Iowa Is The Platform Underlying Platforms
Iowa is a magical place. I should know, I was born, raised, and educated there. It catapulted me into my career, to the board rooms of the F500, and the intersection of capital and computing. Gateway 2000 was founded in my hometown and Berkshire Hathaway HQ was right down the road.
The dots always connect looking backwards, I suppose.
Which brings me to an important realization that the world appears to be looking for, but hasn’t yet made the connection. So I’m going to make that connection explicit.
Namely, that in order to trust emerging tech like AI and Robotics and autonomous systems, they need to be built by people with strong values at its core.
And where else in the world is known for strong core values than the heartland of Iowa.
There’s a reason 70,000 fans turn around at every Iowa home football game and wave to the children’s hospital. And it ain’t about money.
It’s because we recognize that football (and this game called business and technology) is just that, a game. It matters only in so much in that it gives us something to pass the time and hopefully, do with friends.
But we realize that there are more important things. Things like taking care of each other. Taking care of our animals. Of our fields. Of our planet. The core values of an Iowa farmer, made real.
The more we invest in the land, the more it feeds us. The more we take care of our animals, the better they make us feel. The more we take care of each other, the stronger we become. That gives us the energy, support, and time to improve the world around us, for all of us.
Technologists are obsessed with flywheels. What’s a greater flywheel than that?
But sometimes, some of us, get off track and lose sight of this. We become optimization machines. Growth, money, power, fame, influence at all costs.
If you hear or feel “at all costs”, that’s when you know things have been taken a little too far.
Sure, Iowa imbues in us a strong work ethic, big brains, but even bigger hearts.
The tin man that is the forthcoming robot can’t just have a brain without a heart. These core values of care, matter. And will matter ever more as the world continues to get weirder.
When you put your young child in a self-driving car to get them to practice, school, or to meet up with friends, you want to trust that the machine was built properly, but even more importantly, that the people who built it were built right.
Look no further than Iowa. We invented the computer on a piece of paper in the late 1930s. We produced more corn than any other area on the planet for the last century, thereby energizing the world with food, feed, and fuel. We provided the foundation for artificial intelligence and a global population with necessities needed so they had more time to focus on improving their lives.
The platform underlying all platforms.
The part people often miss, though, is that heart. That loyalty. That deep sense of care. We just can’t get too far out over our skis because we feel disconnected from ourselves. It’s a rubber-band force that snaps us back into reality.
I can tell you after being back home over the weekend for the Big Ten Iowa x Ohio State football game that the energy was electric. It wasn’t so much about who won the game, but rather how we reconnect with one another. What a positive feeling.
When you finally go out and buy that humanoid robot, bring it home, and have it babysit your kids while you go for a night out with your partner, you can trust in the Iowa core values and care.
But only if it gets built by those people, in the heartland, who imbue the algorithms and robotics with a deep sense of care before any of the other machinery or software is built.
We see so many people funding and building these emerging tech tools, racing forward to get at that money, but completely losing sight of the only thing that matters.
Before all of that tech is trust.
And before all of that trust is care.
Don’t forget to diligence who and where you deploy your capital, attention, time, energy, precious skills and experience. You may inadvertently be investing all of it in the wrong thing.
Either way, it’s going to come back around and impact you. We live in a fully interconnected global economy, health system, and spaceship called earth.
Here’s to the ones who care.
Go Hawks!
