Predictive vs Generative AI, Explained: Josiah Bryan

Show notes

Predictive vs Generative AI, Explained: Josiah Bryan on Hype, Jobs and Wisdom

Is AI going to end the world, create abundance, or is it just hype? AI expert Josiah Bryan joins Dr. John Oberg and Randy Lorensen to explain how AI works in simple terms, and what it means for jobs and wisdom.

Josiah explains AI for people who aren't tech experts. The term has been around since the 1950s. Generative AI predicts the next word, and machine learning makes sense once you picture a chef writing a set of rules for a menu. He also shares how he got into technology as a kid by changing the code of simple computer games.

Then they tackle the big questions: whether AI will end the world (Josiah starts from optimism and faith), why people who think it's all hype may have believed the headlines, how AI is already helping in healthcare, and why most AI "failures" are really prompting problems. On jobs, they discuss a study of engineers using AI, customer service, and the buggy-whip lesson about new industries.

The last part is about wisdom. They cover how humans gain it, bad information and learning to discern, why technology is amoral but its use isn't, bias in AI outputs, and why we need connection with other people more than ever.

Will AI Take My Job? How AI Works in Simple Terms

What you'll discover:

Predictive vs generative AI, in plain English
AI hype vs reality
Why prompting matters more than you think
Will AI take jobs, or create new industries?
How humans gain wisdom, and whether AI can
Why AI won't replace human connection

Timestamps

[00:00] Welcome: Dr. John Oberg and Randy Lorensen with Josiah Bryan
[01:37] What AI is: a term from the 1950s
[03:04] Who this episode is for (not the tech experts)
[04:32] Generative AI: predicting the next word
[06:02] Machine learning explained with a menu
[07:31] Predictive vs generative AI
[08:58] How Josiah got into technology
[11:55] Learning to speak at people's level
[13:23] Will AI end the world? Optimism and faith
[14:53] Separating the hype from reality
[16:21] Who thinks AI is just hype
[17:48] How few people actually use AI
[19:17] AI as a co-pilot in healthcare
[20:45] AI that helps patients
[23:41] When expectations of new technology get shattered
[25:08] Going beyond the chat window
[26:35] Prompting: why AI "doesn't work"
[28:05] Giving clear direction, to AI and to people
[29:33] Will AI take jobs?
[31:00] A study of senior and junior engineers using AI
[32:28] Customer service and the first jobs to change
[33:58] The buggy-whip lesson: new industries
[36:54] AI as a safeguard for software
[38:23] Don't create in isolation
[39:51] AI and the future of education
[41:23] A prediction about AI and abundance
[42:52] AI for online ads and small businesses
[45:48] Entrepreneurship and connection
[47:17] Why independence is a sad way to live
[48:46] Regulation: how much is too much?
[50:16] AI in Christian ministry
[51:48] Can AI have emotions?
[53:19] Technology is amoral; how we use it is not
[54:47] How humans gain wisdom
[57:47] Bad information, and learning to discern
[1:00:43] Thinking for ourselves
[1:02:10] Free speech and its limits
[1:03:38] Bad inputs, and wisdom in AI
[1:05:07] An article on emotional regulation and wisdom
[1:06:34] Knowledge vs experience: the tomato joke
[1:08:01] Well-formed opinions
[1:09:28] Truth, beliefs and debate
[1:13:55] Be careful with data: biased AI outputs
[1:16:53] Why AI won't emulate humans
[1:18:22] Like nuclear energy, we'll figure it out
[1:19:50] Closing thoughts: stepping away from technology

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About Josiah Bryan

Josiah Bryan is a software engineer and AI expert, and director of Josiah Bryan LLC. He has worked on AI applications in healthcare.

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Related episodes

Meet the hosts: Randy Lorensen · Dr. John Oberg · Anthony Marino

Transcript

A full transcript is below. It was generated automatically from the episode audio, so expect some spelling errors in names and terms.

[00:09] are back for another episode of tales of abundance and joining me as always my co-host Randy Lorensen hey Randy how are you I'm doing great I'm I'm definitely looking forward to this conversation today it's fun I was just thinking the exact same words I am looking forward to this conversation today we have with us Josiah Brian and for the listeners at home Josiah is the chief technology officer of Pristina Health which is the medical practice we started a few years ago to end type two diabetes but he's also the managing director of Josiah Bryan LLC which does a lot of different technology work specifically in AI now Josiah is what they call a full stack engineer he can do all of it but he really has become an expert in the space of AI he's starting to do some publishing in this space and I think he has a really sober view on what AI is and what AI isn't and I really want to dive deep into this so Josiah thanks for being here today we're really excited to have you thanks guys for having me I'm looking forward to the conversation quite seriously I enjoy working with both of you and looking like your perspectives on life looking forward to seeing where this goes and you know AI is is being talked about ubiquitously uh so much so that we have a horrible dad joke in my family that you can't spell blockchain without Ai and everyone rolls their eyes out of their head and it's like you know what is AI what isn't ai ai has been around for a long time on the predictive side generative AI is kind of a table a dining room table conversation now can you just give us a quick like what AI is and what AI isn't real briefly kind of where we are AI is a term that's been around since the 50s AI was came up with as artificial intelligence it's the idea of doing things at or near human level or doing things that humans are good at reading information discovering answering information it's a very general thing people often ask is AI and machine learning and deep learning and generative AI are the same thing different picture them like a V diagram AI is the overarching bucket of Technology it's the field it's the label for the field artificial intelligence and the it ascribes to do something to create a system create machines or collections of technologies that can emulate human thought cogn cognition um comprehension decision- making so that's the bucket we're working with everything we're going to talk about today fits within that bucket that field all right and so what's machine learning then is machine learning and AI are they the same exact thing or is machine learning part of AI machine learning is the component of AI it's a one of the biggest most visible parts of it it came into vog in the 1980s and that is basically just a way of taking lots and lots of data learning patterns from it in predicting outputs giving you an output that is with some level of probability the right answer for whatever the task is machine learning is at its core the emphasis on the word learning sorry no it's great and today I think what we want to do is kind of get that into a conversation that that probably isn't a conversation for like the techn file like like if you're if you're super deep into AI probably not gonna learn a ton of new stuff today because we're g to ask you to aim the conversation um not that direction I know that you know you and I geek out about that sometimes we'll be next week geeking about that all week long yeah into the techn files and getting deep deep into the weeds uh together but for today I think we want to really stick to um building it up from from the basics and and starting there so so talk to me about like this generative AI versus predictive AI like large language model like just for someone who's not really clear about what all this stuff means can you give us like the base definitions to get into the conversation today absolutely it it stems from machine learning so machine learning is a is a supet of generative AI machine learning um generative AI uses machine learning to the patterns in large V amount of data and then predicts the next word the next token so generative added heart basically has this idea of we're not just predicting one answer we're not predicting is this a dog or a cat from a picture we're predicting lots of things from a starting point from the input that is I uh Mary Has a Little Lamb it's flee was white snow that was something you llm would predict based on vast amount of training data it predicts the next few words are are Mary had a little land the interesting thing is that with a lot of this generative AI depending on what you're doing with it they'll take Mary had a little then take that put it back on the start of it and ask what's the next word after that it's the idea of generating a sequence of pieces of information called tokens from that we know tokens like parts of words so it's a subset of deep learning machine learning so you've got AI the big picture that's the field wor in machine learning it's one component of it used to make Ai and then generative AI uses machine learning and deep learning to do what we know as chat Bots or chat GPT so it's gener it's generating the next word in the sentence exactly word in the story or the next word okay so then what's predictive AI That's that's been around for a long time it is and that's that's back up a Level under machine learning deep learning predicted AI be things like well here's an illustration that'll help you conceptualize what machine learning is what predictive AI is and what models are is say I hire say I hire somebody your son to make a menu at a restaurant he probably doesn't know much about uh vegan options vegetarian gluten-free maybe he does but I I'm gonna assume that he probably has no idea what any of these food things are how to make a menu so we don't when I hire him to make the menu for the restaurant I'm not going to sit here and give him a class on it if I'm doing a machine learning I'm G to sit him down in a chair and I'm going to run hundreds of people past him they're going to tell him about their preferences their foods and has to find some pattern in that to be able to satisfy everybody's needs for the menu and he's going to make up this set of rules to make a menu that's an equivalency for what machine learning does and what what he would have done then is predicted what the answer should be you for example if you show a computer a picture of a cat or a dog it's going to predict a label for that's predictive learning it's using machine learning to predict something it's typically a single thing we'll use that a lot in well for example I'll use predictive modeling to say is what's the price of oil going to be tomorrow Traders on Wall Street been doing this for years feeding vast amount of data into a model saying hey based on the weather based on the movement of these companies here's what the price of the stock was or oil was yesterday what's it like tomorrow assuming that the weather will be this assuming that this will happen that's predictive learning it's it's easier I mean predictive AI has been around longer than generative Ai and so is I'm I'm assuming well it's it was first therefore it was simpler generative is harder to do generative just scales up and takes a lot more data and it's a different application with different ideas than predictive learning predictive learning has been around well yeah 1980s 2010s is when it really when it's scaled up and became very much in Vogue jve I really didn't come on the scenes till 2020 2018 was one of the seminal papers on it but it is a scale up and a scale out and a new application of predictive learning you at its core G of AI is still predicting it's just being used in a different way it's predicting the next word and so that's the one thing then it predicts more and more there's obviously a lot of technical Nuance to that but that's the easy answer and I think we'll get we'll get deeper into the the kind of the big question that we have on the table which is you know is AI going to Ru is it going to run the world or ruin the world or neither which is I think a lot of people are asking question questions like that before we do that how did you get into you know computers and AI give us a quick backstory as to how you ended here I was never a very good student I got bored easily when I was young I my when I was in school I would get A's one time and Fs the next week my parents would have to ask the teacher are you are you paying attention what he's doing he's probably reading a book well I was because the students would ask dumb questions so I get annoyed and I just read a book to keep myself interested and graciously my parents I taught me how to work with people I credit everything any social skills and Graces I have to my loving mother and father who really worked hard to not only let me work with technology but also work with people but when I was 10 years old I was enjoying wiring wiring my dad's old real toore tape recorder I found that he had these giant speakers that if I reverse the wires on some of the speakers make a microphone my parents liked to talk about their family matters in the kitchen they kick us out say we're going to have a parent talk I didn't like being excluded so I drilled wires through the floor of my from my basement laboratory and I ran a speaker on top of the fridge ostensibly just so I could play music nice for my mom but then when she found out that I was listening to their conversations because I had hotwired dad's real real she wasn't too happy she was more mad that I drilled through her carpet but that's another story but inevitably of course you your parents parent conversations yes inevitably though that requires a lot of manual labor I had to get my fingers dirty I had to mess up wires find the shorts and when I when they got a computer was this old Windows 3.1 computer and I found out that I could be creative on the computer I could make things on the computer without having to get my hands dirty that opened up a whole new world for me I was able to tweak some of the games that were existing on the computer these you know that worm game that goes around you eat things and they had one where you a gorilla game where you throw bananas at another gorilla it was just this old simple graphic but it had the source code of those games there and I this little 10-year-old kid was playing with it like hey if I change this I can make the banana green I can make the gorilla look like like my dad or something like that and that opened up this whole new world of creating software of tweaking things and learning as I go you lost me at windows 3.1 being an old computer when that was like Advanced for me we were like Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 I had a Commodore 64 to I I remember that you as as did I that my first computer amazing stuff yeah well I the story starts with AI and this is where I'll leave off is when I was 13 my parents we lived in Ken nor took out a half hour from the Canadian border and they would drive us into Min not North Dakota once a week where we would take gymnastics classes and then we would also spend time at the library and I would check out these amazing books of the library that just inspired my imagination one of them was serus circuit stellar and in there the article that caught my eye was teach your computer to program itself it was this very simple article about answering some prompts that would generate out code but it sparked in me this idea of automating the work we do making the computer almost kind of intelligent and ever since then I've been fascinated with it with the idea of intelligent Machines of AI and there's one other interesting thing that I want to relate is is that I I credit any ability to teach anything with my mom draging my dad off stage my my dad is a very very smart man he knows Greek and Hebrew he's a pastor but when he was a young Pastor he was just being too smart on stage he would lose the people and my mom was very good at telling him hey Bruce you need to speak at their level you need to bring out the truth in a way that they connect with and that has complemented my technology abilities and they've they've taught me that that skill because this teaching the teaching and talking about AI isn't just to make us sound smart it's to actually connect with people because at at its core what we're trying to do with AI is talk about Humanity from a different perspective and emulate Humanity yeah and so there's a beauty and increase ity to talking about these things that it's not just be about being smart but it's about connecting with people I can go more into that but I want to land it somewhere that opens up a whole can of worms right emulating humanity and all that stuff that's part of the conversation you and are having prepping for this episode yeah well let's let's jump into the deep end and you know the Josiah is you know I mean from the library in Min not North Dakota to today being an expert in AI some people are afraid we've watched the movies right we've all seen Terminator and whatever other movies where these robots in in essence AI becomes our masters right so is it going to end the world the second option is are we going to be able to use it to create abundance and make the world a better place or is it just hype so let's start is it is it going to end the world let's start there no I have a I come from a place of um of optimism and belief that there is a higher power that is God that he's in control of the world that that's where I how I align my life with following God and serving him and I and part of that that con conviction is that he is in charge and he has his hand on the way Earth is going and if AI is going to end the world it's going to be by his his approval and his Blessing more practically speaking out of the realm of of Christian philosophy I think that there is enough good people that are working with AI that want to do good things with it that is not going to be as dark and dismal of the future as people are afraid of the potential for our AI to bless and and bring abundance to humanity far far exceeds the risks that being said I am not in favor of control of AI of government dictation of government restriction or any sort of um you can you can only velop this you can only release new models if you preview it by the government first not a fan of that I believe Ai and Technology should be open and free to the masses there's a lot that we can go into on that but I will say I don't think it's going to end the world I think the potential is much more of abundance orientation okay let's talk more about that talk more about the how how is it going to create abundance there is so many different applications around it a lot of AI well part of it is let's first talk about the hype so many people will want to say the hype is everybody thinks it's such an amazing thing they want to apply to everything and I think people are getting ahead of themselves in the adoption curve they hype it up so much that then everybody sees a bubble everybody sees that it's not delivering on these promises of the hype people are bringing it and so everybody then will say oh no it's not going to do us any good at all I take much more measured view of things as as you know in most and so the benefit will take time to realize I think it's going to automate a lot of the things that are gruntwork type things this uh there was an article I read recently that was talking about wisdom and Ai and one of the things it talked about is automating research but it also warns about don't take the research that AI provides with at you know carp launch read into it with your own human wisdom there's a lot we can go into on that but automating these type of what you might call a grunt tasks finding filtering and sorting data summarizing data AI right now our generative AI is great at that and as we delve into what type of tasks that humans are doing because we need to do them can we automate with AI freeing up people's times bringing value to their lives bring them to do things that are uniquely human I think that's one of the first areas that we'll see AI bringing abundance bringing blessing to lives I I think my observation the people that think it's just hypee are people that have sort of bought the marketing the headlines right that they think oh it'll just do this and it's magical and they don't understand the work or the steps that are necessary would you agree with that there you have to be very clear eyed around what it can do if I go onto a job site with a single tool this amazing Hammer a carbide wrapped Hammer with a steel head that has a a nail holder and that is just the best hammer you've ever seen I'm going to try and use that hammer for everything on the job site I'm going to try and put the windows in I'm going to try and mount the door frame with a hammer that would be foolish to anybody knows construction that's the knowledge that that's where my knowledge of construction ends right there but if you have a hammer everything all you have is a hammer everything looks like Hammer so that's where the hype is is that all these people are trying to use the llms for everything and they're not delivering they're not being careful and clear eyed about what they can and cannot do what they're good at what they're not good at and part of the problem is is that LM generative AI has no it doesn't present people that have train these models and the way these models work they don't present with any sense of I'm not sure uh they'll give very confident answers even when they're confidently wrong much like a three-year-old making up stories about monsters under his bed so it's that that confidence we talk about AI like everyone's used it I mean where we are today as we record this particular episode a very small portion of the population is actually engaged with in using AI at all and a and a much smaller population using it regularly like we're we're at the very Forefront of the innovators curve right where there's like the the innovators then the early adopters then you have the majority the late majority and the laggards like we're pretty early into this thing and if you look back at you know the printing press and how it was adopted and the steam engine and then you look at like you know nuclear power or the internet or mobile phones or my personal favorite is camera cameras on phones like there are people talking about like why would you ever want a camera on a phone we have like great cameras these are crappy cameras and you know you don't need a camera on a phone and then a few years ago there was more pictures taken in one year than the rest of History combined you know with really high fidelity and so you know it's true that personal computers and calculators change the way we do work but I don't know if that's for the worst necessarily we can make an argument about that John do you want to talk a little bit about how your using it at pren and and what uses and practical uses that you're implementing it in the everyday world yeah I mean we we we're using AI to support work that has to be done right and so like in the patient recruitment cycle there are people that want information about the new way that we do things and sometimes someone's not available and so and this use of AI has been around for a long time nothing new we're doing here but it's like you can talk to a co-pilot and find out what we're doing based on your given s of circum cumstances and schedule an appointment if you want to and I would say that's kind of old technology on a relative basis like there are lots of companies that provide that type of technology that can be used on the bleeding edge of what we're doing is when a patient has a question about their medical chart that the providers already given them information for we can have an AI go in and give them that information in a clinically sound methodology with no risk of um hallucination which is when an AI makes up information um Josiah and I talked about and we've created a clinically Safe Way of producing that data which is uh for the for the patient which I think is really really helpful and then we also use to take data in for the patient so if a patient has kind of what's called unstructured data and wants to get that to their provider but the provider is not available in the minute we can get it to the provider much much faster and there's lots of things we're doing behind the scenes to make the providers work less lift less Lifting for them technologically and a lot of things other people are doing um and then the I think the biggest thing we're doing is creating a new triage tool that is holistic in a way of supporting a new way of treating type 2 diabetes where we've had just really great efficacy by taking vast amounts of data you know in one case 10,000 pages of data and kind of boiling it down to what's the next one thing the patient has to do which you just you couldn't do that before you had these types of capabilities and so um and there's you know there I think there's eight different AI implementations happening in a very small Medical practice um in a way that is you know clinically appropriate and safe and um done you know inside the regulatory boundaries and all that good stuff so a lot of thinking has gone behind it a lot of work and and Josiah's been really genius at putting some of these things together it's been you know there's been some some a lot of creativity has to go into it but uh it'll be things that we can you know things we can do to change the way that we interact with computers we can I mean sentiment analysis josi are really interesting topic to get into but a lot of times AI is looking at um you know what people are saying in text or voice and AI doesn't today as I've talked to many people about it understand sentiment in the way that I understand it as someone who understands human behavior there's just some things missing and so we're actually able to uh go in and create um a set of you know AI agents essentially that can unwind some of that mystery in human Communication in ways that other AIS just aren't doing that and that's probably one of the most kind of Leading Edge things we're doing is helping to uh demystify some of the communication human communication where other Technologies just aren't even contemplating that problem let alone solving it and and to listeners out there this is really high level what you guys are doing right like this is clearly needs somebody like Josiah an expert that is able to implement this this is not done with the offthe Shelf chat GPT or grock or whatever things are out there that those things and I think maybe that's where some people's confusion comes is is they hear about stuff like this and they try to do it with the off-the-shelf stuff would you say that fair ji like people you talk to and there's a there's a lot of people that that's their primary experience with AI and that's where we as humans have this beautiful ability to anthropomorphize and to see Humanity see intelligence where they may not be I mean I saw my nephew playing with robots and giving them names and these little Lego things and he he has whole stories built around their life and we do that even today with chat gbt uh we we ascribe emotions and intelligence to it where there simply isn't any and that's that when they see that intelligence or the assumed intelligence what they perceive as intelligence um fo intelligence then suddenly they think that it can do anything and then they run up against this wall where it can't really deliver on their expectations then the illusion shatters expectations are broken and they enter that state of well this whole thing is just BS and height that's really what's happening is the the internal expectations are being built up and then they're being shattered and that doesn't feel good for any expectation let alone Brown uh new technology so let's talk about because a lot of the people listening that probably is their access to AI right they're using chat GPT they're using Gro or whatever other thing is out there so if that if if somebody's listening and that is their access what can it do well what it can do well is summarize and generate things at its core without anything else it's generating and chatting with you so you can give it information to chat about recent example of what I what I would do what I've done that anybody could do with access to chat GPT is I uploaded a a PDF called the drama triangle and I wanted to uh figure out how it fit into something else that I was working on so I pasted the p PF in there pasted this 50 page write up that I had done into chat GPT and I asked it some questions he said here's the topic on look at this PDF what is what do you think does it align with this other document or not and it it that's something anybody can do rather than having to read through every single word yourself you can use it as a research assistant of course the same um the same rules apply don't just take it at face value use some of your own human intellect to say that doesn't sound right oh yeah that does make but that's an exact example now as as some of these companies get good at integrating it into their new products Apple and Google being some of the examples that have just recently come out that extends the capabilities and the access to AI in ways that go beyond that just chat interface and we can talk about that if you like those are I can point to those as going beyond that that is access to the average person so I might be getting a little ahead here but what skills if the average person wants to do that I I think from my own experience it wasn't intuitive right away what I really needed to be effective using those basic things what basic skill sets do people need to develop for me me me me I want to say Randy you said this long time ago I think you were one of the smartest people around this it teaches us as humans how to ask better questions like one of the I was just gonna quote that yeah it's like it reflects back to us the the the inefficiency or the lack of skillfulness of the questions we ask and and can shine a bright light on how we don't connect well with each other like the number of times in a day that I have to stop conversations where people are talking past each other as a professional who works in that World um it's amazing and so chat GPT you know or gemini or you know Claude all of them appropriately to The Prompt they're given you know bad prompt in bad information back and that doesn't mean that the GPT you know or the AI is is not working well it's just not well prompted and so my hope would be that you know listeners here might think gosh I want to become better at prompt engineering yes 100% And also consider what that means in reflecting with the questions and answers you give to people in real in the real world world and we will for listeners by the way that that's a that's a pretty heavy lift is becoming good at prompting right so go to our our website talesof abundance.com there'll be tools on there that'll help you but yeah what John's referring to wow I remember that so well and and I at the time I was doing a lot with chat GPT and I was talking to one of my employees and I had given her an assignment and she came back having completed the assignment only she didn't complete the assignment that I had given her and I started getting irritated and in my thought I was like well why why didn't she do what I said why why did she do it this way but because I'd been spending so much time in Ai and prompting when AI doesn't give me the answer I want I don't blame AI I just blame myself and I go oh okay I look I go back I look at my prompt and I say that's why it responded this way I wasn't clear enough here right and I realized in this case I went back to that conversation and what I told her and I'm like oh she did do the work I wasn't clear enough and giving direction so making I yeah that's that really has been the biggest benefit to me is it's made me it's still a work in progress certainly but it's made me better at communicating with people I'm not suggesting we should stop the episode here but that's all we ever got to today and that was the biggest benefit of AI that by itself could change the world because right now as a society we don't communicate as well as we could or should and if if we could just have that one lesson if I could have one wish for every listener in the whole world it would be to use that mirror as a way of figuring out how we communicate with each other and just being a little more thoughtful in the way that we prompt and and talk to each other so all right my soap box back to regular programming well let's go to so we talked about the Terminator AR Arnold schwarzen Hager coming back is a terrifying robot so maybe it's not that but I think a lot of people are worried that it's going to take my job right and I know John you referenced an article the other day like what jobs will it take and it was from you know I don't remember the research do let's dig into that a little bit like what jobs is it going to take because I think it I think we all agree it's going to take jobs right um it's my opinion that it will create more jobs and more opportunity more abundance in the world similar you know technology historically people have been scared it's going to take their jobs and while it does take some jobs it inevitably creates more opportunity and more abundance but what jobs is it going to impact I forget the exact quote somebody more well-versed and more eloquent than I said something along the lines that it's not going to replace all jobs but it will people that will succeed are the people that are using AI in their jobs and that typically applies more to knowledge workers than um more Blue collares Jobs even so um we've had Trials of AI at say McDonald's for example where you say that they'll never replace workers with AI well they they're trying to with their ordering system now McDonald's is rolling that back because of hallucination because it wasn't working very well they didn't do it very well there's so many funny reports and another poor example well I'm not going to go to Google putting rocks on pizza but the types of jobs that will'll typically replace are those that are easily automatable it will augment those people that are doing knowledge type work and it will those people that aren't able to use AI such as these AI systems where you're learning to prompt and talk to people and talk to AI it's going to make those people not be able to perform as well as the people that are using AI there was a recent study on of some and focus on software engineering of senior engine a set of senior Engineers a set of mid-level Engineers a set of Junior engineers and I forget which one was used as the control group The takea away from the study was is that the senior Engineers were more productive when using AI the junior Engineers were more productive when using AI however the junior Engineers did not learn or translate their skills to other problems they weren't as critical and as um intelligent of their use with it was more low level they were still a AI still did raise All Ships it did bring everybody and made them more productive but you have to good a different study it showed that the middle performers had had an outsized gain and the top performers also gained but gained lesser so it narrowed the gap between middle level performers and top level performers which was a really important insight into that jagged edge of you know some talking about of performance Improvement right absolutely thank you for bringing that up I forgot that nuance the study but that's an important thing to point out to make it really practical I don't have a magic ball that says these are the specific fields we can reference studies that people have done but I think it's the general takeaway is is that it's good to get familiar with the new technology because a it teaches you how to communicate with humans as John was pointing out but B if you want a general filter to look at what jobs are likely to be replaced it's going to be those lower level knowledge worker type jobs those are going to be the first to be impacted more heavily as they're automated some some companies have touted how they've removed all of their customer service people that are answering the phones with the chats and replace them with two or three chat Bots and they've just let go of that entire Workforce Now to varying degrees of success I'm not going to talk about the success of those right now we can delve into that but those are the types of things that's a filter you can use for that this isn't the first time society's gone through this right like no when calculators and and computers became kind of prevalent you used to have rooms full of people who were doing accounting functions and yes reporting functions that eventually computers took over and then we you know people as a society skill got skilled in different areas so I think there are going to be people that are going to be impacted and there's going to have to be tring for sure in society for certain places and I think people are wise to Think Through how it impacts their particular you know career trajectory for sure absolutely but I think you know there's G to be opportunity that comes from it as well like I just saw it a few months ago for the first this might be you know six months ago maybe even a year ago um job descriptions coming out for prompt engineers and prompt engineering supervisors that I mean that didn't exist five years ago and so new opportunities and the you know skill skilled opportunities which is great yeah go ahead J I was gonna point out the illustration of the buggy whip manufactured just in support of that and back when we had everybody was being driven around by horse and buggy we had entire Industries generated entire companies dedicated to creating buggy whips and as automobiles came into vogan the early part of the 1900s those those companies faltered lost sales and eventually you can't even find one somebody that does buggy with manufacturing now as a business it's sad those people lost their jobs but I I waiter they found other jobs and not I don't want to whitewash everything I want to be sensitive to the fact that this we're talking real people and I want to just say oh yeah everybody's fine I'm sure that felt traumatic to those the people that were losing their jobs at during the time of buggy with manufacturing and yes there will be people that are going to be negatively impacted and I hope that's not the case with AI but I I want to be sensitive to the fact that there may be and I don't have an answer for that I'm just I want to be acknowledge that if if we take that a step further right we think about the buggy went away and the buggies went away and different things around horses however yeah the automobile industry I think it's safe to say employs significantly I mean many multiples more people than those Industries but not only that we then had a need for tires which we didn't previously had it created an excess need for fuel which some people would argue that was a bad thing but the need for roads and all the workers I mean there's many levels of jobs and all the Mater all the Machinery that were needed to build the roads build the gas stations and then that allowed people to travel it open it made hotels more needed we don't the fact that the person who lost their job printing the Yellow Pages because of the internet didn't necessarily go get a job at with an internet company like that and I think that's the the the real understandable valid fear people have and so I you know as a as a caring Society it's important for us to recognize all those opportunities yes and it's also important for us to to be you know careful thoughtful about the people that are impacted help with the transitions yes I mean so so there are real issues we have to face along the way um that I think we want to be sensitive to and but that doesn't mean that I want to slow down Innovation agree AI is going to help us with a lot of things in the healthcare World in terms of research that I'm not even touching and don't know where it's headed but it sure seems positive you can go through like I think Josiah correct me if I'm wrong but like in in De veloping software you may not be able to to use AI as effectively developing software as you'd like to today but unit testing becomes a lot less expensive faster and your software then becomes less buggy if you can absolutely from development into production more quickly right 100% I've used it quite successfully for exactly that and many of the things that I've been doing it's much easier to use AI to generate some tests and I'll tweak them make sure that they work but that makes the overall softt much more reliable it's it's putting a set of safeguards around software that I've written so yes definitely a Ben a beneficial thing to my own work so I if either one of you were advising people it could be somebody that works a job that maybe it's a call center maybe it's a truck driver could be a kid in college right that I think is even a bigger challenge to know where the world's going to be in five or 10 years how do they lean into this how do they make themselves invaluable in the work place of the future right because I think there's opportunity here too so what would you tell somebody you know that's a scary question even for me because I don't have uh answers to that that are well thought out right now I will tell you that the the one rule I've learned as I've grown been growing in my life my career is it's less about the specific it's less about simply being an expert if all you are is an expert in one thing your expertise alone means Jack squat it's about the relationships you build and the people you meet along the way community you build if you if all you're focused on is being an expert at this one thing you're not going to get very far in life at all you need people around you so yes it's scary yes you should still be uh good at what you do I'm not saying don't acquire expertise Don't Look Away look at ways to bring value and bringing creativity and bring Beauty to life but don't do that in isolation without finding people that you know need those things if you're an artist you know you you want people to look at your art if you're a truck driver you need people that are going to need your goods and if you're a kid in college you need to find ways that you can contribute value to society what is your unique passions what is it that you uniquely come alive at doing and it may not be technology for for me it it doesn't devolve technology but there's unique things about that I can say makes me come alive that will translate to other things if for whatever reason I can't do Tech technology so there's look inside yourself to find what brings you alive and find people around you and build community because that those two things together will help weather storms that may come yeah and for my kids Randy it's it's learn how to be a learner because Learners learning is only going to have to accelerate in their careers and so they'd better learn how to learn really really well and how to relearn and keep learning so that to me is absolutely important early career skills they can learn and the second one is be good with people like learn how to be great with people because that's going to be Commodities of the future as we as a society um unfortunately become more isolated and distant learning how to connect people and and is going to be a very very valuable societal uh skill absolutely yeah great advice great advice um you know the learning thing it also strikes me one of the areas that I think is very likely to be disrupted is education it's at some point AI is really I think going to be able to improve education so while they need to learn hopefully AI can can help in that um so this is podcast it's called Tales of abundance I I listen to a podcast hold too fast man I want to I want to talk about that because it's already happening go ahead I ran a company and I'm currently on the board of a company that creates curriculum for medical students and uh you know they um they as they're creating that curriculum they're finding ways to do it better um and faster and less expensively and create a better experience and um so so I think I mean this it's it's already happening I just um some I was just asked to sit on a national board for an educational growth fund that innovates and finds ways to deliver education less expensively um at scale and I had my first board meeting recently and so there's this group of people that you might not have thought were raising funds for this but and they you know they came and interviewed me for a board role because they wanted to bring that you know how do you scale it how do you pick the right things like so so people who you wouldn't think were investing in that type of innovation are investing time energy and money right now today and it's places that would shock oh it's coming it's definitely coming so what I started saying about abundance I listened to a guy in another podcast a few months ago and he predicted that in the not so distant future I don't remember the time frame that there would be two to three person companies so basically one two three people running a company and they would become trillion dollar companies with three people or less I mean do I is that a I mean what what what I'm asking an impossible question but can happen and what kind of time frame when you say trillion dollar companies that immediately you have to think about supply and demand who's spending a trillion dollars and what they spending it on and yes it can happen but how frequently can it happen how much room in there is there in the market for trillion dollar companies in the first place but regardless of the economics of it aside can it happen absolutely it could happen today with the right the right app the right Niche that's was the the dream of the internet bubble is that you could just write one guy or one person could write an app and it just blows up and you make millions of dollars and all you did was write a little bit of software so with the uh the scaling effect of AI I was talking with some who was it yesterday couple days ago they in marketing for example oftentimes you have to build out sales funnels you have to build out the um ad copy the email email drip funnels the drip all these things that I don't even understand repeating words that make sense to me but I I've done enough ads online before to know it's a pain in the neck and he was telling me about hey you just fill out this one form on this new app I found and it generates a complete email sequence a complete set of marking funnels and all these automations for you that's that is the type of thing you would have to hire somebody for typically today build this out you have a marketing expert to do that that's a role that in some ways was just replaced by single form because we've got this generative AI that somebody has inserted and wired into this form and there's a lot of work that goes behind it but it does lend Credence the idea that yeah you could have a trillion dollar company being ran effectively by two or three people augmented by Ai and a suite of tools that replace a lot of these functions which you normally would have to have dedicated humans for but a lot of these you you guys know the world of bigger companies better than I do and so I say this very humbly but there are a lot of roles that um you can retrain people for very quickly you can take a well educated college student and within two or three months have that well educed college student replace many of the roles you know if somebody leaves you could hire somebody again with enough intelligence and with a with appropriate amount of training those are the type of things that are going to be done effectively by AI not to dismiss the humans that are doing them right now I'm not talking like that but lending support to that need all the expertise we have today and more so whether some of that some of that expertise is going to live inside of AI some of it's going to live inside of systems some of it's live in people when you start talking about like business models of employment versus non remember one time there was a big company that said you know our our Revenue per employee is way higher than anybody else and they came out with that announcement right after they had turned 300,000 people from employees into contractors like so I think I think the question itself might be a little a little loaded right and I think there will be some of course there'll be somebody who figures out how to get a trillion dollar company out of a couple of three people you like it's going to happen at some point of course but I think I think you know as as we think about like entrepreneurship and and moving into the future I think Silicon Valley you know has a form of Entrepreneurship where they're building companies with a billion dollars of market capitalization but by number people that's not the largest number of entrepreneurs it's the people who have the tire shops in the midwest it's the person who's got the bakery in the Southeast it's the person like those people entrepreneurs every bit as much as the people in Silicon Valley different economics yes different but but very entrepreneurial and I think that sometimes we make the mistake of looking to Silicon Valley only for entrepreneurship I think there is a certain appeal to that for people and that's great I support that I think it's wonderful um I'm I'm right now I'm in I'm in San Francisco right now for a conference so very supportive of all that but I do want to make sure that we don't lose that this country was built on the backs of a different kind of Entrepreneurship as as well and and that's a very important part and so and I hope we have a lot of listeners that are kind of in all of those camps um going through that so John that Segways in doesn't really segue but far be for me to direct the topic but it makes me think of this article I was reading earlier where it was differentiate between about wisdom and about Ai and the one of the conclusions it one of the devices it had was less about technology and more about humanity and paraphrasing it says in this current world we live in it's so easy to get inundated with information and with that in in inundation of information comes a lot of fear and a lot of concern about things that we can't directly affect or have any control over um the news today is largely plays to our emotions in um rewind a 100 years ago when we were less Urban Centric and less connected there was a lot less of this instantaneous information sharing we were more connected with what was immediately around us in our local community that whether or not information sharing instantly is good or bad it the effect was we had more of a connection with our fellow man and I that that's a beautiful thing because that helps us stay grounded helps us stay connected we're social creatures we're not built to live in isolation I think this the conversion from uh living in the country to living in cities makes us think that we can be so very independent but as I've learned living here in Austin living being independent is a sad way to live we need connections even in cities and so that's of too though we're measuring the wrong things as I I think you're you're you're hitting right on it like we we are about consuming things and there are things we feel have to buy today they were part of a village you know decades and centuries past and and that's really healthy for gross domestic product there's a couple countries that measure gross happiness product I I don't know what the right thing to measure you know for success uccess of a country is and Far Far be it for me to hold myself out as any type of politician but you know we're measuring gross domestic product and and GDP per per person and all these things and so there are roles that have nothing to do with money in our society that we don't value as much and I think it's a problem absolutely do with AI but I think that AI could give us some of the space to go back and spend some of that time unfortunately AI is a tool like a hammer is a tool a hammer can be used to a hammer can be used to throw being thrown through a window the hammer good or bad it's amoral I think AI doesn't have quite that same immorality because the person creating it can introduce bias consciously or subconsciously with an agenda uh one way or another and so so there are some things from a regulatory perspective that I think are appropriately handled um but again I'm a I'm a guy that thinks you got to be careful about how much we regulate that if we're gonna know continue to grow economically yes let's dig deeper into that article jiah because you shared it with us um and I read it and I thought it was interesting I have a fair amount of push back I know that's shocking knowing me um on a couple of things Randy what don't you push back on not much I tend to challenge I tend to challenge assumptions a lot let talk about certain definition words irritates people some Heth healthy the the article talks and I don't know you could probably summarize it and you've already summarized it some and we can put it in the show notes and on the page for people to look at on Tales abundance.com but it talks about how it's good at doing taking a lot of information putting it together right that human brains can't do that well it being AI yeah but it comes at it more from a you mentioned wisdom it talks a lot about wisdom it doesn't have wisdom it doesn't have real intelligence it doesn't have love it doesn't have compassion empathy all those things right I mean does that a yeah a decent overview in your opinion yeah it starts about the idea of how to effectively use AI in Christian Ministry when you're talking about using AI to read the Bible read moral text and it talks about the application of that and how to effectively use that for practitioners or people who are doing that work and it does draw the the lineation between today what AI is good at and that is summarizing and synthesizing and answering questions and again when I'm saying AI we're talking a lot about this generative AI the llm side of things right and so it's very good at coating all this vast amount of data finding these them the need on the Hast stack answering questions on that it's doesn't have any it doesn't have any concept of being able to reflect on its own experiences it does llms do not have self-reflection they don't have the ability to say well this is a good decision this is a bad thing they don't have the ability to make moral judgments based on empathy and compassion they're simply predicting the next best word based on vast amounts of data that they've learned patterns from and that is today and that is focusing in llms I might make that a very firm caveat because I have some disagreements with the conclusions as well of the article so I think where I where I want the three of us to explore here is I guess I think of AI much like a child right child a child doesn't have a lot of wisdom yet or most children but as life goes on and through our experiences and whatnot we gain wisdom I feel like we're sort of at that same stage with AI and llms or whatever it is and I don't think we're there Randy I I I think that you know when you talk about that a child has emotion and that emotional processor exists for a child you know right away and and you you know there's a Reptilian Brain in a child's brain that is processing different than you know the cerebral cortex which is much more like a computer and so I don't it may be true that we haven't found an emotional processor for a computer yet like that part I agree with we haven't found that and if we do that may change the game um but I think one of the dangers we run into is that a computer May and and probably can today if we ask ask it to emulate emotional language and it can draw on and feed the emotional experience of the person interacting with it and I do think that that you bump into some dangers there you know I think that from a just from a species perspective if you've ever read um you know Brief History of Time uh what sapiens Brief History of Time I think it's called and um and then you kind of hold that out versus like some of the robots that are being designed to handle like the sexual desires of people you could see how that would lead to you know reproduction less reproduction lowered birth rates and then despite any you know um biases you have towards any of those things like that that could hypothetically endanger a species absolutely it's not that the tech that again goes back to technology itself is inherently aoral but the application of it makes it a moral good or bad and I agree with you John that the The Originators the AI can induce their moral biases bases whatever to it but it still still is that's a moral the application of it in this case I think we're running up against something in this case is you have to confront the um leanings of man or women and the man of man humankind we have inherent uh nature that drives us to certain behaviors are selfish and self-serving when left alone in this world and that is going to dictate a lot of these negative uses of Technology of AI of money in general as I say power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely and that's what we're running up against here in AI used for these um or machines used for these sexual gratification it's an application driven by our inherently selfish desires and there's solutions for that but that's not a technological solution so appease me here a little bit or play along how do humans gain WIS think think about people you know that are really wise right yeah where where did that wisdom come from taking it from a a pure perspective that doesn't involve referencing scripture of the Bible practically speaking it's going to involve experience and reflection and somebody parents Society to on whether those actions were good or bad and the ability to reflect on that the ability to be a good learner of the the repercussions of your own actions and then be able to think and predict and by experience that oh if I knock this glass of tea off the table it's GNA make a mess here I'm an adult I have that choice but is that a wise choice I'm gonna waste time later that's something you can only learn by experience I think that's true Josiah but I think that's true for One path I think there's probably and let me just caveat all this by saying this is not an area of my professional expertise at all so I'm spitballing here but I would say that it that that is one path of many I don't know how many maybe it's 16 maybe it's 16,000 but I've certainly met people that are wise beyond their years I've met people that are saying things at you know 13 14 15 years old and and by the way I look at the wisdom of the founding the framers of the Constitution and you know they were these documents that were like you know they're 30-year-old you know people writing documents that could live and last for a couple hundred years like there's a level of wisdom in that room that that I would say is uh you know Supernatural is the right word but certainly beyond what I experience in people of the same age and experience that's you know 200 years later and then years later is I want to emphasiz camp on that for a second too because a you've highlighted the certain people wise beyond their years the the depth which which they write two things I want to point out a people that some people wise be the years have gone through things that they should not have gone through had to go through to get them wise behind the years that's all experience-based that that well not all that I've met people today that are 13 14 15 years old that haven't gone through things and are wise beyond their years I think that's just I think there's many paths I've also met people that are you know lots of experience not wise so I don't I mean there's and we should go find if there's experts in this space about developing wisdom like we should yes and figure absolutely science behind it I'm just not familiar with that science at all if it exists I will say that the Practical advice offered is first of all slow down and appreciate the things around you and that that's practically advised by this article that we're talking about but that is that part of it is not necessarily connected with a specific faith and so that does apply to the larger aspect of reflection self-reflection those people that are able to reflect on the consequences the outcome of their actions will inherently grow wiser than people that just act without thinking don't learn from their mistakes so to speak I have I have a lot of thoughts here I'm gonna try and put these in so I don't ramble on so I agree a lot with what Josiah said but I also think in today's world there is so much bad information out there right and the internet has made that worse AI might be making that worse now and all of this information the founding fathers who John I couldn't agree more they were amazing I don't think they were I'm not saying they didn't have bad information but they weren't inundated with as much bad information okay um something near and dear to my heart money and understanding of money if you listen to any of the founding fathers talk about it they all understood economics and in today's world in my opinion that number is not even near 1% of people that understand it and go ji I would recommend people to look at a book called Deep work by Cal Newport and John maybe will have opinions on on the the recommendations there but the thing that stands out to me is also part of the advice from this article that we're talking about is embracing the embodied Reality Part of That is not is being able to learn to focus deeply on things and think deeply for yourself and the embodied Reality Part is acquire your own experiences get off the screens and learn from people around you and that the Deep work part of Cal Newports device that I'm referencing here is being comfortable not just being inundated by everything coming at you all at once online and getting overstimulated by this information but learning to discern and it it's almost like you have to go through this detox of wanting information as fast as possible with with little or no thought about the veracity or the utility of it to taking information perhaps in smaller chunks and thinking and ruminating on it deeply I I would have to imagine that's what a lot of our founding fathers did with economic theory with information they've heard about it they they probably spent hours thinking about it discourse with one another about what's the best way to structure this system of Economics there's a lot of deep work in that that we're we as a society these 200 years later have almost gotten afraid of doing because we're so addicted to in instantaneous access information my dad had a professor in college who told him in in Bible College he said you know the problem of your generation right now in my dad's generation is older than me obviously is is getting access to the information he was using card catalogs you remember those you pull it out look up you know the Bible look up dolphins and you find that catalog that number you go to the go to the Shelf where it is pull it out and then you have to read it that's a limiting a limiting your access to information by how quickly you can find that in card catalog and the professor wisely said the problem your generation is access the problem of the next generation is going to be what to do with the unlimited access that they will have that's where we find ourselves today is because we have unlimited access it's hard to filter out hard to know what to do with all of this information yes AI can help us with some of that again referencing back to its ability to summarize and coate but that puts the the uh responsibility on us as as humans to think for ourselves that's a skill as trivial as it sounds as being lost and has been lost especially in reference to our founding fathers that ability to think deeply and be okay with that and spend time in deep thought and deep deep work yes to deep work by the way C Cal is does a great job going through that I I think there are people that would say that that there are some powers that wouldn't want you thinking for economic reasons of their own and so I don't maybe that's a conspiracy theory maybe it's not I don't I I haven't thought through that perspective and that lens enough to know but I think it's it's plausible that um that there are people that are motivated by their own power or economic reasons for gain that may not want others to th to think deeply it's not in their best interest that as a society and and to keep in mind that you know our founding fathers were around there was a there was disinformation there was character assess there was lots of that type of thing happening but it was slower M so there was much more time to process information and I do think that if we don't get some type of screen around um like like the first amendment does not protect your right to walk into a theater and yell fire that is not absolutely no you know and slander and liable def defamation those things are also um you know against the law but we don't enforce those things and and until we as a community decide to say hey look like and the problem is who's the Arbiter right that it's just such a difficult problem to like this is a really intractable problem seemingly about how you get people because you know your facts my facts Your Truth my truth like what can you agree on what can you not Randy and I got into the other day about a single word and you know we were both right coming from and it was you know I think Jos you might have witnessed that conversation I witnessed for an hour I witnessed that conversation continued on text later yes I remember this very well there there it goes the source of truth and the intention behind it and there that true for any sort of thing like this a you've gotta yeah go ahead Randy oh no I was I wanted to go back to what you said about processing all the information right humans as we process information we are looking at that with our knowledge our reasoning our creativity our understanding and that is where I think that wisdom comes from through those experiences and the more good inputs that we have the more good teachers mentors some it might come from religion it might come from it could come from anywhere right that all creates wisdom and the bad inputs slow down that search for wisdom right yes my theory is that AI is doing the exact same thing AI is taking like chat GPT is taking all this information from the internet and so much of it is crap and that's why that that's why Google recommended putting rocks on pizza or glue on Pizza uh because it couldn't distinguish satire from the facts and it's ingesting vast amounts of data in the form of these and it's the training so I agree with you 100% in as much as fast AMS of data bad information in bad information out right and I guess my question is if it was properly to to somehow be able to decipher that as maybe this is a process of it growing maybe it's coding maybe prompting is it impossible that it creates wisdom much like a human creates wisdom over time I know this is a crazy crazy concept but I just used AI to to ask a question about how humans develop wisdom because I knew there was like none of us are the expert on this and so one of the cool things that came up it went through all the different approaches people have taken from psychology to Neuroscience to um to social cultural sociological philosophical and psychosocial and then um it gave some conclusions but the thing that it talks about in here that was really interesting in several different places is it walks through the the importance of the emotional regulation and maturity on developing wisdom and so I think I'm going to go back to what I said earlier what until a computer has emotion and has to regulate that emotion it may be incapable of developing wisdom because that appears to be that appears from my one minute of reading by the way I want to remind The Listener still not an expert after reading my you know chat GPT answer that there's something about the um the intersection of the cognitive and the emotional that is is foundational to wisdom is is what I'm getting from this quick 10-c you know view of the summary of chat GPT model 40 or 40 whichever I'm not sure what you call it what's see Ste old joke knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit wisdom is knowing you don't put them on a fruit salad and that's that's the illustration that's of pass around in a joking form but that it has the at its core truth and you know with most jokes there is that negative truth even your dumb dad jokes John is that the negative truth is here the negative truth is is that that wisdom knowing that Tomatoes you don't put them on fruit salad is being able to uh reflect on how that would turn out what would that feel like what would that do to the fruit salad that would that would be nasty it would not taste well it wouldn't JY with the fruits it's that reflection it's not pure facts it's an experiential idea and imagine people have make that joke assume that you've eaten a tomato at some point in your life you have an experience of what that's like you've had a fruit salad you know what fruits are like and so that's wisdom because of this embodied reality that you've lived that you know you can reflect on these things it's not simply reading facts off a page which is what our current llms are great at doing they can tell you what a fruit is what is not a fruit but they don't know have an experience of that this is probably a great place to interject on reflection do you know where bad rainbows go Josiah I have the foggiest idea they go to prism oh don't worry it's always a sentence Randy do I have to continue listening to him can you just take over now no we can just we can just mute him do everybody a favor hey man I didn't remember the dad jokes you brought it up and then you said which I mean at that point you couldn't stop me of course God knows we tried I was I was trying to send psychic psychic beams that clearly I don't have that skill our producer we we can fix it in is deciding what is the truth right and John you referenced this earlier people talking past each other and in today's society good Lord I mean you took me to my emotional part now you hit a nerve yeah truth truth like this is what I tell my kids like you can have your opinions if they're well formed it means you can argue both sides of it and then you choose your side like that's a well-formed opinion in my perspective and you can have emotions like emotions you can't control and they're valid they're doings but you don't get your like that's the part where I I tell me like you don't get your own set of facts and this idea that there's my truth and your truth or people like poop a word that that actually would does is it limits the amount of vocabulary we have to communicate with each other by by making something mean that it doesn't mean and and this is where I think we we can very quickly start to try to win an argument by changing definitions that's like changing the number two in the middle of of a math equation like it's just it's not it's not intellectually honest and you've heard me say this before very recently like and by the way and and you changed my mind too because you brought new facts to a conversation right we we had we were talking about something and I said hey look I don't think this is happen happen but if you bring new facts to me I'll change my mind and you went off and you found new facts and I Chang my mind and I think that's that's the way discourse should work yes you can't do that if there's a if the ground is moving underneath you because you're not agreeing what what a means that that this is a problem with discourse it's a problem with communication and by the way because we're talking about AI if we can't think about the definitions of words it's going to create a prompting problem it's create an information problem it's just a problem all the way around so when when I'm saying I think the truth the truth is I think we had so I want to keep this Evergreen depending on when people are listening but we had a debate recently so whenever you're listening to this just think of a political debate right we just had a debate and the exact same words were heard whether people were on the red team or the blue team right yet they completely hear a the words are the same the definitions are the same but because people have different beliefs different values they have different truths in their mind right I think no no they have different no they don't have different truths Randy they have different perspectives we have a word for that in the English language two people look at the same Rock and we everyone agrees that you don't see the same thing right but you can measure the Rock and that rock has a weight and a mass and a volume and and and measurements and it has a chemical composition those are true truth and then when you and I look at it and see different things we have two different perspectives about that truth and I think it's really important that's really important language because there's things you can measure that that are either measurable changing or immovable or whatever and and the reason I say it's not because I want I I don't want to be the Arbiter of Truth like that's not my job but I but I do want to make sure that we have really Crystal Clear language that we can use and and look language evolves over time I accept that but what I want is people to connect and connect means that you've got to have a basis for language and if two people don't agree that that two equals two then you can't do math together that's all I'm saying well I I don't think it's I don't think it's that clean and I'm GNA I'm going to give you an example we have a a dear family friend and I remember the first time she came over for it was Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner and her and I sat and debated and it was friendly and we were still great friends and neither one of us took it personally which we need a lot more of in the world but we talked about various topics and the the her basic belief system is that so for example we talked about education I remember specifically her and I both wanted the same thing we both wanted kids better educated and a better country a better future all of that stuff we we didn't discuss that but we both accept accepted that from the other one because we had a mutual respect however my belief is that or her let's start with hers her belief was that if you just keep giving more money to the schools and more money and more money that it would improve education my belief is that that hasn't been working for all these times right and that the Private Industry would find a better way of solving that problem we didn't argue over any definitions but we we debated argued and it wasn't just that topic it was multiple topics because we had different beliefs at our core different values which therefore shape the conversation and I think that happens a lot and I don't think and where I'm going with this by the way is that I think we're going to have the same challenge with AI depending on who codes who creates it and AI is going to have different is is it's going to give different results based on how it is created in the first place is there such a thing as violent agreement like I am in violent agreement with you if that's even a than but like I couldn't agree more with you that if you have two people that give two different definitions of number two into two separate AIS or into one AI in two separate times whatever the case may be like we're gonna we're going to exacerbate a problem and and that's not an AI problem that's a human problem it's a garbage and garbage out problem if you feed a if you feed AI in um information to AI that says our founding fathers were men and then also feed in information that says we need to prioritize uh access for minorities to political establishments and you ask it to generate a picture of our founding fathers guess what sometimes it's going to generate pictures of our founding fathers of A different race of a different ethnicity than the truth of the matter was and that is representative of somebody's perspective or bias he's influencing ground truth so we do have to be careful about the data and who does it because one was truth one one part was good that you fed into that AI that was the pict of founding fathers being male and the other part was somebody's um emphasis of their values that we need to provide wider access for minorities I'm not disagreeing with that I'm pointing that as a subjective thing somebody's perspective rather than a measurable truth and this is where you need to be careful about facts versus perspective right so if someone said hey um you know and we need more politicians like our ing fathers and if an AI were to take that to mean that we need more politicians that have the same racial characteristics like that would be a total disservice to what we you know in our country which is diversity of thinking diversity of backgrounds like diversity of opportunities like I think you know and candidly you know I've said to lots of people I think we need you know people with you know that look like us talking more about diversity and and and not just the three of us like we need diverse people in the room helping that conversation to int honest because I know that I got blind spots there and so it's it's making sure we parse out like what's the fact what's the perspective what's the opinion what to make sure that we don't confuse one absolutely I think we settle on that there are things that are measurable and those things we call truth those things that are objective and those things that are subjective those things that are perspectives or values based on based on our values opinions and subjective ideas and I both are important I'm not even saying measurement because there are some things that that are truth that are agreed to be truth like we can also agree on yes but start disagreeing about truth now we have perspectives yes and all all I'm suggesting is that not that one person's perspective is less or more than but we just use a different set of language so that we can have the conversation in a better way 100% agree but you're right this is going to be a problem that will affect AI as it and you're we're not going to achieve AI by just feeding it we're not going to achieve this human level of AI where it's going to grow and provide wisdom and empathy by simply feeding it more and more data more and more vast quantities of data scraping the internet for every piece of information it's going to require further Innovation further Thinking by creative individuals by intelligent discourse that brings to bearing expertise in these various areas of psychology of the way the mind works and the way humans learn and that that sum total of things will produce things will produce a set of technologies that does show empathy that does emulate emotions that may actually emulate wisdom that's not that we're going to replace humans but it will be more than the sum of its parts you look at our own human mind and I'll I'll stop rambling after that we're not simply one type of brain matter we have our thymus or preal cortex or amydala all these parts have specialized functions that are designed in different ways that are designed to work together that produce you and I that have thoughts that have feelings and so it we're not going to produce a system that emulates human uh function in all these different ways by simply focusing on one type of Technology that's all that we have generative AI as is one type of a subset of one piece of technology think of a car you've got wheels you've got guys and Engineers who are great at designing brake systems the guy in my church back home he designs brakes for planes I think God from every day I fly he's an expert at those things he's not expert the whole plane brakes don't make the plane fly they make it stop they'll make it Fly same thing with thinking we're not gonna we're going to have people that are experts and we design these large language models but they're not gonna be the sum total thing that make us fly with AI it's a great great place for us to kind of start to wrap things up Randy what's your big takeaway from to be an exciting future and I really do believe that it's going to lead to abundance I think we have to stay diligent I think there's going to be trials and tribulations and potholes along the way but you know I believe in the human spirit I believe that I believe PE there's people are more good than bad and there certainly bad people in the world and that you know good will win out and we'll figure this out we figured out the ab bomb I think you know if we can figure out nuclear energy without killing each other up to this point um we can figure this out and people are going to use it for good and we just it's it's figuring out how to use it in our lives to bring good and bring abundance to the world using it wisely I said using it wisely to play on a wisdom yeah and I think I think being in it every day I think today was a great reflection on just how we still are like it is early early early days and that I think I'm with you Randy that's exciting for me I think that there's lots of ways we can we can implement this to make for a better Society it also underscored for me the importance of what AI is not going to do and how we have to really disconnect and you know I think there's times in my life where I've done a really great job of that and times in my life where I wish I had done better and so I think the two things I'm taking away with early days really excited and you know there are good times to step away from technology screens all that stuff even if for an hour or two with friends um you know we the three of us get together this group once a month we do that regularly but I think just that's a it's a good reminder to step away occasionally and uh you know Josiah said the word detox earlier I don't know if that's the right word but but definitely step away and uh making it part of your practice of connecting with your fellow humans your tribe the people you're around building Community I think that's something that has as I've been preparing to talk about this today has really been emphasized to me and convicted of is that I need to emphasize the disconnect the contrast from being around technology if nothing else that's I do that 247 just about so disconnecting from that and finding the joy and the beauty in our in our fell humans and slowing down and just appreciating people for who they are I might even start to like your dad jokes John probably not that yeah I do think though josi i' be fun to have you back and talk about the research and get in the technical stuff for the technical files in our audience so I think back in and we'll get into the technology and the brass TXS of of AI as well and how that translates to the the everyday user so great stuff thank you so much for being here today Randy always great to see you yeah forward to the next episode so join us again talesof abundance.com join our community uh follow us like us wherever you listen to your podcasts come check out the show notes and get the tools that we will put up for you to read about some of the topics we had today and then get out there and talk to people get out there and learn more about prompting and and use AI as a mirror to figure out how you can be more engaged in asking questions and interrelating with your human your human Village and tribe so thanks for being here we'll see you next time

Interview With Josiah Bryan

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