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For The Future Indicative, Ep 5 Part 1
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome back to the Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 of our look at Nonprofits, the future has come calling, and these institutions of public beneficence must decide if they’ll accept the charges.
MATT BURRIESCI
“I heard Elon Musk talking recently, and he said that in the future, we won’t have video games or television or movies anymore. You’ll just tell AI, “I want to see a fourth season of Star Trek, the original season or whatever.” And it’ll just generate this content on demand for you.
Which is kind of frightening to think about…We’re not quite there yet but we’re approaching it within the next 5-10 years, I think, that will start to really impact society in a major way.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Matt Burriesci, who’s not only the Executive Director of the Providence Athenæum, but a fan of Star Trek. So am I. And as it’s relevant to the present topic, let’s nerd out for a minute and talk Trek while talking about AI.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, once said of his show, and I quote:
“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.”
Roddenberry saw a future where differences are not something to fear but embrace. He thought the worst possible thing was for humanity “to look and talk and act and think alike.”
Perhaps that’s why Elon Musk’s prediction is troubling.
MATT BURRIESCI
“We had Simon Winchester here last year. And he was talking about how we are approaching a point in which we are going to outsource our thinking– our very thinking–our cognitive labor is going to be outsourced to a machine. And something about that Musk quote about show me a fourth season of Star Trek, the original series or whatever—how dull that is, how derivative. We’re just gonna be living in this simulacra of a simulacra, you know what I mean? It’s just going to go on forever. There’s going to be no new original thought. It’s as if all of human creation has stopped in a way, in a frightening way.”
ALEX EFFGEN
We are at a crossroads of creative differences and artificial similarities. But Star Trek explored this scenario as well. Not Original Series, but Next Generation, where they employ a technology called the holodeck.
The holodeck is a plot device where Star Trek characters can experience three-dimensional simulations that allow the cast to go to the Old West, or play the role of private detective in pulp fiction noir.
In episode 3 of the second season, Federation android Commander Data and Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge go to the holodeck to recreate a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Data, as Holmes, has already memorized all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, and solves the simulation within minutes of entering the holodeck. And so they must instruct the computer to create a unique Holmes mystery with an adversary who is capable of defeating Data.
Enter Professor James Moriarty.
MATT BURRIESCI
“I can’t remember that episode…off the top of my head, but I seem to recall that Moriarty basically becomes sentient and starts running roughshod over the Enterprise, right?”
ALEX EFFGEN
That’s right, Matt. The hologram Moriarty, now made sentient and therefore creative, challenges the Star Trek crew not only in this episode, but later in Season Six.
Before we go full nerd, all of this is fiction. Speculative science fiction. But this fiction allows us to explore meaning. Data, a sentient android, is already familiar with the books. Once fed into the holodeck the computer creates derivative simulations until given the right prompt to create something also with sentience. The last I checked our AIs do not experience feelings or sensations, and therefore cannot create anything–regardless of prompt–with sentience. But the impact AI is having on our society, its adoption on search engines and deliverable output, you kinda wish it was sentient. Or at least correctly employed.
MATT BURRIESCI
“In the nonprofit sector, I think that could have enormously positive impact in some ways, like particularly on back-end operations for nonprofits, which is traditionally where they struggle.
At the Athenæum, I don’t think we’re going to be making widespread adoption of this technology. Maybe in some sort of search function or something like that. But it’s so big, it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around it.
This is not just another widget or database. This is a paradigm shift. This is an Industrial Revolution that’s occurring, an Information Revolution that is going to reshape society in very fundamental ways.”
ALEX EFFGEN
In many ways we’re still adjusting to the digital chasm created by the internet, and now, at the dawn of yet another technological revolution, we all need to SECURE ourselves from the next disruption. In part one, Matt made the case that the “Republic required citizens to be both informed and virtuous…It believed that the best way to do that was through history.”
Can that history provide us sentient human beings the experience of feelings or sensations necessary to secure ourselves from the next technological disruption?
MATT BURRIESCI
“I wrote a book on the great books of the Western world and I do look at those books. I do look at them and say, I’ve got a problem. Is there an example that’s similar to this in history that could inform me on how I should proceed, and how I should not proceed? Mistakes that were made.
One of my favorite books is Plutarch’s Lives because when you read that book, it’s like, here’s this person who’s remembered as this great person, and here’s all the terrible mistakes they made in their life. And I like to look at that and sort of reflect upon that with some diligence because those lessons do translate. They do translate across time.”
ALEX EFFGEN
And how does that translate to the Athenæum?
MATT BURRIESCI
“This institution was here for the Civil War. It survived the Civil War. It has seen very, very bad times before. It has seen the flu pandemic. It’s been through two world wars. It’s been through the Cold War. It’s been through Vietnam, it’s social unrest. So, there’s a tendency to doomsay and think, Oh, my God, this is like the worst thing that’s ever happened and we’re in the soup and it’s never going to get better.
But the past provides you with a great deal of perspective on the current crisis that you may or may not be facing. However tough it is, trust me, it’s been worse in the past. And, I like to look back at old annual reports, especially from times of crisis and see how they dealt with it. And it’s funny, during the pandemic, I went back and I looked at annual reports from the Athenæum that were around during the influenza pandemic. And they were so nonchalant about it. It’s sort of frightening. They’re like, Well, you know, 40 people have died from the pestilence, but we need a new iron fence.
So, they were just back to business and sort of dealing with the problems of the institution as they were.”
ALEX EFFGEN
But what are the problems of a nonprofit institution? And what are their cause?
MATT BURRIESCI
“The main thing that disrupts nonprofits is internal misalignment around missions. Everybody needs to be on the same page inside an institution: the board, the staff, and the members to some extent—what’s the big goal? What are we doing? Why are we doing it?
I think people have a need to feel that they’re part of something larger than themselves. That the institution comes before individual egos and all that, and my ego is included in that. There’s things that I would love to do that would satisfy my own ego. I would love to stock the shelves exclusively with works that I love.
But that’s not necessarily what members want. It’s not why the institution exists. So the biggest thing to me that really disrupts, it’s internal misalignment around mission. And another thing I think that could be talked about is incentives–external incentives to do things that are maybe not in an institution’s best interest.
So you have to get everybody aligned around the same mission, resist external pressure to do things that might not be in the best interest of your institution, and then deal with the external events as they come.”
ALEX EFFGEN
What are external incentives that are not in the institution’s best interest?
MATT BURRIESCI
“You see this a lot from funders, especially in the ’90s. At that time there was a whole idea that all nonprofits had to be run like a business. So every foundation grant you would get would be like, What are your metrics? What’s your ROI? And all that. And nonprofits don’t really exist in that space.
You know, I remember being part of PEN/Faulkner, and one of our programs was sending writers into schools, and I could report to foundations. I could say, “We did X number of author visits and we distributed X number of books.”
But what’s the value of teaching a kid to love reading? What’s the value of that? I can’t measure that. It doesn’t work like that in the nonprofit sector.”
ALEX EFFGEN
So how does it work?
MATT BURRIESCI
“There was a big change in philanthropy, really led by the Gates Foundation and that revolution. That incorporated this idea that we needed a top-down incentive model, where foundations would set broad social agendas or social engineering sort of ideas and then institutions would follow those incentives.
One of the ways that that manifested in the ’90s anyway, there was a big emphasis to do education programs for nonprofits. So nonprofits would, for example, start to develop these massive educational programs that were adjacent to their missions, but not really core to their missions. And they were doing it to satisfy funders. But then when the funding dried up, then they had this enormous infrastructure to support without the money to support it. And so it’s that kind of thing that happens a lot in philanthropy. Philanthropy is great. Institutional philanthropy is great. I’m not knocking it.
But one of the things that I try to think about all the time is sometimes you have people approach you and say, “Well, this so-and-so foundation will give you a lot of money if you do X.”
And if X is not aligned with your mission, you shouldn’t do X, if that makes sense.”
ALEX EFFGEN
We’ve come back around to that first principle delivering the product that addresses the need of its members, and provides them value. But sometimes addressing need and providing value requires SCALE to overcome disruption.
MATT BURRIESCI
“The pandemic was enormously disruptive to nonprofit institutions in a lot of ways. When we introduced virtual programs as part of the pandemic, that was a big game changer for us. I did an interview with Ann Patchett during the height of the pandemic. And a thousand people from seven different countries tuned into this event, which for the Athenæum is bizarre. We were reaching people in France and then we thought, Oh, this is the future.
And then the pandemic ended and attendance at online seminars dropped off the face of the planet. There was no resuscitating them. Nobody wanted it. Everybody wanted to be in person again.”
ALEX EFFGEN
So then how do nonprofits, in particular the Athenæum, expand?
MATT BURRIESCI
“There are the traditional ways that you expand in a local market. Partnerships are a big part of that. We have very important partnerships with the Rhode Island Children’s Film Festival, with Providence Children’s Film Festival, with a veterans initiative that’s very important here, the Providence Clemente Veterans Initiative, with Rhode Island School of Design, with all sorts of people. We try to partner with everybody and sort of cross-pollinate as best as we can.
And then the most important thing we did here was letting people know they could come in the building. If you walk to the front of the Athenæum, it’s a little intimidating. You don’t know if you can go in there or if you need some card or something.
So we made a big push to put signage in the front that just says, Come in. We want you to come in. Come in. Come in. And that’s made a big difference. Our visitorship last year was 71,000…it’s a lot of people.”
ALEX EFFGEN
And how did you get that number?
MATT BURRIESCI
“Grow incrementally, and overtime the big things will take care themselves. If you grow your membership base over a series of years, all of a sudden you have access to a larger donor pool. And then you have access to other avenues of partnerships and things like that. That’ll happen naturally.
If you do moon shots all the time, you’re not going to get there. If you’re prudent and you live within your means and you also try to modernize your systems as best we can.
Growth is, to me, incremental. It’s not sudden, even though it feels like we’ve had rapid growth here at the institution. It’s really a snowball. It’s a snowball that got started rolling down a hill, and now it’s picking up steam.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on The Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. The views expressed here are solely our own, but nothing is siloed or secretive. Feel free to contact IndicateMarketing.com and tell us if you find this content useful and edifying. And speaking of useful and edifying, please visit www.provath.org or stop by in person and stand in awe. On behalf of the Providence Athenæum and Indicate Marketing, we appreciate your patronage, and continued support.
