sci tech talk - SHOW TRANSCRIPTIONS

2023 04 24 - SCI TECH TALK - A.I. is it worth the concern Part 1

[00:00:00] Michelle: The My Michelle Live podcast,

[00:00:05] my Michelle 

[00:00:06] Spencer: Live Here's Michelle.

[00:00:12] Michelle: Oh, AI is the next big thing. How are you doing? We're gonna be talking about AI today. See, it's like the industrial revolution. When the industrial revolution came. Everything changed. Now AI is upon us and it's huge. What does that mean to you? What does that mean to your job? What does it mean to the future?

[00:00:38] I think there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of concern, and maybe rightly but we're gonna dig into it with an expert. Spencer O O'Leary is a pro productivity and automation. Expert. Yay. Yeah, we went to the big guns here. He's the C e O of Active Ops North America. It's a global company [00:01:00]that's a leader in the management process of automation.

[00:01:04] Good to have you with me today, Spencer.

[00:01:09] Hi Michelle. Hey, I wanna make sure, is there any way that I could tell that you're actually a real person and not an AI generated interview? 

[00:01:19] Spencer: Probably not these days. No. I could very much be speaking to you, even some clever computer algorithm. But if I'll pinch myself and make sure I'm at least half human.

[00:01:26] I 

[00:01:27] Michelle: appreciate that. At least half. I'm not asking much. We have standards. They're low, but we have them here. I assure you, it's good to have you with us today. So AI really is an incredible tool that a lot of us don't quite understand yet how chat gtp, for example, is available to everyone and people are already putting it into place in many aspects for fun, for jobs, and [00:02:00] for whatever reason we can think of.

[00:02:05] Spencer: They sure are. They they use it in all sorts of different applications these days, whether it's in our personal lives, whether it's in our professional lives, and I see we're gonna, I think we're gonna see that as a huge change. So every generation who are gonna come across some aspect of AI in their lives particularly chat, G P T, and how we're seeing that adopted, I think it's gonna be a real change for a lot of us.

[00:02:24] Michelle: I wanna put it in perspective. I'm gonna put on screen a picture. So if you are listening, you won't be able to see this. But what you're seeing here is this guy, it looks like maybe 1920s, wouldn't you say, Spencer? And he's, he is, Got, he has this big pole that looks like an over-extended selfie stick, which didn't exist back then.

[00:02:47] And he is using it to knock on a window. So what this guy was, he was an alarm clock. He was an alarm clock. I'm gonna say it was way before 1920s because they had alarm clocks back. Then, [00:03:00] so this guy was an alarm clock. He used to go. That was his job. He was paid to go and tap tap, knock on people's windows and wake people up.

[00:03:08] Here's one that's maybe a little more familiar to people. A row of ladies who were operators. They would answer calls and they would pl take their plugin. It almost looked like an audio plugin for a guitar and plug it into the correct. Line. There were a lot of things in technology like these that went away when we saw technology advance.

[00:03:38] Now we're afraid that AI is going to overtake a lot of jobs and apparently, It is in fact some are calling it a cataclysm of the making right on our doorstep. That's some of what we wanted to talk about today. The good, the bad, the ugly. What do we need to know about artificial [00:04:00]intelligence?

[00:04:01] Spencer, 

[00:04:02] Spencer: and I think where you started, Michelle was talking about the industrial revolution. Now, I've seen. I personally experienced one revolution in the way we use technology in my lifetime and the generation before me going through the industrial Revolution. The one I've seen is the RPA revolution, the robotic process automation.

[00:04:18] So over the course of the last 10 or 15 years, RPA was gonna remove lots of humans jobs, the same as the Industrial Revolution. In the generation before was gonna remove lots of human jobs. And actually what we've found is both of those changes in the use of technology has changed people's jobs. 

[00:04:36] Michelle: Yeah, I think that's a great way to 

[00:04:38] Spencer: put it.

[00:04:40] And I, I see that now with ai and particularly chat, g pt t and the way that Microsoft is starting to embed chat g p t into Bing and then into something called copilot, which is Microsoft's version of chat, pt G P T in office. It's gonna change the way we do our jobs, but I don't see it removing the human need for work.

[00:04:58] It's just gonna change the way that people do [00:05:00] their work. And actually, for some, it's gonna make. It's gonna, some of the boring, repetitive things that humans today have to do as part of their role and it's gonna free up some of their time to do more interesting creative things. And I get that AI can teach itself and be creative at the, some journalists out there that are really nervous.

[00:05:19] Cuz if you take a chat G p t written article and compare it to a human written article, someone say that the. The AI driven one is a little bit more entertaining, a little bit more engaging than the human one. So there are some roles out there that this is really gonna change. I just don't see it replacing the need of human acting.

[00:05:39] Michelle: Yeah. Breaking that down a little bit. I guess both things were true. Yeah. It did replace jobs. People did lose their jobs, but we as humanity, we were created to adapt. And we do. We did. So where some jobs were gone, we're not seeing [00:06:00]telephone operators anymore. And we aren't seeing guys coming to our house and using extended selfie sticks to wake us up in the morning.

[00:06:07] But we. Saw that things, as you said, Spencer changed and we adapted with those changes. We developed new skill sets that were more applicable. We are like that. Great companies have to be like that. Do you remember when we used to ha, everyone had film camera and Kodak, they and other companies produced films.

[00:06:35] They were. It's highly successful. As we started going digital companies who hung onto the film and, oh no, things aren't gonna change. There are things like that from film to vhs, for those who are in Gen Z, sorry, you'll have to Google it. And there's a lot of things that do change and we change with the times.

[00:06:57] My concern though is that [00:07:00] you say we are going to take some of the mundane. And be able to replace it with other things. Do you know what we've replaced? Because we have technology that makes life easier. We, my friend, we have the wealth of human knowledge right here at our fingertips. Do you know what we're doing?

[00:07:17] We're sharing cat memes and arguing with people over stupid things. I'm not I'm not as bright and sunny about the future of ai be for one of the, that's one of the reasons I'll say. 

[00:07:32] Spencer: Yeah. And I think it is about a adoption of technology and that changing people's roles and how we embrace change and how we use it to good use rather than perhaps sharing pictures of funny cats and bad use.

[00:07:44] But I've got teenage children and I look and we share a number of examples. Where my expectation and my way of living and working is, will be completely different for that next generation of workers. I remember I'm from England, as you can [00:08:00] probably tell from my accent, but we had something in my day when I was a teenager called the TV Times.

[00:08:05] It was a TV listing that you got printed on paper, Christmas. You used to go through and work out as a family, which films or which programs you were gonna watch. And to my children that's completely alien. They have no idea about why program listing. Now they just go a Netflix or they go to Amazon Prime and they stream whatever it is that they decided at this moment in time they wanna watch.

[00:08:26] So just two generations, they're not that far apart yet. We have a completely different use of technology and how that works. So I do see where technology is used well, and I think the adoption of AI in the latest Microsoft. That tool set has some really interesting consequences for the way that the people work.

[00:08:45] I heard a great example the other day of Microsoft for a while has had the ability to record Zoom or team meetings so that if you couldn't attend, you could go watch it after the meeting. But that meant I had to find 30 minutes or an hour post the meeting to go and listen to the [00:09:00]entire meeting. So Microsoft came up with the transcript that would create a written transcript of the meeting.

[00:09:05] Now I didn't have to listen to the recording. I could just read the transcript. What's co-pilot done with ai? It now creates me two slides. As an executive summary of the meeting, even summarizing if no name was many reactions that were given. So the mundane task for me to have to listen to transcripts or read transcripts or listen to recordings after a meeting, AI's gonna help me be able to understand the output of a meeting in a matter of two or three minutes of reading, saving me hour, more important things.

[00:09:34] Michelle: You, you just summarized the joy of. Generation X right there. So Generation X is, this is this incredible generation that has never really been into meetings. We raised ourselves, we were latchkey kids. We got a note from mom and this is what you do this afternoon. This is, if I'm not home, this is what you eat.

[00:09:55] You get it in short form. So when you can do that, it's glorious. I'm [00:10:00]a Gen Xer, and I remember here we had TV guides that. Were the same thing and we were the remote control, just so that there were no remotes. We were, it change the channel. Luckily there were only like three or four at the time, so it wasn't a big deal.

[00:10:15] But yeah, there are some great things that, that we're gonna see in the future, but we do have to take care. I know that. AI is supposed to make homework redundant, for example, and that they, that private colleges, right now, private colleges are closing at record rates. Community college enrollment is down 37% because jobs have changed.

[00:10:41] So now we have AI that's going to have an impact on education. Is it? Is it going to be a good thing? We've already dumbed down a bit and here in the States we, here we are. A leader in the world, but we linger down in the, [00:11:00]maybe the top 20 in most of the reading, writing, and simple math, although we do rank really high on how good we feel about ourselves and social justice things, but we don't know what other countries know about science.

[00:11:13] So I, I wonder, How we're gonna find balance. Additionally, Spencer it seems like our morality isn't keeping pace with our technology, so that, that to me is indeed a concern. Conversely, there are a lot of things that AI does, maybe we can help to quell some of the fears by explaining AI to a lot of our viewers and listeners who may be of our generation and going, okay, ai, I still don't get it.

[00:11:46] Can you help us? 

[00:11:49] Spencer: I can try and explain how I see AI being used. And I think a couple of things there that you've said, one, one is the morality question and yes, we have to be careful how we use. All [00:12:00] technology. It isn't just ai, it goes back to lots of different things. We've got access. Fair enough.

[00:12:04] There's a right way and a wrong way to use things. Some of that is in people's brains and some of it's in people's hearts, and sometimes there's quite a difference between those two, polar opposites. But if we can get that right and take a moral stance on how we use some of this stuff, I think we can use it to, to, to human advantage.

[00:12:19] I think when it comes around to what AI.

[00:12:24] And one of the things that's a misunderstanding from a lot of people is chat. G P T is about taking everything that we've got access to as humans and feeding that into computer for that computer to learn about the content and be able to cross reference that content to create something meaningful.

[00:12:41] But it's only based on what you've feed and chat. G p t stopped being fed at the end of 2021. So if you ask g p t, you ask Bing, you ask Microsoft Co-pilot, it's all the same technology. If you ask any question about 2022 or early 23, it won't know the answer like a human does, cuz it's only based [00:13:00]on what we feed it.

[00:13:01] So yes, we've got a, an AI engine that's capable of taking the bar, exam and getting a higher pass rate than any human. Of course we have because we've fed it everything that we know about law and it's to itself how to answer a whole series of questions. So to be really clear and any AI technology is only as good as what you feed it, and it's only as good as the algorithms that humans wrote that would enable it to learn and teach itself to be able to answer questions in a meaningful way.

[00:13:30] So I dunno what the current chat G P T hit rate is on expressing something. But anybody out there go to the Amazon store or the Androids. And go and download a little AI app that's got chat gpp in it. You can do it for free and go and ask it. 10 questions. You'll probably get back seven or eight. Really insightful medium, and you'll probably get back two or three absolute piles of.

[00:13:57] So we still have this, even when [00:14:00] that's 97 good things and only three piles of garbage, we still have in, human interpretation of what AI is giving us and making sure we can put it to good use. There's also a huge skill set that's not really in the working pool of humans today, which is. How do we use AI at its best?

[00:14:18] How do we feed the AI engines with the right data? Unstructured, non contextual data fed into AI engines? I'll use the word garbage again. It's the same that's been around for the years. Garbage in garbage. Yeah. If you feed AI with the wrong data structured, contextualize in the wrong way, you will get garbage out.

[00:14:36] So here's a massive industry in the making of how we take the next generation of computer programs and rather than coding an internet application so we can all access, I don't know, our bank, online or shop through Amazon. This is about how we code and feed their data into AI engines and then put that to good human 

[00:14:53] Michelle: practice.

[00:14:53] No wonder a lot of people are concerned that AI will have a bent or a bias because [00:15:00] wouldn't that not be logical if we have. Biased people feeding it information. So where we saw a lot of crazy things happen, especially during covid, and we still are on certain social media sites, this is an example, social media sites.

[00:15:20] You ask a question. About masks in 2020. Are they really necessary? Are they really doing in any good? And suddenly you're brought down, you're canceled, you're the algorithm says, you're feeding dangerous misinformation. No, I'm asking questions, which is what humans are supposed to do.

[00:15:39] We're supposed to debate. And science is about poking and prodding and challenging. Not saying this is subtle. Sorry. So that's a concern that people are having. What? Effect will that have on industry and individuals in your thoughts? Yeah, 

[00:15:57] Spencer: and I think there's a big piece here about, I go back to that sort of the [00:16:00]human interpretation of AI output is human decision making has not really changed in the way that we do that over the course of even hundreds of years.

[00:16:11] Or data that's more in real time. But actually the human decision making process, we've not evolved that much as humans in the recent past. So I think. Using AI to be more informed and using AI to have a quicker access to that decision point is all good things. Once we get to the stage of AI's making the decision for us, and there's no human interpretation or no human execution of the decision itself I think we probably get to the dangerous line to cross and suddenly all those, all those science fiction films.

[00:16:41] I remember when I was growing up. They come to reality and the machines take over. But I think there's a careful line we shouldn't cross. Yeah. In terms of still the best thing on the planet to make the right choice, whether it's a head choice, a hard choice, those moral decisions, generally the human brain.

[00:16:58] And let's just embrace ai. Let's [00:17:00] use AI to be more informed and make better decisions rather than make the decisions 

[00:17:04] Michelle: for us. You can't unring the bell. So understanding what that bell can do and how far that the sound of that bell can reach will be really important in the next year. It seems like technology is just changing almost daily.

[00:17:20] The concern is that we all need to try to understand what's happening. We need to try to understand what AI is capable of, what it is not. At this point, we need to keep a tight. A nice tight rain on it. Do you remember the news story that someone tasked AI with destroying the world? It was unsuccessful, at least at this point.

[00:17:43] Some things that AI can do. Spencer, you might find this interesting. A friend of mine tasked AI with creating this Shakespearean play based on tort law. And it did, and it was spectacular. And you're [00:18:00] going, how did it do that? But what it doesn't do is impute a hu humanity like the soul. And you can tell that.

[00:18:10] And an example is AI called JC wrote a worship song for the faith-based community. And it sounded beautiful and it was a motive, but there was just. Something missing, and that's what it is. I don't think, no I'll get this, your opinion on this, I don't think that any, however far we go down the road with AI, that we will ever see AI compared to a human in some ways, because it will never have a soul.

[00:18:47] Your thoughts on that? 

[00:18:49] Spencer: I agree with that but I find it interesting how. So my kids in high school two of them and I think my school in Dallas have really embraced technology to get the best outta [00:19:00] humans. So they no longer have closed book exams anymore, which is what I was used to at school.

[00:19:04] You can't take a reference book into the, in the exam room. They no longer have closed laptop or closed phone exams. They're totally allowing students to use the internet and use a search engine and even use ai Brilliant to help them answer tests because their view is when tho when that generation have a job they're gonna have access to the internet to do their job so that they, the best students out there in the world are those who use the technology that's available to them, to their best advantage.

[00:19:30] So I, I think it's the same. I was talking to my 17 year old daughter About this. And once she wasn't, she was actually quite surprised that I knew anything about it at all. Cause I'm really old.

[00:19:43] She started talking to me about, did you know, like some students are using chat G P T to write their essays for them. Okay. She said other students are writing some chat G P T code to check students' essays to see if it was written by chat, g p t, and then add some spelling mistakes so that it looks like it was written by the student.[00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] So students are starting to embrace this technology in fantastic ways, but what my daughter does is she will ask chat g p t to write something for him that saves her an hour of time. She can spend 20 minutes. Adding her own personality to the context and to the transcript that's been written, she can add some soul into it.

[00:20:18] Yes, she can add some her own flair into it. And if I go and have a look at what she would've written without AI versus what she produced with her and ai, the end result of using the two things together was far better than what she would've created on her own because it didn't replace the need for her.

[00:20:37] It just enhanced what she could do. And she spent half the time doing twice as good a job cuz she got the bare bones of the, that was the poem she was writing and really put her personality into it. So I think again if we have the next generation, whether it's social, whether it's personal, whether it's in our business lives, if we can embrace AI and we can use it to create the bare bones, it can create the play or it can create [00:21:00] the song and then a human can add the flare.

[00:21:03] Yes. In that competitive difference. I think that's really using AI to a great advantage of the human ready. 

[00:21:11] Michelle: That is a beautiful example of how AI can enhance humanity. I absolutely love that. I wrote the book, find Your Voice. That helps people to find their passion and what it takes to really communicate that passion.

[00:21:28] I found Spencer, that there are four things. Every message needs has to have, it has to be entertaining, engaging, informative, and inspirational. If it lacks one, your message falls flat. It just is the truth. It was even funny in that the Fort Gospels of the Bible, each one was written in that communication style.

[00:21:49] What do. Very cool. AI can. Impugn, some entertainment, lots of information. Some engagement and some [00:22:00] inspiration. But as you said, it really takes a human touch and a human calling to be able to take it to that level. That is glorious. My concern is though like with the calculator, I'm not a math girl.

[00:22:15] I use a calculator, was my best friend. I've got one on my phone, right? It still is. My mom would always say, Lisa, Michelle, what you gonna do if that calculator is no longer available? Oh, mom. But you know what? There's something to be said for that. What are we going to do in the future if we don't have the electronics or the technology, or there's war or whatever?

[00:22:43] Could happen. We think that we're the Titanic and it'll never go down. What does, could that mean for humanity? And what warning do you think we should walk away with today in our final minutes together? 

[00:22:56] Spencer: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting I take my teenage kids now and [00:23:00]math, and nobody seems to be able to do math on a piece of paper anymore.

[00:23:04] They either do it on the calculator on the phone, or we create an Excel spreadsheet and that's the way we compute. The world moves on and do we need to plan for a world where computers no longer exist and technology no longer works, and we're all at war and there's no electricity and blah, blah, blah.

[00:23:18] There's no internet. Maybe but that's, as you said right at the start humans, nature finds a way of adapting and adopting new ways to get the most fulfilling human existence that we can find. I don't see this being any different, 1, 1, 1 constant we seem to have in our lives is the accelerated speed of change.

[00:23:36] I. Particularly in technology. And I think with the birth of quantum computing, that's gonna revolutionize the way that we think about computer power. Today a AI can only progress at a certain pace cuz we can't feed it quickly enough with all of our history as soon as computing catches up I think the next generation will.

[00:23:54] Not understand how slow our computers and phones were. I think as soon as that technology catches up I think [00:24:00] AI starts to become a real help. But I think the key here, as we talked about at the start is nature always finds a way of adopting and adapting new ways. I think rather than resist.

[00:24:11] We need to embrace this new technology. We need to find the best way of using it rather than trying to eradicate it from our lives. I would encourage anybody out there to, these things are easily accessible. If we think about the whole change curve where most people go through denial of change, then resistance, then to some exploration, and hopefully at some point we commit to the change and off we go.

[00:24:30] Most people at this point in time, I think of my generation probably somewhere between sort of denial and resistance. You need to get over denial. It is happening. It's gonna happen in all of our lives. And if you're in resistance, the easiest way is to give it a go and play with it and see how you can use AI in your social life or your professional life.

[00:24:46] Because this is coming and it's. It's gonna come at us quickly and the quicker and and more open we are to embracing it. I think the better experience 

[00:24:53] Michelle: will. Yeah, put the resistance. I say a he a little bit of healthy resistance don't lose at all [00:25:00] because somewhere in that is the voice of reason.

[00:25:02] And so hopefully there will be a voice of reason to mitigate some of the things that you were talking about, of making sure that as we move. Forward that we are careful, we are smart and we don't end up like a sci-fi movie. That would be really good. Final question, Spencer, tell me a little bit more about what you do, your company and how people can get more information.

[00:25:30] Spencer: Yeah. Thanks Michelle. So I'm from active ops. We provide a workforce intelligence and workforce management solutions to large and small businesses across north America. Those solutions are designed to capture data about human activity and provide to managers and to the executives of those businesses.

[00:25:45] I call 'em the inputs and outputs. How many hours do people work every day? How much work do they do? How many staff do they need to provide the goods and services and impress their customers with the levels of experience they provide? So we help organizations do that. We [00:26:00] also use some AI in our software.

[00:26:02] So rather than just provide managers with data and expect them to analyze that data and then make decisions, we use AI to teach our software about. An organization's performance and about an organization's people, and we provide that insightful data back to them through an AI engine to give them some insight into what's going on.

[00:26:22] One of the things that we do for our customers that I think uses AI really is we provide some wellbeing metrics about the way that a workforce is changing over time. Other workforce working too many hours. Not getting enough breaks are they on burnouts? We even use AI to be able to predict future sickness and future attrition cuz people are unhappy with their work.

[00:26:43] Again, imagine that where humans don't have to analyze data to try and find out that someone's unhappy in their job and at some point gonna be off sick and is going through a real emotional roller coaster. If we can get AI to to analyze data and highlight that's happening early. We can have two humans have a [00:27:00] meaningful conversation and hopefully stop somebody going down that not very nice path.

[00:27:04] So we use AI in our software. We don't cross the line. We use it for the right reasons. But I think examples like that are important for us and they're important for our customers. So active ops.com people can find out more about what we do. And if you're out there managing people in a business, we can help you gather data, turn that using AI into insightful information and make some better human choices.

[00:27:25] I 

[00:27:25] Michelle: appreciate your time today, Spencer. You'll find that link as you're watching, listening, or reading@mymichellelive.com. Thank you for explaining some things. I think especially for maybe the Gen Xers, were one step closer to a little more understanding. Thank you Michelle, and thank you for watching, listening and viewing.

[00:27:45] God Bless

[00:27:52] more 

[00:27:52] Spencer: watch@mymichellelive.com.