All About Communication
The following blog post is a culmination of many different ideas I have had related to the topic of communication. Each deserves it's own discussion, though find this as a summary list and read it on your own time. A list of topics covered:
1. How communication will be a new priority in education.
2. How I think school education on languages should change.
3. Why you should learn touch typing, read more fiction books and learn new languages.
4. AI CEO Journal – A new useful tool.
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How communication will be a new priority in education.
Observing new emerging technologies, I pondered on it’s impact in the scope of education. I came to the realization that a new priority and focus of education would be communication. With so many new tools (ChatGPT, Natural Language Processing, etc) and enhanced accessibility to vast troves of knowledge through the internet, one would only be as limited as their ability to communicate- express ideas, define/frame problems and understand solutions.
With regards to ChatGPT some believe in investing towards prompt engineering, but a counter argument that I heard and observed was that the AI can help you in framing your prompt as well. You may give it a general category and ask it to ask you smaller specific questions to create a good overall prompt. So that’s automated too. Then where do you need to be able to communicate? Well, if an AI can give you an elegant solution, someone still needs to be able to understand it well, implement it, and communicate it to others.
A cool thing now though is that this communication ability doesn’t necessarily have to be in English. As long as you are well versed and super fluent in at least one language you now have the tools to rapidly translate and work across languages.
Example: In an internship project I had a product to use that had documentation only in Mandarin. I had Google translate the pdf, and ChatGPT to interpret the translation accounting for translation errors by referencing it’s Mandarin interpretations, and comparing with similar guides. Some data was lost/mislocated in the image to text conversion but overall I could get a sense of the section titles and the information I needed and was able to successfully implement it into my project.
How I think school education on languages should change.
On the matter of communication with reflections on my school education, I wish CBSE/Indian Education Boards introduced more reading materials on diverse topics (from other cultures too) and contemporary (newer) works, enhancing vocabulary with new words, and introducing students to new ideas and different purviews of thinking. Also for some reason my school stopped teaching grammar and punctuation rules after a certain grade. Why? People have terrible grammar and don’t know where to use punctuation! I’m guilty too (although I still remember and follow some rules taught in fourth grade, for example the full stop comes before the closing bracket.) I would say I am not the greatest writer and try to focus on ease of expression of ideas by writing in a more conversational form than to use overly complex ideas and vocabulary. Though this view is biased to an extent as well as I only cater to a certain level of reading comprehension than a universally comprehensible one. Ah, as is with all other challenges in life, it is all about finding a balance. To this thought, the new ability people should teach is the ability to vary expression of ideas to cater to audiences of different comprehension levels / purviews of thinking.
Why you should learn touch typing, read more fiction books and learn new languages.
To be able to interact well with machines, until mind-reading ‘thought to text’ machines are widely available (yes they exist!), do consider in investing towards touch typing as well. I can’t type as fast as my thoughts, but it is pretty damn close and with it I am able to use a lot of tools rapidly by being able to quickly type up my request.
To all of you reading this, READ more fiction books. It quite literally is brain food. Every time I read a new book, my brain spews out poetry and essays with coherence and good vocabulary. Non-fiction self-help books are more of lists and broken down shorter ideas rather than longer coherent ideas and stories.
Learn a new language. If you are a monolingual that is a genuine pity as you are quite limited to just a single culture, and just one way of thinking, in a world so vast. They quite literally unlock new building blocks in thought processes and open you up to new ideas and forms of expression.* Learn a language that you can find people to practice with though, as otherwise maintaining motivation would be a bit challenging. Every single time you choose to converse with a new person you break the fear, an invisible barrier in your mind, and become just a little bit more confident. Speak, speak, speak and never stop.
*https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-speaking-multiple-languages-benefits-the-brain-mia-nacamulli
Be prepared to give a presentation literally any day in your life. Once my presentation partner had not showed up and I had to do the entire presentation by myself. Another time I was informed of a presentation for a seminar just the previous day itself. The only time when I have struggled with giving a good presentation is when it was one not communicating my own thoughts and ideas, rather just reading, and spewing out information that had to be mugged up. For a presentation I got creative and presented in a creative story form as an opening hook and the professor said don’t do all these theatrics. I still hold a grudge against him for that.
AI CEO Journal
Last thing I wanted to talk about- to anyone starting a new venture consider documenting your processes and thoughts into a single journal document. Starting a new venture is a challenge and just as important is finding and training successors. With the help of new NLP technologies an AI could analyse the entire text and help summarize it to new successors, personally tutoring them in it. As a founder or CEO, you could document the challenges you face, things you do, ways you think, how you handled different situations, company visions, etc. This goes back to the importance of communications skills and sharpening it now.
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Communicate. Talk, write and express. Don’t be afraid. If you reach a wide audience that’s great but as long as your ideas get to even one other person, then that’s an achievement.
“In a very real sense, we are all aliens on a strange planet. We spend most of our lives reaching out and trying to communicate. If during our whole lifetime, we could reach out and really communicate with just two people, we are indeed very fortunate.” - Gene Roddenberry, writer of Star Trek.
