Too busy to read it all? Try these books, blogs, webcasts, websites and other info resources curated by CCBJ especially for corporate counsel and legal ops professionals.
BLOG: 10 Things You Need to Know as In-house Counsel
In his latest 10 Things post, Sterling Miller tackles a hard topic: hard conversations. Most of us avoid unpleasant discussions because we don’t want to be the bad guy. “For in-house lawyers, it’s an even more arduous chore because – while lawyers are usually great when arguing for a client or for a client’s position – we are the worst at having discussions involving ourselves.” Miller offer nine bits of advice followed by a short list of useful resources from sources such as Harvard Business Review (“How to Handle Difficult Conversations at Work”). Here’s a sample of his advice: Don’t avoid it (“Clearing the air needs to happen sooner rather than later because there is a cost to inaction, usually in the form of your unhappiness at work, low morale among the team, or a toxic work environment that may lead to regrettable attrition – good people heading out the door, leaving you with the ‘problem’ that you should have dealt with much sooner.” Use active listening (“Active listening, compassion, and empathy are incredibly valuable tools when dealing with other people, especially when there is friction or problems” Reframe it. “One trick I learned early as I was failing and flailing in my early efforts at having hard conversations was to flip the problem on its head. That is, instead of dreading the conversation as something negative, get excited about resolving the problem.”) Read more at Miller’s blog.
PUBLICATION: MIT Technology Review
In this piece, Open AI’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, opens up to MIT Technology Review about what the company is doing to keep super-intelligence from going rogue. For example, “Sutskever thinks ChatGPT just might be conscious (if you squint). He thinks the world needs to wake up to the true power of the technology his company and others are racing to create. And he thinks some humans will one day choose to merge with machines.” As if that’s not enough to get your head spinning, Sutskever says ChatGPT, which has already rewritten a lot of people’s expectations about what’s coming, is “turning will never happen into will happen faster than you think.” “It’s important to talk about where it’s all headed,”he says, before predicting the development of artificial general intelligence (by which he means machines as smart as humans) as if it were as sure a bet as another iPhone. “At some point we really will have AGI. Maybe OpenAI will build it. Maybe some other company will build it.” It’s this train of thought, according to MIT Tech, that has led Sutskever to make the biggest shift of his career – setting up a team that will focus on what they call “superalignment.” Check out MIT Technology Review for how humans may merge with AI.
Published November 30, 2023.
