What Happens to All That Experience?
I recently spoke about AI and AI related scams to the Bagel Boys at the Myerberg Senior Center in Baltimore.
It was one of the more energetic groups I’ve spoken with.
Lots of questions.
Lots of opinions.
Lots of curiosity.
And definitely no shortage of people willing to challenge me.
But as I looked around the room, something else struck me.
These weren’t simply a group of seniors interested in learning about artificial intelligence.
Sitting in front of me were former executives, law firm partners, business owners and professionals who had spent decades building organizations, managing people, raising families, solving problems and making difficult decisions.
And I started wondering:
What happens to all of that experience when we retire?
We spend a lot of time talking about developing the next generation of leaders.
But sitting in that room reminded me how much knowledge and experience already exists within our communities.
Decades of it.
People who have made mistakes.
Built things.
Lost things.
Succeeded.
Failed.
Managed through difficult moments.
Watched industries change.
Watched the world change.
And they’re still curious about what’s coming next.
That last part is really what stuck with me
These were people who didn’t need to learn about AI for their next promotion.
They weren’t worried about whether it would make them more productive at work.
They were there because they wanted to understand it.
They were curious.
There’s something pretty great about that.
And there was also an irony I couldn’t stop thinking about.
We are spending enormous amounts of money building artificial intelligence systems that can capture, organize and give us access to incredible amounts of information.
Meanwhile, some of our greatest repositories of human experience are sitting together eating bagels on a weekday morning.
What are we doing with all of that?
I’m not suggesting everyone who retires needs another job.
Quite the opposite.
But I wonder if we’re creative enough about how we tap into the experience sitting inside our communities.
Mentoring a younger leader.
Helping a nonprofit think through a problem.
Advising an entrepreneur.
Teaching.
Coaching.
Making an introduction.
Or simply sharing the story of something that went terribly wrong 30 years ago and what they learned from it.
AI can give us enormous amounts of information.
But information and experience aren’t the same thing.
Experience comes from living through something.
From making the decision without knowing how it would turn out.
From getting it wrong.
From dealing with people.
From seeing what happens over time.
That’s judgment.
And judgment is incredibly valuable.
Maybe that’s one of the opportunities for Jewish communities as we think about the future.
We spend so much time asking how we’re going to engage the next generation.
we should also be asking how we’re going to continue engaging the generations that came before them.
Not simply as donors.
Not simply as volunteers.
But as people with something incredibly valuable still to contribute.
And perhaps the most interesting part of my morning at Myerberg was that this wasn’t a one-way exchange.
I came to share what I know about something new.
I left thinking about everything the people sitting in front of me already knew.
I went there to talk about artificial intelligence.
I left thinking about human intelligence.
And how much of it is sitting right in front of us, waiting to be unlocked.
