- 26 Jul 2024
- The Parlor Room
Bonus Episode: Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute's Jen Stave on Harnessing AI for a Better Tomorrow
In this special bonus episode, Jen Stave, launch director of Harvard’s Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute, discusses artificial intelligence's transformative impact across industries, the need for global regulation, and the importance of making AI technologies accessible and affordable.
Guest
Jen Stave, Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute Launch Director
Resources
Harvard’s Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute (https://hbs.me/y2x7vhne)
HBS Online's AI Essentials for Business course (https://hbs.me/2p98zyx7)
Catch up on Season 1 of The Parlor Room:
Mihir Desai on Apple's Powerful Financial Model: https://hbs.me/yd84j56n
Mike Wheeler on the Jazz of Negotiation: https://hbs.me/2p8zna3m
Jill Avery on Building a Winning Brand Portfolio: https://hbs.me/yckzfsur
Nien-hê Hsieh on Ethical AI, Decision-Making, and Investing: https://hbs.me/36sw4frv
Jeff Bussgang on the Rise of AI & Raising Venture Capital: https://hbs.me/2p8p9fcu
Joshua Margolis on Elevating Your Leadership Style: https://hbs.me/59st27cn
Forest Reinhardt on Climate Change and the Tragedy of the Commons: https://hbs.me/2p85nasj
Linda Hill on Leading Change and the Paradoxes of Management: https://hbs.me/3hbsm25b
Season 1 Bonus Content (Part 1): https://hbs.me/yz22txwr
Season 1 Bonus Content (Part 2): https://hbs.me/2jj2xxzs
Top 8 Season 1 Q&As with HBS Faculty: https://hbs.me/46czj6dz
Watch The Parlor Room on YouTube: https://hbs.me/4j99nbwc
Transcript
Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file.
Patrick Mullane:
Let me introduce our next activity. I mentioned earlier The Parlor Room, which is a podcast from Harvard Business School that is hosted by Chris Linnane, our creative director. I'm going to read his bio just word for word from this piece of paper I have because it's kind of cool. Where's Chris there? He's very cool, but let me make clear for all of you if you haven't figured out already what Chris's job is. So he manages a team of creative people at HBS online that do everything that make the courses so amazing. So when you see an animation in a course, I think our animations are awesome. That animation has come from Chris's team. When you see a protagonist being filmed in a factory in Singapore, I'm making that. Have you filmed a protagonist in Singapore before? Yeah. So we have done that. So that's Chris's team who have either arranged that or gone and done it themselves.
So much of the aesthetics of our courses, the themes, the artistic themes of them come from Chris and his team. It really matters a lot for having a course that's engaging, even if you don't always notice it. So thanks to Chris and his team. Now let me do a bio, Chris, and I'll let him introduce the podcast segment we're going to do here. So he's the creative director of HBS online and host of the podcast. As we all know, The Parlor Room, Chris's Harvard journey began within the Harvard Art Museum's photo studio, photo studios, and spans an impressive two decades. During his tenure, Chris has been instrumental in producing dozens of long form courses and garnered recognition for award-winning marketing campaigns. His influence extends beyond the academic sphere through Royalist Creative, a driving force behind campaigns for imminent brands such as J Crew and NBC and Living Proof. Furthermore, this is the coolest part to me. His musical compositions resonate across television programs, including all iterations of the Kardashians. CBS is the challenge and MTV's the real world and road rules. So Chris has done a lot and he looks like he's 15 years old, so I dunno how he did that. Anyway, please welcome Chris Linnane to the stage.
Chris Linnane:
Hello everyone. Nice to see you. It's always nice to be introduced as a contributor to the Kardashian fiasco. Anyway, thank you all for coming to this part of the day. There's a lot going on today, a lot of things, a lot of opportunities, and I'm so thankful that you took this time to come here and hear this part of our day. This is the part of the room. It's a podcast. It's only had one season. We're going to do our second season coming up very soon, but it's been great so far. So as Patrick said, I've been in Harvard for 21 years. Long time I've been at HBX or HBS Online, which we turned to a while ago for almost 11 years. We've done lot of really cool stuff. So I should say my voice is a little scratchy. I was coaching my daughter's 11-year-old soccer team this morning.
Good news is we won. Bad news is lots of crying, there's always lots of crying just the way it goes for some reason, and it hit me in the middle of this game that this team is not so much a soccer team as it is a Taylor Swift fan club that meets in a field. So that's what kind of happens. So they don't really want to hear much from me at all about anything, which is okay. So we're here today to talk about ai, which we know is the big thing. Everyone's talking about it right now. How many of you are all in on AI and are excited about it? Alright, how many of you are not as excited as you think you should be about ai? Yeah, that's kind of how life is right now. Everyone's kind of half and half about it. I feel the exact same way about that. So we're going to jump right in. We're going to bring our special guest in virtually to talk to us right now for a little bit. So let me do a quick introduction. As launch director of the D-Cubed Institute at Harvard Business School, my guest is building a startup inside HBS to address tech impact on society. With a PhD in social science and 15 plus years in data and new ventures, she brings vast research and industry experience to guiding the responsible development of AI. Please welcome Jen Stave.
Jen Stave:
I am a completely artificial version of Jen. Can you believe how fast technology is evolving? If the real Jen wanted to, she could go sit on the beach and relax and I could stay and have a conversation with you. I suppose it's too late for that now since she is already here. But something to consider for next time. Can you imagine what a better tomorrow looks like with this technology?
Chris Linnane:
So I guess we're already all fooled by AI already, so Jen is actually physically here, so please welcome Jen Stave to the stage.
Jen Stave:
You too.
Chris Linnane:
Thank you, Jen. Have a seat.
Jen Stave:
Did I fool anyone? One person. One person.
Chris Linnane:
I thought it was a great idea. It came my way. I thought that's what we should do to start this off. So great to have you here.
Jen Stave:
Thank you. I'm excited for this very intimate fireside chat with you and your thousand best friends. Yeah,
Chris Linnane:
We're getting along pretty well so far. So anyway, let's start really at the basics D-Cubed. What is D-Cubed?
Jen Stave:
D-Cubed is a research institute here at Harvard that looks at how AI is transforming business and society. And if you look around at the world today, we believe that we are on the precipice of a major transformation, and we do go so far as to say it's going to be bigger than the internet, bigger than electricity. And I'm not just going to make grandiose claims like that without backing them up. Here's why I think AI is going to be bigger than electricity. Literally everything is in scope. If you think about what AI transformation can affect, it's literally everything. You want to have a dinner party. You can ask AI how to have a dinner party. What's a good menu? If you want to decide what the best Taylor Swift album is, you can ask AI for its opinion.
Chris Linnane:
It'll get it wrong for these girls.
Jen Stave:
If you want to color a picture, AI can do that. If you want to substitute yourself for a podcast, you have other things to do. You can do that. If you want to apply for a job, AI can write your resume, write your cover letter if you want to do your job. If you're in marketing, legal, medical AI can do that too. So literally everything is in scope, which means that there's a lot of experimentation happening right now around the world in every sector, every industry, and people are trying to figure out where do they like it? Where don't they like it? Where is it very impactful, where it's harmful? And so there's a lot of dust flying around, but when the dust settles, I believe the world will be fundamentally different.
Chris Linnane:
So from a research and philosophical standpoint, what's happening in the world with AI and what role is D-Cubed going to play?
Jen Stave:
Yeah, what's happening in the world is that there's a lot of hype. I don't know if everyone has AI fatigue. I certainly do because of the nature of my job, my social is just filled with ai, but it's wild to see how different the narratives are. So one day I'll see a media report that says all CEOs are investing heavily in ai. If you haven't invested yet, you're behind. And then literally the next day, sometimes even the same publication, it's like all CEOs are pulling back AI investment because of regulatory concerns. And so there's just this chaos out there where it seems like no one quite knows what to do, how to make the right decision. And in D-Cubed, we work with a lot of companies and the CEOs that we talk to say, yeah, we don't know what to do. There's so much uncertainty.
We literally have no idea how to act in this environment. And this is where I think the role of our institute, but also academia more broadly comes in. When you have all of this hype out there, there's a real thirst for understanding what's fact and what's fiction. And there's a real need for academia to step up as a non-biased organization that's not financially motivated and help sort through this chaos and really put forward data-driven, scientifically proven studies about where AI is in fact an impact and where it's not. And I will say again, this intimate fireside chat, I'll tell everyone here a secret, no one's filming on social media or none of my Harvard colleagues are going to tell anyone. Right? Okay. When I finished my dissertation a while ago, I immediately left academia and said, this whole enterprise is useless, right? Nobody's reading the papers that we publish in academic journals.
Nobody read my dissertation except for my husband who's right there. He has much better grammar than I do. Well done. So I had him do a copy edit, but no one else read it. So I said, why waste your time? So immediately left academia had a great career in industry, but this institute is different. And in fact, I'm so excited to be in this institute because it's not just about pushing forward scientific theories and academic studies. It's really about translating those into publicly consumable insights for the entire world to understand how to make better decisions. Whether you're a farmer in Minnesota or a doctor in Nigeria, you can look at our output, look at our insights, and understand how AI is going to affect your job. And so that's why I think academia has a really important role here.
Chris Linnane:
That's great. I should say at the very end, we're going to do a Q and A as well. So if questions come up, hold onto them, we'll go around the room and ask those questions. So here's a question for you, Jen, please don't get mad at me for this one, AIAI
Jen Stave:
But I'm already upset.
Chris Linnane:
Okay, good. So I've seen a lot of people working on AI and they get a picture of a cat and they put a pirate hat on and they giggle. And I think, so is this AI thing just almost like a street magician and we're all just watching and meanwhile someone's picking our pocket.
Jen Stave:
It's a good question. And look, there is value to laughing throughout your day. So I'm not going to minimize that example.
Chris Linnane:
Sorry I don't laugh.
Jen Stave:
But no, I think that it is true. There's a lot of people in the world, maybe some in this room who don't have a lot of exposure to AI. And your daily existence goes on really without any interactivity with AI. The fact is AI is still permeating most aspects of business and society. Whether one person as an individual sees that or not, it's happening. And so you can take a look at the video that was shown in the beginning. Our little gimmick that I was so excited about. This is brand new technology. I produced that video with, I think it was $20 and about an hour. And literally anyone in the world can do that. And so this stuff's available, it's out there and you can think about the incredible impactful use cases, both positively but also some really horrible ones that's coming because this technology is now available.
I like to stay optimistic. So I'll give you a few positive examples. You can think about a politician in a multicultural diverse district who now has the ability to record themselves and give a message to every single constituent in their district, in their native tongue about the benefits that are available to that constituent and the benefit of government. This has never happened before. So that state society relationship could become a whole lot more robust on the business side. You can think about a startup that's just scraping together. Its last dollars asking mom and dad for a few more dollars, asking friends for this one last ditch marketing campaign to get their business up and running. Now all of a sudden they get 20 more dollars. And their local last ditch effort just became a global multilingual marketing campaign for the exact same cost. This is going to transform business
Chris Linnane:
When I can't sleep at night and I'm feeling like, oh, I just saw this video and it was really good. And Patrick mentioned, I make video for a living. So it's a little bit nerve wracking in some ways. And I think maybe I'm just going to live longer with less purpose, and that makes me feel weird inside. But that brings me into healthcare thing. We had talked recently about healthcare and everyone thinks, oh, because of healthcare, because of AI and healthcare, this is going to go really well. But you're saying not so fast about that.
Jen Stave:
I don't think it's all positive. And I will say even before jumping into healthcare, I think we're at a point with AI where we need everyone, even those people who think it's just silly hat. And on cats, we need everyone really involved in a debate about the positive and negative aspects of it. Because even if it doesn't affect you, we need society to start to develop what are these cultural norms and values that we want to ascribe to these technologies? So with this video, for example, if I fully authorize the content and I put it out there, do I need to tell you all that it's not really me? Is that unethical? Is it just rude? Is it acceptable? I have no idea. We as a society haven't actually come to terms with how we feel about this. Another thing that I've been thinking about recently with the harm and positive aspects of AI clothing, at some point we as a society decided that every piece of clothing had to have made in this country, this is how you dry clean it.
I don't know how those rules came about, but we are in need of another conversation like that for content and ai, right? Do I need to say this video was made in China or Russia or the us It's 50% artificial. I don't know what we need to have in there, but I do know we need everyone out there debating the positive and negative aspects of it so that we can all come to some agreement on rules of the road. So with that as a backdrop, let me answer your healthcare question. I'm not trying to avoid it. No, you're not. All research has shown both positive and negative and it's definitely not all positive, but the positive aspects of AI and healthcare are remarkable. And I am one of those people who want to live to 200. Me too. I actually have a debate with my husband, like, I'm good, I'm good with 80, I'm good with 90. And I'm like, I'm not going to be a widow at 90. I'm going to have a hundred years left. We got to do this together.
No, but we are seeing, so researchers in our lab, Karim Lakhani in the Laboratory for Innovation Sciences, he and a whole bunch of co-authors showed that an AI model was better at detecting cancer than Harvard medical researchers. So just like remarkable. We also have Amit Goldenberg in our digital emotions lab showing that AI is consistently scored by patients as more empathetic and better bedside manner than doctors. And so AI is just knocking it out of the park and healthcare at the same time. We have a trustworthy AI lab. And Hima Lakkaraju is the principal investigator here, and she had this amazing study where they worked with doctors and they took a cohort of patients who had a very high likelihood of developing epilepsy in the coming years. And they broke those patients into three groups. With one group, you just did it the old fashioned way.
You had the doctors evaluate the medical records and come up with a prediction, yes, we think you're likely to develop epilepsy or no, we don't think you are. The second group there was the doctor, but they also had a large language model that had ingested all of the patient records and gave basically a thumbs up or thumbs down. That's it. And then the doctor could then decide whether to overrule the thumbs up or thumbs down. In the third group, the doctors were given a large language model, again, with all of the records ingested, and the large language model was allowed to tell the doctor all of this narrative around why it should he or she should or shouldn't give a positive or negative diagnosis. And let me actually do a quick poll. How many of you think that just the doctor by themselves did the best? Okay, how many of you think the doctor with just the thumbs up or thumbs down did the best? Okay, a little more. And how many of you think that the doctor that had the full description from the large language model did the best? Okay, you're all wrong.
I set that up. Don't worry. Set that up so that you're wrong. The doctors that had the full description actually performed much worse than the other two groups. And this was what was so remarkable about this study because it's counterintuitive to what we know about AI in healthcare and what they did. These are computer scientists, and so they actually reverse engineered these models and they said, what's actually happening? And it turns out what's happening is that those models were telling the doctors what they thought were most convincing, not cause and effect diagnoses of the patient. And they were so convincing, and this is the key takeaway. The model is so convincing that it made the doctor override it's decades long study of medicine to be like, yeah, I guess I'll trust you on that. Let's go with that answer. And that ability to manipulate is quite scary and still one of those negative aspects that we as a society need to figure out how to contain.
Chris Linnane:
That's fascinating. So a couple negative things there in the medical world, but where are we seeing the best outcomes from AI right now?
Jen Stave:
Well, everyone's going to have a different answer, so I'll give you my personal answer. I personally think that coding and data science is going to be the most disruptive job occupation. And I find it very ironic, like all these data scientists at open AI basically put themselves out of the job. But to leave that aside, the reason I'm so excited about, and it's not just data science, it's really anything coding is because there's this auto validation aspect to it. So if you think about generative AI and some of your silly use cases, I won't go so silly. Let's just say I'm trying to figure out a strategy. I want a new business strategy for this company. You can interact with the large language model and get some advice, but you really have a hard time understanding where it's hallucinating and where it's actually giving you really good advice because it's this gray space where there's a lot of opinion with coding, there's not opinion. And you can take the translation right out of that large language model and test it. And you can see right away, is this code running or not? It still might not be free of bugs, but there's this immediate feedback loop with coding and large language models that I think sets it up for this really, really exciting future.
Chris Linnane:
Okay. Oh, I'm going to bring it back down. I feel so I feel bad about this. So I have a friend, he does really well business wise, good businessman. He sold two companies so far, and I was talking to him recently and he's looking to sell this third business right now. He said, I have seven employees. If this was five years ago, I'd have 77 employees, but I only need seven right now. That felt like bad news to me. Is it bad news?
Jen Stave:
Well, if you frame it that way, it's a real bummer. I don't like to frame it that way. And I don't like the narrative that AI is coming for all of our jobs, as you can probably tell by now, I'm a very optimistic person and I like to instead think about where we are in this moment in history and we are about to have the capability with AI to unlock some of the most challenging problems we've ever faced, right? We have a climate crisis that so far humans with our own brains haven't been able to solve potentially with AI as a tool that we can use, we can solve it longevity disease, we are right on the cusp of being able to cure a lot of those problems using ai. But I think it's important to keep in mind that humans are controlling the agenda. It's not like AI's coming, it's putting everyone out of work. We're always going to need humans to do the types of pursuits and solve the types of challenges that we want to solve. And you can think about AI as a tool for us to do that, right? We control the agenda. And so with these pursuits, let's try to solve climate crisis. Let's solve longevity. Whole new industries and new jobs are going to emerge that humans will create for ourselves. So don't get down Chris.
Chris Linnane:
I'm trying not to. Thank you, Jen. Every time I ask a question, I'm like, it's like the guy at the party who's in the back just turning down the radio over and over again. Sorry about that.
Jen Stave:
Playing piano, man.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah, yeah. No one wants to hear piano anymore, not me. Okay. So you said earlier that one of the keys for D-Cubed is to share the information that you're learning, disseminate the information. What kind of information are you sharing and where can people find this information?
Jen Stave:
Literally everywhere. We are trying to be so accessible, it gets us in trouble quite a bit. So we are open TikTok, Instagram, you name the global social network, and we are attempting to permeate it with all of our insights, again, in a publicly accessible way. So we will take this amazing research paper and we'll boil it down to the key takeaway that leaders need to know. And then we will either record one of our amazing researchers talking about it in the two minute clip and put it out there, or we will take the quote that's most relevant and put it out there and really try to have this global reach. We haven't quite started ramping up our AI based translation, but that's coming. But we also do a whole host of other things. So we have events that we convene and create community. We to the media. We really try to break out of the academic silo to have an impact.
Chris Linnane:
And what do you think are the biggest challenges facing AI over the next five to 10 years?
Jen Stave:
Facing AI or facing humans? Oh geez.
Chris Linnane:
They're blending together now.
Jen Stave:
Does AI have an agency in this?
Chris Linnane:
Okay. Let's say humans using AI.
Jen Stave:
Yes. No, there's a great quote that people across our institute use quite a bit that the future is here, is just not evenly distributed. And I think one of the biggest challenges is getting AI evenly distributed because as long as it's concentrated in the hands of just a few people who know it use it, they're going to have such a headstart on developing this new economy that's going to start that it'll leave large swaths of people behind. And so I know me personally, I'm just trying to share the word to really get everyone understanding that's why I did this gimmick. This stuff's out there, you can see it today. And I think that equal use of the tools because the cost is so low, is one of the biggest challenges that we need to solve and make sure that people really know about it.
Chris Linnane:
And what do you think is the biggest positive near term impact that we're going to get from using AI?
Jen Stave:
I think it's going to be baby steps. And so the first immediate use case that you can literally see today is individual productivity. And I like to make the distinction between individual productivity and enterprise business productivity. So business productivity is, hey, this new tool exists. I'm going to completely change my business model and operating model to harness this beast, right? I'm going to disrupt everything and I'm going to figure out how to create value and capture value with this. I think that's taking a little bit longer to materialize. I think it's coming, and I think you all should jump on the wave that's coming, but it's the individual productivity that I think is already here today. And this is where you hear all these fun anecdotes like you can go and do someone's job 20% faster if you have generative AI with you as a co-pilot.
And literally all of you could test this out in your job and see what sort of individual productivity gains do I get. I'll tell you another couple secrets. Really trusting this group that in my own job, I write a lot of emails. I'm a figurehead, I talk a lot, I write a lot, and I thought sometimes I'm in a bad mood, but I have to communicate with really important people at Harvard and I can't let my bad mood translate into these emails. So I thought, why don't I use ChatGPT and just tell it, Hey, make this email sound more professional and courteous. And I thought, okay, that's going to be a good use of my time. It turned out not to be, no, because I would read it and I'd say, ah, it just doesn't sound like me. But it's this testing and experimentation that we all can do right now to really figure out where the big value proposition is.
Chris Linnane:
Okay, we're almost there, but an application right now for AI that's performing at pretty much a human level.
Jen Stave:
Well, I would've said this video, but only one person raised their hand. I believed it when you sent it to me. It's brand new. No, I think that it is, and this gets into the AGI question also. I do not think that there is any sort of sentient in AI at the moment. And even the large language models I think fall short of that. But I also am a little bit philosophical about it in that I don't know if we can define what a human is. So it's hard to say what is human emotion versus when your dog is happy to see you. All of this is still really fuzzy. And I think with ai, we're at a point where it starts to exhibit some sort of personality, so people immediately jump to, oh, okay, this is AGI, it's human. But I think we're still pretty far from that. And I think what we need to overcome this last barrier is just more compute, more energy, and I think that's where the field is right now, figuring out how to get the cost of energy lower to get those data centers and processing much higher.
Chris Linnane:
Great. And our theme for today, atex is business for a better Tomorrow. With that in mind, are there some takeaways you could share with our audience that they could think about implement at work next week or just something that would motivate people?
Jen Stave:
Yes. Well, actually I have my two kids sitting right over here, Alice and Gwen. And so I'm going to give advice with them in mind because they'll call me out on it later. So I'll give some parental advice in that when I was growing up, my parents would say, be a doctor, be a lawyer. Because climbing to the top of a profession led to a very stable, middle or upper class existence. It's comfortable. I don't think I will give my kids that same advice today. And the reason I won't is because I think all of these professions from, I mean you name it, real estate, law, medical, even academics, I think all of them are going to undergo a pretty significant difference in how they operate in the future with ai. And we just don't know yet what that daily existence will be like. What is your day-to-day?
Do you find it fulfilling? Do you find it to be something you want to spend your time doing? And with all of that in flux with being on the cusp of this major transformation to all of these professions, my advice would not be, Hey, roll the dice and figure it out. Anyways, my advice is be the person who starts the entrepreneurial venture that actually does that transformation. So if you're passionate about law instead of being a lawyer, why don't you figure out what the next generation of lawyers are going to do with AI? If you're passionate about medicine rather than being a doctor, why don't you go and have a startup that transforms what doctors do in the future? I think there's such a wave of entrepreneurial activity coming that it's the best time, right? There's almost a safety net because there's so many opportunities you can try and try and try. And the field is just ripe for so much disruption that I think everyone should get some risk tolerance and try to shape the future of the world and not just sort of go along these comfy paths that have always existed.
Chris Linnane:
So I should be a little more positive.
Jen Stave:
Yes.
Chris Linnane:
I'm going to try my best.
Jen Stave:
The future is bright.
Chris Linnane:
Okay, good.
Jen Stave:
Think about how your job will change in the future.
Chris Linnane:
That's why I don't want to think about that. That sounds horrible to me, but okay, it'll be great. I'm trying to convince myself, Jen, I'll get there. I'll get there for sure.
Jen Stave:
And think if you're the one driving it, you can make sure it's a good existence, right? Yes. If you leave it to someone else, they may make it so that you're just pushing this button every day while avatar, Kris does all the work. And you may not like that.
Chris Linnane:
I won't. That sounds like all, I can't stand the real life version of myself. If I had to watch an avatar version, it'd be horrible. I'm going to stay positive. This is all good news. This is all good news. Say it again. This is all good news. Alright, so we're about to take some questions. We've got some people with microphones, I don't know who's holding our microphone. Oh, way up top. Can we find someone with their hand up? And then we're going to start off with some questions.
Audience Member:
Really great presentation. So thank you. And I'm Ben. I'm originally from Nepal, came from Wisconsin. My question is, I'm in the healthcare and there's a lot of debate on the healthcare. I work as a healthcare executive with your experience and everything, give us, because there is a lot of fatigue as well, with so much AI information. So to live better tomorrow for personal and everybody's health, what are your top three advices? Where do you think to find the resource and where to be on track with all the recent developments without getting fatigue?
Jen Stave:
I'm sorry, will you just say that last part? The top three advice on, say that one more time.
Audience Member:
To look for better health for everybody, for better living. If you want to use some of the AI tools, where do you look into or where do you keep yourself to keep track of everything that's going on?
Jen Stave:
Well, that's a weighty question. Okay. So to keep track of everything that's going on, I would tune into D-Cubed because I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Perfect. That's perfect. Set me up. You set me up for it. Because that's where you're going to see scientific studies about where it's actually fact and where it's fiction, the advice on where to tune in specifically for AI in healthcare. And this is where maybe you're revving off on me, Chris, I'm a little bit more pessimistic. There are some of these use cases, you think about WebMD and then you think about it on steroids where you have this AI that's very convincing and anyone in the world can go and it's under the guise of, well now everyone has access to healthcare advice, but the technology is just not there. And so there's this real potential harm where you are giving the world access to flawed healthcare advice. And so again, we're in this period where everyone's experimenting, where the dust hasn't settled, where society hasn't yet weighed in on whether that's okay or what sort of guardrails and even regulation. We need to stop some of that harm. And so I would say look for academic research on where the state of the field is before really jumping in and accepting some of these tools, especially in healthcare.
Audience Member:
Thank you so much.
Jen Stave:
Do you have a microphone?
Just don't give the microphone to my kids. They have questions.
Audience Member:
Thank you so much.
Jen Stave:
You can't answer.
Audience Member:
You talked earlier about coding, right? So my question is related to sim. So are all the programming languages like c, sap, Java, and for that matter, are they going to be obsolete now? So this is my first question. My second question is what industry AI will not impact? It'll not disrupt what kind of industries will not disrupt. Thank you so much.
Jen Stave:
Yes, I do not think coding languages will be obsolete. In fact, just earlier today I was working with my son on Python. If that shows you how serious I am about that, there's always going to need to be code to interact between humans and ai. But as we see with all of these languages, they evolve over time. And so I am sure new code and new language will evolve, especially as the way that we interact with computers changes. But I think there's always going to need to be that coding translation mechanism. What industry will not be affected? I don't think any, I'm sorry. I really can't think of something that truly wouldn't be affected because AI is now in the creative space as well. And so whether you're in pure mathematics or pure arts, anywhere in between there is AI emerging to either increase your productivity, think about things a different way. And again, it might not all be useful and we as a society might decide that we don't like it in some of those professions, but it doesn't mean that it's not available. Do you know of one that you don't think?
Audience Member:
Maybe sports management? If I'm a player, I don't think it'll impact me.
Jen Stave:
I actually think they've been using AI for quite some time and looking at AI for the, actually, I was just reading about this, about how they're using AI to really understand how to minimize injuries for players. And so looking at where the point of impact is, looking at all of this historical footage that you have of players and then pinpointing, these are the situations where we're getting the most injuries and then adjusting. And so even there, I think we're already there. And in this case it's a good thing, right? People like that. There's no harm. It's providing value.
Chris Linnane:
We Had some hands up here. Is there someone with a microphone over here?
Audience Member:
Yeah, here. Hi.
Chris Linnane:
Oh yeah, but you can start sir.
Audience Member:
Hi, my name is Swami. Thank you for hosting this and choosing the right theme like business for a better tomorrow. And if you take any business, they can't sustain in any broken economy or environment and affordability and accessibility plays a key role. So with respect to ai, how can we make AI technologies affordable and accessible for the businesses so that they can offer their products and services at an affordable to the consumers so that it'll be a win-win for everyone?
Jen Stave:
Yes, that is absolutely at D-Cubed, one of our main motivations. In fact, we have this wonderful lab called Tech for All lab that is specifically devoted to democratizing technology around the world. And they had this Reconning, his principal investigator, and he had this amazing experiment that he just finished running where he partnered with WhatsApp and he created an AI bot, a large language model that essentially had all of this business knowledge. So it was how do you run a business, basically think about a McKinsey in like a box. And he took this and he deployed it on WhatsApp to a little under 700 entrepreneurs in Kenya. And he basically gave them access to it and said, you're all starting a your business. How are you going to be better at starting this business? Make better decisions with technology in hand? And it was this really, really fascinating study.
And he found that those entrepreneurs that essentially already had this upward trajectory, it expedited their business considerably. So the more customers, more revenue compared to other businesses that didn't have this technology At the same time, one of their interesting findings was that if you had a business that was already failing and it was already, it didn't have the right business model, it wasn't set up for success, it actually expedited their closure. And so it was like you're asking it the wrong questions because you're not looking at the business in the right way. And so it kind of expedited those closures. But that to us was very, very promising study of how potentially this technology can start to permeate global communities and help businesses that otherwise don't have these resources. So follow the tech for all lab.
Chris Linnane:
That's awesome. So we had someone up here, Jane, I think you had a microphone out.
Audience Member:
Thank you. Wonderful insights. Commiss from Houston, Texas. All good news by the way, but I'm little skeptical, knowingly, unknowingly. We are all part of this technology now and we are using it. I'm going to concentrate on the bad news. What is the government role in it? I mean the regulation part is very important. I do not want it to be other, let's say cryptocurrency. And the end use case is what really bothers me and the regulations around is government up for this challenge? Do they have any idea of where this technology is going? Because they're the ones who will be regulating this eventually, right? I mean the congress will come in and say that, Hey, we have to stop here at this point. So what do you think about the government's role and who will have the ultimate authority to put some regulations there? Thank you.
Jen Stave:
Unfortunately, what we've always seen is that regulation is always perpetually behind technology, right? It's always scrambling to keep up. And in particular in modern times, this is going to be increasingly problematic because all of these technologies are increasing at an exponential rate. It's not linear like it has been in the past. And so if you think about the changes with these videos in six months, I guarantee it'll all fool everyone. It's increasing exponentially, which means the government and regulatory bodies are going to have a harder and harder time keeping up. And so I think there needs to be some reevaluation of how you govern and regulate in an age where things are moving at an exponential rate. I think there has to be a targeted conversation about how to do things differently. I also think there needs to be a conversation around the international aspect of all of this.
And so if you look around the world today, Europe, India, China, U.S. just to name four, are all regulating in a vastly different way. And what that is creating is different approaches to data management, different approaches to innovation, creating serious problems for any multinational corporation, but also creating problems for regulation where you have one government wanting to not regulate so that they don't give another country an advantage. And so setting the stage for a race to the bottom where everyone's moving so fast to keep their country ahead, that they don't ever do the right thing by understanding how to control the harms. So I really do think there is a role for some sort of international organization, by the way, my opinion not D-Cubed's on convening the global nation states and figuring out regulation through United Nations or some other international forest. I don't see how you do it without international cooperation.
Chris Linnane:
Great. And you had a question right down here.
Audience Member:
Thank you. My name's Angela. I work in marketing and communications and my question was really related to regulation. It was specifically about copyright and the implications of AI are all over the place. It impacts fair use and particularly content creation. And I invite you to chime in on that as well.
Chris Linnane:
I'm steering clear. I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Jen Stave:
Yeah, I honestly have no idea where this is going to go. It is tied up in the courts right now, and I mean I could see 10 different futures. I am definitely following it closely as I'm sure you are, but the implications are huge for deciding one way versus the other. I've even heard some people say copyright law needs to be completely reimagined, like throw it out and start over. And so I know that again, when I talked about the fact that everyone's experimenting and there's all this dust, this is one of those areas that by the time the dust settles I know is going to look vastly different. Like wow, that is a new world for content creation that simply didn't exist before. I do think there's no going back. There's technology only goes forward. And so these models are out there, they're trained on data. I know there's lawsuits that have been won around, Hey, you used copyrighted data, but I don't think that is going to stop the momentum. There's going to have to be some other solution and I don't have the answer for that.
Chris Linnane:
So we got time for two more quick questions. I think this gentleman has a microphone right here.
Audience Member:
Sure. Hello, I'm Evan from Nova Scotia. Thanks very much for the conversation. I actually was going to ask about copyright, but I'm going to take this in a different direction. Is there the sophistication of creation in these models that allows for not just making the best approximation of what's out there, but something like an inspired new direction, let's say like a blue period or the white album or something like that. Is it only just going to be the best approximation of the past or are there areas for new direction that can be created with this tick?
Jen Stave:
I haven't seen it. And perhaps this is one of the optimistic aspects of if we humans are perhaps always going to be needed of not just continuing to push things forward incrementally, but doing a massive leap forward because of some creative genius or Leonard da Vinci came about and everyone thought about things differently. So I still think there's the role for that and we aren't seeing the technology be able to reimagine things in that way. Now, will it be able to do that in a year maybe, but I still think there's always the role for humans in charting our path forward. And so even if technology can do that, we can still decide if we like that direction, we could have decided we didn't like the blue period and it wouldn't be famous anymore. And so even whether it's humans or technology making these big leaps, we do have to remember we're in the driver's seat and it's our opinion that matters.
Chris Linnane:
Young woman up there with the microphone was just handed to you in the front row of the back.
Audience Member:
Hi, first of all, I'm part of the computer scientists who made their own jobs obsolete so that, but I'm particularly interested in the transition that the businesses have to overtake with everything, all the changes that are happening here. I wanted to ask you about the skills and the knowledges that one person needs to have in order to see that transition. So I wanted to get into the world of consulting. I thought that it was the best position, best field to navigate and actually lead the way for businesses for the changes that are happening. But what are the skills and knowledges that I have to look into more to actually understand how AI and machine learning is going to change businesses both for the company side, the industry, and also the society?
Jen Stave:
Great question. So I mean from the business lens, it's just understanding the business literature. So understanding business strategy, understanding all the core components of business that have been around a long time but now are different and affected by ai. But those core principles still exist. And so really understanding those, and this is like your basic MBA curriculum, I think is exceptionally useful in the world when trying to understand the future of business. But then when you think about these verticals, right, that's where the deep knowledge is also going to really matter. So if you're trying to understand how medical businesses are going to change, having that deep expertise in the medical field plus business is going to be what's going to get you across the finish line there. Or if you're trying to understand sports management and how that business is going to change with ai, having that deep expertise of the sports industry or if you're interested in art, really diving deep into art, but then also understanding what does that industry look like and how those businesses operate. I would say there's this horizontal layer around just business savviness that's needed. It sounds like you already have that technical lane to really understand how that's going to change.
Chris Linnane:
We've reached two 30, so we've got to stop taking questions. Unfortunately we could go on for hours and hours and it would be just as exciting.
Jen Stave:
But they're going to join me on Tuesday.
Chris Linnane:
Yeah, you'll be here Tuesday.
Jen Stave:
We'll finish the conversation then.
Chris Linnane:
Do that there. No problem. So what I'm taking away from this, Jen, is don't be down, don't be upset, don't feel, don't cry at stuff at night. Don't do any of that stuff.
Jen Stave:
Don't cry tonight.
Chris Linnane:
Alright, so all I got to do is figure out how to make AI my copilot and I'm going to be just fine.
Jen Stave:
You're going to be just fine.
Chris Linnane:
That feels good. It's not that bad. It's a good outcome. So thank you all for joining us. Edit, thanks for having me, that we'll have this version. We will come out, I'll remove all my jokes, you'll hear that version with no jokes and there's other episodes as well. So please listen if you can. Thank you all for coming.
Jen Stave:
Thank you.
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