Category: Guest Post

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Key Insights to Help You Craft a Stronger Brand for Your Business

Branding targets what makes your business unique. Photo by Freepik.

22 MAY 2024 – The following is a guest post by Julia Mitchell, lifestyle consultant with Outspiration Network.

In today’s saturated marketplace, standing out from the crowd is more crucial than ever, and a strong brand can be the beacon that guides consumers to your door. Boosting your branding efforts isn’t just about slapping a memorable logo on your products or services; it involves crafting an unique identity, a compelling narrative, and an emotional connection that resonates with your target audience. Whether you’re a startup looking to make your mark, or an established company aiming to rejuvenate your image, this article will explore effective strategies and innovative approaches to elevate your brand above the competition and turn casual observers into loyal advocates.

Developing a comprehensive understanding of the core essence of your brand is absolutely imperative. It is crucial to thoroughly grasp the underlying values, mission, and unique attributes that distinguish your brand from competitors. Consistency in tone, messaging, and aesthetic presentation across all platforms are essential for enhancing your brand’s recognition and establishing a strong, resonant identity.

By maintaining a cohesive and uniform appearance and interaction style, you foster a deeper connection with your audience. Ensuring this consistency in all forms of communication and throughout the customer experience helps cultivate trust and enhances the memorability of your brand. This strategic consistency not only strengthens your brand’s image but also forges more robust and meaningful relationships with your audience, ultimately contributing to long-term loyalty and engagement.

Identifying the specific characteristics and preferences of your target audience is a critical initial step towards effective market segmentation and targeting. By gaining a deep understanding of where your potential customers congregate, whether it’s on particular social media platforms, forums, or other online communities, you can strategically tailor your marketing messages. This approach ensures that your promotional efforts align seamlessly with their daily online interactions and activities.

Moreover, it is essential to clearly communicate your unique value proposition. This involves demonstrating why your product or service is superior to that of your competitors and explicitly outlining how it addresses the specific needs, challenges, or desires of your audience, thereby enhancing their overall life quality or solving their problems. This strategy not only attracts attention but also fosters a connection that can lead to increased customer loyalty.

Perfect Your Business Knowledge

Earning a degree online offers the flexibility and convenience necessary for business professionals to enhance their skills without pausing their careers. When you choose to get a business administration degree online, you position yourself to acquire advanced business acumen and leadership capabilities. This degree equips you with the strategic insights needed to excel in the corporate world and drive transformative business decisions.

Additionally, the online format allows you to integrate your learning directly into your daily business activities, applying new knowledge and theories in real-time to your business challenges. This approach not only enriches your educational experience but also immediately benefits your business operations.

Understanding your competitors’ branding strategies can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses within your industry. Analyze their approaches to uncover opportunities to differentiate your brand uniquely for your target audience. While imitation is not the goal, leveraging insights from their tactics can refine and elevate your own. Regular competitor analysis ensures you remain competitive and your branding strategy stays relevant and forward-thinking.

Leveraging targeted advertising is key to enhancing your brand’s visibility and reaching your desired audience effectively. Invest in a diverse mix of channels, including social media, pay-per-click (PPC), and traditional advertising spaces, to maximize exposure. Analyzing the performance of your campaigns post-launch is crucial. This data-driven approach enables you to discern which strategies succeed and which falter, allowing for optimized future advertisements that resonate more profoundly with your audience.

In today’s digital landscape, online discoverability is vital. Implementing robust search-engine optimization (SEO) strategies significantly enhances your brand’s online visibility. This entails optimizing your website and content with strategic keywords to improve search engine rankings. Continuously monitoring your SEO performance and adapting your approach based on analytics and industry trends is essential. With SEO’s ever-evolving nature, staying informed and flexible in your strategies is crucial for maintaining and enhancing your online presence.

Update Your Marketing Strategy

Evolve your branding and marketing strategies in tandem with your business’s growth. Regularly review and refine them to keep them aligned with current market trends and industry dynamics. Engaging with your audience and soliciting their feedback provides valuable insights into their perception of your brand and areas for improvement. Adopting a flexible approach and being receptive to feedback ensures your branding remains effective and congruent with your business objectives.

Visuals are key to effective storytelling and branding. High-quality images, graphics, and videos not only boost your brand’s attractiveness but also sharpen message delivery. Uniform visual elements across platforms strengthen brand identity, fostering a consistent brand image.

Allocating resources to professional-quality visuals enhances your brand’s perceived value and communicative power. Collaborating with marketing professionals, such as graphic or web designers, often involves sharing complex design ideas, sometimes encapsulated within large PDFs filled with images. These hefty files can pose challenges when attempting to send them through email or online platforms. To facilitate smoother exchanges, you can compress these PDF files to reduce the size of your files quickly, ensuring they’re more manageable to transmit. Selecting an adept PDF compression tool is critical, as it guarantees the minimized file retains its original structure, quality of images, fonts, and overall content integrity.

Online reviews and feedback are incredibly influential in shaping perceptions of your brand. Actively monitoring customer feedback across platforms and responding in a timely and professional manner can mitigate negative impacts and amplify positive sentiments. Reputation management tools can help track and manage online sentiment, ensuring your brand maintains a positive image.

In summary, effective branding is at the heart of business success. By implementing the strategies outlined above, you can significantly enhance your business-branding efforts. Continuous monitoring, adaptation, and improvement are essential to keeping your brand relevant and resonant with your audience. Investing in your brand is investing in the future of your business.

About the Author

Julia Mitchell knew from a young age she wanted to have a career that made her excited to wake up every day. Now in a top-level position with Outspiration, a financial services firm, she’s got her dream job alongside multiple side-income entrepreneurial ventures. She is incredibly passionate about the activities that fill her days, she wants to share her adoration for her favorite lifestyle topics with the world and encourage others to turn their INspiration into OUTspiration.

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Look to Libertarians for a strong alternative to the Democratic establishment.

Mimi Robson image
Honor (Mimi) Robson, chair of the Libertarian Party of California Photo by Sander Roscoe Wolf

24 April 2019 – Pundits supporting the Democratic Party would have you believe that a vote for anyone other than whomever their party nominates for President in 2020 will be a vote for a second term for Donald Trump. I have been arguing that this is an extremely short sighted view that only serves the Democratic National Committee’s long-term purpose of maintaining the status quo.

Americans need a third party to break the political polarization gripping our national government under the two-party system and, at minimum, keep the existing parties focused on what matters to the American People right now instead of on partisan bickering.

The following is an invited guest post by Honor (Mimi) Robson, chair of the Libertarian Party of California that makes the case that the Libertarian Party is poised to provide that third alternative. Nearly all she says with reference to her home state of California can be said verbatim about politics in the rest of our country.

In April 2019 Robson was re-elected as chair of the Libertarian Party of California, and in the November 2018 election, she was the Libertarian candidate in the top-two run-off for California state assembly, District 70. This is reprinted with permission from a version published on March 24, 2019 in the Sunday edition of Inland Valley Daily Bulletin under the title “California needs a strong alternative to the Democratic establishment. Look to the Libertarians.” It appeared also in the 10 other newspapers of the Southern California News Group.

The Republican Party is finally realizing what the Libertarian Party has known for decades: California is best when the voters have options. Jessica Millan Patterson, Chair of the California Republican Party, recently wrote, “Republicans have both an opportunity and a responsibility to stand up and offer a viable alternative to the Democrats and give voters a real choice.”

However, other Republican leaders feel that the GOP isn’t the option Californians are looking for.

Soon after last year’s general election, Kristin Olsen, former Assembly Republican leader and current Stanislaus County Supervisor, wrote “the California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time. The Grand Old Party is dead.” So which is it?

What has been the cause of the Republican Party’s apparent demise in the state?

Perhaps it is because they concentrate on issues that are either irrelevant for or antithetical to Californians.

Perhaps it is because the party seems to have abandoned its former regard for limited government in order to appease a president that is wildly unpopular in this state.

Perhaps it is because they also seem to be doing a good job of identifying problems in the state but aren’t coming up with solutions.

The middle class is struggling in the state as they are burdened with the highest taxes and most stringent regulations in the country.

As a result businesses are fleeing the state and taking with them high paying jobs that could benefit many Californians.

In addition to jobs leaving the state, living here has become more expensive; we have a huge shortage of affordable housing.

And last, but certainly not least, we have an out of control public employee pension system; these pension liabilities are unsustainable and will ultimately bankrupt local municipalities and the state itself.

To solve the problems of California, we need to stop the unsustainable spending.

California legislators need to learn to spend within the state’s means rather than raising taxes on the top income earners who will continue to leave the state and take with them their tax dollars.

The Libertarian Party believes the first step is to reduce the many regulations that have forced so many businesses to find a more business-friendly environment.

The housing crisis could be alleviated by reducing the hurdles in place to build affordable housing.

A few simple steps we can take could help millions of people in the state.

And finally, the first step to handling the state’s pension debt is to renegotiate the contracts with the public employee unions.

As an example, when Jeff Hewitt was mayor of Calimesa, his city withdrew from their contract with CalFire and instead created their own fire department whose employees are enrolled in a traditional 401(k) retirement system; this simple step will keep the city from ultimate bankruptcy. This approach needs to be taken throughout the state.

In the last election season California Republicans lost seats in both state houses as well as representation in Washington. Between January 2018 and February 2019 the number of registered Republicans decreased by 2.5 percent while registered Libertarians increased 9.5 percent. Libertarians had a huge win in Riverside County when Jeff Hewitt was elected 5th District Supervisor over the Republican candidate, Russ Bogh, a former state assembly person with the deep pockets of the public employee unions behind him.

The Libertarian Party also ran candidates for state assembly seats in districts where Republicans didn’t even field a candidate. I was one of those candidates; in the 70th Assembly District I was the first Libertarian candidate to progress to the general election in a contested primary coming in ahead of Democratic and Green Party candidates to face off against the Democratic incumbent.

All of the Libertarian candidates running against incumbents in those seats were able to garner a significant percentage of the vote, with one of our candidates receiving approximately 40 percent of the vote in some of the counties in his district.

What does this mean? It means that Californians are looking for real change in the state. I think that the Libertarian Party offers much of this change, but I also believe in working with others when there’s common ground.

When I ran for office I said the beauty of electing a Libertarian is there are often times we can work with people on both sides of the traditional “aisle,” and I believe this more now than ever.

Honor (Mimi) Robson Bio

Honor (Mimi) Robson has been a registered Libertarian for over 3 decades and ran as the Libertarian Candidate for the 33rd District California State Senate in the 2016 General Election. In that election, with very little time or campaign funds she was able to attract support from her community, ultimately garnering almost 50,000 votes (22%). During the election cycle she became more involved in the California Libertarian Party, becoming Secretary for the party in February 2017 when the previous Secretary Resigned. She was unanimously elected secretary at the 2017 state convention; was elected chair at the 2018 state convention; and re-elected chair in April 2019. Honor ran as the Libertarian State Assembly candidate (70th District) in the top-two run-off election in November 2018.

Honor grew up in Southern California and has been a resident of Long Beach for the past 28 years. She is a Licensed Professional Civil Engineer and has worked at a small Structural Engineering Consulting firm since 1994 until recently resigning that position to become an independent engineering consultant, which will afford her more time to devote to the Libertarian Party of California. She has been involved with many charitable organizations such as AIDS Walk LA, The Alzheimer’s Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation however Honor’s main passion is animal rescue and has been involved at every level for many years.

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Americans are Ready for the Libertarian Party

Nick Sarwak Photo
Nicholas Sarwark is the Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee. Photo Courtesy Libertarian National Committee

13 February 2019 – The following is an invited guest post by Nicholas Sarwark, Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee

Republicans and Democrats often have a stranglehold on the U.S. political process, but Americans are ready for that to change.

According to a Morning Consult–Politico poll conducted in early February, more than half of all voters in the United States believe a third party is needed, and one third of all voters would be willing to vote for a third-party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. A Gallup poll from October showed that 57 percent of Americans think a strong third party is needed.

It’s no wonder why. Another Gallup poll from January revealed that only 35 percent of Americans trust the U.S. government to handle domestic problems, a number that increases to only 41 percent for international troubles. Those are the lowest figures in more than 20 years. A running Gallup poll showed that in January, 29 percent of Americans view government itself as the biggest problem facing the country.

This widespread dissatisfaction with U.S. government is consistent with the increasing prevalence of libertarian views among the general public. Polling shows that more than a quarter of Americans have political views that can be characterized as libertarian.

All of this suggests that the Libertarian Party should be winning more and bigger electoral races than ever. In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening. Out of the 833 Libertarian candidates who ran in 2018, 55 were elected to public office in 11 states.

One of those officials elected is Jeff Hewitt, who in November won a seat on the board of supervisors in Riverside County, Calif. while finishing up eight years on the Calimesa city council—three as mayor. Before being elected to the city council, he had served six years on the city’s planning commission. Hewitt recently gave the Libertarian Party’s 2019 State of the Union address, explaining how Libertarians would restrain runaway government spending, withdraw from never-ending wars abroad, end the surveillance state, protect privacy and property rights, end mass incarceration and the destructive “war on drugs,” and welcome immigrants who expand our economy and enrich our culture.

Journalist Gustavo Arellano attended Hewitt’s swearing-in ceremony on January 8. In his feature story for the Los Angeles Times, he remarked, “Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Hewitt just might be the strangest Libertarian of them all: a politician capable of winning elections who could move the party from the fringes into the mainstream.”

During Hewitt’s time as mayor of Calimesa, he severed ties with the bloated pensions and overstaffing of the state-run fire department. He replaced it with a local alternative that costs far less and has been much more effective at protecting endangered property. This simple change also eliminated two layers of administrative costs at the county and state levels.

Now Hewitt is poised to bring libertarian solutions to an even larger region, in his new position with Riverside County, which has more residents than the populations of 15 different states. This rise from local success is a model that can be replicated around the country, suggested Fullerton College political science professor Jodi Balma, quoted in the L.A. Times article as saying that Hewitt’s success shows how Libertarian candidates can “build a pipeline to higher office” with successful local races that show the practical value of Libertarian Party ideas on a small scale, then parlaying those experiences into winning state and federal office.

That practical value is immense, as Libertarian Laura Ebke showed when, as a Nebraska state legislator, she almost single-handedly brought statewide occupational-licensure reform to nearly unanimous 45-to-1, tri-partisan approval. This legislation has cleared the way for countless Nebraskans to build careers in fields that were once closed off from effective competition behind mountains of regulatory red tape.

The American people have the third party they’re looking for. The Libertarian Party is already the third-largest political party in the United States, and it shares the public’s values of fiscal responsibility and social tolerance — the same values that drive the public’s disdain for American politicians and wasteful, destructive, ineffective government programs.

The Libertarian Party is also the only alternative party that routinely appears on ballots in every state.

As of December 17 we had secured ballot access for our 2020 Presidential ticket in 33 states and the District of Columbia — the best starting position since 1914 for any alternative party at this point in the election cycle. This will substantially reduce the burden for achieving nationwide ballot access that we have so often borne. After the 1992 midterm election, for example, we had ballot access in only 17 states — half as many as today. Full ballot access for the Libertarian Party means that voters of every state will have more choice.

The climate is ripe for Libertarian progress. The pieces are all here, ready to be assembled. All it requires is building awareness of the Libertarian Party — our ideas, our values, our practical reforms, and our electoral successes — in the minds and hearts of the American public.

Nicholas Sarwark is serving his third term as chair of the Libertarian National Committee, having first been elected in 2014. Prior to that, he has served as chair of the Libertarian Party of Maryland and as vice chair of the Libertarian Party of Colorado, where he played a key role in recruiting the state’s 42 Libertarian candidates in 2014 and supported the passage of Colorado’s historic marijuana legalization initiative in 2012. In 2018, he ran for mayor of Phoenix, Ariz.

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Six Tips to Protect Your Vote from Election Meddlers

Theresa Payton headshot
Theresa Payton, cybersecurity expert and CEO of Fortalice Solutions. photo courtesy Fortalice Solutions

6 November 2018 – Below is from a press release I received yesterday (Monday, 11/5) evening. It’s of sufficient import and urgent timing that I decided to post it to this blog verbatim.

There’s been a lot of talk about cybersecurity and whether or not the Trump administration is prepared for tomorrow’s midterm elections, but now that we’re down to the wire, former White House CIO and Fortalice Solutions CEO Theresa Payton says it’s time for voters to think about what they can do to make sure their voices are heard.

Theresa’s six cyber tips for voters ahead of midterms:

  • Don’t zone out while you’re voting. Pay close attention to how you cast your ballot and who you cast your ballot for.

  • Take your time during the review process, and double-check your vote before you finalize it;

  • It may sound cliche, but if you see something say something. If something seems strange, report it to your State Board of Elections immediately;

  • If you see suspicious social media personas pushing information that’s designed to influence (and maybe even misinform) voters, here’s where you can report it:

  • Check your voter registration status before you go to the polls. Voters in 37 states and the District of Columbia can register to vote online. Visit vote.org to find out how to check your registration status in your state;

  • Unless you are a resident of West Virginia or you’re serving overseas in the U.S. military, you cannot vote electronically on your phone. Protect yourself from text messages and email scams that indicate that you can. Knowledge is power.

Finally, trust the system. Yes, it’s flawed. Yes, it’s imperfect. But it’s the bedrock of our democracy. If you stay home or lose trust in the legitimacy of the process, our cyber enemies win.

Theresa is one of the nation’s leading experts in cyber security and IT strategy. She is the CEO of Fortalice Solutions, an industry-leading security consulting company. Under President George W. Bush, she served as the first female chief information officer at the White House, overseeing IT operations for POTUS and his staff. She was named #4 on IFSEC Global’s list of the world’s Top 50 cybersecurity influencers in security & fire 2017. See her profiled in the Washington Post for her role on the 2017 CBS reality show “Hunted” here.

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The Future Role of AI in Fact Checking

Reality Check
Advanced computing may someday help sort fact from fiction. Gustavo Frazao/Shutterstock

8 August 2018 – This guest post is contributed under the auspices of Trive, a global, decentralized truth-discovery engine. Trive seeks to provide news aggregators and outlets a superior means of fact checking and news-story verification.

by Barry Cousins, Guest Blogger, Info-Tech Research Group

In a recent project, we looked at blockchain startup Trive and their pursuit of a fact-checking truth database. It seems obvious and likely that competition will spring up. After all, who wouldn’t want to guarantee the preservation of facts? Or, perhaps it’s more that lots of people would like to control what is perceived as truth.

With the recent coming out party of IBM’s Debater, this next step in our journey brings Artificial Intelligence into the conversation … quite literally.

As an analyst, I’d like to have a universal fact checker. Something like the carbon monoxide detectors on each level of my home. Something that would sound an alarm when there’s danger of intellectual asphyxiation from choking on the baloney put forward by certain sales people, news organizations, governments, and educators, for example.

For most of my life, we would simply have turned to academic literature for credible truth. There is now enough legitimate doubt to make us seek out a new model or, at a minimum, to augment that academic model.

I don’t want to be misunderstood: I’m not suggesting that all news and education is phony baloney. And, I’m not suggesting that the people speaking untruths are always doing so intentionally.

The fact is, we don’t have anything close to a recognizable database of facts from which we can base such analysis. For most of us, this was supposed to be the school system, but sadly, that has increasingly become politicized.

But even if we had the universal truth database, could we actually use it? For instance, how would we tap into the right facts at the right time? The relevant facts?

If I’m looking into the sinking of the Titanic, is it relevant to study the facts behind the ship’s manifest? It might be interesting, but would it prove to be relevant? Does it have anything to do with the iceberg? Would that focus on the manifest impede my path to insight on the sinking?

It would be great to have Artificial Intelligence advising me on these matters. I’d make the ultimate decision, but it would be awesome to have something like the Star Trek computer sifting through the sea of facts for that which is relevant.

Is AI ready? IBM recently showed that it’s certainly coming along.

Is the sea of facts ready? That’s a lot less certain.

Debater holds its own

In June 2018, IBM unveiled the latest in Artificial Intelligence with Project Debater in a small event with two debates: “we should subsidize space exploration”, and “we should increase the use of telemedicine”. The opponents were credentialed experts, and Debater was arguing from a position established by “reading” a large volume of academic papers.

The result? From what we can tell, the humans were more persuasive while the computer was more thorough. Hardly surprising, perhaps. I’d like to watch the full debates but haven’t located them yet.

Debater is intended to help humans enhance their ability to persuade. According to IBM researcher Ranit Aharanov, “We are actually trying to show that a computer system can add to our conversation or decision making by bringing facts and doing a different kind of argumentation.”

So this is an example of AI. I’ve been trying to distinguish between automation and AI, machine learning, deep learning, etc. I don’t need to nail that down today, but I’m pretty sure that my definition of AI includes genuine cognition: the ability to identify facts, comb out the opinions and misdirection, incorporate the right amount of intention bias, and form decisions and opinions with confidence while remaining watchful for one’s own errors. I’ll set aside any obligation to admit and react to one’s own errors, choosing to assume that intelligence includes the interest in, and awareness of, one’s ability to err.

Mark Klein, Principal Research Scientist at M.I.T., helped with that distinction between computing and AI. “There needs to be some additional ability to observe and modify the process by which you make decisions. Some call that consciousness, the ability to observe your own thinking process.”

Project Debater represents an incredible leap forward in AI. It was given access to a large volume of academic publications, and it developed its debating chops through machine learning. The capability of the computer in those debates resembled the results that humans would get from reading all those papers, assuming you can conceive of a way that a human could consume and retain that much knowledge.

Beyond spinning away on publications, are computers ready to interact intelligently?

Artificial? Yes. But, Intelligent?

According to Dr. Klein, we’re still far away from that outcome. “Computers still seem to be very rudimentary in terms of being able to ‘understand’ what people say. They (people) don’t follow grammatical rules very rigorously. They leave a lot of stuff out and rely on shared context. They’re ambiguous or they make mistakes that other people can figure out. There’s a whole list of things like irony that are completely flummoxing computers now.”

Dr. Klein’s PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Illinois leaves him particularly well-positioned for this area of study. He’s primarily focused on using computers to enable better knowledge sharing and decision making among groups of humans. Thus, the potentially debilitating question of what constitutes knowledge, what separates fact from opinion from conjecture.

His field of study focuses on the intersection of AI, social computing, and data science. A central theme involves responsibly working together in a structured collective intelligence life cycle: Collective Sensemaking, Collective Innovation, Collective Decision Making, and Collective Action.

One of the key outcomes of Klein’s research is “The Deliberatorium”, a collaboration engine that adds structure to mass participation via social media. The system ensures that contributors create a self-organized, non-redundant summary of the full breadth of the crowd’s insights and ideas. This model avoids the risks of ambiguity and misunderstanding that impede the success of AI interacting with humans.

Klein provided a deeper explanation of the massive gap between AI and genuine intellectual interaction. “It’s a much bigger problem than being able to parse the words, make a syntax tree, and use the standard Natural Language Processing approaches.”

Natural Language Processing breaks up the problem into several layers. One of them is syntax processing, which is to figure out the nouns and the verbs and figure out how they’re related to each other. The second level is semantics, which is having a model of what the words mean. That ‘eat’ means ‘ingesting some nutritious substance in order to get energy to live’. For syntax, we’re doing OK. For semantics, we’re doing kind of OK. But the part where it seems like Natural Language Processing still has light years to go is in the area of what they call ‘pragmatics’, which is understanding the meaning of something that’s said by taking into account the cultural and personal contexts of the people who are communicating. That’s a huge topic. Imagine that you’re talking to a North Korean. Even if you had a good translator there would be lots of possibility of huge misunderstandings because your contexts would be so different, the way you try to get across things, especially if you’re trying to be polite, it’s just going to fly right over each other’s head.”

To make matters much worse, our communications are filled with cases where we ought not be taken quite literally. Sarcasm, irony, idioms, etc. make it difficult enough for humans to understand, given the incredible reliance on context. I could just imagine the computer trying to validate something that starts with, “John just started World War 3…”, or “Bonnie has an advanced degree in…”, or “That’ll help…”

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I’d won $60 million in the lottery. I was being sarcastic, and (if you ask me) humorous in talking about how people decide what’s true. Would that research interview be labeled as fake news? Technically, I suppose it was. Now that would be ironic.

Klein summed it up with, “That’s the kind of stuff that computers are really terrible at and it seems like that would be incredibly important if you’re trying to do something as deep and fraught as fact checking.”

Centralized vs. Decentralized Fact Model

It’s self-evident that we have to be judicious in our management of the knowledge base behind an AI fact-checking model and it’s reasonable to assume that AI will retain and project any subjective bias embedded in the underlying body of ‘facts’.

We’re facing competing models for the future of truth, based on the question of centralization. Do you trust yourself to deduce the best answer to challenging questions, or do you prefer to simply trust the authoritative position? Well, consider that there are centralized models with obvious bias behind most of our sources. The tech giants are all filtering our news and likely having more impact than powerful media editors. Are they unbiased? The government is dictating most of the educational curriculum in our model. Are they unbiased?

That centralized truth model should be raising alarm bells for anyone paying attention. Instead, consider a truly decentralized model where no corporate or government interest is influencing the ultimate decision on what’s true. And consider that the truth is potentially unstable. Establishing the initial position on facts is one thing, but the ability to change that view in the face of more information is likely the bigger benefit.

A decentralized fact model without commercial or political interest would openly seek out corrections. It would critically evaluate new knowledge and objectively re-frame the previous position whenever warranted. It would communicate those changes without concern for timing, or for the social or economic impact. It quite simply wouldn’t consider or care whether or not you liked the truth.

The model proposed by Trive appears to meet those objectivity criteria and is getting noticed as more people tire of left-vs-right and corporatocracy preservation.

IBM Debater seems like it would be able to engage in critical thinking that would shift influence towards a decentralized model. Hopefully, Debater would view the denial of truth as subjective and illogical. With any luck, the computer would confront that conduct directly.

IBM’s AI machine already can examine tactics and style. In a recent debate, it coldly scolded the opponent with: “You are speaking at the extremely fast rate of 218 words per minute. There is no need to hurry.”

Debater can obviously play the debate game while managing massive amounts of information and determining relevance. As it evolves, it will need to rely on the veracity of that information.

Trive and Debater seem to be a complement to each other, so far.

Author BioBarry Cousins

Barry Cousins, Research Lead, Info-Tech Research Group specializing in Project Portfolio Management, Help/Service Desk, and Telephony/Unified Communications. He brings an extensive background in technology, IT management, and business leadership.

About Info-Tech Research Group

Info-Tech Research Group is a fast growing IT research and advisory firm. Founded in 1997, Info-Tech produces unbiased and highly relevant IT research solutions. Since 2010 McLean & Company, a division of Info-Tech, has provided the same, unmatched expertise to HR professionals worldwide.