, “Nonprofit Burnout: Top Statistics and Tips to Break the Cycle”, citing Center for Effective Philanthropy State of Nonprofits 2024 and Social Impact Staff Retention Project 2025. Mission Edge, “Talent, Burnout, and Retention: The Defining Challenge of the Nonprofit Workforce”, citing Center for Effective Philanthropy and Independent Sector / United for ALICE 2024 data. Candid/Dr. Janaé Bonsu Love, “Data Shows Why Frontline Nonprofit Workers Face Burnout and Turnover”, citing the Building Movement Project Race to Lead 2022 survey, October 2025. Johnson Center, “With Crisis Comes Change: Black Women and the Glass Cliff”, citing the Black Women Thriving 2022 report by Hines and Fitts Ward and Building Movement Project Race to Lead. Race to Lead/Building Movement Project, “Race to Lead: Women of Color in the Nonprofit Sector”, 2019. The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, “The King Philosophy: Six Principles of Nonviolence”. Pansini, Buonomo, and Benevene, “Fostering Sustainable Workplace Through Leaders' Compassionate Behaviors: Understanding the Role of Employee Well-Being and Work Engagement”, Sustainability, December 2024. Compassionate Leaders Circle, “Compassion Research Resources”, citing Harvard Business Review neuroscience of trust data. Mindful Leader, “Workplace Pulse: Fall 2025”, citing Gallup 2025 engagement data and McKinsey wellness research. Shawn A. Ginwright, PhD, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, Penguin Random House / North Atlantic Books, 2022.

One of the most vulnerable and honest questions we can ever ask ourselves is, “Why should I keep going It is about knowing you can bend, regroup, and keep going when you need to. So why should we not keep going in other situations? You only need to keep choosing yourself in small, steady ways. Seeing yourself as powerless keeps you stuck and undermines growth.

Written by Kass James, Healthcare Business and Disability Specialist Kass James is an assistive technology specialist with a master’s in management of information systems from the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. Fully licensed in ADA compliance and environmental access, he’s a partner at The Spoonie Advocate Associates. It has become impossible to discuss the future of business or IT project roadmaps without a serious conversation about artificial intelligence. But what do people mean when they are talking about AI? Schools, governments, and businesses discuss how to manage AI systems, yet they seem to know nothing about them. They talk about AI as though it were science fiction. Every website, lawmaker, tech billionaire, and IT professional seems to have a different opinion. When we talk about the cost and value of artificial intelligence, it often seems as though many of us are talking about different things. It is deeply frustrating for those of us in the IT industry when C-suite executives discuss AI without understanding it. It is going to upset a lot of people, but we must start with the fact that artificial general intelligence, known as AGI or “true artificial intelligence,” does not exist yet. Many things seem like AGI. They mimic it and are even claimed to be close to it, but they are not. Artificial general intelligence refers to a computer’s ability to make independent decisions, draw conclusions based on feelings rather than facts, adapt and change opinions fluidly, and approach “human” thought. We do not have it, and despite the claims of some incredibly wealthy people, we are not even close to cracking it. We are limited by current technology. Anyone who is trying to sell you or your company a “replacement” for your human workforce is selling you the pipe dream of AGI. It is, however, a goal of many companies to develop the next best thing. If AGI does not exist, what do they mean when they are selling AI? There are a couple of things that fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence, but usually, what is being discussed is a machine learning, or ML, algorithm. ML is the basis for every single AI system being pushed, and it is the only way we have to simulate intelligent decision-making. It is not actual decision-making, but rather a combination of data collection and a well-trained predictive algorithm. IT professionals train machine learning algorithms through data and repetition The system starts with data collection. The more extensive and up-to-date the data, the better. This is where many legal objections have been raised, as customer privacy remains a legal gray area. Common buzzwords such as “data mining,” “web mining,” and “scraping” all refer to the process of collecting large amounts of data. This is also what those large data centers are designed to store. The data is then sorted, categorized, and tagged with a range of characteristics. The algorithm is initially trained manually through supervised modeling and learning, allowing it to learn to “cluster,” or group, similar items. It then narrows its focus and excludes anomalies. Finally, it begins making structured predictions based on interactions with the data and users. These are not actual predictions. The algorithm uses statistical probability to produce results based on data points that often appear together. This is most often seen in systems such as YouTube and Netflix, where the algorithm makes recommendations based on the videos other users have watched. It does not, however, care whether the results are correct. AI algorithms are addicted to interaction, and you are their dealer The downside of how ML is developed and trained is that the systems only function if they focus on what drives interaction. This means the algorithm does not know or care whether the results are accurate, only that users interact with it often. This is the failure point for many of these systems. They will generate results that appear authentic based on the search terms if no results are found in the database. This is a problem for both businesses and legislators because these results are often mistaken for authentic information and have contributed to widespread misinformation. The reason for and burden of data centers Data centers are a necessary evil in this industry. The data collected and the computer infrastructure used to interpret it are massive and constantly growing. Nearly 400 terabytes are added to the internet every second, with an annual growth rate of 15 to 25%. The infrastructure used to gather and interpret the data also needs to scale accordingly. Unfortunately, the costs associated with these centers are not just monetary. They also include demands on infrastructure and natural resources. Water and power are necessary for cooling and operations. However, data centers seldom shoulder the burden of upgrading local infrastructure to meet these needs. In addition, data centers produce very few permanent jobs and contribute little to the local economy. Thus, it is understandable that communities oppose building projects in which local taxpayers shoulder the burden of infrastructure upgrades while seeing no long-term benefits. Data centers are necessary, but developers seem unaware that, if they want to build, they must budget for the necessary infrastructure. What is not AI or machine learning? Mistaking complex software for AI seems to be a common problem in education, where generative AI is understandably prohibited. Still, administrators do not realize that not all software designed to assist users is AI. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems may be used by AI systems to collect data and interact with users, but they are not generative AI. Similarly, basic spell-checking and grammar-checking software is not AI, but more advanced systems, such as Grammarly, may use AI to edit. Business systems such as basic chatbots, automated phone menus, and statistical analysis software are also not AI. So, where are ML systems used? The most common examples are search engines and data interpretation software systems. This is also the best use of AI. You ask a question and get results. These systems excel at the inhuman task of taking in trillions of data points, sorting them, and producing results based on statistical predictions. Brokerage firms have spent sums equivalent to the annual GDP of many first-world nations on these predictive analytics systems, and for good reason. Google has become synonymous with searching online by developing the best search algorithm money can buy. You also see the predictive side of these search engines in the recommendations from systems such as Netflix and YouTube. Targeted advertising is the second most common interaction you will have with machine learning. For better or worse, you are nothing but a dataset to a machine learning system, and the more it knows about you, the better it can try to sell you something. On the other side of that, digital marketing firms pay a premium to know what drives interaction and which advertisements are not engaging. Google’s and Facebook’s market dominance lies not in social networking but in targeted advertising and data mining. The more people interact with something, the happier that system is, and the more profitable it can be for an advertiser. Generative pretrained transformers, or GPTs, have become somewhat synonymous with AI, but they use all that data to generate a response that the algorithm believes will drive interaction. Systems such as chatbots and AI assistants can be extremely useful for providing immediate service to customers without needing to scale your customer support system. The problem with these systems is that falsehoods, errors, and “hallucinations” become more prevalent the more they are relied upon to generate new and unique data. Because they are trained to provide information based on likely interaction, these systems often create responses that look true but are incorrect assemblies of information. One of the most common examples occurs when professionals search for peer-reviewed research, and the GPT system provides the title of a paper that was never written, attributed to authors who have never worked together. Once again, the system is an addict and will do anything, including assembling bits of information to fabricate a result that looks like what you asked for, to get that interaction. Where AI really works, and we do not talk about this enough, is in making people more efficient. New video cards use AI to process data more efficiently. Data modeling and predictive systems for weather, natural resources, and healthcare reduce human error and save lives by predicting change. AI is also necessary for many programming languages, such as Python. Correctly applying AI can reduce errors and employee burnout while increasing workforce productivity. The value of AI lies in how you use it It is important to remember that AI is not inherently good or bad. It depends on how it is trusted and applied. ChatGPT is not your friend or personal assistant, but using it to gain a new perspective can make you a more effective leader. The best AI tools for programmers do not replace them, but AI-assisted development can make your team less prone to errors. Chatbots streamline your customer support system, but you will always need a human to tackle complex issues. Healthcare systems such as AlphaFold 3 allow us to fully sequence and model DNA in days rather than months or years, yet scientists are still needed to interpret and use that information. Effective use of AI can make a company more effective, but relying on these systems or using them to replace humans completely is where everything falls apart. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kass James Kass James, Healthcare Business and Disability Specialist Kass James is a forerunner in the field of disability rights, corporate responsibility, and healthcare business. Having been physically disabled for most of his life, Kass was acutely aware of the lack of accessibility in the workplace. His work focuses on restructuring healthcare to increase profitability while benefiting patients, as well as doing patient assessments for ADA compliance and assistive technology. He’s a partner with the Spoonie Advocate Associates, an organization pushing for increasing value and patient outcomes through common sense and responsible change.