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Episode: Cognilytica’s AI-Enabled Vision of the Future: AI-Augmented Everything [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:12:49

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: AI-Augmented Everything [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. I'm your host, Kathleen Mulch. And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. And wow, people are engaging with us.

00:00:30 Speaker_01
Even as we're recording this podcast, I'm getting messages from folks about our previous podcast, which we have really been on this terror recently, really looking at what all this means. You know, what does AI mean for us in the future?

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And for those of you that don't know, Cognolitica, we have been writing about what AI means for you beyond just talking about the topics of the day here in the AI Today podcast. We've been writing about this for years.

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And in 2018, we created our first original thought leadership piece on the AI-enabled future, or the vision of the AI-enabled future, where we talk about, well, what does it mean when AI is truly everywhere.

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And we realized that, hey, it's a pretty broad topic here because it impacts our work, it impacts our personal life, it impacts society, it impacts our human experiences and things like that.

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So we've been covering that in these past few episodes in this series.

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And if you haven't listened to them, then this is the time to binge and listen to all of our episodes on the series so you can get a full glimpse of what it means when we have AI in our future.

00:01:38 Speaker_02
Exactly. But for today's podcast, we're going to be talking about augmented and autonomous everything.

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So back in 2018, when we first looked at what this AI-enabled vision of the future looked like, we really dove into this idea of augmented everything. And this also fits with the seven patterns of AI with autonomous as well.

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We really said, okay, what does autonomous everything look like? Autonomous is one of the seven patterns of AI. And we said, you know, how is this really going to enhance everything that we do?

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If you've listened to our podcast for a while, you know that we love augmented intelligence, especially me, this idea of augmented intelligence where you can, you don't replace the human, but you just help the human do things better.

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So do tasks better. And it really allows you to be superhuman and have these super capabilities. I'm air quoting, you can't see that, but imagine that. And so what does it mean to really be super and have these superhuman capabilities?

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So when you use AI, it helps you perform tasks that maybe were previously really hard, required significant talent or skills. Maybe they just took too long. And it kind of made it prohibitive. But now you can use the skills that you're good at.

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Humans are really good at critical thinking. We have intuition, creativity, and common sense.

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And then we use what machines are good at, which is processing large amounts of data, being able to spot patterns very quickly in that data or those outliers in that data, and then generating outputs based on the patterns that it's seen.

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So in this AI-enabled future, so we're looking forward and we're saying, what does now this future look like where everything is AI-enabled? Because AI is really, truly going to be everywhere, maybe even in things that it shouldn't be in.

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That means that AI will be in everything. So if we think that even if there's just a slight chance of improvement to help augment our lives and our experiences and help us do things better,

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And then it will be added to any product, any service, any experience. So we think about adding these AI capabilities. Sometimes it is an actual real benefit, and it really does augment and enhance.

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And other times we say, you know, it's this PR benefit. Especially recently, a lot of people, a lot of organizations and companies are just

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sprinkling this little AI magic fairy dust or putting a little sparkle tab into their product or service and saying, hey, this is AI enabled, but it's not actually really helping.

00:04:20 Speaker_02
So in this way, in this future, we're going to see literally everything become AI augmented. And when we say literally everything, think about everything that could possibly be augmented, your clothing, maybe glasses that you wear,

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your bathroom, retail experiences, home appliances. And we say, you know, what, what would an AI enabled ceiling fan look like or microwave or an AI enabled front door or back door or garage door, your ovens, your furniture, your shoes.

00:04:51 Speaker_02
I mean, think about anything that could be AI enabled and it will be.

00:04:56 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, and that's because one, it's really easy to do that now. I mean, these models that are out there, they're just, there's a majillion of them. They're being updated every day.

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There's both the cloud-based ones, the ones you can access as well as like the private ones and the, and the ones you can download the open source ones.

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That means it's just so much availability of these models that if you have a need or a desire to add some AI capability to something you can, as of today. This doesn't necessarily mean that it will do everything you want.

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That doesn't necessarily mean that it has the quality that you want for everything, but you will add it anyways, because adding that little bit of AI capability enhances the product, or maybe makes people think that the product is enhanced in some specific way.

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And when we were talking about this back in 2018, even though we were talking about augmented intelligence and augmented systems, that is basically AI systems and humans working together, we had also really been spending a lot of time thinking about autonomous systems, which are, of course, AI machine systems doing things without the human in the loop, or very little human in the loop.

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And, you know, that's because all the rage in 2018 were autonomous vehicles. You know, people were looking at, oh my goodness, all this AI stuff is coming. Surely cars will be self-driving themselves any day now.

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And, you know, the predictions were like, yeah, by 2020, there'll be a million, you know, self-driving taxis on the road. That didn't happen. Didn't happen in 2021, 22, 23, 24.

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You know, in this AI-enabled vision of the future, at some point, we will get there when we have autonomous vehicles, because it seems like that's what people want. And the AI capabilities are getting better and better every day.

00:06:34 Speaker_01
So, I mean, unless we want to say that it'll never happen, autonomous vehicles, which I don't think anyone is saying never. I think most people are saying it may be farther out than we may have originally expected, but it's going to be here one day.

00:06:47 Speaker_01
And when that happens, you think about, well, what are the impacts of mass autonomous vehicles, not just one or two or three vehicles, not just e-taxis in the case of Waymo's.

00:06:58 Speaker_01
No, we're talking about when the average person can step into the average vehicle and it has autonomous self-driving capabilities. What does this mean when everybody will come to expect it? And even back in 2018, we talked about this.

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We're like, well, you know, maybe the homes won't look the same because you don't need a garage, perhaps, or maybe you don't need a driveway, especially if you don't

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own the vehicle, that's the big thing, because with an autonomous vehicle, you can call it on demand, and therefore we don't even need parking lots because we don't need to park the car anywhere, the car can keep driving.

00:07:30 Speaker_01
Of course, there's the big question as to whether or not people will want to own autonomous vehicles on their own or just use autonomous vehicles.

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I mean, if you're not driving them, it does kind of beg the question as to whether or not you really do need to own them. But I think all these things have big impacts that people haven't really thought through right now.

00:07:47 Speaker_01
But of course, in our AI-enabled vision of the future, we've thought things through. The cities will look different, just the way that people interact with their lives.

00:07:54 Speaker_01
If we're going to do a lot of autonomous trucking and autonomous delivery systems, then maybe we will have loading docks or landing pads or drones or whatever it is.

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Maybe even our bicycles, our scooters, or our own little transport devices, maybe those will be self-driving too. You can just jump on a little scooter and press the button and I guess close your eyes.

00:08:13 Speaker_01
I don't know, it doesn't make as much sense with the scooter. But it's possible, right? You could have it do that. And then maybe in the future, then driving will be a hobby, just like riding a horse is a hobby now.

00:08:23 Speaker_01
It's not really a necessity anymore for transportation or for moving products and goods. So for sure in this AI-enabled vision of the future, when we're talking about autonomous

00:08:33 Speaker_01
vehicles, if this is an inevitability, then it does have these much more far-reaching impacts, especially when it comes to our societies, which are, to a large part, really dependent on owning and driving our own vehicles and dealing with the infrastructure from streets to parking to garages to refueling, all that sort of stuff that comes about from owning a vehicle.

00:08:59 Speaker_01
But in this AI-enabled vision of the future, autonomous vehicles, the autonomous doesn't start and end with the idea of autonomous vehicles.

00:09:06 Speaker_01
And I think now we can move a little bit past that to talk a little more broadly about what we mean by autonomous and augmented everything.

00:09:15 Speaker_02
Exactly, because this isn't just autonomous vehicles, even though I still am one day very bullish on this, so I don't have to drive. That's really just one application in the autonomous pattern.

00:09:28 Speaker_02
And then when we go to augmented, it is even more than that. So when we think about autonomous, what does it mean when we have homes that are autonomous? And we have appliances that can turn themselves on at the exact right time.

00:09:42 Speaker_02
And that our home is, you know, integrated with our lives and, you know, really be that augmented intelligence tool where it's synced with my calendar and it knows what time I'm out and going to be back home.

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And it can automatically open a door for me because I now have AI enabled doors. And so, you know, do we need keys anymore, right? It's just going to be able to know when we're home. Or are we going to have

00:10:08 Speaker_02
you know, meals that are prepared at home with robots. You know, we think about the Jetsons a lot, right?

00:10:13 Speaker_02
Like, will we actually have these AI robots at our house that can do things like help prepare our meals, or turn appliances on for us at the exact right time, or perform different security tasks for us, or do things like chores that we don't want to do anymore?

00:10:30 Speaker_02
you know, laundry and cleaning things.

00:10:32 Speaker_02
You know, can we, we already have vacuums that are able to navigate on their own in our homes, but what's that going to look like when we'll have vacuums that can do that and it can mop and it can mow our lawn and do all sorts of different things that we don't need to do anymore that we used to have to do either ourselves or we hired somebody to do that.

00:10:53 Speaker_02
So do we have, you know, all of these different things being done? And if we do, when we do, we need to say, how do people feel interacting with these bots that are operating in their homes, maybe without their monitoring?

00:11:08 Speaker_02
You know, we have augmented intelligence where we're keeping the human in the loop. But at what point do we go to that fully autonomous and no longer do we have humans in the loop and things are just getting done?

00:11:17 Speaker_02
Do I feel good that I'm having things being done in my home without me, you know, having to trigger it? Or am I starting to, you know, maybe wish for the days that I didn't have that?

00:11:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think it's actually something that we're going to be coming back to as this recurring theme, which is that there's both the actual impacts of the technology and then there's sort of our responses and our reactions to what is something that may not be in our control.

00:11:44 Speaker_01
That's just sort of, this is inevitably going to happen. So how do you respond to it? And of course, with all these things about AI, there's always two sides of the coin.

00:11:51 Speaker_01
There's sort of like the, hey, this is a tool that's going to enable me to do things. in ways that it couldn't do before. Or maybe you may not even have much of a choice in terms of if you don't do it that way, everybody else is doing it that way.

00:12:04 Speaker_01
Therefore, you will find yourself disadvantaged. We had talked about that in the context of the workforce in our last podcast on the AI-enabled organization, how that's going to impact workforces.

00:12:14 Speaker_01
And you don't really have much of a choice in the AI-enabled future about whether or not to use AI. Everybody will be, so you can just decide to be in the workplace or not.

00:12:22 Speaker_01
And I think now that we're looking beyond the workplace into our personal lives, people will be using AI for everything and people will be augmenting all of their activities with AI.

00:12:31 Speaker_01
So choosing not to will either be for something sort of cute and quaint and something that you're doing sort of to be aside and apart from technology, or you will be at a big disadvantage.

00:12:42 Speaker_01
And I think one of these big things is that I think we're going to start to see a little bit of a pushback

00:12:48 Speaker_01
on AI enabled everything and the things that are AI embedded as mentioned if you just look at the CES show from twenty twenty four in january you'll see everything's got AI i think it's going to become crazy in 2025 26 and of course in our AI enabled vision of the future won't even be competitive anymore to say you have AI and something it's going to be like yeah no duh

00:13:10 Speaker_01
If you're collecting data of any type, if there's any digital thing, it will have AI in it. Not having AI in it just makes your product seem antique.

00:13:19 Speaker_01
So I think that this is sort of one of the things we want to talk about here, because as we start to see AI embedded in all these solutions that may or may not even need them, but maybe they feel like they need to have them, people are going to change the way they interact with their products, right?

00:13:36 Speaker_01
You know, we're starting to see this even in like basic things like today, like smart televisions. It's like, you know, you have TVs now that that have computers on them that are putting ads in front of you that are doing all sorts of stuff.

00:13:46 Speaker_01
And you're like, why can't I even just get a dumb TV anymore? And the answer is you can't, you know, unless you. want to spend a lot more money or deal with very featureless systems. I think that's the situation.

00:13:57 Speaker_01
I think the same thing is going to happen with AI. If we're going to be looking at these AI-enabled systems to make us more efficient, then what are we going to expect people to do with their own lives?

00:14:06 Speaker_01
When you think about autonomous vehicles, it's like, okay, if everybody's letting the vehicles drive for themselves, then what was the problem that was being solved?

00:14:14 Speaker_01
Because you could have solved that problem with public transportation in terms of not wanting to drive, or you could have solved that problem with ride-sharing companies if you really didn't want to drive. But people wanted something else.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
I guess that's not either of those things, right? And if not, people have always talked about the future having flying cars and jetpacks. But then you think, wait a second, that means everybody's going to have flying cars and jetpacks.

00:14:36 Speaker_01
That may not necessarily be a great idea. Think about how many accidents we have on the road. Do you want these things in the air? I think people might start to feel that way about autonomous vehicles.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
It's like, well, maybe it's not so great to have these autonomous vehicles driving around everywhere. I think outside of these devices, I think we're going to find AI in all of our interactions because we're going to be communicating

00:14:57 Speaker_01
with AI systems in our retail experiences, in our shopping experiences. We'll be communicating with AI in our healthcare, in our finance, in our education, in our customer service interactions.

00:15:06 Speaker_01
We're going to be dealing with the fact that these AI systems can generate outputs that look and sound like other things that may or may not be truthful.

00:15:15 Speaker_01
So we're going to have to learn how to deal with this new reality where we can't believe anything we see, we hear, or read because it's just so easy to generate something.

00:15:25 Speaker_01
We're going to have to develop some sort of new reflexes and intuition about not trusting digital output.

00:15:32 Speaker_01
I think, in some ways, all of these things I just talked about, AI being everywhere, all this new reality of problems with AI in terms of reality and trusting, may lead to a pushback from folks.

00:15:45 Speaker_01
I think we could see, Kathleen Wright, a few different ways that we feel people might push back against the inevitable AI enablement of everything.

00:15:54 Speaker_02
Exactly. And you can even see it now, you know, sometimes people push back from technology or being so connected or always on with our devices.

00:16:03 Speaker_02
What's that going to look like when everything's AI enabled and it's even more and you can't get away from it, right? No, everything's AI enabled in my home. I can't get away from this technology. I can't just go anywhere to kind of reset myself.

00:16:16 Speaker_02
So I think that we are going to see that pushback where those who do not want their activities or interactions enabled, monitored, or involved in any way with AI, what is that going to look like?

00:16:30 Speaker_02
Because in this AI-enabled future, we are going to really see so many

00:16:36 Speaker_02
things ai enhanced that what is it going to look like when you know people are pushing back and are we going to have these experiences that are so-called ai free where i can go to a retail store and it's you know an old school way of shopping where i just walk up and down the aisles with a shopping cart that's not enabled with anything and products that are on shelves that aren't you know continuously monitored and

00:17:01 Speaker_02
You know we stopped automatically and it's you know kind of that older older way of experiencing things which is the current way now right and i need to talk to people to get help on the floor if i don't see a product or i need to be able to know where.

00:17:16 Speaker_02
you know, a product is what aisle that it's in. So, you know, that's going to be that kind of, you know, AI free. Also, we can say, well, maybe it's the primitive or the artisan products and services that people are really looking for.

00:17:29 Speaker_02
And things will be advertised as having no AI in any component. And what's that going to look like? And how are those going to be different? Are they going to be more expensive?

00:17:39 Speaker_02
Because they are unique, you know, and because that's not the way that we're doing it anymore. where things of today are going to actually be more expensive in the future without being AI-enabled?

00:17:51 Speaker_02
And will we also seek out those experiences that are far from perfect? Because that's what defines us as humans. So we'll be so used to these AI-generated art where images are just really crisp, great quality, always perfect, all the time.

00:18:07 Speaker_02
Will we actually go back to learning how to create with pen and paper? learning how to draw and seeing beauty in things that aren't perfect and flawed, just like humans. So what is that going to look like and how is that going to impact us?

00:18:24 Speaker_02
Because some things that aren't perfect, you can find the beauty in it. So what does that mean? And then we also need to look at when we're in this AI-enabled future, what do laws and regulations look like?

00:18:39 Speaker_02
And how are our current laws and regulations really going to be rethunk so that they impact this future society?

00:18:47 Speaker_02
Already, we see this with any enabling technology and any transformation that laws and regulations that we had around mobile devices did not exist in the 80s or even in the 90s. But then as we said, OK, how are people using it?

00:19:02 Speaker_02
Then we see that in laws around the internet, Right? We didn't have that in the 1960s, 70s, 80s. Now we do. And it just seems so like, yeah, duh, of course we have this. And it's so ingrained in us. But we didn't have that back then.

00:19:16 Speaker_02
We didn't have laws around children being on the internet. What kind of laws are we going to have around children interacting with AI systems?

00:19:24 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I think here's our general thought about it. Even though we've actually been very much involved in this, we're still involved with organizational and governmental activities around AI.

00:19:34 Speaker_01
Kathleen and I both still sit on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD's thought leadership team, and we're actually working right now on some aspects of trust and AI systems.

00:19:45 Speaker_01
But I think us fast forwarding many years ahead into the future, A lot of these laws and regulations will be seen as very outdated and antiquated, no matter what we come up with today, for a lot of reasons. One, I think, again, it's an inevitability.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
AI will be in everything. Any sort of attempts to ban the use of AI, to prevent the use of AI, I think will be hopeless, because people will see the value of it in certain cases.

00:20:10 Speaker_01
And they're going to say, well, wait a second, why is it that I can interact with an AI system when I'm ordering something from McDonald's, but I can't do that with my doctor or something like that? You know, people are going to demand the use of it.

00:20:22 Speaker_01
Of course, they want the responsible use of it. Nobody wants the impacts. The problem is that these laws and regulations are going to be so far behind in trying to figure this out, because in this

00:20:32 Speaker_01
AI-enabled vision of the future, we're going to have changes to the whole idea of privacy. People say, well, we want privacy. It's like, well, what is privacy now?

00:20:42 Speaker_01
Especially since I'm constantly seeing technology demos, especially lately of companies would say AI-enabled phones are just walking around the office all day just pointing at things, talking to this phone, and it's doing all this activity, transcribing meetings and doing things on whiteboards.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
finding lost glasses or whatever the heck people are doing with it and it's like well are people gonna start banning people owning glasses are you gonna ban the use of phones are you gonna ban the use of laptops with with microphones on them are you gonna be like that's the problem right because i is again gonna be enabled in everything it's not like

00:21:20 Speaker_01
some discreet technology. Oh, we have this technology here and now over there is the AI thing. So we're going to prevent you from using that AI thing over there. It is hopeless. Let me just tell you again, it is hopeless to do that.

00:21:33 Speaker_01
AI will be enabled in everything, even in things you're not expecting.

00:21:37 Speaker_01
If you're telling me that the organization by say an AI enabled sink are you gonna are we going to ban sinks you know if we have AI enabled clothing are you gonna ban clothing if you have AI enabled shoes you can i can keep going right and able pencils and able desks.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
Where does this stop? And the answer is, in the AI-enabled vision of the future, it does not stop. Because AI will be enabled and everything.

00:22:03 Speaker_01
Because if it wouldn't be, then all these companies that are demoing their AI-enabled products at CES or any other thing, they would have realized that people would not want to buy them. But the reality is, people want to buy them.

00:22:18 Speaker_01
and they're going to use them. That means that AI will be everywhere. So all of these regulations and laws that are focused on preventing the use or limiting the use will be challenged. Instead, we have to grapple with the fact is it is here.

00:22:34 Speaker_01
How do we deal with the way people interact with the AI that is all around us, whether it's

00:22:40 Speaker_01
Dealing with bad actors doing bad things in terms of crimes and mischief whether it's challenges to misinformation disinformation whether it's about the fact that people may not be able to consent to the use or disclosure of a systems or they may not know that it was being used in something or they may assume that's being used or not being used i even on our own site we have a chat bot who's primary chat bot just a chat

00:23:06 Speaker_01
that people can use to send us messages. People are talking with that chat as if it's a chatbot. We have specifically not enabled the AI part of it because we want people to talk to us. We don't want them talking to some bot. People go, phone number.

00:23:22 Speaker_01
It's like, do you walk up to a random person on the street and go, phone number, as if they're a chatbot? Hell no, right? People are already realigning their expectations of technology. And I think that means that laws and regulations

00:23:36 Speaker_01
are not able to foresee what people are doing. They're not able to think about what this means in terms of AI.

00:23:43 Speaker_01
They'll have to think about things like detecting when and where and how AI is being used, whether you can have AI-free zones, what that means to have an AI-free zone, and just all that sort of stuff.

00:23:55 Speaker_01
We're going to get into more of this when we talk about the impacts of AI on privacy, when we talk about the impacts of AI on things like intellectual property in some of our upcoming episodes where we dive deeper into these topics.

00:24:08 Speaker_02
Exactly, because we're not done with our AI-enabled vision of the future yet. So if you haven't done so already, subscribe to AI Today so you can get notified of all these upcoming episodes.

00:24:17 Speaker_02
And I will link to our previous podcasts in this series as well so that you can check that out. If you haven't done so, or if you don't know, we also have a LinkedIn newsletter that I encourage you to subscribe to.

00:24:29 Speaker_02
We go over some of these topics that we touch upon in our podcasts. So we do have our AI-Enabled Vision of the Future newsletter series out, but we also have a number of other topics that we cover as well.

00:24:40 Speaker_02
So I will link to that in the show notes, and I encourage you to subscribe to that and also to AI Today. Like this episode and want to hear more? With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:24:54 Speaker_02
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00:25:07 Speaker_02
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00:25:20 Speaker_02
Check it out at aitoday.live slash list. This sound recording and its contents are copyright by Cognolitica. All rights reserved. Music by Matsu Gravas. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.