18: How to Become a Robot Whisperer with Dr. Tom Guarriello

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Hi, I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the book Turn what's Working for you into what's Next, which comes out with Portfolio Penguin in September of 2016.

In this podcast, I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit jennyblake Me podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

I am positively giddy to be interviewing Tom Guariello today. Tom and I met through our mutual friend Maxine and have had captivating conversations ever since. Tom has his PhD in psychology and has spent most of his career helping individuals and organizations improve the quality of their lives and relationships. Fifteen years ago, he co founded a consulting firm called True Talk, Inc. And in 2009 he became a founding faculty member in the Master's in Branding program at New York School of Visual Arts. Where Tom and I really geek out is that over the past few years he has also become fascinated with the ways in which modern technology, specifically robots, were changing the psychological landscape. And so he recently created and launched a new platform and field of study called Robo Psych the Psychology of Human and Robot Interactions. Tom, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you very much Jenny. Pleased to be here.

Can you tell us what is Robo Psych and what inspired you to create it?

Well, let me answer the second question first. As you mentioned, I've been very much.

A follower of technology and a user of technology for. Well, I mean I bought my first computer in 1982, so I I came from a background that did not include technology, but I got involved through some work relationships. And the next thing you knew, here I was learning about technology. And as a psychologist, I became fascinated with the ways that technology.

Become integrated into our lives, how we use technology, and the effects that technologies have on us. Over the years, I've been very interested in using all different kinds, social media, different kinds of technologies. And the more I saw the movement of robots into our real world, the more I began to think about how we were going to use robots. And in light of our history with them, which has been that robots usually end up doing bad things to us.

In our fictional histories that have included them. The very first use of the word robot comes from that check play R U R in which, you know, the robots uprise. So from the very beginning, it's as if we had this adversarial relationship with robots that, of course, continued through Frankenstein and the Terminator and, you know, Battlestar Galactic. Well, every story that we tell about robots has usually been a dystopian one, a bad one. And I thought that that was going to contrast very sharply with the kinds of collaborative relationships that we were going to need to develop with robots in order to use them as we use other technologies in our lives, like automobiles, like televisions, like telephones. We had to integrate these technologies into our lives in order to improve our lives. And so the same thing I saw was going to need to happen with robots, but we had these kinds of barriers to actually integrating them and being comfortable with them. So I started to think about what would it take to really be comfortable, not just being around robots, but working with robots, using robots as an extension of ourselves. And that's when I started to think about robo psych, which was just a way to think about the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral competencies that we need in order to be effective at working with robots. Long answer, but that's what it is.

Well, that's what I found so interesting. We have overlapping fields of study because I'm looking at how people can pivot and be agile in a rapidly evolving economy. What do you think robocyc has to do with that?

I think they're very closely related with one another. When you think about. I know, of course, that your pivot method very much is one in which a set of an approach, a set of ways of thinking and feeling and acting towards your career, opens opportunities for people rather than closing them off. Robo psych is very much. It's kind of a subset of the pivot ideas that you've had, Jenny, that using those kinds of emotional Cognitive and behavioral competencies that will make working with robots successful and focusing on those to become an early adopter, if you will, of robots in your life, both in the workplace and in the everyday world.

Right. I thought it's so interesting how you talked about the fear and even in our pop culture. We both emailed back and forth about the Wired article titled Inspector James Bond battles his Midlife Crisis. And here again is a narrative about is James Bond obsolete because he's not a drone or a gadget or artificial intelligence? And when it comes to career, similarly, I think there's a lot of fear that people see as robots and automation and outsourcing and AI start to come more and more into our daily lives. Even self driving cars, which I know you talk a lot about, will there still be jobs for us? Or how do we stay agile and stay well positioned to capitalize on that opportunity and not become obsolete?

It's really easy for us to construct a scenario in which all jobs disappear. You know, the Oxford study in 2013 that found that.

47% by the air lights of US occupations were vulnerable to being replaced by technology by robots and self driving cars. We know that.

The single occupation in America that is the most popular for males is driving truck drivers, cab drivers of all kinds, all of which become potentially vulnerable to self driving automobiles. So it's easy to construct a world in which jobs disappear. I have a hard time envisioning such a world because of the catastrophic social consequences that would.

Be an outgrowth of that job kind of world. And so I think what we will do will be to find ways to expand work to deliver important value to customers that can best be delivered through human, robot, human technology.

Interaction through, through essentially augmenting human capabilities with robot capabilities.

You had a really interesting point along those lines when I interviewed you for the book. I said, well, what skills do people need? And you told me that's not even the right question because skills can become obsolete. For all we know, typing is going to be obsolete in 10 years. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between skills and mindset and where each plays a role?

Yeah, I think.

It'S easy to get focused on skills and say, well, robots are going to be able to take typing, robots, certainly as natural language recognition becomes better and better, which we know it's going to improve, then the idea that knowing how to do something.

As a safeguard against obsolescence becomes, I think, less and less viable. Instead understanding how, for example, the things that typing conveys, ideas are, you know, the province of Humans now, someday, we're told, someday, off in the future, robots are going to be able to create the same kinds of ideas that humans do and write the same kinds of stories that humans do. But those days are not today. We do not yet have robots who create the kind of stories.

That are engaging to people. We don't have robots that create. Just take advertising, for example. We know that by improving analytics that we can get more and more.

Precise in our ability to discover who's watching an ad or who is looking at a particular page, for example, on the Internet and robots.

In all ways of describing what a robot is. Google is a robot in my way of thinking about things. So robots will be able to do those kinds of analytics and tell you, well, your visitors, because of the kind of information that we share when we move around the Internet. Your visitors to your site are in these kinds of demographic categories and we know these about their location and so on and so on and so on. But what those analytics cannot tell you is what sorts of things are likely to be very engaging to these people. Might be able to say, look, the same people who come to your site have also gone to these four sites. What do those four sites have in common that a human would be able to look at them and say, ah, I can tell a story about those four sites and my site that no robot is going to be able to construct, at least not now, and improve the way I communicate with people who come to that site. So the mindset of thinking of ways to make what we do more engaging to other people is a human quality. That is part of what I think it means to have an effective robo psych use what we learn from robotics and analytics of all kinds and what robots can do and then augment that with. And here we have humans augmenting robots, not robots augmenting humans. Augment what the robots can do by adding the kind of creative, empathic insights that only human experience can deliver. At least so far.

Right? There were so many key themes in what you just said. Creativity, right? Brain thinking, synthesizing data, making connections. Funny too how you propose it as humans augmenting robots. And a lot of people even say we've reached peak information. We cannot possibly. Our brains are really not structured to maintain a database of all these facts. And I think that's what's creating so much transformation, even in white collar fields like law and accounting and radiology, where computers can scan and search and interpret early levels of data that then humans can come in later. But what would you Advise someone who is in a profession or on the cusp of wondering if this can be automated? How do they pivot? How do they transition into something new?

I think the key comes down to creating experiences for people that are engaging for people. And.

Only people know what engaging experiences are like. This is something that's really important for us to remember.

There is no algorithm that can capture the sense of someone delivering an outstanding experience to a customer. So when I go into a restaurant and I am greeted by someone who is.

Fill in the blanks for an excellent experience for you in a restaurant. Engaging, friendly, warm, knowledgeable, connecting. All of those things that make a restaurant experience go way beyond the products, the food, even the environment that you're in. That's what people can focus on. So I suggest that what we focus on is how do we delight other people? What can I do in my job that will result in a delightful experience for my customers? And then how can I use the kind of, like you say, the information that's available through all the technology that's currently at our fingertips? How can I use that information, that technology, to give me insights into what I can do to make those experiences delightful and engaging for my customers and have people come back? Because what we come back for are extraordinary experiences, not necessarily the features and benefits of the products that we're engaging with.

Right. And that relationship piece and interaction and empathy, like you said, I love framing it as, how do I create delightful experiences? Because that's such a uniquely human question. Just even this concept of delight as something that we can create and seek out, it was actually my word of the year for 2015. So funny to be capping it off with this conversation.

And it's such a. And it's.

Focusing on.

The things that make you, as an individual, happy with an experience of any kind of interaction with a business.

Starts to give you clues about, well, how can I be valuable going forward? No matter what your role is.

The extraordinary performers in any kind of a job are the people who understand that. That the functions that.

They perform in their job.

It'S that core. But that's not what makes people come back. That's not what creates the kind of loyalty that will get us to do that thing that every business wants anybody to do, which is to recommend the business to their friends and their family. Right. So what are the things that are likely to get people to go, oh, I want to go back there. That's the restaurant I want to go back to. That's the dentist I want to go back to because his office manager is so terrific. Her hygienist is just the best. Why? Because what they've done is to transcend the technical aspects of the encounter, having a meal or getting your teeth cleaned, and turn them into something that has human connection and meaning. This is where the opportunity to go beyond the functions of work, the mechanics of work, which are going to be increasingly automated, to go beyond those, to add those dimensions that take that experience with that company, with that individual, to the next level of satisfaction. That's what we're going to be freed up to do. And the people who are going to be successful are the ones who can appreciate that that next level is now their job. Their job isn't just to do the things that are mechanically replicable, but their job is now to take those things to that next level of human connection.

It's so true, as you were saying, that I was remembering, I had an airport restaurant experience where all the ordering was done on iPads. And on the one hand, while it was convenient, I have to say it was a somewhat hollow experience. I think there was some novelty because it's like, ooh, I can order my food on an iPad. But then it quickly turns into, this is weird. I feel like I'm sitting in a restaurant graveyard. Like, where are the people? Why? Where is the interaction? And it's so different from a place like the classic Gramercy Tavern in New York, which just has impeccable service and really makes the meal. I mean, I go back there, yes, the food is great. It pales in comparison to how wonderful every single interaction is. Whomever comes by the table.

I really love the word hollow that you use there because that really is the difference between what.

We have, an opportunity to fill up, the experiences that we create for others in our business world. And it's not just outside customers. If we think about internal customer satisfaction and delight that we can focus on once we don't have to worry about the mechanics of doing the work. So having an iPad ordering system in a restaurant should free up that restaurant to provide human connections.

In and around the meal that transform the meal from being just a hollow, forgettable, perhaps other meal into something special. And that's where the opportunity is going to lie. Now, the economic value of doing such things, of going beyond the mechanical basics of work, that's going to take some imagination. And we're going to have to, as individuals and as a society, we're going to have to figure out.

How to do two things. First of all, how to redefine value in terms of human experience, so that the things that are important to us are things that make a difference in choices that we make around different businesses. But also we're going to have to work out the transition. The biggest, I see the biggest challenge that we're going to face is in this period of trying to figure out what are we going to do when the first instinct of every business is going to be to automate and. And by virtue of automating, to increase efficiencies and cut costs. So that answer is going to be the first answer, as we see, for example, in Amazon warehouses. The Kiva robots in Amazon warehouses have replaced what would have been had they been hired thousands of workers. And so we do have to figure out this transition. And I think it's not going to be necessarily a short transition. We're probably looking at, I don't know, anywhere from 10 to 30 years of figuring out how to redefine value in businesses such that people can continue to have meaningful work that contributes to the value of a business.

And get through this period. Because it is not going to be easy. I don't mean to. To imply that this is going to be painless and easy. It's going to be a difficult transition.

Right, I agree. I think when I talk to people, I notice there's a sense of anxiety and it could be simultaneously excitement as well. Some people are at different places in their lives and their careers, but I think everybody has a sense that things are changing. And we may have a few years, we may have five years where no one really has to take a hard look and they can keep doing what they're doing. But most people I interviewed for the book, that was not the case. From the year, the time I interviewed them to a year later when I was checking their quotes, almost everybody had pivoted or gotten pivoted. Their company was acquired, they were laid off, the company folded, they quit their business, they started a business. Nothing remained the same. I mean, there were only a handful of stories that were the same. And I think you're absolutely right. It's not necessarily going to be easy, but the opportunity is to acknowledge that this is going on, acknowledge that there's anxiety, and now ask, okay, let's get creative. And that is the uniquely human trait. Get creative. Have imagination, like you said.

Yeah.

The idea of having a pivot attitude, the way you frame it up, I think is certainly.

A necessary condition for people to be successful going forward in that even if your job is not taken over by robots, even if what happens is just oh, your everyday acquisition or.

Just your everyday downsizing or just having nothing to do with robots or the fact is we know that.

In the last century people worked for longer times in one job than they ever will again. We will never have people who get the 30 year watch or there might be two of them in a company that get the 30 year watch, but it used to be that was pretty much what everybody looked forward to. You know that that's not the case any longer, regardless of robo or no, that your ability as a.

And it's not just work that you think is easily done by robots. We know now that high skill jobs are just as vulnerable to being replaced by automation as are dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. So.

Behooves everybody to adopt a mindset that is flexible and that focuses on.

Their strengths and the key experiential aspects that differentiate great experiences in what they do from mediocre from poor experiences.

Right. One of the things I admire most about you is your experimental nature and your openness. I have to say on the subject of.

Mechanized things and delight. I got a great smile today when we were confirming this podcast and all of a sudden I got an email from who else? Amy, your artificial intelligence assistant. And just for everyone on the call, this is the URL. We'll put it in the show notes. It's X AI. I'm still on the wait list, but Tom got total street cred once again. Not that you needed any more from me, but that you already were. Of course had your own Amy. And the email said Tom to me. It said Tom, let me know this meeting will be today at 3pm Additionally, Tom has let me know this meeting will take place over Skype. I'll go ahead and send out an invite. And then I got an invite. I mean this is wild. This is what tell me, how does this work? And that's wild to me that that was all AI sent from your inbox.

Yeah, it as you say, I do like to experiment with new technologies and as soon as I saw that Amy was out there and Amy is an AI assistant and.

The mechanics of using the system are very simple.

Once you get this AI assistant set up and you can have you name your assistant or you name the gender, you know, you choose the gender of your assistant and then your assistant has a name and your assistant has an email address. And so whenever you set up any appointment, you simply CC Amy. And Amy sees, reads the email, sees what the.

Particulars of the appointment or meeting are, puts them on a calendar, sends out an invite to all the people, confirming and will manage communication back and forth with the participants in the meeting. So, for example, if somebody says, no, can't meet at 12:30, how about 1:30? Amy will then inform me of the change, tell me that she's made the change, if I have time free on my calendar, if I've instructed her to be able to do that. So it's, you know, it's still very early days for these kinds of technologies, but I like to be on the early days to see what it feels like more than anything else to use them and to integrate them into my daily world.

It's so interesting how we have our own little AI families. You and I both have Amazon's Echo, which. Her name is Alexa and she's my new roommate. Oh, she just woke up, but she's on my desk.

You say her name, she's ready.

I know. So we have Alexa. I was teaching my grandma how to use the hey Siri feature where it's ambient. She doesn't even have to touch her phone. And now Amy, it's like we have a whole mini team of AI assistants and that we name them and we really. What do you think is important from a psychological perspective in them having names?

Well, I think it's such a natural aspect of our humanity, of our evolutionary history, to know who is it that I'm talking to. Everyone that I talk to has to have an identity. And that identity certainly is connected with a name and a personality and functions. And, you know, we just take all those things for granted about the people that we interact with. And so designers of AI systems design in the familiar aspects of other people to help us to adopt the technology. So Amy takes on business language in the way she writes emails. And once again, this is a reflection of where the technology has gotten to. We have bots now that writes news stories and.

Routine news stories about quarterly results for businesses or sports stories that are written by robots that are essentially impossible to distinguish from the same stories written by people. So.

The proficiency with using language that is focused on the domain that the robot is working in is important. And then the more of a personality that.

The AI can take on depending on its function. Certainly an assistant like Amy, you want to have a friendly but still businesslike demeanor. And so designers are now working through all of those kinds of.

Variables in creating their systems. I interviewed a fellow named Ben Brown last week on my podcast, and Ben is the co founder of Howdy Howdy AI, which is.

A bot that operates within Slack, the new communication framework that many companies are trying to replace. Multiple communication channels like texting and email and voicemails. Slack is becoming a pretty popular way for teams to communicate. And Howdy is a bot that lives within Slack and will take care of administrative duties for your team, like setting up meetings, like doing pre meeting planning.

For the team. So for example, if there's a check in every week on a project and every member of the team goes around and does the normal check in, well, what Howdy will do will be to go around and ask people what's your check in? What's your check in? What's your check in? Gather the information from people and then present that aggregated summary to all the participants, thereby saving a lot of time in the meeting itself and so on. So again, early days of seeing how to bring automation into our daily lives in order to cut out some of what we know to be sometimes drudgery work that we just don't want to have to deal with, but we don't have any other way around it now. So it's.

And in order to be successful at using those, it takes a kind of openness to experimenting, as you said, and a playfulness. There's no other way, I think to put it, but a playfulness in that you have to have a light touch. When you're working with new technologies like this, if you become overly concerned about am I really going to be able to get this? Is it going to be what's going to happen? You sort of lose that deftness that makes working with new technologies.

Fun and also leads to more productive adoption of them.

Absolutely. It's so important, this willingness to learn and fumble through something. I was explaining that to someone the other day that.

The iPhone didn't exist 10 years ago. So it's been 10 years that we've all been pushing buttons, learning how to swipe, learning how to zoom in and zoom out. This wasn't a skill we were born with. Kids today now pretty much are. But we've learned it. And I've noticed that some people take it personally when there's a new technology or type of gadget and they think I don't know how to use it. I'm frustrated and they put it down and it's awkward for all of us. But like you said, there's a certain willingness to let it be awkward. I was teaching myself audio editing. I don't know the first thing about it, it was so awkward. It took me so long. But actually I was really glad when I made it over some of those initial learning humps. And I'm not ever gonna probably become a professional audio engineer, but there's a way to have fun in the process a little bit while acknowledging, yes, it is awkward and these skills aren't gonna come overnight. That's part of the enjoyment.

Yeah, that's very important to be able to.

Let yourself be a beginner. And as we get older, we become less comfortable being beginners because somehow we believe that as we become more proficient.

In, say, our vocations, that somehow that's supposed to mean that we're proficient, period. That we know how to do things. And in fact, all of us are beginners about something. Like all of us are novices about something. And so audio editing, for example.

If you did not have the kind of mindset that made it possible for you to say, well, I don't know, I'm going to try it and say, see.

How I pick it up. And then when I run into obstacles, I'm going to figure out how to get past them. That kind of confidence in your ability to point, to point, navigate through a new situation is absolutely critical to being successful in adopting all the new things that are coming at us all the time.

Right. I can see the other side of it, which is sometimes, and I fall into this too. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I'll think to myself, it would be really cool if I could learn coding. Maybe I'll go do a boot camp in New York. And then I think, oh, but there are people been doing it 10 years and it'd be so inefficient. I might as well just continue hiring developers, let's say. I know front end web design, but I don't know PHP or any programming languages. And I actually struggle with that. That on the one hand I think it would be fun and on the other.

There'S no way I could catch up with people who have been doing it 20 years. Maybe there is. Maybe I shouldn't sell myself short. But particularly when it comes to career changes, I even know, let's say former stock traders where it's all being automated and in order to work in a hedge fund now, they want you to have coding knowledge and database skills. That's new.

Yeah. And.

It'S a problem in that, as you said, in regard to audio editing, you're probably never going to become a sound engineer. So the question is, do you need to become a sound engineer in order to use audio editing in a way that will be beneficial and productive for you or will competent be good enough for your purposes. If that's the case, then by all means, go ahead and spend the time in learning audio editing. If, on the other hand, the only way that you could actually benefit substantially from learning coding is by learning how to Write Python and pH.

Then.

Is the investment of time and energy best spent here or is it best spent elsewhere? So those are hard questions, but I think.

Using your expectations about what am I trying to accomplish by learning this skill will help you to calibrate just how much time and energy.

Is worth investing.

That's such a great distinction, that threshold between does competence work and serve the point, the function? Or do you really need to be excellent? In which case you're absolutely right, that might be the deciding factor right there. This reminds me about the conversation around social media. This is another thing that overwhelms me a lot and a lot of people I know where we feel like, oh my goodness, how can I possibly keep up? I even have a public facing platform. I'm coming up on my 10 year anniversary of that and I don't always want to try every new, latest, greatest periscope, Twitter this, that the other. I'm even fatigued from Facebook and Twitter, the two basics. Not to mention I don't do Instagram and this is my career and I know other people too feel like, well, am I supposed to just jump on every social media product that gets released? And at what point is it diminishing returns on your actual core business activities and careers? What's your take on that?

Once again, it becomes a really difficult decision to make. And I think you're.

Being able to distinguish between the latest, greatest shiny object and the things you really need to master in order to be successful. That kind of judgment is really important. I think chasing after every shiny new object.

Can be a serious distraction from delivering value with the, with technologies and with, you know, in the case of robots that we're talking about, you know, you don't have to become a roboticist. You don't have to learn how to construct robots or write code for robots, using robots in your work situation effectively and learning how to be the.

I humorously talk about becoming a robot whisperer.

You know, someone I love that.

Someone who can, who understands robots the way many people understand their pets and can communicate with them and can have a productive relationship with them without having to know too much about.

Veterinary medicine or too much technically about. But in this case, robots can be a very, it is, I think the right. The right. It's probably a sweet spot of being able to productively use the systems without having to be overwhelmed by the kind of technical challenges that a field like robotics offers.

So what does it take to become a robot whisperer?

It becomes.

I think, the number one skill is an openness to learning about what the robot can do and how you can enable it to do the things that it can do. So when you're working, like take Amy, for example, I'm just learning about what Amy can do for me as an artificial intelligence assistant. I'm going to experiment now with some things with Amy. I'm going to see whether Amy can write some correspondence for me. I want to see what other kinds of things Amy I can offload to Amy. So I'm going to experiment with her, and I'm going to experiment with her. Listen to that. I'm going to experiment. Her name is Amy. So I'm going to experiment with her.

Robot whisperer.

That's right. I'm going to explain, experiment with her and try to become very familiar with.

Essentially her dialect.

It's kind of like learning a new software system. When you get a new piece of software, the first thing you're trying to do is to figure out, well, where's the stuff that helps me to create something new in this application? Where's the stuff that helps me to find what I've already created in this application? Where's the stuff that helps me to send what I've created to somebody else in a different format, let's say? So all of those.

Constituents of what we know to be good software that we've learned about, and that's just kind of all deeply embedded in our way of using software. We don't have a list of things I need to master in the new software system. They're just kind of there when we start to use it. Like, oh, where's the create new stuff? Where's the. Find the stuff I was working on the other day? Those are characteristics same with robots. They are going to have ways to activate them, they are going to have ways of persistent, they are going to have ways of processing, they are going to have ways of communicating back. So becoming familiar with the idiosyncrasies. What I call the dialect of the particular robot system is how you become familiar with it. And the more familiar with it you become, the more capable you will be of integrating it productively into your. Into your life.

It reminds me of the site. Let me Google that for you. Where even working at Google, people used to email a lot of us who worked there, friends and family, Saying, how do I do this? How do I do this thing? And just even learning how to get better at searching on Google, not to mention using Siri and all these other commands, like you're saying that learning how to ask the question to AI or robot is actually a big piece of it. How to structure a query that strips out most of the unnecessary words. Ideally, though, they're getting much smarter and better at it and understanding what inputs to give to get the output that you seek.

That's exactly what I use the Google example all the time when talking to people about these things. In that we had to learn. Google had to teach us how to become Googlers, how to Google things. Right? We didn't know it, we had to learn it. Well, how did Google teach us that? Well, it taught us that by delivering more relevant answers more quickly when we posed questions in one way rather than another way. Right. So we were being reinforced from a learning theory standpoint. We were being reinforced to ask questions this way. Oh, fewer words, not more. Cut out all the nonsense, just use the words that will make this a distinctive.

Question that you're asking. Oh, okay, great. I get it now. It took all those years, but now I know how to do it intuitively. Right? Most of us who have used Google for any period of time are pretty good. Now there's all those delimiters and all those other kinds of things that if not within how many words and all those other the arcane aspects of Google that only the experts know, not those of us who are just merely competent at Googling, but there are people who are Google whisperers, they are experts. Right, in Googling. And so.

Your motivation to become the most proficient robot user that anybody has ever seen becomes.

A vocational differentiator for people and it's going to just become more. Now remember, not only are you going to have to learn how to do these things, but your colleagues are going to have to learn how to do them too. So given your background, Jenny, as training and, and teaching people how to do things, I think we see that there's a pretty open field here for people who can teach other people how to use robots too.

Right. One thing you mentioned during the social media conversation was looking ahead and having discernment about where things are heading and what might be useful and what might not be. And even this term futurist only entered my radar a year or two ago that there are actually people who study where things are going and make predictions. Do you think that everyone has to get better at becoming futurists in order to know where to invest their time and attention? Or are there shortcuts or signals that they can piggyback on?

Well, I think like Yogi Berra said, you know, making predictions is hard, especially about the future.

It is hard to forecast what's going to happen in the future. I think realistically speaking, looking at your professional domain and looking at what you see now starting to happen will give you your best indicator of how quickly you need to learn how to integrate new technologies, new robotics into your work world. So, for example, if you are a lawyer, we know that your world is already deeply affected by robotics. We know that artificial intelligence is being used more and more to perform jobs that used to be done not just by paralegals, but by.

Novice attorneys as well. So that's a field in which, if you're not.

Appreciating how much your profession is going to change now, you better hurry because that one is not 20 years off, that's not 10 years off, that's, that's five years off. And not that you're going to be replaced as an attorney, but how the things that you used to be able to bill for discovery and document review and other things, they're going to now be conducted by robots, which means you have to figure out some other way to add value. So look at your domain. On the other hand, if you are a. My wife is an occupational therapist. Occupational therapists are probably not going to be replaced by robots anytime soon because there's a tremendous amount of.

The high touch angle of a field like occupational therapy is very important. It's crucial to enabling people to regain functionality that they've lost as a result of.

An illness or an injury. So.

You might not be worried about being replaced by a robot if you're an occupational therapist, but what you might be looking at is how can I adopt robotics into my practice so that I can help more clients by using robots who are going to be able to do some of what we do as occupational therapists, but can't do so much else of what we do. So it's having that attitude of what is already happening, what is likely to happen.

In the very near term and what looks like it's going to be a little further out. Which gives you then the opportunity to think about all those value adding kinds of activities that we talked about earlier.

Right. That's so fascinating because the pivot method and the biggest mistake that I made when pivoting was not looking at what was already working, what was already right under my feet. And it's really interesting to hear you frame this technology conversation and robots around. Look at the transformation that's occurring right now that actually if we open our eyes and we probably feel it on a visceral sense, you know, I say in the introduction to my book this the Boiling Frog, my friend Scott uses that analogy that the water is getting hotter and hotter and we haven't yet jumped out of the pot, but I think we can feel the discomfort and some people have jumped out of the pot and they're on to new things. But that to look at, I mean that's just great advice to not try and look so far out that it's debilitating. But just say, what am I seeing already and how do I want to adjust or complement what I'm doing?

With technology it's very difficult to look far out.

Most predictions about anything.

Well, it depends on the domain. The reason that weather forecasts are seven day forecasts is that beyond seven day forecasts, nobody knows what the weather's going to be. You can't predict more than seven days. Within seven days they're pretty good. Now we have pretty good models that give us the dynamics of weather systems in such a way that we can say, well, it looks like four days from now this is going to happen because we know how weather works.

But beyond seven days we don't know how weather works. It's just there are too many, there's too much dynamism in the system to be able to predict out similarly if you're in an occupation, you do know that a year from now, again, attorneys, a year from now, are there going to be more things that robots are going to be able to do that lawyers do today? Yes, there will be more. Will there still be things that they can't do? Yes, there will be. Well, okay, there's the next point to point navigating chart if you will understand that and then see what happens a year from now. People can be uncomfortable with looking at things in those kinds of chunks of time, but I think it's more realistic than saying, oh well, 20 years from now I know everything. No, we don't know anything about 20 years.

Right. So that reminds me, and this is a big philosophical question around all this, which is some people say, listen, this is the economy that cried wolf. Every time there's a new piece of technology, we get all and and upset about it and we say that jobs are going away and we create a big crisis and then it ends up being fine. But then other people say, no, this time is different. Look how much automation is already happening. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

Well.

I do think that we are about to see another of these major inflection points in the way work gets done, much as we saw with the automation of agriculture and of manufacturing. I think what we saw was that while we continue to have jobs, many jobs disappeared. What I know we're going to see is tasks being replaced. So whether or not lawyers disappear.

That'S not a question for me. No, lawyers are not going to disappear. Some of the tasks that lawyers do are definitely going to disappear. Disappear, meaning being done by robots. So I think that this time is different in the sense that we've never had the level of skill being replaced by automation robotics.

Before that we have now and that we are going to see. So we're used to seeing manual labor, dull, dirty, dangerous jobs disappear to automation. What we're not used to seeing are these higher skill jobs be affected, not disappear, but be affected by robotics. So I think it's different in that sense. It's not different, I think in the sense that.

As a society we have created an economic and social structure that relies on people working to have money to be able to purchase things to keep other industries alive. And so unless we figure out some new social and economic model, I don't think we're going to try to scrap what we've done so far.

Socially and just replace it with nothing. So I think we're going to be making lots and lots of modifications. But in some sense we will find ways to replace the work activities that we're doing now. For both economic reasons and for social reasons, we do not want millions of people not having productive lives and working in ways that will not just keep them busy, but keep them engaged and have their lives be meaningful. So I have a lot of faith in our ability to create new ways of doing that. That doesn't mean that the road isn't going to be bumpy from here to there.

That's a great distinction between tasks changing versus roles changing. That we may still have lawyers, but the tasks that they do will be different. And that's, I think, a really important one and very interesting. So as we approach the end of our time together, I would kick myself if I didn't ask you about my two favorite shows of late that I know you've watched too. I think both of us have watched both seasons, twice through, and that's humans on AMC and Mr. Robot on USA Today. Both are very different. But for robot obsessed and AI obsessed people, they're Fascinating. Particularly Humans, which you turned me on to, where every family has a Synth, a synthetic human robot that looks real, sounds real, and helps with all these house chores. What do you think it is about the Zeitgeist that is creating these shows? And I know they've existed and books like these have existed for a long time, but Humans was very powerful for how kind of really realistic it was, but also how the psychology of having a synth in the family unit, how that changes people and relationships. And I'd just love to hear some quick thoughts that you have after watching these.

Well, I certainly enjoyed both of them a lot. And as you say, they were two very different shows. Humans was fascinating to me in that this very humanoid robot, a synth, was introduced into a family. And immediately what you see are the family dynamics playing themselves out around.

How to integrate this robot into the family's life. So, you know, the mother in this family is an attorney. She's away on a case, and her being away prompts her husband, who is overwhelmed by household chores, to go ahead and get a synth. And now the synth comes in and the synth is, no surprise, better at doing the household chores than the mother is or than anybody in the family is. So now suddenly we have jealousy, we have sexual attraction on the part of a teenage boy to this very attractive looking female synth who, who is around the home. Not too many spoilers here, but he's not the only one sexually attracted to the Synth. And so all of the.

All the possibilities of having a truly sentient, interactive, non human family member.

24, 7.

The challenges that that presented to the family, the way they came to terms with those challenges, was to me a very interesting depiction of fictional depiction of the kinds of situations that you can imagine happening in a world where these kinds of advanced artificial intelligence agents are commonplace. And that's, that's for me. Is that 30 years off? Is that 20 years? Is it 50? I don't know. But there is some time in the future, I believe, when these kinds of.

Systems are available to us, the way cars are available to us, the way any technology is available to us. Mr. Robot, on the other hand, is a very different kind of story in that, that it is the story of.

The impact of having tremendous power concentrated in businesses and the.

Effects that hackers can have on those very powerful businesses and how those effects ripple out to the whole world.

Mr. Robot is the depiction of.

A hacker who is a troubled young man, in many ways brilliant, and his group of cohorts who are trying to do something that we've seen Edward Snowden do and we've seen others do, which is to reveal the manipulation of large systems, monetary systems. In the case of Mr. Robot debt, the objective in Mr. Robot is to wipe out all personal debt for people, which the Occupy Wall street people probably would have resonated with had they had the kind of.

Technological prowess that we see Elliot having in.

Mr. Robot. So a fascinating story of kind of. Actually I think of Mr. Robot more as a now story than a future story.

Because those issues are really right, you know, as they say, ripped from the headlines.

So true. It's so true. And even cars being hacked. And so I think the hack, hacking piece of it speaks to our fear around the security of our data and cyber security in general. Identity theft. And then humans was so interesting about the psychology of integrating these intelligent machines and a self driving car got pulled over the other day. The Google offices for self driving cars are in my mom's backyard actually over the fence, there's just a little wood fence that separates them. And when I was home visiting last, there was, I was at a stoplight and do do do do do comes the self driving car turning left. And it was so wild to be on the road and just see it and it and it not be. They did an open house day that we went to too. But just in that moment my feeling and for me it was delight. But I can imagine the fear and concern and questions and curiosity and the whole mix of emotions, emotions that I think humans really nailed around starting to see these things in our everyday lives.

As you say, one was pulled over the other day for driving too slow.

Right. I left that out, which is, yeah.

I was going 20, 25 and a 35 and you know, a police officer pulled the, pulled the car over and what I read the police report and the police report, report said there is an obstruction.

There's a law on the books in California about obstructing other traffic basically by driving too slow. This is where Google needs to learn how to integrate its self driving cars into the world more effectively. They've taken a very conservative approach so far. Makes perfect sense to me. You don't want your cars doing 45 and a 35, but likewise you probably don't want it really routinely doing only 25 and a 35 either. So how will they adjust? How will they be, you know, make these systems more comfortable for us to live with on a daily basis because that's what we're going to be doing.

Right. I wonder, did the report say, did the self driving car know that it was being pulled over, like, when it saw the flashing lights? Are they smart enough to know that or did they.

I don't know.

Okay.

I don't know whether somebody had to go into override mode at that moment or not. That's a good question.

Yeah. Because I know right now Googlers are sitting there's. It's like a bucket seat. There's not even a steering wheel in these things. And there's two people sitting almost like on a bench on the back. And what was so funny was the one I saw. The girl was half asleep, yawning and texting, and I was like, well, hey, at least she's not driving, right? Because she was bored. There was nothing for her to do, really. And so they're doing these test drives, and I do wonder if that car knew it was being pulled over. And then the look on the cop's face. I mean, I would have liked to see that.

Yeah, there's no driver here.

Oh, well, Tom, I could talk to you about these topics all day. I really grateful that you're doing what you're doing with Robo Psych and your fantastic podcast. Thank you so much for being on this one. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Well, thanks so much, Jenny.

Of course. Robopsych.com and you can find there.

My newsletter, the RoboCyc newsletter, also the podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast in itunes. Friends, I'm on Twitter tomguariello, which is a lot of letters, but I'm sure Jenny will have them all in the show notes and also on Facebook. Similarly, also Tom Guariello there. So that's where I live online.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Yes, I will post all the links to what we talked about today in the show notes at Jennyblake Me.

Tom, thank you so much and huge thanks to everybody who's here listening.

Thanks again, Jenny. Enjoyed it a lot.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit Jennyblake Me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter ennyblake. And remember, build first. Then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.