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Episode: Cognilytica’s AI-Enabled Vision of the Future: Enhancing the Human Experience [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:20:23

Episode Shownotes

The Four-Part AI-Enabled Vision of the Future In 2018, when at the time we thought AI hype couldn’t get any more hype-y, we at Cognilytica spent time thinking about what the broad implications of AI would be on our individual lives, our business and work lives, and on society in

general. This thinking led us to put together our four-part vision we called the “AI-Enabled Vision of the Future”. Continue reading Cognilytica’s AI-Enabled Vision of the Future: Enhancing the Human Experience [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_00
The AI Today podcast, produced by Cognolitica, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:00:10 Speaker_00
Learn about emerging AI trends, technologies, and use cases from Cognolitica analysts and guest experts.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Hello, and welcome to the AI Today podcast.

00:00:24 Speaker_02
I'm your host, Kathleen Mulch. And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. And wow, these last few podcasts have been getting people talking.

00:00:32 Speaker_02
We've seen people talking about really, I think maybe thinking things through for the first time for some folks about what all this movement to AI really means in terms of AI being in our daily lives and its impacts, whether it's to the future of work,

00:00:46 Speaker_02
to his future of automation and everything being augmented, to the future of our personal lives and interactions, and just to the future of data and economies and ecosystems.

00:00:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's a pretty far-reaching vision, which is why we've been sharing our vision for the future, what it looks like for the AI-enabled future. And I think for those of you that are engaging, we do appreciate you reaching out to us.

00:01:08 Speaker_02
Many of you have. But we like this conversation to be public. We want other people to also benefit from your own thoughts, your own feedback, your comments. So please comment and share our various posts on LinkedIn, especially where we're most active.

00:01:25 Speaker_02
We're active on some of the other channels, but really it's LinkedIn where we're the most active. comment on our posts, share our posts, subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter if you haven't already.

00:01:34 Speaker_02
We want to make this the most well-read newsletter on the topic of how AI is impacting us today.

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And because AI Today is such a great podcast, we know all of you listeners out there, there are a lot of you listeners out there, you should all subscribe to our newsletter, especially if you really like what we're saying, so that way you can get more.

00:01:51 Speaker_02
But we're going to keep on this path here because we have a lot more to share about what the future looks like with AI.

00:01:58 Speaker_01
Exactly. So in today's podcast, we are going to be continuing with Cognolitica's AI-enabled vision of the future and really talk about how it's going to enhance the human experience.

00:02:11 Speaker_01
So as Ron mentioned, definitely subscribe to our newsletter on LinkedIn. We'll link to it in the show notes. Also subscribe to AI Today if you haven't done so already so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes.

00:02:22 Speaker_01
We are in the middle of this series right now, so stay subscribed to get notified of all of the podcasts in this series, as well as additional topics that we talk about.

00:02:31 Speaker_01
But as I said, today's podcast is really going to be focused on our AI-enabled vision of the future and enhancing the human experience and what does that mean.

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So with AI everywhere, especially in the future, everyone is now going to be able to reach their full potential. AI is rapidly becoming that augmented intelligence tool that we've all been hoping and expecting for.

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If you've listened to previous podcasts, you know we are very bullish on augmented intelligence, which is this idea of not replacing the human, but just helping the human do their job or their task a whole lot better. We say it's AI superpowers.

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So we're already seeing impacts of this augmented intelligence in all aspects of our lives, even now. And in our AI-enabled vision of the future, it's going to be even more enhanced.

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So right now, if you're having trouble writing something, use AI to help you. If you want to generate a picture or an image, use AI to help you. If you need to brainstorm ideas, use AI to help you.

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If you want to create royalty-free, AI-generated music, go ahead. There's a tool for that. And so you can really do a lot of things right now that weren't possible before. or it was incredibly difficult to do if you didn't have those skill sets.

00:03:52 Speaker_01
But in the AI-enabled future, if you have a desire to learn really any task or anything that you want, there will be AI to help you accomplish that task or that goal and really learn. So if you want to do something new, no problem.

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AI can help you, AI can assist you, AI can teach you how to do it in that hyper-personalized way so it really can teach each person individually how best they learn so that you want to do that.

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So if you do want to reach your full potential with AI in our AI-enabled future, you absolutely can.

00:04:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, so I think there's a lot of ways that we could see our full potential. Of course, today, we could see the impact on all the things we mentioned, music and arts and writing and all that sort of stuff.

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But in the future, in the AI-enabled future, where we're literally using AI for everything to help us,

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There really won't be such a thing as, I don't know what that is, or I don't know how to do it, because your little assistant is going to help you figure out what it is and how to do it.

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Whatever the task is, it might be repairing something in your house, or it might be learning a new skill, or it might be understanding some concept, or it might be learning some new task or skill for a job.

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Whatever it is, you're going to have that capability right there. in the palm of your hands most of the time, because it's going to probably be on your phone or some other device or something.

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You will be able to just ask how to do it, and if you don't understand it, you can keep asking. All that capability is there, and that really has some pretty profound impacts.

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We're going to spend some time in this podcast talking about what those impacts are. But one of the other things that you can do now, now that we have all this AI enabled capability, is that we can communicate with each other more easily.

00:05:33 Speaker_02
We talk about this in the seven patterns of AI.

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We talk about one of the main patterns is the conversational pattern, which is basically the pattern of machines talking to humans, human talking to machines, but also humans talking to humans, intermediated by machines.

00:05:49 Speaker_02
And this idea of, say, in Star Trek, the universal translator, where you're Obviously, everybody in Star Trek is speaking English, right? Some of them are Canadians, so it's Canadian English, but no, it's English.

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And, you know, whether there could be a creature from another planet who communicates in whatever language or method they communicate, you can communicate with them through the universal translator.

00:06:10 Speaker_02
Well, we're not actually getting too far from that now. No, we're not communicating with aliens and other planets, but we can communicate with different people here on this planet.

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And the translator that's out there, like the AI capabilities are getting really, really good. And so what does that mean? But even think about the impact of that. You know, when you have

00:06:29 Speaker_02
a translator which does which basically allows you to communicate natively or fluently i should say with someone in their language and maybe now it's not perfect but in the ai enabled future it probably will be pretty dang close to perfect as good as any translator might be right.

00:06:45 Speaker_02
What does that mean you can go anywhere you can travel anywhere you can have any conversation with anybody in their language but also i think have some impacts on the way people communicate now.

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For now english is seen as sort of the universal common language that if two people you know don't know each other's language but they both can speak english then.

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That's the language they communicate in because it's become a language or lingua franca, if you will, of business. Computers are programmed in English, things like that. So it's become that language.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
But in the future, when we have this universal translator, do people even need to learn any other language but their own native language?

00:07:25 Speaker_02
Do they, because if they're going to come to depend on AI to communicate for them, then they don't need to go through all the effort and maybe miscommunicate because they misunderstand something.

00:07:35 Speaker_02
You know, maybe people will not even learn languages anymore. Or maybe learning languages will be like a hobby, like learning how to do pottery. You know, maybe in the past you needed to know how to do pottery to store stuff.

00:07:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, now you just do it for fun. Same thing. Maybe we don't need to learn languages in the future. What does this mean even for language learning in school? Will people really learn language that way?

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Especially since kids and students will be so tempted to say, wait a second, why am I even learning this? I can just communicate in my language. I can use my app, my phone, my device, and speak to someone else.

00:08:08 Speaker_02
So it's interesting that even something as straightforward or simple as machine translation in the AI-enabled future really could have some profound impacts on a lot of the way people in society interact.

00:08:23 Speaker_01
Exactly. I am very much looking forward to that. So you can literally go anywhere and talk to people and converse. You know, we already are very global. This helps us to become even more global.

00:08:36 Speaker_01
Another thing that we will see is how AI is changing education. We're starting to see this.

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But it is going to really be enhanced in AI enabled future just as the workforce will see profound and disruptive change with AI enabling every process and task and we talked about how a I will be.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
you know, the AI-enhanced organization in a previous podcast, so definitely go back and check that out. We'll link to it in the show notes to hear our take on that AI-enabled vision of the future.

00:09:08 Speaker_01
But just as that workforce is, you know, and everything's going to be disrupted there, so too will education see profound and disruptive change. Whereas, you know, information today on any topic is available, but it isn't always easily available.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
You can find it on the internet, but you have to do, you know, queries and you have to, you know, cull through all this information. It might not be provided in a format that's easy to find. It's not interactive at all.

00:09:40 Speaker_01
You can't dig deeper into that content. And it often may be explained from either a particular point of view or with a particular age or audience in mind. Maybe also some things are written in languages that is not your fluent language.

00:09:56 Speaker_01
And so, yes, it is available, but it's not going to be as easy as it is in the AI-enabled future, where education access will really be at the hands of anybody. that wants to learn any single topic.

00:10:08 Speaker_01
We'll have AI assistants that can educate us and inform us on any topic, help go very deep into topics that we want to go deep into. And it will teach us in that hyper-personalized way, provide that hyper-personalized wording that you understand.

00:10:26 Speaker_01
It won't be geared towards any particular age or audience that's out of where you understand things. And it'll really help it explain in that individualized manner. So now we can have those personalized experiences.

00:10:40 Speaker_01
And this is going to be a part of our everyday lives. And this is going to be something that we just grow up with.

00:10:47 Speaker_01
So from the moment we're born, through continuous learning and education throughout our adult lives, a lot of people, you know, talk about upskilling and reskilling, but this isn't necessarily going to be words that we use because it's just something we're doing all the time now.

00:11:02 Speaker_01
We're always learning.

00:11:04 Speaker_01
and and so we're always continuing to you know further educate and further learn and and further learn things in all aspects of our lives from work to personal as well and this provides opportunities now for those who lack education or have difficulties maybe in this current one-size-fits-all approach to education and the way that we currently learn maybe that's not you know the best

00:11:27 Speaker_01
Now we can have hyper-personalized experiences so that we're able to teach every student and address all of their needs throughout that life cycle.

00:11:36 Speaker_01
Also, because we have this from a young age, the system's going to continue to learn and adapt as we grow and learn and adapt as well. So maybe how I learned as a child is different than how I learn as an adult.

00:11:49 Speaker_01
That's not a problem in our AI-enabled future, because this education is going to be self-paced, self-directed, self-fulfilling, really geared towards each individual.

00:11:58 Speaker_02
But now you might think, oh, I don't want this kind of educational tool, or maybe I feel like there's some issues or flaws in this AI-based type of personalized learning. And that may or may not be true in terms of whatever your personal opinions are.

00:12:13 Speaker_02
But the truth of the matter is, in this AI-enabled vision of the future, other people will be learning that way. Even if it's not necessarily the way you might want to learn, other people will be learning that way and they will be getting ahead.

00:12:24 Speaker_02
They will be learning content and material at their required level of detail.

00:12:31 Speaker_02
And the method that works for them and they will be able to understand it meanwhile if you want to use other approaches of learning nothing wrong with reading a book nothing wrong with going online and doing your own research nothing wrong with going to a class or a school or learning for some electric format.

00:12:45 Speaker_02
But if you're not also right making use of these AI tools you will fall behind. And I think there's another sort of interesting outcome of this AI-focused education training, which is here, by the way, today.

00:12:58 Speaker_02
I mean, even though we're talking about this in the future, you could actually start and decide that you want to engage in a conversation with any of the large language models today to try to understand some topic that you want to understand.

00:13:08 Speaker_02
And yes, there are flaws because today's LLMs are not perfect and are full of possible issues of incorrect data and that sort of stuff, but you can at least

00:13:18 Speaker_02
have it continue to explain over and over and over again, perhaps different ways, and you will benefit in a way that may give you an advantage even today over other people who are not able to learn that.

00:13:30 Speaker_02
There's sort of another impact, which is that has to do with the hard skills. So usually when people think of like education and training,

00:13:37 Speaker_02
The stuff that people feel like they need education for especially are going to be science and math and physics and analytics and those sorts of things.

00:13:45 Speaker_02
The reason why they're called hard skills is because they require perhaps some hard math and they have some other things you need to learn how to do those. It may take you years to learn how to master all of those techniques.

00:13:57 Speaker_02
However, this is sort of the weird side effect of AI. In the future, first of all, it's going to be easier to learn those things so that maybe there'll be more people who know how to use those hard skills.

00:14:08 Speaker_02
But maybe in the future, a lot of AI systems themselves will be performing those hard tasks. You can have a huge equation, and maybe for fun, you might want to figure out how to solve it.

00:14:19 Speaker_02
But if you absolutely need to solve it, why would you not use the AI tool to help you solve that problem, do the analysis, Do some calculation whatever the hard science is you probably will be using that tool and maybe you might.

00:14:34 Speaker_02
Spot check it or maybe have enough experience to know whether it's correct or not but but it's gonna become less and less likely that you're gonna depend entirely. on your hard skills knowledge to address those needs.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
So that means then that if hard skills are going to become, on the one hand, easier to learn because of AI tools, and on the other hand, perhaps less necessary because the AI systems will work, then what do people need to learn?

00:15:00 Speaker_02
Well, people need to learn more the soft skills.

00:15:04 Speaker_02
In order to get the value out of these AI systems, you need to learn how to be creative, how to communicate, how to have critical thinking, how to do all these activities, because you need to be able to gauge the performance.

00:15:17 Speaker_02
You need to think about different ways of approaching a problem. These are all soft skills, so I think we can actually see more emphasis, ironically,

00:15:25 Speaker_02
as more and more AI is being used on mastering those soft skills, giving people really a mastery of critical thinking, which schools have not been teaching. And I think we can see the impact of the lack of critical thinking out there.

00:15:37 Speaker_02
People just not questioning information on the internet. They're making bad decisions. We're seeing people even losing creativity.

00:15:44 Speaker_02
People are losing creativity because they're getting lazy and they're not thinking about different ways of doing things, right?

00:15:50 Speaker_02
I think as we start to learn more and more about the value of that, we'll start to see the benefit of getting value from our AI systems.

00:16:01 Speaker_01
Exactly. So now if this AI-enabled future, we have this hyper-personalized education where we can be lifelong learners, and it starts at a young age, well, what does education look like?

00:16:15 Speaker_01
And really, what is the role for teachers and educational institutions? Because even today, even now, we see that AI systems can create or enhance tailored educational content. So they already can be used as an augmented tool to what we're doing.

00:16:31 Speaker_01
It can help summarize content. It can even generate quizzes for us, flashcards, interactive Q&A, and audio as well. You know, not everybody learns the same way. So some people may need to read things. Some people may need to listen to things.

00:16:45 Speaker_01
Already, we can use AI to enhance what we're doing and how we're learning. So what does this mean when we're in our AI-enabled vision of the future?

00:16:55 Speaker_01
And will teaching now be focused on how to use these tools and opportunities for collaborative discussions, really helping to teach and enhance soft skills?

00:17:07 Speaker_01
and maybe just used, you know, to test and make sure that students really are learning the material. How are things going to change?

00:17:15 Speaker_01
And this is what we talk about, because in the future, we are not going to have systems, you know, educational institutions that are what today's educational institutions look like.

00:17:28 Speaker_01
We even think about, you know, what did a hundred years ago versus today look like? So now with these AI augmented tools, how can we push forward education even further? And what will teachers look like? And what will that role of a teacher be?

00:17:41 Speaker_01
You know, will we learn from older students or will, you know, so it really is going to impact everything.

00:17:48 Speaker_01
We're already seeing this change in higher education and we're going to continue to see this change in in you know K through 12 and higher education as well.

00:17:56 Speaker_01
And then, what is higher education going to look like our professors going to be teaching tomorrow's workforce are we really going to have these Ai enabled.

00:18:06 Speaker_01
personal, hyper-personalized assistants that are teaching us, and we go to universities for really research. You know, are universities going to get back to their roots as research institutions?

00:18:19 Speaker_01
And so, you know, AI might not hold the answers to all these questions, but it's definitely going to accelerate and accentuate the issues. A lot of people are, you know, rightfully so, saying that higher education is quite expensive.

00:18:34 Speaker_01
And is the expense worth the value of that degree? How can we be these lifelong learners? How can we continue to learn? So in the AI-enabled future, education is going to change, especially from how it is today.

00:18:49 Speaker_02
That's funny. It's all these different forces from different perspectives are impacting education. You could say it all kind of maybe started even with the pandemic and students having to learn from home and remotely.

00:19:03 Speaker_02
Then you might say, well, that was sort of one issue in and of itself, but everything else is kind of now just compounding to it. Now we have AI. That's just kind of coincidental in many ways.

00:19:13 Speaker_02
The pandemic could have happened 15 years ago, but it happened when it did. It happened when we had the technology to do remote learning. Imagine if we had a pandemic back when we didn't have remote learning.

00:19:24 Speaker_02
Imagine now we're post-pandemic when students have already learned how to learn on their own, put that in mind, and now they have AI. So they're thinking, why do we need the teachers? Why do I need the interaction?

00:19:35 Speaker_02
We also see all these challenges with higher education, as Kathleen has mentioned, but not just the cost and the value, but also all sorts of struggles for the experience. And the workforce is changing at the same time.

00:19:46 Speaker_02
So you're going through school so you can learn how to do something, so you can get a degree, so hopefully you can graduate school so you can work in that profession.

00:19:54 Speaker_02
But meanwhile, while you've been in school, that profession itself has been changing, and AI has been changing. And maybe the value of a degree has been changing. So I think it's kind of an interesting moment that we're at.

00:20:04 Speaker_02
I think anybody in higher education needs to be thinking very critically about the role of AI for the future of their own institution and for the future of the students they're training. Now, educating, that is.

00:20:15 Speaker_02
Now, sort of switching gears a little bit here, because in addition to the learning and in addition to the education, we know that AI is also going to have a personal impact on our human experience, which is what this podcast is all about, when it comes to arts and when it comes to creativity, right?

00:20:32 Speaker_02
Everybody is born with some innate creative capability. It may not necessarily be in the arts. It could be creative sciences, creative in the business world, creative on the

00:20:42 Speaker_02
sports place, wherever it is, your brain, you kind of, you have something that you like to think in a unique and different way that you enjoy doing it. That's your creative angle, right? That's the way you express yourself creatively.

00:20:56 Speaker_02
And the thing about that is that in the past, especially for some of these more difficult things like, you know, sculpture, you know, or, you know, painting or any of these things where it required some skill.

00:21:08 Speaker_02
Over time, you might have had this idea in your head for something that you want to create, but it took some real skill and talent to be able to actually create it.

00:21:17 Speaker_02
So a lot of times you'd have this sort of moment where it's like, well, I had this vision in my head, but in reality, it came out this way that was not so good, right?

00:21:26 Speaker_02
But here's the thing, in the AI-enabled vision of the future, even now, anything that you can possibly envision creatively, you can actually produce, if it's a digital output, that is.

00:21:38 Speaker_02
You can actually produce that output because AI is there to help you realize the vision that you have in your head. So instantly, a lot of the skill and talent gap goes away when it comes to the creative arts. So you might think that's fantastic.

00:21:55 Speaker_02
People will be creating all sorts of things that they can envision. But of course, as with all these visions of the future, there's always a flip side to that that is a consequence of people being able to create anything that comes into their head.

00:22:07 Speaker_01
Exactly, because as you can create anything, then this is going to also lead to some issues around things like intellectual property or, you know, maybe pushback against these AI-generated outputs.

00:22:24 Speaker_01
Is everything going to kind of look the same and look very average and not, you know, creative, right? Not distinct. from each other.

00:22:33 Speaker_01
And, you know, again, we talk about how AI is going to just enhance their outputs and it absolutely will, but it's also going to make people crave and seek out reality and truth and maybe

00:22:48 Speaker_01
you know, human-generated things all on their own, and what does that look like?

00:22:53 Speaker_01
So we might see, you know, some of this flocking towards, you know, some of this neo-primitism that we say, where it's urging people to go back and seek out real-life primitive experiences, untouched with AI.

00:23:07 Speaker_01
And we talked a little bit about this in our previous podcast as well with autonomous everything and augmented everything. But how is this going to really get people to want to do things that's not AI enabled or not enhanced with AI in any way?

00:23:24 Speaker_01
So we've already seen this a little bit where we have some artisan crafts are blooming again. And people want to go back to agrarian and Yet a little farm and people now are planting their own gardens in their yards.

00:23:43 Speaker_01
And I laugh because I think this was a pandemic thing. And also, it's kind of just this movement of people of a certain age. And they joke, they're like, well, you know, I paid $20 to get some to get like three tomatoes for the season.

00:23:56 Speaker_01
because it's not always efficient at scale but it's like you know it it gets you back with using your hands and out in nature and being able to explore and so is that what we are going to see now some of these old school ways of doing things as a form of a rebellion against this technology when we're just so interconnected and so AI enabled and it's enhancing and augmenting every single thing

00:24:19 Speaker_01
that we do, how are we going to, you know, kind of unplug, go back to this old way where we're not so interconnected?

00:24:27 Speaker_01
And AI-generated everything will create an even more longing for reality and maybe, you know, ways that we don't have AI-enabled things. We talk, I mean, you know, it's trained on lots of data.

00:24:42 Speaker_01
It's only going to be continued to trained on that and trained on itself as well. And, you know, AI-enabled

00:24:49 Speaker_01
creations will continue to flourish, but now are we really kind of blurring those lines between human ideation and human creativity and then this produced output and what we perceive as human creativity that's kind of being displayed artificially intelligently.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
So, you know, it's going to beg this question, are we going to want to see kind of proof of human creation, or is this human-assisted work, and what is that going to look like in the future?

00:25:20 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think basically this point is that I think people are going to start to become skeptical about creativity, you know, meaning that they might say, hmm, you created this, but did you really create it? Was it really yours? Right.

00:25:34 Speaker_02
And I think the point is, is that he's just blurring that line. I mean, how much of it needs to be yours for it to be yours? That's a really good question, right?

00:25:43 Speaker_02
I mean, if you're creating some piece of artwork and you're guiding it prompt by prompt and then the system is generating that vision,

00:25:51 Speaker_02
You could say that you were the human that was guiding the creation, but the machine was basically accentuating that collaboration using the data from all these other people, right? So you could say, well, that's not really yours.

00:26:05 Speaker_02
You just had some ideas and you let the machine do the work, right? This is especially the case of music generation now. A lot of people are talking about this because the music generation is getting so good. But it does still require that human input.

00:26:17 Speaker_02
It requires the human choices, right? But this line between human originality and creativity and machine generation just gets trickier and trickier and trickier.

00:26:26 Speaker_02
And I think this is one of those issues that I think is going to really rear its head when it comes to intellectual property. Intellectual property already is challenged when it comes to AI.

00:26:38 Speaker_02
We especially think of things like AI tools using the data, other people's data, as training data. Because that's actually where our app comes from. We think about where's all this generation coming from?

00:26:47 Speaker_02
It's coming from everybody else's creative work. So humans have been out there creating music and creating written artworks and creating artwork. And the machine is basically taking all those zettabytes of data.

00:27:00 Speaker_02
And I like to say it's actually really not, it is generating them, that's the actual term, but I like to think of it more as collaging because it's taking a little bit of this and a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

00:27:09 Speaker_02
and it's stitching it all together and it's generating some output. So if you think of it as more of a collage than generation, it's not actually creating it out of nowhere. It's just using that

00:27:20 Speaker_02
a ton of data, the zettabytes of data, and it's using your ideas to say, how can I combine this existing information together in a way that works, is cohesive, that represents what the prompt is and generates the output?

00:27:31 Speaker_02
This is an issue for intellectual property ownership, on the other hand, because people want to copyright the outputs. of these generative systems. They're like, man, I generated this cool music or this cool art or this cool text.

00:27:46 Speaker_02
I wrote a book, perhaps, using generative AI. What do you mean I can't copyright a book that I wrote with generative AI? That is the ruling of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, that if it's not the majority work of the human, then it is not

00:28:01 Speaker_02
protectable. This is the flip side. On the one hand, we're saying, wait a second, AI systems are taking from protected works. We don't like that. But on the other hand, if I generate something, it's not a protected work.

00:28:10 Speaker_02
And so we have these issues, because right now, all of the intellectual property organizations are all pushing back on this idea of, no, you can't have protections for this stuff, because there's not enough human involvement.

00:28:21 Speaker_02
You need real human authorship. There needs to be some transformation that a human is doing. But I think, just like we said before on other topics with AI, with regulation especially, these laws are backwards. I know.

00:28:35 Speaker_02
I want the intellectual property associations to work too, just as much as we want people to use AI responsibly. But as we said in our previous podcast when we were talking about issues around augmented AI and augmented everything when it came to

00:28:49 Speaker_02
trying to ban the use of AI. We said that's impossible because there'll be AI-enabled shoes and clothes and glasses, and you can't ban shoes, clothes, and glasses, right? So that means you have to accept that AI will be everywhere. You can't ban it.

00:29:00 Speaker_02
Same thing here. You cannot put the cork on intellectual property content that's generated from an AI system and say, sorry, even if 99% of the work is being generated, none of that is protectable. That's just not going to work.

00:29:14 Speaker_02
Long story short, it kind of kills the whole idea of intellectual property in general.

00:29:18 Speaker_02
I think basically the whole idea of intellectual property, I think is in real jeopardy with AI because there's nothing protecting the works from being reused by AI systems and there's nothing protecting the outputs. So what is the point?

00:29:31 Speaker_02
Like what exactly is protected at this point? The answer is probably the not digital stuff, which is really not that much. So this is what I'd like our people to think about.

00:29:39 Speaker_02
When AI is being used every day in every activity as part of every generation step, the separation between what the human is responsible for and what the human is not responsible for, what are human inputs, what are human outputs, is going to become an impossible task.

00:29:54 Speaker_02
It's all just inherently part of the process. Part of the creative process is using AI. to get you to wherever you want. So either you allow that to be protected, or you just get rid of the whole idea of intellectual property altogether.

00:30:08 Speaker_02
One way I like to think about it is that in the future, no one needs to plagiarize. Nobody needs to cut and paste stuff. You know why? Because I can always just ask AI to paraphrase it. I can just ask AI to generate another version of it.

00:30:21 Speaker_02
And actually, this is the interesting thing. A lot of the concepts of intellectual property are not that old.

00:30:25 Speaker_02
If you go online and do some research, you'll see the idea of the patent was first evolved in the 1400s or 1500s, so in the Renaissance age, right? The idea of the trademark is actually much more recent. The first trademark was in the late 1800s.

00:30:42 Speaker_02
It was Bass Ale had the first trademark for a logo of their thing. Can you imagine we did not have trademarks enforceable before that?

00:30:50 Speaker_02
We had some idea where I think like some bakeries got to put some design and they could say that they were the only bakery to make that design. That was only enforceable in one country. Trademarks are not even 200 years old. Is that right?

00:31:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, they're not even 200 years old. Patents are only a few hundred years old. And copyrights are fairly recent, too. I think copyrights go back to the 1600s or 1700s.

00:31:11 Speaker_02
So intellectual property might have been just a relic of the time in which it took effort to produce some piece of content. You had to print it or you had to produce something.

00:31:23 Speaker_02
And maybe intellectual property will become a concept of the past, a dinosaur of the past.

00:31:28 Speaker_02
I mean, this would be something I would love to hear back from you, which is that if you don't want intellectual property to be a dinosaur of the past, then what is the role of IP in the AI-enabled vision of the future?

00:31:38 Speaker_02
I'd love to have that conversation with you, especially if you're on the IP side. And let's get away from wishful thinking because, as we said, we're already in the AI-enabled future. The AI, the future is here.

00:31:48 Speaker_02
And I think we need to deal with it just like we're dealing with every other impact of AI while we are here.

00:31:54 Speaker_01
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, you could have great discussions around literally any part of the AI-enabled future and then even, you know, the subparts of all of it. So the last part that we want to discuss today is this idea of the great averaging.

00:32:11 Speaker_01
And, you know, when we're talking about the human experience, you go, well, what do you mean the great averaging? Well, in the future, AI will be everywhere and it will be used by everyone in this AI-enabled future.

00:32:24 Speaker_01
So since AI systems are trained on this collected and average outputs of humanity, then that means that everybody who's using it will have the power to be average at the least.

00:32:36 Speaker_01
We already are seeing this and having discussions around this with large language models, where we say, you know, this really can increase, like sub-performing people to be average people if they're using these tools right now.

00:32:49 Speaker_01
So in the future, that's just, you know, going to be enhanced even more. And if you're not using it, then, you know, you're going to not be average anymore, right?

00:33:00 Speaker_01
Because AI systems will, they already are, and they will continue to raise the bar for that minimum expectation that you expect everybody to produce. So we will all have this, you know, AI-generated average output.

00:33:13 Speaker_01
So we need to be at least as good as that because in this AI-enabled future, we're all going to be using these AI-generated outputs. So in many ways, they are maybe even better than today's average human performance.

00:33:28 Speaker_01
But again, we're going to be moving that bar up, and so everybody is going to be at least average.

00:33:35 Speaker_01
On the flip side then of this great averaging is that the below average people, so these are people that are just going to be resistant to using AI and maybe not using AI for whatever reason, they're going to be marginalized.

00:33:48 Speaker_01
So using and leveraging AI in the future will no longer be an advantage like it is today. It will become expected. And it's only those that aren't using AI that really truly will be disadvantaged.

00:34:03 Speaker_01
So since AI is everywhere in our AI-enabled future, then not using it is going to put you at that significant disadvantage. It's going to put you definitely below average, because we say that AI is this great averager.

00:34:16 Speaker_01
So everybody that's using it's going to be at least average. Anybody that's not using it is going to be below average. So in the future, if you are not using AI, then you really will be disadvantaged.

00:34:30 Speaker_01
We talked about how this is going to be impacting education right here schools educational institutions really will have no choice but to educate those.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
And to educate students into how to use and leverage Ai capabilities and for those that are out of school.

00:34:48 Speaker_01
They are going to need to learn right we talked about how in the future you're going to be this lifelong learner well you really do need to learn and if you're not this is where you're going to quickly be marginalized and be below that you know great averaging if you're not using.

00:35:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think this is kind of an interesting little thing. You know, given that anybody can use AI to help them do something that they're not good at, right? And you'll do that at least at the average, the average level, right?

00:35:15 Speaker_02
So you'll produce something that's going to seem credible, professional if you're in a workplace. decent quality, right? Because that's what AI will do. It'll give you stuff that'll be good, good enough. It won't be super profound.

00:35:28 Speaker_02
It might be better than anything that you've ever done. It might be magical in that sense. But let's fast forward again. Let's fast forward to the future when everybody is using them. It won't seem so magical anymore.

00:35:40 Speaker_02
You'll be like, yeah, yeah, I've seen that artwork before. I've seen that writing before. You'll only notice it when someone is not using it. And you're like, why is that writing so bad?

00:35:51 Speaker_02
Why does that artwork look like some toddler did it who didn't even have an AI tool? Because you can't even say elementary school students, because they're all going to be using it too, right? So you're only going to notice the below average stuff.

00:36:03 Speaker_02
You might notice the stuff that's way above average. But the funny thing is, what skill do you need? What skills do you need to make stuff that's above average? Ironically, it's going to be the soft skills. It's knowing how to be creative.

00:36:18 Speaker_02
critical thinking, communication, all that sort of stuff, being able to extract maybe more value than anybody else can out of the AI system.

00:36:27 Speaker_02
Or maybe applying some of the things that AI systems are not good at, like the understanding and the common sense stuff.

00:36:32 Speaker_02
So that is sort of the weird thing about this future, is that in the future, when anybody can extract whatever value they want, they can achieve their full potential.

00:36:41 Speaker_02
The question is, this is sort of a weird thought, if everybody is achieving their full potential, Does that actually distinguish anybody?

00:36:50 Speaker_02
Everybody is the best that they could be at whatever their thing is, and they're using AI to cover or help any of their deficiencies. Everybody will just be the best that they can be. So it's kind of a weird place to be, right?

00:37:05 Speaker_02
Because then at what point, how do we distinguish something that people are really good at? It's going to be the things that are the soft skills, because if there's a hard skill deficiency, they can just learn it. So it's a weird thing.

00:37:18 Speaker_02
It's a weird construct, but I think we're going to end up there. As we like to say, AI, on the one hand, is the great enabler. It's the great tool that enables you to achieve what you want to achieve.

00:37:31 Speaker_02
And on the other hand, it's the great averager, because what it's going to help you achieve, it can help anybody else achieve too, right?

00:37:39 Speaker_02
You can't be, if you're, if there are multiple people trying to use AI, you can't have on the one hand, somebody being enabled in a way that they're not enabled to be better than somebody else. who is not enabled, who wants to be enabled.

00:37:51 Speaker_02
They're both going to benefit from that same enablement, which ironically makes it average. So when you're thinking about this, it's kind of interesting to figure out what does it mean in the future? Well, it means that we need something beyond AI.

00:38:07 Speaker_02
The future means that if you want to truly overachieve, you're going to have to overachieve in some way that is beyond AI. And that's using whatever our innate human capabilities are or Or maybe some things that AI is still not good at.

00:38:19 Speaker_02
That's kind of where humans need to be. So a lot of things to think about here, but this really does impact the human experience, doesn't it?

00:38:25 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah. And this is how you can see if AI is the great averager, how people that aren't using AI and all those different ways that we talked about.

00:38:33 Speaker_01
with learning, with being able to communicate with people that don't speak the same language, with enhancing your creativity, that overall kind of experience. If you're not using it, you can see how you quickly can get marginalized.

00:38:46 Speaker_01
So a lot of people right now are fearful of AI, but we say in this AI-enabled future, you can't be fearful of AI. It's just going to be all around you. So you're going to need to embrace it and really,

00:39:02 Speaker_01
move forward to see what that AI-enabled future looks like. And that's what we are doing in this podcast series. So if you haven't done so already, subscribe to AI Today so you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes.

00:39:13 Speaker_01
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00:39:24 Speaker_01
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00:39:36 Speaker_01
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00:39:47 Speaker_01
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00:39:55 Speaker_01
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00:40:02 Speaker_01
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00:40:28 Speaker_01
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