AI and the Future of Humanity: Exploring New Opportunities with Susan Borke

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute, and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian, and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute.

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Susan, thanks for joining us today.

Glad to be here.

Yes, and we are glad to have you back, my friend. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Sure. So my name is Susan Bork and I work under boorkworks. B O R K E W O R K S. So my last name, what I do is I help you ask for what you want and get what you need with more success and less stress. Of course, you know, Kwame, that's through negotiating effectively, and I do that. My joy is when I can bring it to a group of people, because the energy in the room when that light bulb goes on over people's heads is very special. And I've also done it as a coach on individual situations that people are facing. At the end of the day, I think people learn more about negotiating when they're actually applying the ideas that you and I and all the other people on your podcasts talk about is when people can actually apply them to their own situation.

Absolutely. This is great. And listeners, my friends are very, very humble. So I want to make sure that I give Susan a proper shout out. Susan is one of the best in the biz, and you're a professor at multiple universities. You have experience negotiating massive deals on your own in multiple large organizations. And so, listeners, if you're looking for negotiation training or anything of that nature, check out Susan's work. It is really, really good. So I want to make sure we get you a proper promo here.

Susan, thank you. Thank you.

My pleasure.

So, listeners, today we have a fun.

Conversation and I will be starting to talk about this a lot more. And it is considering what the future looks like with artificial intelligence as part of our lives, this is not going anywhere. And when you think about all of the incredibly mind blowing things that artificial intelligence is doing today, I want you to remember this important point. This is the worst that artificial intelligence will ever be.

It's just going to keep getting stronger.

So we need to think about what our lives look like going forward. And so to kick things off, Susan, when you think about artificial intelligence and then you think about the future of human communication and human interaction, what are the first things that you consider when you think about what AI is going to do to the future of humanity?

One of them is sort of there's always right, the opportunity and the concern. So I see there's a lot of opportunity. And I think what's really interesting is that in the negotiation space, as you know, AI has been sort of developing and growing for some time, but these were larger programs focused on big purchasing operations. So we've got corporations that have whole purchasing departments and these were using AI to make their purchasing more effective, more automated, that kind of thing. And that was going on. That's always been going on in the background probably for, I don't know, at least three, I'd say more. Five years or so that's been happening. I've read, you know, there will be an article here, an article there, but not much. Then ChatGPT comes along and suddenly, you know, it's like become available to individuals, right? Everybody right now has access to that ChatGPT so you can play with it and try things out with it. And I think that's brought it down to a more individual level, which is a great opportunity. People are really playing with it and doing some interesting things. I've seen. If you look on LinkedIn, people are posting, they're like, oh, I used it to rehearse for a negotiation. I used it to generate open ended questions. I know one of the challenges when I'm teaching that I give people is I say, okay, there are these problematic statements or why questions, right? Why won't you agree? Why are you being so hard or you're being unreasonable? All those things that we really want to say. And you can feed those in, you can play around with feeding those into ChatGPT or I'm sure there are other programs at this point being whoever's got whatever they've got, but you can feed them in with an instruction saying, I want to convert this to an open Ended what or how question. Because that's what I make people do in class. I have a few of these and I'm like, okay, now convert those. But now you've got something that'll do it for you. Right? It can be helpful when you don't have time to do it yourself. So that's the place where I see opportunity. What kind of opportunities are you seeing? And then we can get to the concerns.

Yeah, well, the opportunities. When we think about AI in general, I think it's going to be a question in every single industry, not if AI will be there, but how it'll show up. And that's going to be in every industry, every business. But I think just individual to individual, like you said, we're going to have opportunities day to day to utilize this. I remember just yesterday, for example, I was thinking about coordinating things with my mom because I was going to be out of town. Whitney and I were both going to be out of town. So mom's going to take care of the children, and you typically have a nanny who's there, but she's not going to be there all of the time there. So I said, okay, this is a lot to say.

And so what I did was I.

Just did voice to text and just dictated a ramble of what was happening, what my concerns were, and what questions we still need to answer to make sure that we coordinate this. And I put it in ChatGPT and said, Clean this up, make it sound organized and very nice and friendly and.

Respectful, and it produced something instantly. And so think about some of these.

Messages that we kind of sit on for hours. Like, we think about how we're going to say it, and then we draft it, we send it to other people and things like that. Now you can just put in your unfiltered thoughts and then tell it your goal. And then it produces something that is incredible and flawless. And so I think that there are just so many opportunities. It's going to be really fascinating to see how just every day, every week, every month, we start to find new ways that it applies. And when you think about the growth of AI, the exponential growth is like nothing we've seen before. Because when you think about when cell phones initially came out, it would take years between iterations of the cell phone. Okay, iPhone one, iPhone two. Right. Took years. Now with artificial intelligence, we're seeing these types of leaps happening in days and weeks instead of years. So the landscape that we have for AI today is going to be very different from what it looks like in a Few months. So it's been really fascinating just watching the development over time.

So that's the good side, right? That's the exciting side, that's the opportunity. I think the concern though, you know, goes hand in hand with that. One of them is there are sort of, I think two things. One is that if we're using it and the growth is exponential, what AI draws on is original human content. And when that human content, right now there's lots of original human content. That's sort of everything that's out there. When we rely more and more heavily on AI to generate our texts, our emails, which is part of what it's scraping and drawing on as well as our work, our books, articles, our writing, those things. If there's less human, original human, human content and an increasing amount of AI generated content, I worry about how self referential it becomes. That's one concern. The other concern goes to something else you were just saying, which is that in looking to have that communication with your mother, or let's start with that one because it's a good example. What we used to do in these situations, before text, before emails, before all that was we picked up the phone, right? And we called our mothers and we said, right, we had these conversations and they were a dialogue so we could figure out where we'd have to worry as much about how clearly we communicated because we had more. There was a back and forth so we could figure out if we were communicating clearly or not. Are we going to do that less as well as have higher expectations for when we actually talk to each other, that it should all be so polished, so perfect, right when it isn't. We're messy. We're messy when we talk to each other. I shudder to think what it would be like for me to listen to what I'm saying right now. All the ums, all the pauses, the coughs, the thinking out loud, the hesitations, all of that which your listeners are hearing and they hear me, they're connecting the dots because that's what we also do. But I worry that we create this unreasonable standard for our oral communication if we get out of practice with it. I think the place where I see it is the young people, let's say the Gen Z people I know and there are some of them, not all of them, but the ones who actually are not able to tell time using an analog device. They don't know what the hands mean because they never had to. That was the whole thing about calculators in the schools. We survived. Certainly civilization hasn't fallen because people, at least the kids are still learning multiplication, addition, subtraction, basic algebra. And so you should be able to figure out the tip you're going to give in your head. Still, one hopes or do we need to I guess is the other question is that an important skill?

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Right back after this.

Yeah, I think we're going to find out.

I think they're going to be it's.

One of those things where we assumed that all of these core skills were just going you're going to need it forever. But we never thought about life where we didn't need it. I remember even hearing just in my lifetime when I was younger, I heard people refer to their sense of direction. Oh, I have a good sense of direction. Oh, I have a bad sense of direction. It's been years since I've heard anybody say that because everybody has a cell.

Phone and it doesn't matter. The cell phone will tell you where to go.

It can become a crutch and is when it comes to communication, we could use that as a crutch. We could use AI as a crutch. But then when it comes time to have those unavoidable human interactions, then we see how the communication skills really are. And I think a lot of times we might enter a world where we get a false sense of security as it relates to our skillset of negotiation, conflict resolution, or just effective communication in general. So you can write really well, your emails are pristine and all of these things. And then when something comes up that is unexpected and you have to get on a video call or pick up the phone or meet somebody in person, how good are your skills? And when you think about it, and I'd be interested to hear your perspective on this, but I'm assuming that the skills that we've had just as a society as it relates to communication, conflict resolution, negotiation have been diminishing year over year a little bit when generationally, because the older you are, the more in person conversation you had to have, the younger you are, the fewer you have to have going forward. It's going to be really interesting to see how people can adjust to that reality when it's really time to have those tough conversations.

And we saw, I mean, Covid was a horror, right? Covid, I think we see what happens with the pandemic, with the shutdown, what it did to the mental health of young, particularly young people and adults as well. I'm not discounting. There were a lot of people who. Older people who didn't have the interaction anymore. People in assisted living or nursing homes. They were terribly negatively affected. Children and young people were very. Were affected. The best of circumstances were there were enough people in the household or there were a couple household pods together, so there was more interaction. But for a lot of young adolescents, of teenagers especially, they felt terribly isolated and it's been hard for them to reconnect. And even before that, there's the. I don't know if you had her on, but the professor at Yale who created the happiness course, I don't have her name off the top of my head. And then it went out on Sarah or one of those. And it's like one of the most popular courses ever. And at Yale, I think it is the most popular course in the history of Yale University. Like it's. And she was saying the part of what got her involved in doing something about that was she. This was well before COVID she went in, she was a house master at Yale and she remembered her college years when the dining hall was where everybody socialized. There was a buzz, there was activity, people were talking and moving. And she went into the dining hall and the house where she was the housemaster. And it was quiet and people are with headphones and they're on their computers and it wasn't like they were playing video games or something. They were working, they were doing schoolwork, but they weren't interacting with each other over it, you know. So I do worry about us. It becomes a vicious cycle. Not a virtual where we spend less time in each other's company, we feel less comfort in each other's company, so we avoid each other's company and that just makes it worse.

Agreed. And you know what's interesting is that when you think about how technology develops, it makes it easier for us to live more isolated lifestyles in some ways.

Yes.

Yeah. And when you Think about the direction of artificial intelligence. One of the things that they want to be able to do is pass the Turing test, where going back and forth, you can convince the person that you are that the computer can convince us that it is a human. And I think with ChatGPT, we're pretty much there. It's close. I think as the conversation continues, you'd start to realize, okay, that wasn't human.

But it would take a lot longer.

Than it was in the past. For example, there's a program called Replica that's really popular, and so it's replica spelled with a K. And so the story is the founder. I should have her on the podcast. Yeah. So the founder, I think it was. I think it might have been one of her best friends passed away. And so she. But she had the text message conversations, and so she built an AI that would respond like him so they could keep on talking. And so she built a program that's. That is a chatbot, but it's grown. You can actually hear the voice now, and things like that, where it's a companion. So you could either make it a friend, like a romantic partner, spouse, or just a mentor, all of these things, and it can go back and forth with you. And I think as the AI develops, we'll have more of these types of programs where you can have an AI companion. And it's like, well, you know, my friends are making me mad, my spouse is making me mad, but I'll just talk to my replica or something like that. And then we have lessons, need to interact with other people, because we have this program that's going to be endlessly empathetic, endlessly interested in you, and doesn't even have emotional needs of its own.

And you just talk to it forever.

And what it doesn't do, I mean, you know, that's the beauty of therapy, right? For 50 minutes, that person is focused on me. A good therapist is not merely focused on me. A good therapist is looking for ways to help me gain insight, help me identify, push me so that I can see where I might want to change and be motivated to change my behavior. Help me develop tools or ways of doing that, you know, so that I'm moving forward in my relationships and in my life. Whereas, you know, what you're talking about is the friend who doesn't. It's like the dog friend versus, you know, versus the friend who's the really. The person who, like, tells you you're being an idiot when you're being an idiot. As uncomfortable as that might Be and maybe, you know, at some point, replica or any of those something, some AI will get to that point. And it's still the problem that you've identified, which is it's not a person and it's what becoming that intermediary. It's a layer between us and life.

Exactly. And you're right. We all need that person to call us out when we need to improve. And think about that. Think about in the future.

That could be a setting like, do you want me to make you better?

Yes.

Coach me now or no, let's turn that off.

I don't care. Just listen to me and validate me endlessly. And I think that'll give us, that'll create a scenario where we are less tolerant of humanity because wow, I'm having this conversation and how dare this person want to talk about themselves? Ugh, okay, you know, I'm done.

Yeah, it may be, you know, when you talk about how important curiosity is, does it end? Is it something that. That starts diminishing our curiosity?

Yeah, I think for sure it'll diminish our curiosity about other people.

Yeah.

Because we have with AI, I mean, especially if it's connected to the Internet, you have a friend that's validating you endlessly that has all of the world's information at its fingertips. So you could almost treat it like Google, Siri and a friend that only cares about you. But then when it comes to the curiosity directed at other people, like Susan, how are you today? Like the whole half hour conversation we.

Had before starting the podcast, like that skill set, they.

I think it's going to be gone. Not gone, but greatly diminished just because.

Of lack of practice on the other hand. And here, you know, so here's the other, right. Everything's a tool. And it's how I cannot think of the name. I can sort of see the picture in my mind. But my, my sister, when I was, I saw her a couple of weeks ago, handed, showed me this brochure because it was such an interesting thing. And it's a kind of robot, you know, not like moving around, but a figure, a robot companion for children that helps them develop empathy. Like exercises their empathy and engages them in ways that both help them find ways of expressing their emotions more constructively and articulating them, talking about them. So it helps children do that and then helps them problem solve ways to maybe do things. It has a lot about behavior and apparently allegedly, who knows, the children who interact with it develop. It does help with the social, emotional skills for kids. So it can be a gym. Right. It can be a teacher, it can be helpful and help you engage that way. It's not a substitute. But whereas the school of hard knocks that we get from our playground and our siblings can be useful, but they can also be a little. Can be a little rough on the psyche. So this was a way of helping kids, you know, learn some of these skills in a more constructive and coached way.

I love that. And again, that shows the benefit. Like you said, it's a tool. And so we have to be mindful of the way that we're using these tools. And so I want to make it clear to the audience like, I am pro AI. I think it's cool.

I'm just endlessly curious.

I'm fascinated by it. I'm consuming a lot of news on this, just learning as much as I can. And so there are going to be these tools that exist that can help you to improve your communication skills and everything. We have to still maintain that personal drive to improve those skills. What I'm most concerned about, like, will people just say, you know what? I've really not liked these difficult conversations. Now I have a tool to help me avoid it even more. That's what I'm afraid of. And this is a bit of foreshadowing. I don't know how long this is going to take, but our team, we're working on something in the AI space. But those type of things, developing it takes time, so hopefully we get that out soon. But I just think that there's so many opportunities we have to figure out how to. To make it work for us.

Yeah, I think, you know, somebody. It was a, like a cartoon, you know, a cartoon strip or something about, you know, the next job is going to be being a prompter, like being. Being the person who writes the prompts for AI to get the information you need, kind of the way researchers used to be. Right. You know, if you, if you really needed something, you'd go to a librarian who really understood how to dig through the. The data. Right? How to dig through the card catalog to find what you were looking for or the, you know, published articles index. Remember those? Are you too young? It used to be a printed, a big printed book that you had to, like, figure out where your articles had been. Anyway, it was a long time ago.

But I remember being in the library and looking things up and having to do those types of research projects and whatnot. But again, like, to your point, Susan, there's so many conversations I have with Kai that I almost regret Even beginning.

Where I refer to something. And he's like, what?

I have no concept of what that is. Like, I remember one time explaining to him that the, oh, the video game he's trying to play isn't working because the Internet's out. And he's like, what do you, what do you mean it's out? Like, he, for him, it's just this ubiquitous energy that's always there.

He had no concept that could not be present. And I was like, back in my day, the Internet didn't really exist. And then when it did, it took a long time. It was very loud. Connecting to the phones, he's like, whoa, why phones?

I just stopped the conversation.

But to your point, you're right, I.

Think like that, that new role of prompt engineer, that's, it's very legitimate because learning how to use artificial intelligence, even if it's like a platform like ChatGPT, that in itself is a skill. The better you get at coaxing it and prompting it and asking questions and giving commands and whatnot, the better the outputs you get.

Yeah, I mean, it's a different kind of programming which isn't, you know, and coding seems like, you know, I don't know, it's, there's talk about, you know, these being able to build apps without having to know how to code. There's some, somebody's creating some software that allows you to do that. You still have to be able to think it through though. You still have to, you know, even if you don't need to write the particular code, you still need to work through the logic, which Kai's going to be very good at because he's a chess player.

Yes, yes, I appreciate that.

Yes, that's.

You're so right. And it's, coding is a great example. Coding is a really good example too, because, Susan, I remember a couple weeks ago I was playing around because I saw that it writes code too. I'm not, I don't know how to write code, but I'm like, all right, let's try it out. And I just, in literally less than five minutes, it was about three minutes, I had it code a simple app and I put it into like an HTML tester and it worked.

It worked.

So people can create really high level codes just using their imagination by telling Chad GPT what you want it to do and it'll build the code out for you. And I think it's another great example of one of those things that was a core skill for human advancement. And now it's just, we've raised the baseline so much. Like now, we. It's like, okay, well, we can now actually see a future where knowing how to code line by line isn't as valuable. It's almost like, hey, I understand English really well and other Romance language because I understand Latin.

You know, I think it might be.

One of those types of things.

Yeah, it's going to be. I mean, I think there are different skill sets and different ways of thinking which will all be fine until there's, like a solar flare and the grid goes down. Right. And then, God help us. I read too much science fiction. I grew up on science fiction.

What can I say? I love it.

Well, since you love science fiction, you'll love this little thought experiment. I was watching a comedian one time, and he said, I think about how advanced things are today. I thought about what would happen if I went back to, like, the 1900s and I had all of this knowledge. And he's like, I would be absolutely worthless.

I would tell people about technology, and they'll be like, well, cool.

Build it. Like, I don't know.

I don't know what to say, what to do. We just keep on building on the.

Previous advancements of each generation. It doesn't mean we fully understand those advancements, but we just benefit from them.

Well, the challenge with AI is exactly that. In many ways, we don't understand it. It's borderline magic, really. It is magical. You tell it to code a simple app, and boom, it's magic. It creates this app.

Yeah.

Now somebody program the A.I. right. So it's not that it's completely. It's not. They're not programming. AI isn't programming itself yet.

Not yet, but it is doing some weird things. So we have things like hallucinations where it will come up with some answer that's not just wrong, but it's, like, confusing as to how you even got to that. And then sometimes it's not necessarily that it, like, codes itself, but it can learn things that they didn't expect it to learn. And I think that's one of the most fascinating things about this technology. It seems as though, like, as you gather more data using the large language models and you get put more into it, at some point, it just, like, levels up in a way that the creators didn't even see coming. And I can't think of another technology where you created it. And then it got better almost by accident. It's like if we made a toaster, and then it's like, wow, this toaster makes pizza too. I Didn't even ask it to. That's not how technology typically works.

It doesn't make itself better. But certainly people, I mean, if you think about the inventions, things like, you know, post it notes or microwaves, they generally started where people were trying to solve one problem and found out that what they were trying to solve, you know, they ended up with something that worked for something completely unrelated. So that's a good point. So I mean, I think it is a, I mean that's a human quality and that's one I wouldn't, I'd want to, I'd want to retain.

Exactly. And that's where you start to get.

Into those more scary iterations of what the future could be like if we lose control of it. Like, that's what a lot of people are concerned. Concerned about, who knows?

The challenge is doing the hard and the right thing for everybody. And it's an everyday challenge for every person, myself included. Right. Those small decisions we make. Do I take a walk this morning? Do I do my morning walk? Oh, it's raining. Maybe I won't. Well, that's fine. But if I then be like, tomorrow morning. Oh, I don't want to do it tomorrow. And suddenly I'm no longer doing my morning walk. That has repercussions. Right. Building that resilience and that grit to get back on difficult wagon of better ethical behavior, better self care, better interpersonal interactions, all those things. And that's the challenge, because the tool, so that it isn't a crutch, it's an aid. There's a difference.

Absolutely.

Most people don't use a cane until they have to. And when they have to, it's something that they need to continue to be mobile.

Right.

So if we're, you know, we're not. Because if you use a cane, if you start using it too soon, right. Then you're creating an atrophy of some kind that you shouldn't.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the biggest concerns too. Like what do we lose? What parts of ourselves? So I think it will require a lot of discipline and like you said, making the right decisions to make sure we retain those core elements of our humanity that we, that are really meaningful to us.

And the challenge now is that the pressure is on us not to, I think, I mean, do more with less, do more faster. I mean, these are all the pressures we're under as a, you know, and you look at all the people who are, I just need a job. I just need to make enough money to pay the Rent. I mean, they're not, you know, that's a person who has less bandwidth for, you know, they're looking for the. Not the fastest way to get ahead, just the fastest way to stay. To stay, you know, keep their head above water.

Right. I agree. Yeah.

It's a challenge. And so providing people. That's why things like, it's not to date ourselves too much, but it's May, it's Mental Health Month, and it's taking time for that care for ourselves and for people we know.

Right.

We hide that a lot and that can be a real problem.

Right.

We put a real good face on things and then people don't know. And it's not that you have to advertise that things are. You're feeling terrible, but it's. It's, again, a balance. Yeah.

And that's the key word, balance with all of this that we've been talking about. Right. Balance. Susan, I appreciate this. This was a lot of fun. And listeners, like I said, we're going to be talking a lot more about artificial intelligence going forward. So shoot me a message if you have any other questions or topics that you want to make sure we cover. But, Susan, this was really, really cool. I really appreciate chatting with you and I really appreciate your perspective on this, too.

Well, it was good to hear yours. I always like. I mean, and I'm looking forward to what other guests say as you hash through this topic and kind of bring it up and because I think that you have such a diverse group of people who come. They're going to come with such different views and I'm very excited to hear that. So I'm going to be tuning in.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

No, Susan, this was great. And one more time before we wrap, let the listeners know again about Bork works and how they can get in touch with you.

Sure. So the way you can get in touch with me is through my website and it's my last name, B as in boy O R K E W O R K S dot com. So that's borkworks dot com and I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you, Susan. Really appreciate it. Thanks again for coming.

Thank you.

Awesome.

This is great. This is great.

I'm excited. And I'm excited to hear the feedback, too, because I think we're all still trying to figure this out. It's brand new. So posting this and then getting feedback from people and hearing, I think we just all grow and learn together. So I'm excited to see what happens when we make this.

Yeah, I think it'll be. I'll be curious. I'll be curious. So I'm happy to kick off a new thread, as it were.

Yes.

Love it, love it, love it. All right, my friend.

Well, we will be in touch.

All right, you take care. And take care of your voice.

Yes, thank you. Will do. All right, I'll see you. Bye.

Bye. Bye.

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