BURNT TOAST THINKING

 

 

When the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour they celebrated it as a massive victory.

They thought they’d won the war, but it was actually the point at which they lost the war.

How can that be, they sank or damaged 8 battleships?

That’s exactly the point, by removing America’s battleships they removed their ability to fight in the traditional way.

It forced America to rethink naval warfare in a completely different way.

The Pacific Ocean is vast, nearly twice as big as the Atlantic where naval battles had traditionally been fought between big ships exchanging gunfire.

The Japanese targeted the American battleships, thinking once they were out of the way they’d have the Pacific to themselves.

But what the Japanese hadn’t allowed for was the three American aircraft carriers that weren’t in Pearl Harbour that day, they were at sea, so they weren’t sunk.

The vast distances of the Pacific were a problem for slow, fuel-hungry battleships.

But airplanes could cover distances in hours that would take battleships days.

By destroying their battleships, the Japanese had forced America to concentrate on a new kind of warfare.

War where the opposing ships didn’t even see each other.

American aircraft carriers could launch attacks from hundreds of miles away, which made battleships obsolete.

Fighting this new kind of war, planes from US carriers sank three Japanese aircraft carriers and shot down 600 Japanese planes in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

Then, at Midway, planes from US carriers sank another FOUR Japanese aircraft carriers and shot down 300 more Japanese planes.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had the biggest, most powerful battleship in the world, the mighty Yamato, it was sunk by planes from aircraft carriers.

America won the war in the Pacific because it was forced into fighting a modern form of warfare after the Japanese destroyed their battleships.

This is a large-scale version of being forced to turn a problem into an opportunity.

On a more human scale, my daughter was telling me about ‘Burnt Toast’ thinking which recently became a viral topic across social media sites.

Suppose you are getting ready to go to work in the morning, you pop your bread into the toaster while you get dressed.

But your toast gets burned and you either have to scrape off the burnt part or put more bread in the toaster.

Either way, it throws your schedule off, you miss your train which makes you late for work.

Now you can either spend the rest of the day frustrated and angry at what you missed, stuck in only seeing the bad side of everything.

Or you can choose to see an upside – what might have gone wrong if you’d caught your train, and what good might come out of you missing it.

It sounds trite, but which is the more empowering way to lead your life?

One way you are at cause with life, the other way you are at the effect of it.

As Buddha said “Act, don’t react”.

Darwin is usually misinterpreted as ‘Survival of the fittest’.

Apparently, the actual point he was making is ‘Survival of the most agile’, those most able to adapt to changing conditions survive, those who can’t don’t.

I bet this is the situation with AI.

We can be terrified that it’s replacing us by copying what we do, or we can realise that all AI does is copy what we do.

It doesn’t have ideas; it doesn’t initiate anything,

It takes someone creative to have an idea, then they use AI to make that idea happen.

About 60 years ago, when people were terrified that the first computers were going to take their jobs, Carl Ally wrote a campaign line for IBM:

“Machines should work. People should think.”

I think that’s pretty much where we’re at with AI.

Chris Wilkins once said something that I think is appropriate: “It’s a tool and, like any tool, you can either hold it by the handle or the blade.”

History shows that change is always forced on us, those that survive see the change creatively, as an opportunity.

There’s no power in staying stuck in the problem.