267. I, Human: Behavior and our Complicated Relationship with Technology, featuring Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Welcome to episode 267 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Tomas Chamorro Primusic, author of I Human. Ready, let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer hello hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Tomas Chamorro Primusic, an international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, leadership development and people analytics. His commercial work focuses on the creation of science based tools that improve organizations ability to predict performance and people's ability to understand themselves. He's currently the Chief Innovation Officer at Manpower Group, co founder of Deeper Signals and Metaprofiling, and professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University. He has previously held academic positions at New York University and the London School of Economics and lectured at Harvard, Stanford and London Business Schools, Johns Hopkins, IMD and Inseed, as well as being the co Founder and CEO of Brazen X and the CEO at Hogan Assessment Systems. Dr. Tomas has written 11 books and over 150 scientific papers on the psychology of talent, leadership, innovation and AI, making him one of the most prolific social scientists of his generation. His work has received awards by the American Psychological association, the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, and the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology, to which he is a fellow. Dr. Tomas is also the founding director of University College London's Industrial Organizational and Business Psychology Program and the Chief psychometric advisor to Harvard's Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. Over the past 20 years, he has consulted to a range of clients in financial services including JP Morgan, HSBC and Goldman Sachs, advertising for Google, wpp, BBH and media for BBC, Red Bull, Twitter and Spotify, consumer goods for Unilever and PNG in fashion like lvmh, Net, A Porter and Valentino, government for the British Army, Royal Mail, NHS and intergovernmental organizations including the United nations and World Bank. But we're not done yet. His media career comprises over a hundred TV appearances, including the BBC, cnn, TED and sky, and regular features in Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, Fast Company, Forbes, and the Huffington Post. Dr. Tomas is also a keynote speaker for the Institute of Economic affairs and I am so beyond delighted and honored that he's joining me today on the show to discuss his newest book, I Human. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for everything, including related past episod links to articles and books, including I Human and so much more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 2 6, 7. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Tomas Chamorro. Primusic welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure.

Yeah. Well, for everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a bit about your experience and your work and, you know, how you found yourself doing the work you do now?

Yeah, so. Well, my background is in psychology. I basically did that all my life. So I overstudied the subject. Started in the clinical field, then moved to organizations, and then spent actually a lot of time studying human intelligence and how people make decisions and trying to understand why some people are smarter than others. And that actually led me to paying attention to artificial intelligence, starting with the prospect of whether, much like everybody else, trying to understand whether machines could surpass or at least emulate human intelligence. And actually, then I digress and focus on what artificial intelligence is actually doing to human intelligence and what the impact is of the AI age on how we think and make decisions. So that's basically it in a nutshell.

Oh, okay. So we're gonna dig in on some of that a little bit, if you're okay with that.

Yes, would love to.

Oh, good. Okay. I love the history of how we got to where we are, you know, and so you were talking about the, you know, transitioning from psychology to human intelligence. Do you remember some of the questions that were particularly vexing for you that kind of got you into that space? How did you make that transition?

Yes, it started with really being a little bit fed up with the dark side of abnormality, Having studied clinical disorders and psychopathology for a long time and actually having spent several years as a therapist working with people who were kind of in the 1 or 2% of the population when it came to dysfunctional behaviors. I asked, what does it mean to be at the other end of the spectrum? Spectrum. And to be in the 1 or 2% for being exceptional, but in a good way. Right. Or being very bright, being very smart. And really, I always try to see things from a practical lens. And the main question that I was very interested in addressing was whether people who do well in life actually deserve it for being smart or whether things like Effort, luck, serendipity, privilege, nepotism, politics, or random facts account for the success. And what I found was pretty unremarkable in the sense that much like everybody who thinks about this will probably guess, it is generally more useful to be smarter than not. But there are many other things than intelligence that contributes to people's success in any area of life. And that then led me to try to understand the irrational side of decision making and personality and biases, etc. And thus really most of what I've been researching in the last 15 years.

And so I think that, you know, knowing, like you were saying, it's the top, you know, 1 or 2% of exceptionally intelligent people, I think it's probably good to know that there's, you know, hope for the rest of us. I guess that it's not just like, well, you're smart or not as exceptional in intelligence and so, you know, you're kind of doomed to not be as successful. So I guess that's positive.

Yes. And you know, and I think, well, it's interesting because I think people have a general tendency, you will know this since you cover reasoning biases. And you know, there, there is, there is always a label or a name for sort of predictably irrational simplification or categorization of sorts of. And I do think that there is sort of like a natural impetus or tendency for people to believe that things are either good or bad and that if you don't have A, you have to have B, as opposed to, you know, what's the right combination of things. So, you know, the way to think about intelligence, especially in the human realm, is that it's one of the ingredients that you need to create, you know, the dish of success or happiness or health or well being. And it's not about using salt or pepper, using intelligence or personality, or using social skills or cognitive skills, but it's the combination and really the abundance of ingredients that make people better or at least increase their chances of doing well. Now you can be in the 1 or 2% of cognitive ability or human intelligence, and with that, actually a lot of problems are created. You can become very intense, you can become very disinterested in the minutia or trivia that interests most people, including you and I. And you can be labeled a freak and you can be seen as abnormal and you can suffer. And sometimes it also makes you more arrogant and less humble because if you're generally good at finding answers, you're less willing to compromise and more likely to belittle others. Et cetera. So I'm a fan of seeing things in a nuanced way and understanding that even very sought after strengths can come with limitations and can turn into weaknesses if overused. And by the way, that's a rule that I have applied not just to explaining human intelligence, but also artificial intelligence.

Yeah, I'm excited to dig in on that in a minute. But while you were talking, it made me think of so very close proximity to this episode coming out. We'll have just had the episode with Wendy Smith about her book Both and Thinking, which. Not sure. Oh, sounds like you're not familiar with it. Highly, highly, highly recommend.

No, but great. Great title. Love the title.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so she talks about. And it's actually, it's a co authored with Marianne Lewis and they talk about. We tend to see things. Our brains kind of look binary for sorting things in this either or thinking and how both and thinking can allow us to be so much more successful and to be embracing the everyday paradoxes of our lives.

Yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah, I think, you know, so on the one hand, everything is good in moderation, except perhaps moderation. And if you spend enough time thinking about stuff, you'll realize that reality and facts are more nuanced and balanced than we like to think and that certainly than we see on social media. On the other hand, the propensity to be nuanced and balanced and moderate actually makes you pretty boring and makes people lose attention. It's a lot of people to. It's a lot easier, sorry, to captivate people if you're being sort of like cognitive extremist and throwing, you know, intellectual grenades and being radical and overly simplistic and brutally exaggerated in the things you say and do. And you know, I'm still an academic at heart, so I think I suffer from very much the opposite. I can talk about things in detail, but then people fall asleep.

Right, well, and that's one of those. I mean, like, you know, you talked a little bit about politics and whatever else. I hate watching the news. I do everything I can to not. And especially because, you know, you get some stations where it's, you know, is your. The cup you're using to drink from killing, you secretly find out at 8. And then it's like, nope, it's not. Right, but it's ridiculous. Right. Like, but if you. Those extreme things, you know, the. There's a reason that clickbait works. Can you shine a bit of a light on what's going on in our brains that makes it so that that extreme stuff is more likely to be interesting to us.

Oh yes. And you know, there's so many factors, but to pick the first two that come to mind, I think one is that, you know, humans are naturally tribal and you know, we want to construct very coherent identities. And with that comes, you know, the, at least the subjective experience that we belong to certain groups and by definition don't belong to others. So we need to feel very strong and passionate about our in groups and vice versa, you know, so that even that can explain why if I don't know, you spend five minutes watching cnn, it's very clear that Trump is to blame for everything that's wrong in the world. And if you spend five seconds watching Fox, it's all Biden's fault and maybe Hunter Biden's as well. If only reality were so simple. So I think that the tribalism is one, and the second one is that we also strive to feel very rational and consistent. So, you know, it's, it's a lot simpler and generally more pleasant and, you know, less likely to generate sort of cognitive dissonance to hold attitudes, beliefs and values that are compatible with each other. And so therefore, you know, if you tell me a list of things that are associated with liking Trump, you don't need to know whether I like Trump to predict whether any of the other things I will sympathize with or not and vice versa. And I'm only picking on Trump and Biden because they're the current example of polarization. Actually in the history of politics or social sciences or political sciences, tribalistic views or attitudes were defined by people who were actually a lot more different from each other than Biden or Trump. But the fact that this comment could offend people shows that they're so immersed in this rhetoric and so passionate about not being the other that, you know, anyway, a fish doesn't know what water is. And same for people who are there. You know, by the same token, I always find it very funny that most people see themselves as open minded. I have yet to meet a single person who tells me they are not open minded. And yet those people also hang out with other people who are exactly like them. That's how open minded they are. I think so much of this world could be, if not improved, at least changed or modified a little bit if we convince people to spend time with others who think the opposite of them and who don't think like them. In fact, you know, when we think about one of the consequences or effects that algorithms and AI have They are sort of turning us into a more exaggerated version of ourselves. You know, they learn very quickly what we like and then they amplify that. So. And people already have a natural tendency to become an exaggerated version of themselves as they grow older by definition or osmosis. So algorithms are fueling gasoline to the fire, but by making this faster and even more exacerbated.

Yeah, that's fascinating and feels like a good transition point to be moving into your newest book along that journey. I know you said that this is your 12th book, so, you know, just all sorts of amazing stuff out there. Are any of your other books general population facing that? It makes sense to talk through some of the journey on them. I'm guessing some are a lot more academic.

Oh yeah, I like. It's a very. It's a very diplomatic and euphemistic way of asking, have any of your other books being read? Which is how I interpret the question. But you know, as a matter of fact, it is the right question or it will be the right question because the first nine or ten were extremely obscure, academic and probably read by two people, including, well, I would say my parents, but they probably haven't read it. They're very proud to show it on their bookshelf, but you know, they don't really care that much. But no, the last one, I would say yes, generated and still generates quite a bit of discussion. Maybe it's because of the title, which is why do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders and How to Fix It? And so, you know, given that. Well, I think it's a question that seems very relevant to many people and yet the question is not being asked very often or answered very often. It has generated a lot of curiosity and that actually speaks about the gap between the leaders we need and the leaders we have and how our tendency to make decisions and pick leaders based on their confidence rather than competence generates a lot of the problems we have in the world. A couple of books before that one, I wrote a book about the dark side of confidence and how Western civilization and modern society, and particularly the US well, and especially the west coast, although a little bit further south than where you are, I would say more LA than Seattle, have ended up glorifying self belief at the expense of valuing self knowledge. And you know, if you think about it, an excess or surplus of confidence really dilutes self awareness. You know, the better you think you are at something and of course listeners might be familiar with the done in Kruger bias, the worse you probably are at that thing. So again, this has been a general pattern in some of my work that a lot of the problems we have are for optimizing views, opinions and culture, for style rather than substance, and focusing too much on how people see themselves and how good they think they are as opposed to how others see them and how good they actually are.

Yeah, I, as you were talking, of course, I was thinking of the Dunning Kruger effect and the episode I did on that was actually the second most downloaded episode of the podcast in 2022. And so hope it seems like a lot of the audience will be familiar with it, but I know it was something I got a lot of comments on when it came out and something that's always good to be sharing about our confidence and competence and the. Their own kind of paradoxical relationship.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Okay. So I feel like people will be interested. I'll definitely link in the show notes. Well, of course, to the episode on the Dunning Kruger effect and where I've already talked about both and thinking and your books. We'll have a couple of them in there, including why do so Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders and How to Fix It. Is there a little a peek behind the curtain of that before we jump into the new book?

Yeah, sure. I mean, well, it's a very short book and you know, maybe rather than spoiling the potential interests or pleasure that people might have in finding out the answer to that, I'll give you a little kind of anecdotal footnote to the book which started life as a blog on hbr, which was a response to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean in when it came out. My editor at HBR back then, Sarah Greene Carmichael, knew my work and wondered what a scientific kind of scrutiny or evaluation of the so called lean in argument would derive on or would argue. My point was very simple, that instead of blaming women for not behaving like overconfident and often incompetent men who put themselves forward and lean in when they don't have the talents to back it up, we should actually stop falling for men who actually do that and, you know, not point the finger at women and trying to fix them, but point the finger at ourselves for being fooled, in essence by people who are not as good as they think. And so, you know, the article was published in 2013. It did very well. It became, you know, one of the most widely read and, you know, sort of praised articles on HBR and was part of the top 100 kind of curation or compilation that appeared last year. And here comes the interesting kind of bit of trivia. For about six or seven years, I suggested to HBR that we turn that article into a book and publish all the evidence that I had on the sort of disparity between the fact that on the one hand, if leadership selection was gender blind, you would end up with 60% or 65% of women in charge because things like emotional intelligence, hard skills, qualifications, absence of dark side traits like psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellian, and, you know, and even things like self awareness, integrity, humidity are far more common in women than in men. And yet, if you look at the actual frequency of women and men in leadership, it's not even reversed, but more like 80, 20 in favor of men. So, you know, I suggested that and the publisher's response, and by the way, they're also the publisher of my current book, so I can spend some time on this and not feel bad or guilty and I'm sure they'll be happy. Said, look, we'd love to do this book, but 80% of our readers are male. So, you know, we can't, we can't insult them basically or upset them. They're male, not just male, but male executives and actually largely white male executives. And I kept on telling them, don't worry, because one of the most central characteristics of incompetence is lack of awareness. So if some of these people do represent the archetype and the, and the profile of the incompetent but successful man that I'm describing in the book, they won't realize that it's about themselves. And as a matter of fact, when the book came out, I've had a lot of comments, probably many from those men, saying, this is fantastic. I know a lot of people who are like this inept but successful figure that you describe in politics or businesses, et cetera, without for a second being remotely likely to think that it might actually be themselves as well. So anyway, that's the backstory to that. On a more serious note, I do think that gender diversity and inclusion interventions have become more data driven in the last five years. And I do think that in the future we will look back to things like lean in and understand that they are in essence, benevolent sexism. Because there again, we end up pointing the finger at women for not behaving like men, ironically, for not copying some of the least helpful and beneficial qualities that men are more likely to display than women, such as arrogance, narcissism, and overconfidence. So if our solution to a world run by overconfident fools is to try to make the other half of the world overconfident. I don't think we're going to end up with a much better world.

Right. Yeah, definitely has me. So you know what last year was that the movie Don't Look Up. Right. All these Stars, which is the most terrifying movie to watch because of seeing all the similarities to a world that we live in and a direction that we could very much find ourselves in in a way that's kind of scary.

Yes. And you know, and again, I mean, I think you look at that movie and it's interesting how polarizing it has been based on people's own political affiliation. Right. So if you're more and we're just talking about, for example, the U.S. the further you are to the right or if we're just looking at the two categories, those on the right would label it part of the woke industrial complex and deny that climate change is happening and say it stupidifies them or the other side. And many people who see themselves as being on the left or who are on the left actually use it to bully people on the other side. So the movie was interesting, but the effects or the level of discussion and the quality of discussion I think was even better than or more interesting or a more kind of a rich material than the actual movie.

Right, yeah, no, definitely, I see that and I think I made it clear which side I'm on, I guess in the way that I talked about it.

There you go.

So thank you for taking some of these additional paths as we've been sharing your story leading up to the new book and I feel like, I don't know if this is the best place to start. It feels whether, you know, serendipitous or opportune, that the entire world, it feels like, is talking about ChatGPT as your book is coming out. Feels like that's good for you. As far as people wanting to read and learn about the book and see that conversation. Do you have any thoughts on that? And then just sort of leading into what I Human is about.

Yeah, I think you're right. And of course I don't for a second think that I could have predicted this. I mean, I did see that interest in AI was increasing, but I very much tried to focus on what had happened so far and what we were seeing in the present. So, you know, I tried to stay away from predictions. And although ChatGPT is mentioned in a few pages, the fact that I even talked about a version that is two years older, shows how much it has improved right now. But anyway, I think this has been sort of a milestone in the evolution of AI. And in a way, yes, I am hoping that people pay more attention to AI and what it means for us and our way of acting and thinking. And so with that, I just published a piece on Forbes on what I think is the most interesting question vis a vis the impact of the intersection between chat, GPT and human behavior, which is what it actually does to our expertise and our intelligence. I mean, what does it mean to be knowledgeable or even an expert, let alone an expert in an age where we clearly cannot compete with the knowledge and expertise that machines have? Not so long ago, our sort of defense mechanism or our comfort was to say that AI may know about very narrow domains of knowledge or expertise, but we had this breadth. But now it is clear that we have lost the battle for breadth as well. And so I think the question that we should be asking is how can we ensure that human expertise and human knowledge does not become totally obsolete with the rise of technologies like ChatGPT, which even though they're impressive now, they will continue to advance, even if not exponentially, to a point where no question will be able to be asked to a human, with you expecting an answer better than you can if you go to open source AI, et cetera. And so I highlight three avenues to perhaps protect and preserve our expertise. One is actually to focus more on asking questions rather than trying to answer questions. I think historically, you know, we saw people who are knowledgeable or experts as somebody who has the answer to questions. And in fact, in an age where all of the knowledge is outsourced, crowdsourced and readily available, what really matters and differentiates between smarter and less smart humans is whether they ask critical questions and whether they have a hungry mind or learn ability to actually be curious. And especially to go beyond surface level of inquiry to more in depth level of exploration and fall in love with problems and leverage this tremendous resource and tool to dig deeper and enhance their experience. The second one is to really pick one or two areas of expertise where you invest in so that it allows you to spend half an hour on these tools on an AI kind of platform like ChatGPT and detect the errors, right? And I think in a way that's not different from what we've seen in the past decade with Wikipedia or Google Search, if you have no knowledge on, say, medieval history and you spend 10 minutes there, you'll go from zero to quite a bit of knowledge. But if you spend 10 years studying medieval history, what you're going to tell me is how poorly written the pages and all the errors and inaccuracies. So I think machines and technologies have always pushed us to upgrade ourselves and this really is the opportunity to upgrade ourselves intellectually. And the third one is to actually go from insights to action. Even if you're asking the right questions and you can vet the information, to go from theory to practice requires action. It requires far more than being either curious or theoretically interested in something. And you know, that requires energy, productivity, determination, et cetera. So I think just because there is a lot of information out there doesn't mean people will become smarter. But we need to be proactive so that it actually doesn't make us dumber. You know, as I think even the first year of Google search have shown, you know, when, when you know that the answer to any question is out there, you just stop wondering and stop asking questions or stop memorizing stuff. Just like you stop memorizing your friends phone numbers when they're saved in your smartphone.

Right? Yeah. The hope we never have to try and remember someone's number. Right. I'm, I'm lucky that my, you know, my parents have the same phone number that they've had since I was a kid, because otherwise I would have no idea how to get a hold of anybody. If you ever needed to. Well, that is really fascinating. And I am constantly, I think the thing I talk about more than anything is the value of asking really good questions and knowing the problem that you're solving and not jumping into solutions and spending more time on that. So I think the entire audience here is really going to resonate with what you're talking about. For sure.

I hope so. And I hope, you know, they read this book with a critical mind and it generates questions. I mean, it's not designed to provide answers, but to sort of incentivize people to keep asking questions. And I think even if you look at the design of these platforms and these technologies, they're not asking questions, they're answering questions. So what's there left for us to do? And that's, you know, to inquire and be inquisitive and be curious.

Well, we're definitely going to. I'm going to link to the Forbes article that you were talking about as well as that original HR article from the first, the first book you were talking about. Well, so when you look at, I guess some more detail on then ihuman itself, you said it's intended to help People to ask questions and to think about some things. What do you want people to be asking questions about? What should people in business be thinking about and learning from this?

Oh, that's a great question. And I don't know, to be honest. I think it's a book that doesn't have a single angle or a sort of elevator pitch or a silver bullet. I think what I try to do is to answer the question of what it actually means to be human in this day and age, in an age where all the focus is on artificial intelligence and machines are clearly evolving and advancing irrespective of whether they acquire human like features. And with that, you know, I tried to write a book that could perhaps be interpreted as a mirror that we put in front of humanity at this given point in time, maybe the last decade. I mean, I wrote it in the midst of the COVID kind of a pandemic, I would say in the bulk of it in the first six or nine months. So it was obviously a very bleak point in time, but it was also a time where we were all mostly socially isolated or physically isolated for others. So in a way, I was immersed in the AI age there because my interactions with others were mediated by technology. Everything I was doing was datafied and created a record and all of that data helped all these algorithms understand me better and predict me better. So I tried to kind of. My reaction to that, if you like, was to write a book about what was happening to us humans. And I guess the simplest way to describe the book is that it has two parts. The first part highlights some of the worst behaviors that we have already seen humans display as a consequence of being so dependent on AI and related technologies. Things like, you know, our inattention, crisis or destructibility levels, the fact that we cannot focus on anything. Things that, you know, like the fact that we're becoming more impatient. Our digital narcissism, which is off the charts or off the roof, you know, the fact that we'll do people do, will do anything to get other people's attention and you know, the decoupling of our identity with feedback from others in the real world and our dependence in sort of what people manifest to us when we are in these social media platform and other environments. And you know what I think is the most worrying aspect of all this, which is that in its attempt to predict us better, because prediction is a pre requirement or prerequisite for understanding these technologies, especially AI, if you think about the main one, have made us more predictable. Most of us are very different from each other. But in a way, we're all spending the bulk of our time doing the same thing, which is coding things, classifying things, clicking on different things so that algorithms understand us better without giving us back any understanding, but predicting us better, mostly because we have diluted ourselves to more predictable species. So, you know, the main conclusion there is that we have spent a lot of time worrying about and wondering about how smart machines could get. And in the process, we turned ourselves into machines. You know, we've became automata, while we were worried about whether technology could automate one thing or the other. And then the second part, which is shorter, perhaps my bias, my pessimistic bias, makes me spend a lot more time on the problem than on the solution, was the same on the previous book. So why so many incompetent men become leaders has a longer explanation than and how to fix it, which is very short. But the second part and the last part of the book is really a request for us to rediscover and reclaim the qualities that make us special and make us unique and that actually make us different from machines. Our ability to act not just in human, but also in humane ways. So it talks about the importance of lost human virtues such as empathy, compassion, kindness, humility, self awareness, creativity, and how focusing more on those will help us maintain our relevance and distinctiveness from machines. I think it's quite interesting that for the most part, in our narcissistic ways, we try to justify the claim that we are special by showing that we're different from other species in the animal kingdom. And now we're really somewhat paranoid because machines, synthetic kind of, you know, entities are achieving most of the things that we thought are found in us but not in other animals. So that's basically. That's basically what the book tries to cover and deal with.

Well, I'm sure everyone is just. If they haven't already gone and ordered their copy, I bet they're going to be doing it very shortly using links in the show, notes and things. I'm curious as we kind of expand on that and would love to hear your thoughts. To me, there's the question of, you know, what should businesses be doing? If we're thinking about what we need to be hiring for, how we need to be training employees and things and even, I mean, I find myself thinking further back too, of what does school look like? As we're looking for educating, not just at university level, but, you know, we've got kids with iPads and all these sorts of things as we're looking at technology, you can take that in any direction that feels compelling to you. But that's just sort of what's on my mind as you were talking.

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. And I think the second part seems somewhat more, you know, more obvious to me when I look for answers. And I think whether it's schools or higher education, university colleges, I mean, the shift really needs to be much more prominent from teaching content and information and stuff that students can then, you know, vomit in their essays or in their exams to actually teaching skills, values, and really the aptitudes and behaviors that can protect us as workers, as humans, as citizens, and as valuable members of society, including, by the way, the ethics of technology and how to use it and how to deploy it. I mean, it's interesting if you think that in the last 10, 15 years, elite schools have spent so much time trying to teach things like software development and cybersecurity and IT skills, hard skills, without really focusing on the ethical, philosophical, moral, and wider social implications of actually going down that path. And for organizations, on a simple level and obvious level, it's clear that as it happened with other previous industrial or technological revolutions, AI and current technologies eliminate jobs, but create many other jobs. But it is also clear that the people who lose their jobs cannot automatically be fit or apt or, you know, a good match for the new jobs that are created. So, you know, for example, if brick and mortar shops disappear and, you know, brick and mortar sales assistant lose their jobs, they cannot automatically become cyber security analysts or work in digital marketing. So organizations, not just for profit corporations, but also nonprofit organizations and institutions and governments and societies, need to sort out the issue of reskilling and upskilling so that they ensure that people are not automated and made useless or redundant. And again, I think every. Just like most companies are now technology firms because they rely on technology and most of them are data firms because data is part of their assets and what they have and their IP and their product and services solutions. Most of them will be in the AI space. And with that comes the issue of not just having the technical skills to design, deploy, and leverage AI, but also a good understanding on the psychological implications, the ethical and philosophical and moral implications. So it's quite, I think, a big leap from, you know, the world of work we had even just 10 years ago when we thought, oh, you know, technology might come and make things more efficient. Well, I mean, now we're seeing the other side of the opportunity, which are these risks.

Yeah, it's just so interesting. There's so much there and the thoughtfulness and helping, like you said, I mean, for kids to be able to learn the importance of asking good questions, you need to understand how things work, to have a foundational knowledge of what's to come and how things work already so you can ask better questions. But that not just being about rote memorization is such a, such a big difference. For sure.

Yeah. And I mean fundamentally, you know, I think the opportunity is here and it's clear we are still in the driving seat. And with that comes not the ability to choose whether we use AI or other technologies or not and what we use it for and how we use it, but also to ensure that we benefit from it. And when I say we, I mean humanity. Right. So with that, I think you asked about what businesses should focus on. I think really finding ways to humanize work in the age of machines and AI is really important because if you're just so focused on optimizing for efficiency and cost reduction and profits, et cetera, you're not creating environments where people actually want to be or belong to and where people actually feel that they can thrive.

Yeah. Well, the book is fantastic. Everyone should definitely pick up their copy. There's an entire chapter on taming bias which we didn't really talk about much today. But the, you know, the audience has some background on the biases and will find that really interesting. I think we talked about some of it, of course, but we didn't like dig in on, on that aspect. One last question about questions before you can share. Where people can find you is do you have a approach that you suggest for people as they are looking to be better questioners? For someone who is kind of stuck in, in answer mode, what's your method for that? Do you have any tips for people?

Oh, I don't know that I have a formula, a counterintuitive science based formula. But I think first find the time to do it. Don't take facts at face value. Usually things are presented in a much simpler and lazier way than they deserve to be. And then really do focus on the things that you find interesting, useful, and that you're passionate by. You don't have to apply this to everything. I mean, you know, you wouldn't be able to live your life if you had to question everything that happens around you. But try to apply this to areas that you know, you're curious about. And you know, we all have things that intrigue us, so finding what those things are, much like, you know, sometimes you have to invest a lot of time to discover a podcast or a movie or new artists, etc. Time, I think, solves half of the problem. And then you practice it. We all get better with practice and with that comes getting feedback from other people and finding some role models and mimicking or emulating them. So find the time and practice will be the short answer.

I love it. Well, and the good thing is, if we use our technology appropriately, it can help free up some of that time that we need to be doing bigger, more important stuff.

Exactly. And I think that's a fundamental point. Because what's the point of having things like ChatGPT if all the time we spend not having to find the answer to those questions is only reinvest, I don't know, trying to find out what our neighbor's cat had for breakfast. I mean, that's not a very useful use of our intellect and existence, I think.

Yeah, agreed. For sure. So, Tomas, for everyone who wants to learn more about you and to connect, you know, what's their best course of action at this point?

Yeah. So the best is especially given that I had a. I have a complicated name, as you noted. I think just go to my website, which is Dr. Thomas with no h.com so d r t o m a s dot com and all of the stuff will. Most of the stuff about me and my work will be there.

Wonderful.

We will of course link to that in the show notes, make it really easy for people, as well as some of the articles you mentioned and past episodes I was talking about in your books and all sorts of great stuff. So thank you so much again for, for the conversation. I really enjoyed it. I'm sure everyone else did as well.

Same here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Thank you again to Dr. Tomas Chamorro, pre Music for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I'm guessing it isn't too much of a surprise that I love the idea of asking better questions, of becoming better questioners so we can use AI and other techniques, technology more effectively in life and business, starting earlier than when everyone's already working. Perhaps by incorporating techniques from Warren Berger's book, Beautiful Questions in the Classroom is a great way to start encouraging us all to be more thoughtful in the way we think about problems and opportunities at work. And don't worry if you're already beyond the classroom. I also highly recommend Warren Book's book A More Beautiful Question, which is one of my favorites. It's linked for you in the show notes it's been really interesting to watch the explosion of interest in articles and stories and posts about ChatGPT. At the same time as having read this book and speaking with Tomas, I read an article in the New York Times about how some students are cheating by using ChatGPT to write their papers. And of course I'm worried about availability bias and our biased brains making a stimulus, assumptions about social norms and hurting that will come from articles like this making more people end up trying to cheat because it sounds like everyone else is doing it and they don't want to be left behind. And also how some teachers are having to update their curriculum to fight this before it becomes a problem. It's interesting to look at the balance of a lot of this as some of the behaviors really should be changed. I'm sure there are a lot of classes out there that were more going through the motions than they were about learning. And knowing that rote memorization isn't the future is important for the life we're preparing tomorrow's workforce for. A forced shift in teaching methods and how we test knowledge and show intelligence isn't inherently bad. I think there are some real opportunities there. That being said, people shouldn't be cheating. And as someone who creates content for a living, it is interesting to watch how people like me are starting to either incorporate or fear or Both tools like ChatGPT for our work and my biggest fear on this front is knowing how we believe things first and ask questions later if we ask at all. But Chat GPT is actually showing how it perpetuates some misinformation. I shared an article from the Economist writing every day on my Twitter Twitter recently about how they asked Chat GPT some questions and it cited articles that don't exist. It created its own logic and explanations and sometimes misappropriated quotes and other times misnamed articles or their authors and at the worst of times just made them up. When the authors confronted Chat GPT by saying neither of those papers actually exist, what? Why did you cite them? Rather than limiting your response to discussing papers that exist, it responded by saying quote, I apologize for the confusion. I cited papers that do not exist as a language model. My training data is based on the Internet and it is possible that the papers I cited might not exist as of my knowledge cutoff date. It then said it could provide a summary that is quote based on existing papers. And then it went on to cite two more non existent papers in its response. So that's a problem for those who already have existing knowledge in a field and can fact check and know that they are getting real papers with real proper insights in the writing or reference list. That's fine. We can also see hey, that's obviously wrong. Let me do some of my own research to see what's really up. But what about everyone else?

What.

What about the people who don't know that the output is wrong, which is likely the majority of people that would be using a tool like this who then share that information as if it's a fact and everyone then believes it. When people have incomplete information about technology and assume that it's accurate because that's what our brains do, and then share it and truly believe it because they consider something that's a trusted source told them it's accurate. There are so many issues I can see with this ahead of us if this isn't fixed. Hopefully Chat GPT and other AI systems have been alerted of these problems and are already working to fix them. I fear that may not be the case, though I hope it will be fixed soon before we have a greater problem of misinformation being touted as truth than we already do. For me, I have a great concern that this is even a possibility. Why would we ever want to be citing fake papers? How can it misattribute so many things and still be considered reliable? Again, my concern isn't about ChatGPT specifically, but the space as a whole and the logic it's built upon. My advice to you, dear listener, is to try to understand your own brain's tendencies and not believe everything you hear, see or read. Find ways to do your own fact checking whenever possible, especially when using citations or writing posts that will live on and be attributed to you into the future. It's okay to get some ideas from tools like Chat GPT to start your process of inquiry and find some places to look for more detail, but don't let it be your whole strategy. Your brain is a powerful asset that you don't want to let become stagnant. Look for ways to be a better questioner, and let's all do what we can to support integrity in citations, stories, posts, and everything else. Okay, that got into a bit of a tangent. So as we close out the episode, I want to thank Dr. Tomas again for joining me on the show and discussing his new book, I Human, as well as so many other important and interesting aspects of business and life in general. To connect with Tomas, check out the books and articles related to today's conversation, including that article about Chat GPT citing economic papers that don't exist. Check out the show notes for the episode, which are found within the app. You're listening to and at the brainy business.com 267 and thank you again to Dr. Tomas Chamorro Primusic for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.