In this updated and expanded edition of his groundbreaking book The Leader’s Brain, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt reveals how the latest advances in neuroscience — including new insights from artificial intelligence — are transforming our understanding of effective leadership. In the following excerpt from the book, Platt explains how leaders can adapt to new technologies like AI and help their teams do the same. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technologies.” — E. O. Wilson.... As a neuroscientist, I would modify his statement slightly to emphasize that we’re attempting to manage these godlike technologies not just with paleolithic emotions, but also with a Stone Age brain—neural architecture that evolved to handle the basic survival challenges of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, not to manage powerful tools that can transform how society works and how we think.
