Artificial Intelligence and You

To help us get new and valuable insights into the future of work is Matt Beane, Assistant Professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has spent over a decade doing extensive field research on how workers, organizations and even AI defy norms and rules in the 21st century. 

His new book: The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, was just published by Harper Business, and he has given you a special deal as a listener, to get a free copy of the first chapter, by going to http://aiandyou.theskillcodebook.com. The book lays out a plan for us to protect our skills and by extension the human connection between experts and novices (which is the foundation of skill-building) even as AI continues to take hold in our lives.

In this first part, we talk about how Matt studied surgeons in operating rooms for his PhD thesis and saw the effects that the introduction of a robot surgical system had in stifling the time-honored process of mentoring new surgeons, and generalized this to other fields, and observed the rise of “shadow learning,” where people bend or break the rules to get the learning they need. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest is William A. Adams, technologist, philanthropist, and recorded by the Computer History Museum as one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. He was the first technical advisor to Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott and has founded and overseen global initiatives at Microsoft from XML technologies as early as 1998, to DE&I initiatives in 2015. The Leap program, with a focus on diverse hiring, was named Microsoft’s D&I Program of the year in 2020.

We talk about William’s experience creating the Leap program, its impact, the relationship between AI and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs like Leap, and creating personalized chatbots.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Our relationship with time is dysfunctional. Here to help us explore possibly the most critical effect of AI on the pace of life is Oliver Burkeman, author of the best-selling self-help book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and former author of the psychology column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in The Guardian.

Most of us can attest to being severely overworked and with a shrinking amount of personal time left over. This is true despite the introduction into our lives of a huge amount of technology from the PC to the Internet. Why have tools like email, Google, and instant messaging not reduced our workload and stress? In fact, it’s not hard to believe that they are responsible for making those things worse. In which case, we must ask, what effect will unleashing AI – which accelerates everything it touches - have on our work life? 

This is exactly the thought space that Oliver inhabits, and his work has made a major difference in my own life. Read Oliver's posts and subscribe to his newsletter at OliverBurkeman.com.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about whether this is Luddism, the influence of the Silicon Valley billionaires’ pursuit of immortality, the appropriate use of AI to save us time, and what will remain constant throughout any amount of technological evolution. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Our relationship with time is dysfunctional. Here to help us explore possibly the most critical effect of AI on the pace of life is Oliver Burkeman, author of the best-selling self-help book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and former author of the psychology column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in The Guardian.

Most of us can attest to being severely overworked and with a shrinking amount of personal time left over. This is true despite the introduction into our lives of a huge amount of technology from the PC to the Internet. Why have tools like email, Google, and instant messaging not reduced our workload and stress? In fact, it’s not hard to believe that they are responsible for making those things worse. In which case, we must ask, what effect will unleashing AI – which accelerates everything it touches - have on our work life? 

This is exactly the thought space that Oliver inhabits, and his work has made a major difference in my own life. Read Oliver's posts and subscribe to his newsletter at OliverBurkeman.com.

In this first half of the interview we talk about the parable of the rocks in the jar and how it’s a pernicious lie, the psychology of perceiving life as finite, and how technology has not changed our work stress and may be making it worse through induced demand. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Mounir Shita, CEO of Kimera Systems, is author of the upcoming book The Science of Intelligence, which contains some interesting and thought-provoking explorations of intelligence that had me thinking about Pedro Domingos’ book The Master Algorithm. We talk about theories of AGI, free will, egg smashing, and Mounir's prototype smartphone app that learned how to silence itself in a movie theater!

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is, perhaps, no more burning topic at the moment than the future of work, and so I am particularly grateful to welcome to the show Gary Bolles, author of The Next Rules of Work and a co-founder of eParachute.com, helping job-hunters & career changers with programs inspired by the evergreen book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” written by his father. Gary's courses on LinkedIn Learning have over 1 million learners and he is a former Silicon Valley executive and a co-founder of SoCap, the world’s largest gathering of impact entrepreneurs and investors.

Gary is adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity University, and as a partner in the consulting agency Charrette, he helps organizations, communities, educators and governments develop strategies for “what’s next.”

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about unbossing and holacracies, how AI will impact organizational structures, fear, FOMO, and agency, and the Singularity University.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is, perhaps, no more burning topic at the moment than the future of work, and so I am particularly grateful to welcome to the show Gary Bolles, author of The Next Rules of Work and a co-founder of eParachute.com, helping job-hunters & career changers with programs inspired by the evergreen book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” written by his father. Gary's courses on LinkedIn Learning have over 1 million learners and he is a former Silicon Valley executive and a co-founder of SoCap, the world’s largest gathering of impact entrepreneurs and investors.

Gary is adjunct Chair for the Future of Work for Singularity University, and as a partner in the consulting agency Charrette, he helps organizations, communities, educators and governments develop strategies for “what’s next.”

In the first half of the interview, we talk about the gig economy, the new rules of work, what ChatGPT did to the job market, and an interesting concept called the community operating system.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

My guest is the co-host of the Good Robot Podcast, "Where technology meets feminism." Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow at The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and was named in the Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics of 2022. She is also co-author of a recent book also called The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism. 

In this conclusion of the interview, we talk about unconscious bias, hiring standards, stochastic parrots, science fiction, and the early participation of women in computing.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.