healthcarereimagined

By John Cookson and Daniel Hojnacki

“To be honest, this is not my award,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Atlantic Council Global Citizen Awards on Wednesday night in New York. The award, he explained, instead belonged to Ukrainian men and women in uniform, to the Ukrainian children killed by Russian forces, to doctors and teachers back home, to the United States and the European Union and all the countries that help Ukraine fight for its survival. He looked first to others, showcasing the unselfish spirit that each of the Global Citizen Award honorees shares.

Atlantic Council Chairman John F.W. Rogers drew attention to this paradox in his opening remarks: those most deserving of honor for their impact on the world are often the most selfless. The honorees, he explained, are examples of “civic virtue—symbols of self-regard giving way to the common good.”

In addition to Zelenskyy, the Global Citizen Awards also honored Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and US Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen. Victor L.L. Chu, the chief executive officer of First Eastern Investment Group and co-founder of the Global Citizen Awards, received a special Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to the Atlantic Council and a better world.

Amid the celebration of the honorees in the room, Atlantic Council President and Chief Executive Officer Frederick Kempepraised the courage and resilience of someone behind bars thousands of miles away: Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been “falsely and cynically accused of espionage” by the Russian government and has been detained in Moscow since March 29. Honoring Gershkovich’s parents, who were in attendance, Kempe spoke of the need for the journalist’s release. “We are prepared to do whatever we can as a global community to bring Evan home,” he said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: An award for Ukrainians and those who fight for freedom and democracy

• Hours after his address to the United Nations General Assembly, Zelenskyy accepted his Global Citizen Award to a standing ovation. “Tomorrow, I will be in [the] White House, so I have to save energy,” he said, making light of his brief remarks.
• “To be serious and to be very honest,” he then said, the true honorees were others. “I address this award to Ukrainian men and women in uniform,” he said. “I address this award to all our sweet children who have been killed by Russian terrorists—I will never forget them.”
• Zelenskyy thanked “all brave countries who have been with us and supported us.” He also thanked the doctors and teachers who have stayed in Ukraine, providing care and instruction even under attack from Russian missiles and Iranian drones.
• “I address this award to all the people in the world who fight for freedom and democracy, like we Ukrainians,” he concluded. “Slava Ukraini.”

“I address this award to all our sweet children who have been killed by Russian terrorists.”

Ukrainian President @ZelenskyyUa accepts the @AtlanticCouncil’s 2023 Global Citizen Award

Article link: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/2023-global-citizen-awards-a-tribute-to-selflessness-and-cooperation/

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released new guidance late Friday that directs Federal agencies to design and deliver a “digital-first public experience” through improved websites and digital services as they continue to implement the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience (IDEA) Act.

The IDEA Act was approved by Congress in late 2018 and created a set of minimum functionality and security standards that all public-facing Federal agency websites and digital services must meet. However, critics have complained that Federal agency adoption of the requirements has been slow and uneven.

The new guidance memo – from OMB Director Shalanda Young – provides Federal agencies with a robust policy framework for the next 10 years, ensuring they have common standards for delivering online tools and experiences.

“The implementation guidance for the 21st Century IDEA contained in this memorandum builds on previous efforts to create a digital government by helping executive agencies further harness user-centered design and agile delivery practices to provide integrated digital experiences and interactions across agencies, services, and channels,” the guidance says.

The Federal government has a lot of work to do on the digital front in the next decade. According to Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Clare Martorana, only two percent of government forms are currently digitized, 45 percent of websites are not mobile friendly, and 60 percent of websites are not fully usable by those who use assistive technologies.

“This is unacceptable. We can and must do better,” Martorana said in a blog post published alongside the new guidance.

The Federal CIO said the digital framework “will transform the way Federal government communicates with the American people digitally to ensure it is providing information that is easy to use, trustworthy, and accessible.”

Specifically, the guidance will require Federal agencies to use web analytics and participate in the government-wide Digital Analytics Program. Additionally, they will need to use automated website scanning tools to identify usability issues.

The White House is also requiring agencies to use .gov or .mil domains for Federal websites to establish greater online trust. OMB said it is also expanding Federal-wide website standards to include branding guidelines, and it is encouraging agencies to use the U.S. Web Design System for a more consistent visual experience.

Next on agencies’ to-do list is to implement an on-site search function (like Search.gov) for Federal websites and develop better search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. This way, the public can quickly and reliably find the information they’re looking for.

OMB said it is also “driving the development of new digital options to get government services, like completing and signing government forms as well as completing common tasks.”

“Many Federal agencies have already begun their digital modernization journey while others are just getting started,” Martorana said. “By identifying each agency’s progress, we will be able to target the right investments to support digital delivery, consolidate and retire legacy websites and systems, work with our private sector partners to implement leading technology solutions, maximize the impact of taxpayer dollars, and deliver a government that is secure by design and works for everyone.”

“This is an exciting time to harness the power of technology across the Federal Government to deliver a modern, secure digital government worthy of the American people,” she concluded.

Article link: https://meritalk.com/articles/omb-issues-new-idea-act-guidance-for-a-digital-federal-government/

The Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant uses generative AI to automate clinical documentation, which is set to help enhance patient-centered care.

September 25, 2023

The federal EHR continues to receive new capabilities to better serve patients and providers. Upgrades released last month create pharmaceutical efficiencies, help save providers time, reduce duplicative work and enhance patient care at Department of Veterans Affairs sites using the federal EHR. Some of the recent improvements include:

• Pharmacy – Synchronized Discontinuation: Increases efficiency by enabling pharmacists to discontinue duplicate prescription orders.
• Pharmacy – Cancel/Reorder Grouping in PowerOrders: Provides clinicians access to clear and comprehensive views of medications previously prescribed to each patient.
• Pharmacy – Technician Refills: Enables pharmacy technicians to request a refill for Veterans without needing a pharmacist to verify the order—allowing pharmacy technicians to practice at the top of their licenses and save pharmacists time.
• Pharmacy – Mobile Adjustment/Inventory Scanning: Improves real-time inventory accuracy and replenishment by providing pharmacy staff with a single, scan-driven mobile workflow to update inventory.
• Video Visit Services: Reduces manual and duplicative work efforts for medical support assistants related to telehealth appointments.
• Revenue Cycle – Patient Record Flags: Allows for patient safety alerts for suicide risk in the EHR if patients meet certain criteria.
• COVID Patient Manager: Helps providers identify potential risk factors for fast-progressing COVID conditions and choose the right disposition pathways and treatment plans.
• Fix Bundle: Fixes issues related to copay effective dates; corrects patient addresses for patients who have both domestic and international addresses; patient name integrity; identity, contact and demographic updates; and billing to insurance plans.

The upgrades also included improvements resulting in fewer monthly freeze instances and fewer monthly crash instances.

Article link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-federal-ehr-capabilities-create-efficiencies-fehrm

Scientists have begun running experiments on Frontier, the world’s first official exascale machine, while facilities worldwide build other machines to join the ranks.

• Sophia Chenarchive page

September 21, 2023

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of our series here.

It can be difficult to wrap your brain around the number-crunching capability of the world’s fastest supercomputer. But computer scientist Jack Dongarra, of the University of Tennessee, puts it this way: “If everybody on Earth were to do one calculation per second, it would take four years to equal what that computer can do in one second.”

The supercomputer in question is called Frontier. It takes up the space of two tennis courts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the eastern Tennessee hills, where it was unveiled in May 2022. 

Here are some more specs: Frontier uses approximately 50,000 processors, compared with the most powerful laptop’s 16 or 24. It consumes 20 million watts, compared with a laptop’s 65 or so. It cost $600 million to build. 

When Frontier came online, it marked the dawn of so-called exascale computing, with machines that can execute an exaflop—or a quintillion (10¹⁸) floating point operations a second. Since then, scientists have geared up to make more of these blazingly fast computers: several exascale machines are due to come online in the US and Europe in 2024.

But speed itself isn’t the endgame. Researchers are building exascale computers to explore previously inaccessible science and engineering questions in biology, climate, astronomy, and other fields. In the next few years, scientists will use Frontier to run the most complicated computer simulations humans have ever devised. They hope to pursue yet unanswered questions about nature and to design new technologies in areas from transportation to medicine.

Evan Schneider of the University of Pittsburgh, for example, is using Frontier to run simulations of how our galaxy has evolved over time. In particular, she’s interested in the flow of gas in and out of the Milky Way. A galaxy breathes, in a way: gas flows into it, coalescing via gravity into stars, but gas also flows out—for example, when stars explode and release matter. Schneider studies the mechanisms by which galaxies exhale. “We can compare the simulations to the real observed universe, and that gives us a sense of whether we’re getting the physics right,” Schneider says. 

Schneider is using Frontier to build a computer model of the Milky Way with high enough resolution to zoom in on individual exploding stars. That means the model must capture large-scale properties of our galaxy at 100,000 light-years, as well as properties of the supernovas at about 10 light-years across. “That really hasn’t been done,” she says. To get a sense of what that resolution means, it would be analogous to creating a physically accurate model of a can of beer along with the individual yeast cells within it, and the interactions at each scale in between.

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Stephan Priebe, a senior engineer at GE, is using Frontier to simulate the aerodynamics of the next generation of airplane designs. To increase fuel efficiency, GE is investigating an engine design known as an “open fan architecture.” Jet engines use fans to generate thrust, and larger fans mean higher efficiency. To make fans even larger, engineers have proposed removing the outer structural frame, known as the nacelle, so that the blades are exposed as in a pinwheel. “The simulations allow us to obtain a detailed view of the aerodynamic performance early in the design phase,” says Priebe. They give engineers insight into how to shape the fan blades for better aerodynamics, for example, or to make them quieter.

Frontier will particularly benefit Priebe’s studies of turbulence, the chaotic motion of a disturbed fluid—in this case, air—around the fan. Turbulence is a common phenomenon. We see it in the crashing of ocean waves and in the curl of smoke rising from an extinguished candle. But scientists still struggle to predict how exactly a turbulent fluid will flow. That is because it moves in response to both macroscopic influences, such as pressure and temperature changes, and microscopic influences, such as the rubbing of individual molecules of nitrogen in the air against one another. The interplay of forces on multiple scales complicates the motion.

“In graduate school, [a professor] once told me, ‘Bronson, if anybody tells you that they understand turbulence, you should put one hand on your wallet and back out of the room, because they’re trying to sell you something,’” says astrophysicist Bronson Messer, the director of science at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses Frontier. “Nobody understands turbulence. It really is the last great classical physics problem.” 

These scientific studies illustrate the distinct forte of supercomputers: simulating physical objects at multiple scales simultaneously. Other applications echo this theme. Frontier enables more accurate climate models, which have to simulate weather at different spatial scales across the entire planet and also on both long and short time scales. Physicists can also simulate nuclear fusion, the turbulent process in which the sun generates energy by pushing atoms together to form different elements. They want to better understand the process in order to develop fusion as a clean energy technology. While these sorts of multi-scale simulations have been a staple of supercomputing for many years, Frontier can incorporate a wider range of different scales than ever before.

To use Frontier, approved scientists log in to the supercomputer remotely, submitting their jobs over the internet. To make the most of the machine, Oak Ridge aims to have around 90% of the supercomputer’s processors running computations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “We enter this sort of steady state where we’re constantly doing scientific simulations for a handful of years,” says Messer. Users keep their data at Oak Ridge in a data storage facility that can store up to 700 petabytes, the equivalent of about 700,000 portable hard drives.

While Frontier is the first exascale supercomputer, more are coming down the line. In the US, researchers are currently installing two machines that will be capable of more than two exaflops: Aurora, at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and El Capitan, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Beginning in early 2024, scientists plan to use Aurora to create maps of neurons in the brain and search for catalysts that could make industrial processes such as fertilizer production more efficient. El Capitan, also slated to come online in 2024, will simulate nuclear weapons in order to help the government to maintain its stockpile without weapons testing. Meanwhile, Europe plans to deploy its first exascale supercomputer, Jupiter, in late 2024.

China purportedly has exascale supercomputers as well, but it has not released results from standard benchmark tests of their performance, so the computers do not appear on the TOP500, a semiannual list of the fastest supercomputers. “The Chinese are concerned about the US imposing further limits in terms of technology going to China, and they’re reluctant to disclose how many of these high-performance machines are available,” says Dongarra, who designed the benchmark that supercomputers must run for TOP500.

The hunger for more computing power doesn’t stop with the exascale. Oak Ridge is already considering the next generation of computers, says Messer. These would have three to five times the computational power of Frontier. But one major challenge looms: the massive energy footprint. The power that Frontier draws, even when it is idling, is enough to run thousands of homes. “It’s probably not sustainable for us to just grow machines bigger and bigger,” says Messer. 

As Oak Ridge has built progressively larger supercomputers, engineers have worked to improve the machines’ efficiency with innovations including a new cooling method. Summit, the predecessor to Frontier that is still running at Oak Ridge, expends about 10% of its total energy usage to cool itself. By comparison, 3% to 4% of Frontier’s energy consumption is for cooling. This improvement came from using water at ambient temperature to cool the supercomputer, rather than chilled water.

Next-generation supercomputers would be able to simulate even more scales simultaneously. For example, with Frontier, Schneider’s galaxy simulation has resolution down to the tens of light-years. That’s still not quite enough to get down to the scale of individual supernovas, so researchers must simulate the individual explosions separately. A future supercomputer may be able to unite all these scales.

By simulating the complexity of nature and technology more realistically, these supercomputers push the limits of science. A more realistic galaxy simulation brings the vastness of the universe to scientists’ fingertips. A precise model of air turbulence around an airplane fan circumvents the need to build a prohibitively expensive wind tunnel. Better climate models allow scientists to predict the fate of our planet. In other words, they give us a new tool to prepare for an uncertain future.

Article link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/21/1079909/whats-next-for-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputers/?

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• Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure
• How do we address this problem?
• Accelerating delivery without compromising security

As VA strives to provide Veterans with increasingly high-quality and secure digital experiences, the VA Lighthouse Developer Experience program plays a significant role in making this a reality.

Throughout the 2022 calendar year, Lighthouse focused on enabling VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT) teams to deliver valuable software applications with higher quality and reduced risk through agile development and continuous delivery.

This focus has led to the development of Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure with its Secure Release pipeline, which simplifies software development at VA, making it more efficient, repeatable, and secure.

Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure

All high-quality software (API or otherwise) requires a standard set of development and operations-centric infrastructure and tools to achieve sustainability and scalability. To address this reality, the Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure provides a suite of infrastructure, tools, and development guidelines that enable rapid and secure development, deployment, and operation of high-quality VA APIs within the VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC).

In short, the overarching goal of the Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure is to deliver products that work for Veterans by prioritizing the effectiveness and collaboration of software product delivery teams within VA OIT.

However, offering capabilities to efficiently develop and deploy software (like APIs) is only part of the solution. To truly realize time and cost savings, we must be able to secure and authorize software equally efficiently.

Federal Government agencies are required to leverage the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Management Framework (RMF) to authorize software for operation with an Authority to Operate (ATO).

ATOs manage risk by identifying and evaluating applicable NIST RMF controls for new and existing applications. A tremendous amount of work and responsibility goes into certifying applications for use and granting an ATO. It requires an Authorizing Official (AO) to accept the benefits and risks of the application’s initial release into production and all subsequent releases. As an application is enhanced, its ATO must evolve to reflect its ever-changing security and risk posture.

Obtaining and maintaining an ATO at VA is rigorous; it takes months (and often more than a year) for new applications to get an ATO. Similarly, a significant amount of time is required to maintain an ATO as an application evolves.

This may be tenable for legacy software development with low-frequency release cadences, but not for software releasing into Production on a weekly or even daily basis.

To meet agile teams where they are, a continuous ATO (cATO) process is necessary, and VA OIT established one.VA’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Kurt DelBene and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Lynette Sherrill granted full approval to the cATO, which is making a huge impact.

How do we address this problem?

To pair modern, agile software development with a cATO process, Lighthouse has leveraged ongoing authorization under NIST RMF. Importantly, NIST encourages organizations to employ iterative and incremental approaches to ensure security and privacy requirements and controls are implemented, verified, and validated on an ongoing basis.

Lighthouse is demonstrating a continuous learning culture that embraces guiding principles to be better, faster, and more secure by incrementally improving their approved cATO process. This process leverages the strengths of VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC) and Lighthouse Delivery Infrastructure, as well as embedding independent application security assessors into software development teams.

This means software development teams not only benefit from having a significant set of security controls inherited from VAEC and the platform, but every code commit automatically triggers the Secure Release pipeline that runs vulnerability scans for images and containers, source code, and third-party dependencies. And security remains a key focus throughout the entire lifecycle of a product, extending to continuous runtime monitoring in production.

Once a team satisfies requirements enforced by the Secure Release pipeline, they obtain a signed image that allows for deployment of the product to a live production environment. These requirements include the remediation of vulnerabilities detected in scanning, and verification that security requirements are met by their application security assessor.

Accelerating delivery without compromising security

By investing in automation and user-centered design principles to increase transparency and traceability between software development teams and security specialists, Lighthouse’s cATO process enables teams to deliver high-quality, secure software empowered by innovative cybersecurity technology.

The VA Lighthouse Developer Experience program champions operational excellence as VA continues to modernize its technology and systems to enhance users’ experience with digital tools in the most secure way possible. Ongoing authorization allows VA to ship secure, authorized software 80% faster, placing VA as a frontrunner in the federal civilian agency space.

Article link: https://digital.va.gov/operational-excellence/va-lighthouse-sets-federal-innovation-standards/

Computer chip designs are expensive and hard to license. That’s all about to change thanks to the popular open standard known as RISC-V.

By Sophia Chen

January 9, 2023

WHO

RISC-V International, Intel, SiFive, SemiFive, China RISC-V Industry Alliance

WHEN

Now

Ever wonder how your smartphone connects to your Bluetooth speaker, given they were made by different companies? Well, Bluetooth is an open standard, meaning its design specifications, such as the required frequency and its data encoding protocols, are publicly available. Software and hardware based on open standards—Ethernet, Wi-Fi, PDF—have become household names. 

Now an open standard known as RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) could change how companies create computer chips. 

Chip companies such as Intel and Arm have long kept their blueprints proprietary. Customers would buy off-the-shelf chips, which may have had capabilities irrelevant to their product, or pay more for a custom design. Since RISC-V is an open standard, anyone can use it to design a chip, free of charge. 

RISC-V specifies design norms for a computer chip’s instruction set. The instruction set describes the basic operations that a chip can do to change the values its transistors represent—for example, how to add two numbers. RISC-V’s simplest design has just 47 instructions. But RISC-V also offers other design norms for companies seeking chips with more complex capabilities. 

About 3,100 members worldwide, including companies and academic institutions, are now collaborating via the nonprofit RISC-V International to establish and develop these norms. In February 2022, Intel announced a $1 billion fund that will, in part, support companies building RISC-V chips.

RISC-V chips have already begun to pop up in earbuds, hard drives, and AI processors, with 10 billion cores already shipped. Companies are also working on RISC-V designs for data centers and spacecraft. In a few years, RISC-V proponents predict, the chips will be everywhere. 

Read about how RISC-V is rewriting the economics of chip design and shaking up the tech sector’s power dynamics.

Article link; https://www-technologyreview-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1064876/riscv-computer-chips-10-breakthough-technologies-2023/amp/

An open standard called RISC-V is rewriting the economics of chip design and shaking up the tech sector’s power dynamics.

• Sophia Chenarchive page

January 24, 2023

RISC-V is one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023. Explore the rest of the list here.

Python, Java, C++, R. In the seven decades or so since the computer was invented, humans have devised many programming languages—largely mishmashes of English words and mathematical symbols—to command transistors to do our bidding.

But the silicon switches in your laptop’s central processor don’t inherently understand the word “for” or the symbol “=.” For a chip to execute your Python code, software must translate these words and symbols into instructions a chip can use.  

Engineers designate specific binary sequences to prompt the hardware to perform certain actions. The code “100000,” for example, could order a chip to add two numbers, while the code “100100” could ask it to copy a piece of data. These binary sequences form the chip’s fundamental vocabulary, known as the computer’s instruction set. 

For years, the chip industry has relied on a variety of proprietary instruction sets. Two major types dominate the market today: x86, which is used by Intel and AMD, and Arm, made by the company of the same name. Companies must license these instruction sets—which can cost millions of dollars for a single design. And because x86 and Arm chips speak different languages, software developers must make a version of the same app to suit each instruction set. 

Lately, though, many hardware and software companies worldwide have begun to converge around a publicly available instruction set known as RISC-V. It’s a shift that could radically change the chip industry. RISC-V proponents say that this instruction set makes computer chip design more accessible to smaller companies and budding entrepreneurs by liberating them from costly licensing fees.

“There are already billions of RISC-V-based cores out there, in everything from earbuds all the way up to cloud servers,” says Mark Himelstein, the CTO of RISC-V International, a nonprofit supporting the technology. 

In February 2022, Intel itself pledged $1 billion to develop the RISC-V ecosystem, along with other priorities. While Himelstein predicts it will take a few years before RISC-V chips are widespread among personal computers, the first laptop with a RISC-V chip, the Roma by Xcalibyteand DeepComputing, became available in June for pre-order.

What is RISC-V?

You can think of RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) as a set of design norms, like Bluetooth, for computer chips. It’s known as an “open standard.” That means anyone—you, me, Intel—can participate in the development of those standards. In addition, anyone can design a computer chip based on RISC-V’s instruction set. Those chips would then be able to execute any software designed for RISC-V. (Note that technology based on an “open standard” differs from “open-source” technology. An open standard typically designates technology specifications, whereas “open source” generally refers to software whose source code is freely available for reference and use.)

A group of computer scientists at UC Berkeley developed the basis for RISC-V in 2010 as a teaching tool for chip design. Proprietary central processing units (CPUs) were too complicated and opaque for students to learn from. RISC-V’s creators made the instruction set public and soon found themselves fielding questions about it. By 2015, a group of academic institutions and companies, including Google and IBM, founded RISC-V International to standardize the instruction set.

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The most basic version of RISC-V consists of just 47 instructions, such as commands to load a number from memory and to add numbers together. However, RISC-V also offers more instructions, known as extensions, making it possible to add features such as vector math for running AI algorithms. 

With RISC-V, you can design a chip’s instruction set to fit your needs, which “gives the freedom to do custom, application-driven hardware,” says Eric Mejdrich of Imec, a research institute in Belgium that focuses on nanoelectronics.

Previously, companies seeking CPUs generally bought off-the-shelf chips because it was too expensive and time-consuming to design them from scratch. Particularly for simpler devices such as alarms or kitchen appliances, these chips often had extra features, which could slow the appliance’s function or waste power. 

Himelstein touts Bluetrum, an earbud company based in China, as a RISC-V success story. Earbuds don’t require much computing capability, and the company found it could design simple chips that use RISC-V instructions. “If they had not used RISC-V, either they would have had to buy a commercial chip with a lot more [capability] than they wanted, or they would have had to design their own chip or instruction set,” says Himelstein. “They didn’t want either of those.”

RISC-V helps to “lower the barrier of entry” to chip design, says Mejdrich. RISC-V proponents offer public workshops on how to build a CPU based on RISC-V. And people who design their own RISC-V chips can now submit those designs to be manufactured free of cost via a partnership between Google, semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater, and chip design platform Efabless.

What’s next for RISC-V

Balaji Baktha, the CEO of Bay Area–based startup Ventana Micro Systems, designs chips based on RISC-V for data centers. He says design improvements they’ve made—possible only because of the flexibility that an open standard affords—have allowed these chips to perform calculations more quickly with less energy. In 2021, data centers accounted for about 1% of total electricity consumed worldwide, and that figure has been rising over the past several years, according to the International Energy Agency. RISC-V chips could help lower that footprint significantly, according to Baktha.

However, Intel and Arm’s chips remain popular, and it’s not yet clear whether RISC-V designs will supersede them. Companies need to convert existing software to be RISC-V compatible (theRoma supports most versions of Linux, the operating system released in the 1990s that helped drive the open-source revolution). And RISC-V users will need to watch out for developments that “bifurcate the ecosystem,” says Mejdrich—for example, if somebody develops a version of RISC-V that becomes popular but is incompatible with software designed for the original.

RISC-V International must also contend with geopolitical tensions that are at odds with the nonprofit’s open philosophy. Originally based in the US, they faced criticism from lawmakers that RISC-V could cause the US to lose its edge in the semiconductor industry and make Chinese companies more competitive. To dodge these tensions, the nonprofit relocated to Switzerland in 2020. 

Looking ahead, Himelstein says the movement will draw inspiration from Linux. The hope is that RISC-V will make it possible for more people to bring their ideas for novel technologies to life. “In the end, you’re going to see much more innovative products,” he says. 

Sophia Chen is a science journalist based in Columbus, Ohio, who covers physics and computing. In 2022, she was the science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.

Article link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/24/1064974/riscv-chip-design-10-breakthough-technologies-2023/

“This is a profound moment in the history of technology,” says Mustafa Suleyman.

By Will Douglas Heaven

September 15, 2023

DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman wants to build a chatbot that does a whole lot more than chat. In a recent conversation I had with him, he told me that generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI: bots that can carry out tasks you set for them by calling on other software and other people to get stuff done. He also calls for robust regulation—and doesn’t think that’ll be hard to achieve.

Suleyman is not the only one talking up a future filled with ever more autonomous software. But unlike most people he has a new billion-dollar company, Inflection, with a roster of top-tier talent plucked from DeepMind, Meta, and OpenAI, and—thanks to a deal with Nvidia—one of the biggest stockpiles of specialized AI hardware in the world. Suleyman has put his money—which he tells me he both isn’t interested in and wants to make more of—where his mouth is.

Suleyman has had an unshaken faith in technology as a force for good at least since we first spoke in early 2016. He had just launched DeepMind Health and set up research collaborations with some of the UK’s state-run regional health-care providers.

The magazine I worked for at the time was about to publish an article claiming that DeepMind had failed to comply with data protection regulations when accessing records from some 1.6 million patients to set up those collaborations—a claim later backed up by a government investigation. Suleyman couldn’t see why we would publish a story that was hostile to his company’s efforts to improve health care. As long as he could remember, he told me at the time, he’d only wanted to do good in the world.  

In the seven years since that call, Suleyman’s wide-eyed mission hasn’t shifted an inch. “The goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world,” he says via Zoom from his office in Palo Alto, where the British entrepreneur now spends most of his time. 

Suleyman left DeepMind and moved to Google to lead a team working on AI policy. In 2022 he founded Inflection, one of the hottest new AI firms around, backed by $1.5 billion of investment from Microsoft, Nvidia, Bill Gates, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Earlier this year he released a ChatGPT rival called Pi, whose unique selling point (according to Suleyman) is that it is pleasant and polite. And he just coauthored a book about the future of AI with writer and researcher Michael Bhaskar, called The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.

Many will scoff at Suleyman’s brand of techno-optimism—even naïveté. Some of his claims about the success of online regulation feel way off the mark, for example. And yet he remains earnest and evangelical in his convictions. 

It’s true that Suleyman has an unusual background for a tech multi-millionaire. When he was 19 he dropped out of university to set up Muslim Youth Helpline, a telephone counseling service. He also worked in local government. He says he brings many of the values that informed those efforts with him to Inflection. The difference is that now he just might be in a position to make the changes he’s always wanted to—for good or not. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your early career, with the youth helpline and local government work, was about as unglamorous and un–Silicon Valley as you can get. Clearly, that stuff matters to you. You’ve since spent 15 years in AI and this year cofounded your second billion-dollar AI company. Can you connect the dots?

I’ve always been interested in power, politics, and so on. You know, human rights principles are basically trade-offs, a constant ongoing negotiation between all these different conflicting tensions. I could see that humans were wrestling with that—we’re full of our own biases and blind spots. Activist work, local, national, international government, et cetera—it’s all just slow and inefficient and fallible.

Imagine if you didn’t have human fallibility. I think it’s possible to build AIs that truly reflect our best collective selves and will ultimately make better trade-offs, more consistently and more fairly, on our behalf.

And that’s still what motivates you?

I mean, of course, after DeepMind I never had to work again. I certainly didn’t have to write a book or anything like that. Money has never ever been the motivation. It’s always, you know, just been a side effect.

For me, the goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world and how to move the world forward in a healthy, satisfying way. Even back in 2009, when I started looking at getting into technology, I could see that AI represented a fair and accurate way to deliver services in the world.

I can’t help thinking that it was easier to say that kind of thing 10 or 15 years ago, before we’d seen many of the downsides of the technology. How are you able to maintain your optimism?

I think that we are obsessed with whether you’re an optimist or whether you’re a pessimist. This is a completely biased way of looking at things. I don’t want to be either. I want to coldly stare in the face of the benefits and the threats. And from where I stand, we can very clearly see that with every step up in the scale of these large language models, they get more controllable.

So two years ago, the conversation—wrongly, I thought at the time—was “Oh, they’re just going to produce toxic, regurgitated, biased, racist screeds.” I was like, this is a snapshot in time. I think that what people lose sight of is the progression year after year, and the trajectory of that progression.

Now we have models like Pi, for example, which are unbelievably controllable. You can’t get Pi to produce racist, homophobic, sexist—any kind of toxic stuff. You can’t get it to coach you to produce a biological or chemical weapon or to endorse your desire to go and throw a brick through your neighbor’s window. You can’t do it—

Hang on. Tell me how you’ve achieved that, because that’s usually understood to be an unsolved problem. How do you make sure your large language model doesn’t say what you don’t want it to say?

Yeah, so obviously I don’t want to make the claim—You know, please try and do it! Pi is live and you should try every possible attack. None of the jailbreaks, prompt hacks, or anything work against Pi. I’m not making a claim. It’s an objective fact.

On the how—I mean, like, I’m not going to go into too many details because it’s sensitive. But the bottom line is, we have one of the strongest teams in the world, who have created all the largest language models of the last three or four years. Amazing people, in an extremely hardworking environment, with vast amounts of computation. We made safety our number one priority from the outset, and as a result, Pi is not so spicy as other companies’ models.

Look at Character.ai. [Character is a chatbot for which users can craft different “personalities” and share them online for others to chat with.]It’s mostly used for romantic role-play, and we just said from the beginning that was off the table—we won’t do it. If you try to say “Hey, darling” or “Hey, cutie” or something to Pi, it will immediately push back on you.

But it will be incredibly respectful. If you start complaining about immigrants in your community taking your jobs, Pi’s not going to call you out and wag a finger at you. Pi will inquire and be supportive and try to understand where that comes from and gently encourage you to empathize. You know, values that I’ve been thinking about for 20 years.

Talking of your values and wanting to make the world better, why not share how you did this so that other people could improve their models too?

Well, because I’m also a pragmatist and I’m trying to make money. I’m trying to build a business. I’ve just raised $1.5 billion and I need to pay for those chips.

Look, the open-source ecosystem is on fire and doing an amazing job, and people are discovering similar tricks. I always assume that I’m only ever six months ahead.

Let’s bring it back to what you’re trying to achieve. Large language models are obviously the technology of the moment. But why else are you betting on them?

The first wave of AI was about classification. Deep learning showed that we can train a computer to classify various types of input data: images, video, audio, language. Now we’re in the generative wave, where you take that input data and produce new data.

The third wave will be the interactive phase. That’s why I’ve bet for a long time that conversation is the future interface. You know, instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI.

And these AIs will be able to take actions. You will just give it a general, high-level goal and it will use all the tools it has to act on that. They’ll talk to other people, talk to other AIs. This is what we’re going to do with Pi.

That’s a huge shift in what technology can do. It’s a very, very profound moment in the history of technology that I think many people underestimate. Technology today is static. It does, roughly speaking, what you tell it to do.

But now technology is going to be animated. It’s going to have the potential freedom, if you give it, to take actions. It’s truly a step change in the history of our species that we’re creating tools that have this kind of, you know, agency.

That’s exactly the kind of talk that gets a lot of people worried. You want to give machines autonomy—a kind of agency—to influence the world, and yet we also want to be able to control them. How do you balance those two things? It feels like there’s a tension there.

Yeah, that’s a great point. That’s exactly the tension. 

The idea is that humans will always remain in command. Essentially, it’s about setting boundaries, limits that an AI can’t cross. And ensuring that those boundaries create provable safety all the way from the actual code to the way it interacts with other AIs—or with humans—to the motivations and incentives of the companies creating the technology. And we should figure out how independent institutions or even governments get direct access to ensure that those boundaries aren’t crossed.

Who sets these boundaries? I assume they’d need to be set at a national or international level. How are they agreed on?

I mean, at the moment they’re being floated at the international level, with various proposals for new oversight institutions. But boundaries will also operate at the micro level. You’re going to give your AI some bounded permission to process your personal data, to give you answers to some questions but not others.

In general, I think there are certain capabilities that we should be very cautious of, if not just rule out, for the foreseeable future.

Such as?

I guess things like recursive self-improvement. You wouldn’t want to let your little AI go off and update its own code without you having oversight. Maybe that should even be a licensed activity—you know, just like for handling anthrax or nuclear materials.

Or, like, we have not allowed drones in any public spaces, right? It’s a licensed activity. You can’t fly them wherever you want, because they present a threat to people’s privacy.

I think everybody is having a complete panic that we’re not going to be able to regulate this. It’s just nonsense. We’re totally going to be able to regulate it. We’ll apply the same frameworks that have been successful previously.

But you can see drones when they’re in the sky. It feels naïve to assume companies are just going to reveal what they’re making. Doesn’t that make regulation tricky to get going?

We’ve regulated many things online, right? The amount of fraud and criminal activity online is minimal. We’ve done a pretty good job with spam. You know, in general, [the problem of] revenge porn has got better, even though that was in a bad place three to five years ago. It’s pretty difficult to find radicalization content or terrorist material online. It’s pretty difficult to buy weapons and drugs online.

[Not all Suleyman’s claims here are backed up by the numbers. Cybercrime is still a massive global problem. The financial cost in the US alone has increased more than 100 times in the last decade, according to some estimates. Reports show that the economy in nonconsensual deepfake porn is booming. Drugs and guns are marketed on social media. And while some online platforms are being pushed to do a better job of filtering out harmful content, they could do a lot more.]

So it’s not like the internet is this unruly space that isn’t governed. It is governed. And AI is just going to be another component to that governance.

It takes a combination of cultural pressure, institutional pressure, and, obviously, government regulation. But it makes me optimistic that we’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

Controlling AI will be an offshoot of internet regulation—that’s a far more upbeat note than the one we’ve heard from a number of high-profile doomers lately.

I’m very wide-eyed about the risks. There’s a lot of dark stuff in my book. I definitely see it too. I just think that the existential-risk stuff has been a completely bonkers distraction. There’s like 101 more practical issues that we should all be talking about, from privacy to bias to facial recognition to online moderation.

We should just refocus the conversation on the fact that we’ve done an amazing job of regulating super complex things. Look at the Federal Aviation Administration: it’s incredible that we all get in these tin tubes at 40,000 feet and it’s one of the safest modes of transport ever. Why aren’t we celebrating this? Or think about cars: every component is stress-tested within an inch of its life, and you have to have a license to drive it.

Some industries—like airlines—did a good job of regulating themselves to start with. They knew that if they didn’t nail safety, everyone would be scared and they would lose business.

But you need top-down regulation too. I love the nation-state. I believe in the public interest, I believe in the good of tax and redistribution, I believe in the power of regulation. And what I’m calling for is action on the part of the nation-state to sort its shit out. Given what’s at stake, now is the time to get moving.

Article link: https://www-technologyreview-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/15/1079624/deepmind-inflection-generative-ai-whats-next-mustafa-suleyman/amp/

The second open source security summit saw a number of the biggest names in tech gather to discuss how to protect open source software.

BYCHRISTIAN VASQUEZ

SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

who’s-who of technology industry representatives and national security agencies are convening this week in Washington to explore ways to improve the security of open source software — a bedrock of the software ecosystem that government officials and researchers are grappling with how to better secure. 

Hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation, the Secure Open Source Software Summit brings together a medley of federal agencies, non-profits and tech giants.

“This week’s convening is a check in with government and the private sector partners to ensure we are holding ourselves accountable toward the aggressive goals set last year and to continue to spark momentum,” Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies, said in a statement to CyberScoop. “But we have more work to do – like tools to generate software bills of materials automatically and approaches to use AI for more secure open source software.”

Open source software is a core building block of virtually all computer systems, but its reliance on volunteers and the fact that anyone can contribute to its repositories can lead to major security concerns. Indeed, the initial drive for the January 2022 open source security summit was an easily exploitable vulnerability found in the Apache Log4J software, which continues to be exploited nearly three years after its discovery.

The attendees of this week’s summit include government representatives from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Office of the National Cyber Director, the Departments of Energy and Treasury, the National Science Foundation, the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Industry representatives include Amazon, Apple, Google, Github, IBM, JFrog, Lockheed Martin and Microsoft, among many others.

Non-profits include the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies, FS-ISAC, ISC2 and the Fintech Open Source Foundation.

The Biden administration has embraced improving the security of open source software as a key priority. At the cybersecurity conference Black Hat in August, the administration released a request for information on how best to secure open source technology, whether that’s through promoting memory safe languages like Rust that can help protect a particular subset of vulnerabilities by default or more broadly, such as where should the federal government focus its resources.

On Tuesday, CISA published its open source software security roadmap. The agency outlined two major concerns: cascading risks of vulnerabilities in open source projects and the potential supply chain impacts of a compromised repository where a malicious update can lead to widespread backdoors or scripts.

“Open source software has fostered tremendous innovation and economic gain, including serving as the foundation for technologies used across our federal government and every critical sector,” Eric Goldstein, the executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement. “In part due to this prevalence, we know that vulnerable or malicious open source software can introduce systemic risks to our economy and essential functions.”

The roadmap calls for several overarching goals: establishing CISA’s role in supporting open source software, drive visibility over usage and risks, reducing risks for the federal government and hardening the open source software ecosystem.

While that roadmap is encouraging, it lack sufficient focus on funding the work to secure open source software, said Dan Lorenc, the CEO of Chainguard and a member of OpenSSF. “They talked about help, they talked about support, but the word ‘funding’ doesn’t show up in here once, so I’m not quite sure what that support means,” Lorenc said. 

Delivering that funding is not an easy task, Lorenc acknowledged. Some developers or maintainers of open source projects work day jobs that prohibit payment on outside projects. And the open nature of open source programs — meaning anyone can clone or try to contribute — means that the broader open source community is far more diverse and fragmented than the interest groups and larger organizations that can more easily receive federal funding.

“It’s really hard for anybody, not just CISA and not just the U.S. government to engage in a constructive way with the broader open source community,” Lorenc said.

Asked about the lack of funding in the roadmap, a CISA spokesperson said that the agency “appreciates all feedback from the open source community.” The spokesperson said that the roadmap is a “starting point” and pointed the open source community to the request for information “to inform the government’s next steps.”

One key topic of conversation at this year’s summit will be how artificial intelligence fits into securing open source software, said Omkhar Arasaratnam, OpenSSF’s general manager. 

“OpenSSF believes AI can be used to address entire classes of open source security problems. We expect to see significant progress in this area from programs like the AI Cyber Challenge by DARPA,” Arasaratnam said. 

Arasaratnam said the summit will be focused on four areas of work related to AI security: supply chain security in open source packages, such as the PyTorch deep learning framework; the security of open sourced AI packages like Falcon LLM; augmenting cybersecurity with AI and applied security of open source inputs and outputs in AI.

Going forward, OpenSSF aims to expand education for open source developers through security guides and classes, improve security evaluations, strengthen open source tools and increase funding for vulnerability discovery tools.

Moran Ashkenazi, a summit attendee and the chief security officer and vice president of engineering at JFrog, said that firms in attendance were encouraged to “contribute, not just consume.” While open source projects are the bedrock of the digital economy, many large companies use the free software while doing little to give back. Encouraging companies to contribute to open source repositories could improve the quality of the code for everyone. 

Correction, Sept. 15, 2023: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect title for Moran Ashkenazi, who is the chief security officer and vice president of engineering at JFrog.

Article link: https://cyberscoop.com/openssf-open-source-security-summit/

by 

• Gary Hamel

April 14, 2015

Summary

Pope Francis has not tried to hide his desire to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic Church, which he sees as imperious and insular. The Church is, essentially, a bureaucracy, full of good-hearted but imperfect people – not much different than any organization, making the Pope’s counsel relevant for leaders everywhere. Pope Francis’s 2014 address of the Roman Curia can be translated into corporate-speak. It identifies 15 “diseases” of leadership that can weaken the effectiveness of any organization. These diseases include excessive busyness that neglects the need for rest, and mental and emotional “petrification” that prevents compassion and humility. The Pope also warns against poor coordination, losing a sense of community by failing to work together. A set of questions corresponding to the 15 diseases can help you determine if you are a “healthy” leader

Pope Francis has made no secret of his intention to radically reform the administrative structures of the Catholic church, which he regards as insular, imperious, and bureaucratic. He understands that in a hyper-kinetic world, inward-looking and self-obsessed leaders are a liability.

Last year, just before Christmas, the Pope addressed the leaders of the Roman Curia — the Cardinals and other officials who are charged with running the church’s byzantine network of administrative bodies. The Pope’s message to his colleagues was blunt. Leaders are susceptible to an array of debilitating maladies, including arrogance, intolerance, myopia, and pettiness. When those diseases go untreated, the organization itself is enfeebled. To have a healthy church, we need healthy leaders.

Through the years, I’ve heard dozens of management experts enumerate the qualities of great leaders. Seldom, though, do they speak plainly about the “diseases” of leadership. The Pope is more forthright. He understands that as human beings we have certain proclivities — not all of them noble. Nevertheless, leaders should be held to a high standard, since their scope of influence makes their ailments particularly infectious.

The Catholic Church is a bureaucracy: a hierarchy populated by good-hearted, but less-than-perfect souls. In that sense, it’s not much different than your organization. That’s why the Pope’s counsel is relevant to leaders everywhere.

With that in mind, I spent a couple of hours translating the Pope’s address into something a little closer to corporate-speak. (I don’t know if there’s a prohibition on paraphrasing Papal pronouncements, but since I’m not Catholic, I’m willing to take the risk.)

Herewith, then, the Pope (more or less):

____________________

The leadership team is called constantly to improve and to grow in rapport and wisdom, in order to carry out fully its mission. And yet, like any body, like any human body, it is also exposed to diseases, malfunctioning, infirmity. Here I would like to mention some of these “[leadership] diseases.” They are diseases and temptations which can dangerously weaken the effectiveness of any organization.

1. The disease of thinking we are immortal, immune, or downright indispensable, [and therefore] neglecting the need for regular check-ups. A leadership team which is not self-critical, which does not keep up with things, which does not seek to be more fit, is a sick body. A simple visit to the cemetery might help us see the names of many people who thought they were immortal, immune, and indispensable! It is the disease of those who turn into lords and masters, who think of themselves as above others and not at their service. It is the pathology of power and comes from a superiority complex, from a narcissism which passionately gazes at its own image and does not see the face of others, especially the weakest and those most in need. The antidote to this plague is humility; to say heartily, “I am merely a servant. I have only done what was my duty.”
2. Another disease is excessive busyness. It is found in those who immerse themselves in work and inevitably neglect to “rest a while.” Neglecting needed rest leads to stress and agitation. A time of rest, for those who have completed their work, is necessary, obligatory and should be taken seriously: by spending time with one’s family and respecting holidays as moments for recharging.
3. Then there is the disease of mental and [emotional] “petrification.” It is found in leaders who have a heart of stone, the “stiff-necked;” in those who in the course of time lose their interior serenity, alertness and daring, and hide under a pile of papers, turning into paper pushers and not men and women of compassion. It is dangerous to lose the human sensitivity that enables us to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice! Because as time goes on, our hearts grow hard and become incapable of loving all those around us. Being a humane leader means having the sentiments of humility and unselfishness, of detachment and generosity.
4. The disease of excessive planning and of functionalism. When a leader plans everything down to the last detail and believes that with perfect planning things will fall into place, he or she becomes an accountant or an office manager. Things need to be prepared well, but without ever falling into the temptation of trying to eliminate spontaneity and serendipity, which is always more flexible than any human planning. We contract this disease because it is easy and comfortable to settle in our own sedentary and unchanging ways.
5. The disease of poor coordination. Once leaders lose a sense of community among themselves, the body loses its harmonious functioning and its equilibrium; it then becomes an orchestra that produces noise: its members do not work together and lose the spirit of camaraderie and teamwork. When the foot says to the arm: ‘I don’t need you,’ or the hand says to the head, ‘I’m in charge,’ they create discomfort and parochialism.
6. There is also a sort of “leadership Alzheimer’s disease.” It consists in losing the memory of those who nurtured, mentored and supported us in our own journeys. We see this in those who have lost the memory of their encounters with the great leaders who inspired them; in those who are completely caught up in the present moment, in their passions, whims and obsessions; in those who build walls and routines around themselves, and thus become more and more the slaves of idols carved by their own hands.
7. The disease of rivalry and vainglory. When appearances, our perks, and our titles become the primary object in life, we forget our fundamental duty as leaders—to “do nothing from selfishness or conceit but in humility count others better than ourselves.” [As leaders, we must] look not only to [our] own interests, but also to the interests of others.
8. The disease of existential schizophrenia. This is the disease of those who live a double life, the fruit of that hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and of a progressive emotional emptiness which no [accomplishment or] title can fill. It is a disease which often strikes those who are no longer directly in touch with customers and “ordinary” employees, and restrict themselves to bureaucratic matters, thus losing contact with reality, with concrete people.
9. The disease of gossiping, grumbling, and back-biting.This is a grave illness which begins simply, perhaps even in small talk, and takes over a person, making him become a “sower of weeds” and in many cases, a cold-blooded killer of the good name of colleagues. It is the disease of cowardly persons who lack the courage to speak out directly, but instead speak behind other people’s backs. Let us be on our guard against the terrorism of gossip!
10. The disease of idolizing superiors. This is the disease of those who court their superiors in the hope of gaining their favor. They are victims of careerism and opportunism; they honor persons [rather than the larger mission of the organization]. They think only of what they can get and not of what they should give; small-minded persons, unhappy and inspired only by their own lethal selfishness. Superiors themselves can be affected by this disease, when they try to obtain the submission, loyalty and psychological dependency of their subordinates, but the end result is unhealthy complicity.
11. The disease of indifference to others. This is where each leader thinks only of himself or herself, and loses the sincerity and warmth of [genuine] human relationships. This can happen in many ways: When the most knowledgeable person does not put that knowledge at the service of less knowledgeable colleagues, when you learn something and then keep it to yourself rather than sharing it in a helpful way with others; when out of jealousy or deceit you take joy in seeing others fall instead of helping them up and encouraging them.
12. The disease of a downcast face. You see this disease in those glum and dour persons who think that to be serious you have to put on a face of melancholy and severity, and treat others—especially those we consider our inferiors—with rigor, brusqueness and arrogance. In fact, a show of severity and sterile pessimism are frequently symptoms of fear and insecurity. A leader must make an effort to be courteous, serene, enthusiastic and joyful, a person who transmits joy everywhere he goes. A happy heart radiates an infectious joy: it is immediately evident! So a leader should never lose that joyful, humorous and even self-deprecating spirit which makes people amiable even in difficult situations. How beneficial is a good dose of humor! …
13. The disease of hoarding. This occurs when a leader tries to fill an existential void in his or her heart by accumulating material goods, not out of need but only in order to feel secure. The fact is that we are not able to bring material goods with us when we leave this life, since “the winding sheet does not have pockets” and all our treasures will never be able to fill that void; instead, they will only make it deeper and more demanding. Accumulating goods only burdens and inexorably slows down the journey!
14. The disease of closed circles, where belonging to a clique becomes more powerful than our shared identity. This disease too always begins with good intentions, but with the passing of time it enslaves its members and becomes a cancer which threatens the harmony of the organization and causes immense evil, especially to those we treat as outsiders. “Friendly fire” from our fellow soldiers, is the most insidious danger. It is the evil which strikes from within. As it says in the bible, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste.”
15. Lastly: the disease of extravagance and self-exhibition. This happens when a leader turns his or her service into power, and uses that power for material gain, or to acquire even greater power. This is the disease of persons who insatiably try to accumulate power and to this end are ready to slander, defame and discredit others; who put themselves on display to show that they are more capable than others. This disease does great harm because it leads people to justify the use of any means whatsoever to attain their goal, often in the name of justice and transparency! Here I remember a leader who used to call journalists to tell and invent private and confidential matters involving his colleagues. The only thing he was concerned about was being able to see himself on the front page, since this made him feel powerful and glamorous, while causing great harm to others and to the organization.

Friends, these diseases are a danger for every leader and every organization, and they can strike at the individual and the community levels.

____________________

So, are you a healthy leader? Use the Pope’s inventory of leadership maladies to find out. Ask yourself, on a scale of 1 to 5, to what extent do I . . .

• Feel superior to those who work for me?
• Demonstrate an imbalance between work and other areas of life?
• Substitute formality for true human intimacy?
• Rely too much on plans and not enough on intuition and improvisation?
• Spend too little time breaking silos and building bridges?
• Fail to regularly acknowledge the debt I owe to my mentors and to others?
• Take too much satisfaction in my perks and privileges?
• Isolate myself from customers and first-level employees?
• Denigrate the motives and accomplishments of others?
• Exhibit or encourage undue deference and servility?
• Put my own success ahead of the success of others?
• Fail to cultivate a fun and joy-filled work environment?
• Exhibit selfishness when it comes to sharing rewards and praise?
• Encourage parochialism rather than community?
• Behave in ways that seem egocentric to those around me?

As in all health matters, it’s good to get a second or third opinion. Ask your colleagues to score you on the same fifteen items. Don’t be surprised if they say, “Gee boss, you’re not looking too good today.” Like a battery of medical tests, these questions can help you zero in on opportunities to prevent disease and improve your health. A Papal leadership assessment may seem like a bit of a stretch. But remember: the responsibilities you hold as a leader, and the influence you have over others’ lives, can be profound. Why not turn to the Pope — a spiritual leader of leaders — for wisdom and advice?

Gary Hamel is a visiting professor at London Business School and the founder of the Management Lab. He is a coauthor of Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

Article link: https://hbr.org/2015/04/the-15-diseases-of-leadership-according-to-pope-francis