00:01:49
Ways in which people think about new technologies, ways in which people and organizations adopt new technologies. One of my favorite expressions dates from the famous science fiction author, Arthur Clarke. And you may remember Arthur Clarke as the author of the books and of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is still regarded by many people as the greatest science fiction movie ever made. And he said in another book that he wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And we've seen that actually happen during World War II. The people, indigenous people who lived in the South Pacific islands had never been exposed to external technology. And suddenly airplanes during the war were landing on these islands. And they actually established what they called cargo cults, where they worshipped the people who came in these airplanes because it was so advanced.
00:02:55
And it seemed magical to them. So I thought it was very interesting when not quite two years ago, so many people around the world who had certainly heard of the idea of artificial intelligence, but thought of it as simply another science fiction idea. You know, Terminator and Skynet and iRobot and that sort of thing. To so many people, it seemed almost magical when overnight, here came ChatGPG. com, and quickly followed by Google Gemini and Anthropic Clawed and other generative AI tools. And seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly this idea of that was simply a concept from science fiction was suddenly a tangible reality in our lives. And magical for some people, exciting for some people, scary for some people.
00:03:51
But I think it's important to understand that this new generation of AI technology did not suddenly spring forth full-blown from the brow of Zeus, as some ancient Greek god might have, but instead, actually had been evolving for many, many decades. The first conference on artificial intelligence took place at Dartmouth University in 1956. And in fact, even prior to that time, there was some early thinking about the possibility of whether machines, computers, might someday be able to do something that could be considered thinking. So in my personal case, when I first got actively involved in the software industry in the 1980s, for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with right now, one of the things I was doing was researching artificial intelligence, such as it was at the time, to try to determine if this was something that could make the software products that we were delivering to our markets more powerful and effective.
00:04:58
And to make a long story short, the answer at that time was, no, not really. Artificial intelligence was not ready for prime-time live production business applications, certainly. But I was so intrigued. I remember that one of the things that in the research I was doing at the time, I read a paper by a fellow by the name of Ray Kurzweil. Now, Ray Kurzweil recently published a paper on artificial intelligence. He eventually retired as the head of all AI research for Google. And hard as it is to believe, Ray Kurzweil is even older than I am. But so he had a few years on me at the time. And one of the things he said in one of his papers, again, this is back in the mid-1980s, he said, someday we may have artificial intelligence so advanced that you will be able to speak to your computer and it will understand what you're saying.
00:05:52
Words and transcribe them into written text. And most people who read that at the time said, 'Oh my gosh, I can't imagine this.' You know, now most people, when I tell them this story, they say, 'That's not artificial intelligence. That's just speech recognition because we've had it for five or 10 years. We're used to it. We take it for granted.' 40 years ago, it would have been considered just unbelievably advanced artificial intelligence to be able to do that. So, our AI has been evolving for many decades. And I wrote a couple of books in the 1990s after I left the software industry and went out into consulting and speaking on my own, where I talked a little bit about how AI was going to be used in the future and integrated along with other technologies, like what at the time was this new emerging technology everybody was excited about called the internet and e-commerce.
00:06:50
And so, by the time I was in the software industry, I was in the software industry. And I was in the By the early 2000s, I actually was in a position where I was running the commercial division of a small AI software company. Now, the kind of AI we were doing was not the generative AI or the machine learning that's being done today. It was called knowledge-based expert systems, but it was pretty much leading edge at that time. And so, that gave me a tremendous opportunity to learn a lot more about AI and the various forms of AI, how it worked, what you could do with it. And at the same time, I started doing a lot more research and writing and teaching of people about AI.
00:07:34
And so, as I said the other day at the beginning of a recent presentation, I've actually been speaking on AI for 20 years now, and for the last two years, people have been listening. So, it's been nice to see this sort of professional love of my life finally, you know, come to the fore after the last few years. And it's very exciting. And I have a lot of ideas about how it's going to continue to evolve and how people and organizations are going to continue to use it. But I'd love to hear what thoughts or questions you have at this point, Marie. Yes, you definitely put, like, I have now lots of questions because we really took it from the beginning. And I'd also like to talk about World War II, Greek gods, and also the change.
00:08:26
And my main question here is how people are adapting to change. Because, as you said, you were speaking about it for the last 30 years, but only two years. The last two years, people started to listen because there was a boom of artificial intelligence and people could touch it. People could, for example, speak with ChatGPT, with different models being now available. And people started to, like, utilize it in their daily lives without actually thinking that it's going to change. And I think it's really important to hear what people think about it. It's some sci-fi. But what do you see as, like, the biggest issue when it comes to adapting to change of the people? Because you could see probably, like, really directly because you were in the field all this time.
00:09:09
And then, like, in one year, like, everybody started to change. So, like, what do I say about this adapting to change and how people react to change in this aspect? Well, that's an excellent, excellent point. And I think it's important to make the distinction between how individuals react to change, specifically as it relates to emerging technologies, whether they're using them for strictly their personal or family purposes, or whether they're using them to help them do their jobs within whatever kind of organization they're affiliated with. And how the organizations, as a whole, relate to change. And by way of analogy, let me talk about what happened when personal computers, very early in my career, personal computers first emerged.
00:10:06
Organizations, especially larger organizations, but some mid-sized and even smaller organizations, had been using the pre-existing mainframe computers for 10, 15, 20 years or more, and were used to having computers to help them do their jobs. And so, I think it's important to be able to think about how personal computers and how personal computers can help people manage aspects of their businesses. It's just that individuals didn't think about computers as something that they needed to interact with. That was strictly for computer programmers, information technology professionals, and so forth. And suddenly, personal computers became available, and people realized, wow, here's a computer I can actually use myself, not only when I'm at work, but something that I can use to help me manage my personal life.
00:10:49
And so, it's a very similar situation with, you know, I think, you know, I think the most AI. Organizations in healthcare and finance, even in such areas as manufacturing and retail and supply chain management, have been applying various forms of AI for 5, 10, 15, in some cases, even 20 years or more. But it's been growing steadily, but slowly. And what's happened is very similar to what we saw with the emergence of the personal computer in the early 1980s, 40 years ago, an explosion of interest and awareness that, wow, suddenly here's a new tool, AI now, that individuals can use without having to be trained professionals or data scientists or knowledge engineers or anything like that, just an ordinary person.
00:11:41
And I think one of the best ways to think about AI, and one of the things that's exciting about it, is for so many people, it's very important that people understand the importance of AI, and I think many years ago, if you really wanted to use advanced technology, you needed to understand how to speak or interact with computers in their languages. You had to understand how to speak the languages of computers. And now what has happened is computers have learned how to understand our languages so we can speak to them in English or Flemish or French or whatever language you prefer. It's making a huge change and people are getting more and more excited about it.
00:12:19
As far as the people that are nervous about it, I think the best thing I can do is reassure people that there is, first of all, there's no danger. These things are not spying on us. There are certainly valid concerns about two things. One, how AI might be used, used by bad actors in the future, bad people or bad organizations or bad even countries in ways that are harmful to others. And secondly, might AI at some point become so powerful that it becomes independent of human control and do things that are damaging and scary to people? Now, it's so it is important that people, certain people within organizations, that are looking at and contemplating AI, certainly those that are in the technology companies that are developing these platforms and these tools, and those people in government who are responsible for overseeing the safety of our societies, should be looking at these issues and focusing attention on these issues.
00:13:32
And just as ordinary citizens ought to all be aware of any issue from whether it's new technology or climate change or pandemics, ought to have a general awareness of the issues. Most of us, aside from getting vaccinated or taking care that if a hurricane is coming, that you prepare ahead of time and you pay attention. But there's not a lot that most of us as individuals are going to do directly to control these things. So aside of maintaining a general level of awareness, people ought to spend much more time and attention focusing on how can we use these tools to help us do a better job of managing our personal lives or of managing our personal lives.
00:14:14
Or of managing our professional responsibilities within our organizations and not worry about being scared that, well, am I going to do something wrong and it's going to cause some horrible problem? Almost certainly that's not going to be the case. It's not going to cause a problem. There are things you could do. I mean, they will tell you, for example, if you're using it as part of your business, one of the first things that they tell you is don't, for example, upload all the spreadsheets with all your customers, and all the business they do in you to ask AI ways to do that better, because there's a very, very, very tiny chance that some of that information could end up getting exposed to the general public.
00:14:57
And you don't want to take a chance that your competitors suddenly learn all the details about all of your customers. So most organizations have already gotten that kind of word out. That's not an appropriate thing to do as part of your job and using AI. But there's a lot of other things you can do as part of your job and using AI, and certainly as part of your personal life and using AI that are much safer to do. We've now learned over the last 15, 20, 25 years of the internet, for example, we don't publish our internet usernames and passwords on a website because, well, what if I forget it? I'd like to go to this website and look up all my, well, no, that's not a smart thing to do because other people could find that information and have your passwords.
00:15:41
And we learn a certain amount of cybersecurity, but unless you happen to have a certain amount of cybersecurity, you're not going to be able to do that. You're not going to be a cybersecurity professional. Most of us don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about what's going on at the cutting edge of cybersecurity. And so I will say to people, don't be afraid to use AI, be excited about the possibilities that it can help you do a better job. And some of the research that's out there already shows that AI can do anywhere from 20 to 50 to 100% increase in productivity, doubling productivity of people. Relatively quickly, if they use it well and effectively and are properly trained to do so. I believe in that as well.
00:16:21
I mean, I'm using AI on daily basis. It's; I'm not uploading the spreadsheets of my customers, but I'm using it, for example, as my immediate assistant. So when I need to, for example, make email more comprehensive, when I need, for example, research, what platforms can I use for the different researches that I'm doing, et cetera. And it's; it's; it's; it's; it's; it's; it's; it's; it's; it's; super helpful. I would just go back a bit because at the beginning, at the beginning, you said that we should also take care about like how we are speaking with laptop, that this is the main, this is the main thing that we are actually not speaking with a human. We are speaking with AI, with our laptop, when we are asking some questions or we are coming up with a prompt.
00:17:04
But there is this kind of like thing that some people, they are saying that you should say, thank you to artificial intelligence, because if you don't say, thank you, it can come back to you. What is, what do you think about this one? Well, I think the best analysis I've seen on this and, and, you know, I, as a professional in the field, I follow some of the other people that do leading edge research in various aspects of this stuff. And some of the information that these people come up with is information that pretty much everybody else ought to be following too. And some of it is not stuff. It gets way down into the weeds of how this is working and what's going on.
00:17:46
And unless you're also a professional in AI or even certain aspects of AI, there's no need to get that level of detail. But the best description I've heard is that you should say thank you and please. And even that was an excellent job or conversely, no, you're really not right on track. That was not what I was thinking of. And the reason is not because the AI is not good enough. The AI itself is emotionally sensitive and will do a better job and work harder to get you the best answer if you speak to it nicely. It's because if you interact with the AI as if you were interacting with another person, it actually is going to respond better.
00:18:36
You're going to explain what it is that you want in terms that makes sense to you and that will help it, in effect, better understand what you're asking for. There is a funny scene in the movie Her that came out about 12 years ago, I think back in 2011 or 2012, somewhere in there. Are you familiar with that movie? No, I think I didn't. Well, Joaquin Phoenix was in the movie and it came out about 12 or 14 years ago. And it was a movie that was set in the near future. So that most things weren't different. There weren't a bunch of flying cars and stuff like that. But a few things were enough different that you could tell, well, was this 5, 10, 15 years in the future from then?
00:19:28
And at that point, people had these advanced forms of AI that had started to recently emerge, not dissimilar from where we actually are now. A little more advanced than what we have. And he starts interacting with an AI who becomes his personal assistant. He does an upgrade to the operating system on his computer. And all of a sudden, he's got this personal assistant available. And the voice of the AI was voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Her, the movie title refers to the AI character in this feminine voice that was voiced by Scarlett Johansson. And at one point in the movie, he gets used to just having conversations. Well, tell me what's going on. And he says, 'what's going on with this? Or I'm trying to decide. I want to meet some friends for dinner tonight.
00:20:17
Where's a good place?' And then we just come back and say, 'here's a couple of different places.' Here's one that has reservations available at 7:30. Would you like me to make it? Yeah, would you do that for me? And so we're not quite there yet, but we're very close to being able to do exactly that kind of thing now, or certainly within the next year or two. At one point, he said, she said to him, anthropomorphizing the AI, you've got a couple of interesting new email emails. And he responded in the way that people have been used to sort of interacting with responses. And he said to her, read email. And sort of like when we do a Google search, we don't put into Google, I'd like to learn about this and so such and such.
00:21:02
We just put the keywords in, you know, because that's how we're used to interacting with computer systems. So he just says, read email. So she responds back in Scarlett Johansson's voice. And I can't remember what his name was, but the character was Joaquin Phoenix. So we'll just use Joaquin. And she comes back in a very stilted voice all of a sudden and says, okay, I will read email for Joaquin, starting with the first email. And he, at that point, cracks up and he realizes that I'm speaking to this person as to this entity that I shouldn't be interacting with as if it were a person, as if it were simply a computer. And, and so it's a very, very, very, very good cute scene that takes place.
00:21:45
So the point is, if you interact with it as if you were interacting with a person, that's how you actually get the best results. I tell people, great, if you have not tried using ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Anthropic Cloud or any of a number of other tools that are out there, one of the best ways to get started is to say, just like you were talking to a person, gosh, I haven't used you before. Here's something I would like to do. How can you help me do this? And it will then come back and walk you through the process. You don't have to already know how to issue the right proper form of a prompt. You just start talking and interacting with it as if it were a person.
00:22:29
Well, part of interacting with people is you say, please, and thank you, and great job, or gosh, that wasn't really what I was looking for. I make the analogy of it's almost like if you have hired a new junior assistant who has not quite got your knowledge and experience of what it is that you're trying to accomplish, but wants to be very, very helpful and happens to just think a million times faster and know a billion times more than any human being you've ever met in your life. So if you can encourage this person and excite them that, you know, you're going to help them help you, you're going to be able to do a lot more. That's a very good thing.
00:23:10
It does lead into one of the other questions and issues, which is not nearly as much of a problem as it was two years ago when this technology first emerged, but it's still an issue people need to be aware of. Sometimes this brilliant, incredibly fast-thinking new assistant is so eager to please you that if they can't find exactly the right answer that they think you're looking for, they'll make something up based on what they do find. And many times what they make up has little or no connection to the actual reality. Now, it's a very small percentage. I find in my experience now using it daily, and you may see the same thing, that maybe once out of every 10 or 20 responses, I'll get something where I'll say, 'I don't know.' Can you see the same thing?
00:24:03
Yeah, sometimes it's also like that I need to double-check. I like what you said, that it's like junior assistant, that I always need to double-check if everything is right. Also, sometimes I give links, like URL links that I want to incorporate, and I have sent it to the customers, and then I actually realized that the AI changed the URL links, so it actually sent out like wrong URL links. And I was like, oh my God, this is, but it's about double-checking all the time. Well, it is. So one of the things that I found is useful is there, in my case, the three that I use most commonly, well, there's really fourth, but first ChatGPT, second Claude. Now, Claude doesn't, which is the anthropic tool, which is ultimately supported by Amazon, much as ChatGPT is created by OpenAI, but ultimately supported by Microsoft.
00:24:56
Then there's Google Gemini, which of course is from Google. And then I don't remember who's behind Perplexity, but it's another interesting one. Perplexity is very good at doing web searches. And Claude is very good at writing and wording things better. I will often get a response from ChatGPT that's got excellent information in it, but the way it's worded might seem a little odd or stilted, not quite right. And I'll cut and paste it and put it into Claude and say, 'How would you rephrase this so it's easily understandable to an average college-educated business executive?' And it comes right back and it's taken the same thing and just made the wording just that much clearer and more concise and easy to understand. So I cross-check them against each other sometimes.
00:25:46
I'll take an answer out of one and plug it into the other and say, evaluate this and let me know if there's anything here that looks questionable. That's interesting. I never did this actually. So it's basically doing sort of an adversarial role, if you will, between the different AIs and having them cross-check each other. And I will still, as you pointed out, I was doing research. I recently spoke for the Florida Municipal Electric Association, which is public power companies where cities or towns own their own electrical utilities as opposed to privately held investor-owned utilities. I was doing some research on what electric utilities are using various forms of AI right now. And it came up with these interesting stories. And what I've learned now is I went back and sent me the URLs for those stories.
00:26:41
And then I'll click on the URL. Half the time I get a 400 error, can't find it. But when I do get it, then I'll still read the story. Now, if I actually find a story, most of the time it's legit. Every now and then it's like, oh, it's just misinterpreted this information. It isn't really valid. But then if I do find, this is a well-established publication. In this particular field, and they've interviewed these people, and they say, here's how we're at that point. I'm not going to go so far down the rabbit hole of worry about misinformation as are these people intentionally trying to mislead me by publishing this story? I assume it's probably true without having to actually talk to the person at the company that's running that particular system, for example.
00:27:24
But that's why I think when you're in a situation where you're making recommendations to clients, or you're making recommendations to senior management about a strategic direction for the business, and you're trying to it's important that you have sources to support this information and research, that you do go double check it. Also, a really good tip that I'm using, AI, is like an emotional filter that sometimes, you know, like when you are in work and you, for example, want to express, like complain, or that something is not right, and you are like super emotional. I really like to then put it in AI and run it. Through the emotional filter, that's like, how would you respond in a professional environment, but express still like what I'm trying to say here.
00:28:11
And it's really brilliant. I really love it in this sense. And I think that's a very smart thing to do. I mean, you know, I've been learned over the years, but you know, before we had AI, the secret was if you're writing, responding, especially with an email, because again, it's easy to get inside your own head. And it's not like you're sitting down across from a person and you sort of naturally tend to want to respond. So, I think it's really about how you relate and, you know, you may have to convey a concern or even that you're upset or angry about something, but you do it in a way that's not hurtful to the other person. But it's very easy.
00:28:45
I think that's why we have so many, you know, on some of these social media, you know, people get mad about something, they just say something horrible and post it before they think. Well, if you're writing an email and you're upset about something, they used to say, 'Wait an hour before you send the email'. And then go back and reread it and see if you've still want to say it that way well now you don't have to wait an hour because what you do is so smart you know you just let chat gpt or cloud or one of these other tools uh you know reword this so it comes across as professional and
00:29:15
you know to your point well exactly an excellent thing i really love this usage it helps me a lot especially i don't need to wait our cultures it say like wait one day not one hour so then like usually in 24 hours you are either heating up still or like you are losing time because you still like think about it you bring it with you at home and it's like you know this kind of like emotion so like you just run it through to gpt you send it within 10 minutes you know that there are no emotions it's 100 percent professional bulletproof perfect love it yeah yeah exactly in fact i sometimes actually find the other way i'll say all right here's what i want to say in an email can you draft me a quick email on this it'll come back and i find these tools do tend to err toward the
00:30:02
very professional business-like non-emotional approach well sometimes that's very appropriate but if it's someone that you've been interacting with for some time and you know reasonably well and you're comfortable with them then it can almost seem as kind of cold and it's like well why is this person saying this like this i mean we've had conversations before we've talked like that so i've gone back a couple times and said okay that's good just give me another draft that's a little friendlier and more personal you know it'll come back and give me an approved one and then i might still tweak it a little bit before you know i actually send it to the person so it can it can really kind of go both ways on those occasions yes i also like how GPT now Put the memory, I don't know, like how it is used 100 but I see that every time and I'm asking something that it's loading and analyzing the
00:31:00
different prompts that I used in the past that it's like GPT is saving the information about me so that I don't need to repeat all the time the same things again and again so this, I also really like that it saves currently my time that the chat GPT is getting my profile well you know and that's something that's very interesting these tools keep evolving and how in how they work and what they do so part of it is that to a certain extent it's my best understanding that chat GPT and I, except the. The other leading tools do similar kinds of things, not exactly the same, not exactly the same way. But to use Chat GPT as it's sort of the market leader, in that they will remember some general things about you.
00:31:44
Also, if you're in a thread, you can start new threads so it it does a very good job of remembering what was in the thread before and you can always ask it to remind you. So, if I'm like, 'was this the thread that I used where I was asking it about this particular topic', I'll just go into the thread and I'll say, 'please summarize the key points we've discussed in this thread today'. It comes right back and says, 'and I'll say, yep, okay, i'm in.' Right thread or, oops, no that's not the right one I just saw the last prompt in exchange and misunderstood. You know what that was because it might be something I used a week ago or even a month ago.
00:32:18
The second thing is that and um have you played with creating your own GPTs as they called them? Not yet, I heard about it that but uh I didn't try it yet so you can maybe how we can do that. There are a couple of things that you can do, you go now you have to have the paid version to do this and I will tell people out there if you want to understand AI okay start by using the free version because it's like learning how to ride a bicycle but once you recognize That this is a tool that can be very powerful, you need to switch over to the paid version because that's like learning how to fly a jet plane and you want to fly the jet plane, you don't want to be stuck riding the bicycle, and so you can do so much more.
00:33:10
So creating your own GPTs is one of those things, so you can certainly do it. You can go through a process where you say, 'I'd like to create a GPT' and I'll say, 'Well, what do you want it to do? What should we call it?' You can say, 'Here's what I wanted to do well let's give this a GPT a name. Here's a GPT, and I'll say, 'Well, what do you want it to do? You can say, 'Here's a few ideas, do you like These or do you want to give it your own name, you give it your own name um uh, and so now what are some what what are some of
00:33:38
the give us more details about what this GPT should do and you give it a bunch of details and at some point it says was there anything more in general that you would like this tool to do for you well no well then that's let's start using the tool then as you use the tool it gets better at doing those things you've told it to do that you're using it for that that tool for so I have several that I use for example I have a tool that that I call proposal development and when I have a prospective speaking client that is considering Engaging me to speak for a certain type of group on a certain topic, then I will go ahead and use this tool to help me do a little more in-depth research for.
00:34:22
Okay, I understand the general topic and I've spoken to this general type of group about it before. But, to get much more specific, what are the things that are likely to be in the group that I'm of most interest to them? And what about this topic so I can put together a proposal that's much more highly customized to what are likely to be their needs and interests? And then, I've got a slightly different one because the first one is based on doing some research and helping me. Generally, I present myself from a perspective that here's why this fellow is qualified to speak for us and could do a good job for us. I've got another one that I call 'Presentation Pro' and 'Presentation Pro' once I'm actually working with a prospective client.
00:35:05
Now I know in much more detail about their audience-exactly who they are, who their audience is, what they want to hear about. Typically, it's not just 'We want to learn about AI', it's 'Here are the kinds of questions we have and here's how we'd like to learn more about it'. Is it about how our organizations are using it or about how we can use it personally-and that kind of thing so. I can do that, and I can do much more in-depth research on it, and it'll even come back and I'll say, 'Okay', so these are the topics I want to cover with them. Here's the high-level overview: Come back and propose some ideas for a series of four or five slides that discuss this aspect in detail, and what would you recommend would be uh the titles and bullet points on those slides, and maybe key points that I ought to cover in discussing that, and it comes up with ideas.
00:35:54
Now those are not my final slides but that's a great starting point for me to say, 'Okay', a lot of this I can use, I don't know if I can use a lot of this, I don't like this fourth one, but the first And the second one, and the fifth one, those are really good. Let me take some variation on that, plug it into my actual presentation, and uh, then I've got another tool that I just found and it will actually when I come back and I say, okay here's the slides I want, here's the titles and the bullet points, uh, and even I'd like to have the AI image creation capability create me an image that's
00:36:30
supports what's on this slide and I'll have a prompt, it'll say give me a prompt for an image that would be appropriate to this slide, okay then it'll come back and it'll actually create a file that I can copy and import into PowerPoint and just like That it sets up the whole slide and the image prompt and the additional comments are in the notes section then I can take the image prompt and I can create a file that I can copy and import into PowerPoint plug that in back into ChatGPT it comes up with a picture of the image and plug it in so it's still not quite a whole finished process where I
00:37:09
say I want to speak on this topic here's a few of the details create the whole slide presentation for me from scratch and then let me go in and edit it I'm not we're not quite there yet that'll probably be another year or two before we get to that point but we will pretty quickly as AI agents Begin to emerge, so anyway, these one of the other ones that's fine is: We're planning a trip to Europe. Uh, my life partner and I, and she and I have decided we're going to go to Italy. We're going to spend a few days in Milan, and then go to Sicily. I've had for the last year and a half a GPT that I developed, called something like um... Luxury Travel and Dining Concierge.
00:37:54
Nice! And so it comes up with recommendations, and it knows that it's going to be a good idea to have a GPT that's going to be okay. These are the kinds of hotels we'd like to stay in, and these are the kinds of restaurants we'd like to eat in. But then it'll say, 'Well, if you're going to be visiting palermo sicily then these are among the types of local Sicilian restaurants that are especially good you know this one has seafood this one has pasta and they're all the very kind types of places that you guys enjoy eating at and here are the kinds of hotels that are within a reasonable budget but still have the nice you know capabilities and you know the kind of hotels that are within a reasonable
00:38:30
budget but still have the kind of facilities and environment that you like to stay in and so forth and so uh so developing these kinds of tools um i believe that uh it's anthropic Claude has something called projects that does something similar i haven't worked with that one but so these kinds of capabilities are also going to continue to be you know much more powerful yes and uh when you are saying just this i have a question about what's next with ai so what we can get excited in the future because i'm sure that you have heard about so many interesting things because you believed the ai even when other people they're actually thinking that it's just harry potter in a software so like how do you uh what do you think that will be the next with the artificial intelligence what we can get excited and like open our minds to be more Adaptive when it comes, well, okay so there are, there are, there are two things.
00:39:23
One is coming very quickly and we'll see a great deal of this over the next year or so. These are called AI agents, and these intelligent agents will be able to do tasks that have a whole series of steps. So, right now you can use AI very powerfully working at every stage of workflow that you're doing something as I just described as I'm preparing a proposal for a uh prospective speaking client, and now I've got an actual speaking client and I'm developing my presentation and what material I'm going to propose and I develop that material and then I'm actually Ready now to create the actual PowerPoint slide deck I'm going to use. I've got another tool to do that at each of these steps, now what we're going to see emerging is already beginning to emerge but it's going to be much more readily available over the next 6-12-18 months.
00:40:20
Our AI agents that understand how to link together a whole series of steps now you might initially have to explain to them what you're doing and what you're doing and what you're doing and what you're doing and what are the steps in this process and how do they fit together but you will be able to say like I said, 'I'll be able to say here's the broad parameters of' a presentation i'm doing on artificial intelligence in health care for nursing and pharmacists and it'll go out and do the research find this stuff and it may stop and ask questions at certain points you want to do this or this more in here, not so much on there, you know, okay.
00:41:02
And then just go through the whole process, as opposed to I manage the whole process and just interact with it at multiple steps along the way. So this AI agent technology is coming very soon. And it's something that's going to be useful for us both personally and professionally. Again, you can stop and think about it. If you're planning a trip, a vacation, you'll think about all the steps. Well, where am I going to go? And what am I going to visit? Okay, but now I've got to book my airlines. And I've got to book my hotels. And when am I going to go? And what's the best time to go for the prices? And which hotels have the best prices on rooms at which dates? You know, there's, you can use AI for all these things.
00:41:43
But there's not an AI agent out there that says, 'I'll plan the whole trip for you.' Like a travel agent would do, for example, restaurants, book the hotels. And actually, wow, that would be amazing. Like, it's also likeable for the event management, for example, you have like position, like event management that you need a venue for 200 people high class in the center of Brussels for these dates. So then like, yeah, within a few minutes, you can have your venue and your best choice. Oh, event management is an excellent example for that. Because now you've also got, okay, now how do we handle the marketing side of it to reach out to prospective attendees? How do we handle sponsorships? For example, depending on what the business model is for the event?
00:42:31
How do we handle speakers? How do we find the right speakers? You know, how do we find the top, you know, paid professional speakers to do keynote presentations for the whole conference? But also, how do we find the people that, you know, we don't have the budget to pay for, but work in the field and are knowledgeable to do breakout sessions or participate in panel discussions and interact with them? There's so much time and effort involved in all that. Now, that AI agents aren't anytime soon going to completely take away the jobs of meeting professionals and meeting planners. But they're going to be very powerful assistants to help them do their jobs faster and more effectively. So, AI agents are going to be very exciting.
00:43:13
And we're going to see those emerging over the next year or two. Further down the road, 10 or 12 years down the road, now we're out into the mid-2020s. We're going to see artificial general intelligence. And that's a whole new level because artificial general intelligence will be AIs that effectively are as fully intelligent and interactive as a human being on everything we would normally expect humans to be able to do. You won't have to explain to them the background of thus and so. Just as an adult, knowledgeable human would understand it. You know, you and I don't have to have a conversation about, geography, you know, what is a country and where is Europe and where is North America and all that, you know, we're educated adults. That just is taken for granted.
00:44:07
With AIs, that's not necessarily right now completely taken for granted. Now, you can ask an AI a specific question about the geography of Europe, for example, and it'll give you an answer that 99% of the time is going to be exactly correct. But that doesn't mean, for example, if you say I'm preparing a presentation to deliver in Europe, that it would have, the subtlety to say, well, if we're going to talk about this topic, we need to be certain to understand, to present it from a perspective of the European audience, which is going to be slightly different in these ways than the perspective of a North American audience might be, for example. All right. When we get to artificial general intelligence, it will have all those capabilities.
00:44:48
It will be like interacting with a fully capable human being, except that in addition to that, everything else, it'll be, a million times, think a million times faster and be a billion times smarter than any single human being will be. And that is the point at which some people do begin to get a little scared about, well, if these systems are designed without the right controls and guardrails, could they get out of control and cause problems? But on the other hand, um, uh, they are, uh, will also be so vastly making us, so vastly more powerful, uh, that, um, uh, they will be really, really, um, uh, even exponentially more powerful tools than the AI tools that we have available to us today. And in, are you familiar with the famed science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov?
00:45:52
He passed away a few years ago, but he wrote many books. Yes. Yes, I am. Okay. Good. Good. Good. His most famous books were the Foundation trilogy and to a large extent, Star Wars by George Lucas, uh, uh, and Steven Spielberg was based in many respects on his Foundation trilogy. Well, he wrote a number of books about robots, and one of the things that he came up with, and these were intelligent robots, but it was artificial intelligence just also embodied in a robot that can move around, which by the way, will also be emerging over the next 10 years or so, but that's a whole other conversation. Um, but the three laws of robotics that he put down were first that a robot must never allow a human being must never harm a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
00:46:42
It's like in the, in the movie, I Am Robot as well. Yes. Right. It was also like they had the rules and like how the robots should actually be providing the service to the humans, but then there are the bad robots, the red ones, which, uh, actually want to conquer the world and who can actually harm the humans. And well, and so there are some of the challenges, how do you program robots or more broadly AI entities to follow these rules? But the first is never harm a human or allow a human to come to harm through inaction. Second is as long as you don't violate the first rule, always do anything you're told to do by a human, follow instructions, but you can't follow instructions.
00:47:25
If the human says, 'go kill that other human', because that violates the rules. So you have to follow the first rule, which overrides the second rule. And then the third rule is without overriding either the first or the second rule, always protect your own existence. And so he has a whole series of stories that explain various aspects of these rules and so forth that, and how they interact and how they could sometimes conflict. But the same fundamental concepts underlie what a lot of people are trying to do in terms of how do we put guardrails, around artificial intelligence, so that it does what we want it to do, but doesn't harm people. And, you know, those are going to be interesting. Now, longer term, there's a very interesting speculation about where this might go.
00:48:16
A couple of different respects. One is artificial super intelligence. That is when another, say, 10 to 20 years further down the road, now we're in the mid-20s, we're in the mid-20s, we're in the mid-20s, we're in the mid-20s, 21st century, we have AIs that are not as intelligent as human beings. They're a billion times more intelligent than any single human being could be. And what is that going to mean for us? Most of what I or anyone else can say about this point, idea right now is just highly speculative. It is sort of thinking science fiction, but we can see that we are quite likely moving in that direction where that's plausible. It's also a very intriguing idea, too. And I mentioned earlier Ray Kurzweil.
00:49:03
And Ray Kurzweil wrote a book about 20 years ago called The Singularity is Near. And his idea was that something is going to be happening called the singularity, where change takes place so fast that human beings can't keep up with the pace of change. And it's beyond our brainpower to keep up with the pace of change. He just came out with a new book, which I finished reading a few weeks ago called The Singularity is Nearer. Oh, wow. The subtitle of the book. The subtitle of the book is When Humans Merge with AI. And what it's about is you're probably aware of some of the work that's been done over the last five or 10 years in the healthcare field, where people with hearing problems, for example, not just somebody who needs a hearing aid, but somebody who has like a profound hearing problem, because there's something wrong with the nerves between their ears and their brain, they can have an implant in their brain that can stimulate the right part of their brain.
00:50:00
And that they can then have a microphone outside and now they can hear. Also, people who are quadriplegics or quadriplegics can control computers with their minds with certain brain implants. They're learning the structure of the brain so well, that they're learning how to interconnect; in some cases, having multiple connections into the brain. And especially with AI to assist in the acceleration of the research in this field, it's expected that within the next 10 or 15 years, we could be at a point. And this is one of the things that Elon Musk, who there's a lot to say both good and bad about Elon Musk. But one of the good things to say about him, he's a very forward-looking person who's not unwilling to invest in potentially very far-out ideas.
00:50:46
Hence, SpaceX, Tesla, and so forth. He's also working on these brain implant ideas. And the idea that Ray Kurzweil talks about in his book is that within another 10, or 15 years, we may be at the top of the world; we may be at a point where you can put enough implants in effect within your brain that you no longer need to have a computer interface at all. You can interact with your computer through your brain completely. We just talked about it in one of our episodes, actually, last week. It was about brain GPT, where we had actually the bioengineer who is working on the implants in the brain. And he was telling us a lot of interesting insights in how to get actually GPT in your brain, how it will look like in the 15 years to have it there.
00:51:35
And it's just mind-blowing. And I'm just thinking about how we can keep up with this change as a human, because you also said that there is a super artificial intelligence coming in the future, in 20, 30 years, or something like this. How can we equip ourselves to not fall behind as humans and to keep up with the change, as you said, that the change is nearer than what we might think. And I can also see nowadays that, for example, me and you, we are really innovative people. We are really interested in what is out there, the new stuff. But not a lot of people sometimes can keep up with the new innovations. And especially, we are seeing here a lot of digital gap. So how can we not fall behind with the artificial intelligence?
00:52:28
And how can we keep up with the new innovations? And how can we keep up with the future that we will just become irrelevant? All right, let me address that. But first, let me ask you, please, would you send me a link when your conversation with the bioengineering guy that you were just talking about? Yes, I will do so. I will do so. I would love to see that. And it is all of a piece of the only way you can keep up with the rapidly accelerating evolution of AI and all kinds of other related technologies, sensor technologies, for Internet of Things, for everything from healthcare to supply chain management to manufacturing and so forth, augmented and virtual reality. There are just so many things.
00:53:07
You have to use AI as a tool to keep up with AI. So this is one of the most important reasons people need to understand how to use these tools so they can do the research and stay on top of this and understand how this accelerating level of change in our world, whether it is economic, social, political, what have you, how do you keep up with all that change? You have to use the tools. You have to use the tools to keep up with the change. If you went back to people 200 years ago who were just as intelligent as we are and based on the knowledge that was available to them at the time, just as informed and up-to-date and well-intended, and you had shown them our lifestyle and said, here is Jack and Marie sitting in Atlanta and Brussels and talking to each other.
00:53:52
And if they decided there was a good reason they needed to meet in person, within 24 hours, they could get on an airplane. They could fly eight or nine hours across the ocean and meet the other person face-to-face. They would have thought it was magic. They must be wizards. Who could ever imagine anything so advanced? So it's very hard for us to sit here and think about the idea that at some point in the near future, we or our children may have brain implants and take it for granted that allows us to immediately, just through our thoughts, access AI superintelligence to help us manage our lives and run everything. I had an artificial hip implanted. My grandfather would have loved to have had an artificial hip because he had trouble walking because he had problems with his hip, but they hadn't been invented yet.
00:54:43
And if anybody had suggested to them, well, they're just going to go in and cut your hip open and cut the top off your thigh bone and put a new metal hip in there, they would have said, not me. That's crazy. Who would let anybody do that to them? Well, the point is now we take for granted that. And if they were to learn how to do that, the fact that, you know, you could have, you wear glasses, you can have a joint implant if it helps you or a pacemaker and all that. And it helps us lead longer, happier, more productive lives. We use these new technologies, right? I think they will help us do much the same thing. And we'll have to use the technologies to help us understand how to better continue to use them as they evolve.
00:55:22
Yes, I always like to say the example of it, the horses and the car; that when the cars were invented and there was the first car, people actually thought how dangerous it is. You couldn't sit in the car like you were like by your parents, don't sit in it. It's just so dangerous. And nowadays, like we cannot imagine to actually ride a horse. I never rode a horse in my life. And I mean, we are just using the cars and bikes and all of these new inventions. But for example, the people in the past just couldn't imagine to own even the car because it was super expensive. And nowadays, it's for us such a useful thing that everybody is using.
00:56:04
I have a last question and it's regarding like what would you advise to the people who are resistant in starting with artificial intelligence? Because I have, for example, around me a lot of colleagues who, for example, are aware of artificial intelligence. However, they, for example, believe that their jobs will never be that the artificial intelligence. They'll never, never be that level as their jobs. So, for example, in design or in social media manager, etc. So, what would you advise them to actually cross the bridge, start to openly think about the artificial intelligence as, for example, the new car as you are riding a horse and you want to ride the car to be more efficient. So, what would you advise them?
00:56:53
If you are afraid that you might lose your job to AI, the most important thing that you can do is to immediately start learning how to use AI to do your job better. And what you will quickly find is that by using AI, you will increase your productivity and it will change the nature of what you do. It will allow the AI to do those parts of your job, no matter how forward thinking and how much of a creative kind of person you are, to make your visions come to life. There's a lot of stuff you have to do that is just plain, boring, pick and shovel work, as they call it. It's the only way to make this happen.
00:57:49
With AI, in many cases, it will take much of the routine, mundane, boring parts of your job off of you, still allowing you to do the most creative parts of your job better and more effectively. There will be some jobs that won't need to be done anymore. But the only way that those jobs will go away is by people implementing AI that can subsume those jobs into the capabilities of the AI. And if you have a job of that type, again, presumably that means you understand as well or better than most people how to use, how to do that job. Start figuring out how to use AI to help you do that job better so that you can be among the people that's figuring out how to do it and make the transition into, I'm the expert on using AI to do this job.
00:58:48
If you're going to have AIs doing whatever that task or series of tasks is, then someone's going to have to tell the AI how to do it. Why shouldn't it be you? So that's the way I look at it. Either your job is going to be enhanced by AI and you'll do it much better and more effectively. If you're in that small percentage of jobs that might pretty much go away entirely, then use AI to help you learn how to make that job go away so you can do something more interesting at a higher level than what you're doing. And because it's at a higher level and you're doing more strategic and productive work, certainly the value of AI is going to be higher.
00:59:26
Your employers are getting out of that should justify them paying you significantly more than they're paying you today for doing that. I really love it. I really like this justification. And for you, for our audience, if you are still thinking about artificial intelligence and that maybe it's not the thing for you that you still want to write in your traditional roads, then try something new because this can actually facilitate you even a bigger income or even a bigger efficiency. In your workload, in your professional life, but also in professional life. And you can have much simpler life or even like to have a focus on the things that matter more than what you are doing currently. So thank you so much, Jack. It was a really pleasure to have you here.
01:00:13
And I really enjoyed our conversation from even like a history about artificial intelligence. You're really impressive. You're a really impressive work that you've done and how you were actually speaking about artificial intelligence. When nobody was even believing that it was a magic. And now it's the reality that a lot of people are using. And also, it can facilitate your productivity. You said so. So thank you so much for accepting our invitation and see you next time in another episode. Well, it's my pleasure. And I was going to say we should do this again at some point a little farther down the road and see how things have changed. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you, Marie.
