How you can prepare and benefit from Artificial Intelligence

Um, so hi everyone and welcome. Um, firstly, to introduce myself, my name's Alana. I'm a HR Business Partner partnering with Italy, Netherlands, and Sweden as part of the Western Europe HR team. It's my pleasure to open today's Luxgood session and help host alongside Andy Mears, VP of Digital Offerings based in the US, and And we also have Logan Wilkes, who's joining us from DXC US to help challenge our speaker a little bit later on. Today's session will be an interactive session. We will have a presentation from our speaker, but we've been challenged to not allow him to finish his slides. So let's keep the questions and comments coming through the event. And we'll do our best to live up to that challenge. So let me now pass over to Andy, who will introduce today's speaker.

Thanks, Alana. Hi everybody, welcome again to our monthly Looks Good session. I'm really excited today about our speaker, Thomas Anglero. Sorry, I kind of butchered that, Anglero. And Thomas is here today. Thomas is hailing to us today from Oslo, Norway. He is a Nordic CTO for an IT firm very much like ours. But beyond that, Thomas is well known as an inspirational motivational speaker. Thomas has a 25-year history talking about topics that we're going to discuss today, like innovation, artificial intelligence, and we're really excited to have him here to share with us. And truly, we will be interrupting Thomas and asking lots of good questions. To help me do that, like Alana said, I brought someone from my Solutions and Practices organization for DXC Luxoft, Logan Wilt. Logan's our Chief Data Scientist with our AI Center of Excellence, which is a a program we've been running in combination with Drexel University here in Philadelphia in the US. And so Logan's come along to keep us all honest about artificial intelligence. And so, you know, we're really excited about the conversation today. And so Thomas, I did want to start with one question because we've got folks on the line here from, you know, from mostly from our engineering group, a heavy IT background, of course. And so I think one of the questions that comes up a lot around our circles is, you know, will AI replace my job? And so let's start with that question. Will AI replace all of us? Will eventually this just be 5 bots talking to each other versus 5 people?

Andy, I don't know about your job, but I'll address everybody else. So, look, since there's a lot of fellow nerds out there,, right? All you guys and girls probably have seen, and if not, right now open up your mobile phone, go on YouTube, and type in the word Amazon Echo versus Google Home. And they actually took both of those devices and had them talking to each other. And I think one guy had it going for like 4 hours where they actually were debating, right? So yeah, that could technically happen. That's not a big deal, right? The answer to your question, No. Well, it's yes and no. Let me be very specific. You will lose your job against AI if you're lazy, if you're not into it. Look, AI is to me, if any of you were working or were alive back in the dot-com bubble days, remember that thing was you couldn't go wrong, everybody was making money. It's sort of like the crypto last week, not crypto today. Is everybody watching crypto?

Not today.

Dot-com all in one week, right? You couldn't go wrong. It was like the best thing ever. And so what you should look at today is not just dot-com. Think about this. I was joking you guys before, you know, the day you graduated, you were given your diploma and you got your diploma. And even us nerds, we got our diploma like, yeah, I could conquer the world, you know, watch out Bill Gates, all this excitement. That's where we're at with AI, right? AI is not here to replace you, it's here to be your ultimate assistant. You know, here's a joke. All the— Andy, I'm gonna pick on you. I'm not gonna pick on the very nice Alana because I'm afraid of her, and Logan I'm definitely afraid of, right? But Andy, you're, you're open bait, right? Andy, when you were in college, did you, uh, ever do some drinking or stuff like that? Did you ever, when you were supposed to be studying, instead somebody knocked on your door and you— they said, do you want to go out for a drink? And you went for a drink. Did that happen to you?

Uh, you know, you're in Oslo, and yes, my roommate was, um— I was 17, my roommate was 22 because he was from Norway and had done his required service. And so we were the only room that was allowed to have alcohol in it at all. And so they didn't even have to knock on my door. So maybe a little bit of drinking.

So here we go. That version of you that should have never drunk those peach schnapps, those 2 or 3 bottles of peach schnapps, all right? Remember that Friday that turned into a Sunday, right? That version of you that should have studied, that should have been diligent, that should have wrote that report and all that stuff, that is what AI— you should look at, okay, I'm who I am, but AI actually can be that version of me that studied, that version of me that never sleeps, that version of me that actually speaks 10 or 15 different languages. What could you do with who you are and the ultimate version of yourself? If you together, what could you conquer? What could you achieve? That's how you got to look at AI. Do you understand? It's not a competitor. It's a competitor if you don't do a damn thing. If you have this timid mentality, if you go, oh, I don't know what to do, I'm scared, oh, I don't— uh-huh, it's gonna knock you, run you over, right? Yeah, what is it? So this is— so what you should do is you got to ask yourself, what is it that I really want to achieve? What crazy idea do I have? This is the time that we could do it, right? And one of the best things, like yesterday, Google, um, yeah, Google AI, the conference announced— they announced that the, the— they're releasing for free that their coding for the latest AI is now 80% less coding My point is this: all us nerds know that being a data scientist up until today, pretty much even today, is still hot and irrelevant and all that. But for the last 5 years, being a data scientist, you're going to program, you take all those datasets, you can make it intelligent, connect everything. Oh, am I all the time programming? Fantastic. What Google announced yesterday was that 80% of that coding is not necessary. What the industry and technology companies like yours, mine, everybody's driving to is it allow mom and pop to allow— like, I'm in a boardroom right now— to allow the board— you have a board, you have all the people in the board, or you have a steering group or something, and you have a question. It should be such that you ask the Amazon Echo or the Google Home a question, and you don't need to program the question or to understand, and one doesn't have to go search for a private database, public database. It all is intuitive. So this is with the announcement that they made yesterday. They I thought it would take a little bit longer. They already got rid of 80% of the lift, right? 80% of the programming. So that means that what the hell do you want to achieve? What do you want to conquer? What do you want to do? That's an intimidating question, right? Because all of a sudden you always have excuses. Well, I got kids, I got a mortgage, I got a wife, I got a husband named Kev who drives me nuts, right? Things like that, right?

And isn't there something behind it? Like, so when they say, okay, we've done the lift, there are people back there making it so that that lift can be done, right? And are these our people? Are these our programmers who have to be the ones in the background making the AI work?

It's less and less people and more and more AI. All right, so what's happening now is that the AI is writing the algorithms for the AI and is going to these derivations, and that's why it's going faster and faster and faster. It's less people needing to program it. Right? Here's another example. And this— what was it called? So you know the 3D printing? You know what 5D printing is? Have you heard of 5D printing?

No.

Okay. 5D printing is when you add AI to a 3D printer. Say we're making— say we're making a cup, right? So you put the design of the cup into the 3D printer. It comes out of the 3D printer. The AI is looking at the final product. With a webcam, with multiple webcams. It looks at it, it then takes the cup, puts it back into the 3D printer, and what it does is, as it looks at the, the cup, it goes through all these different algorithms. It goes and looks at all the different versions of cups. It looks at the history of Italian Renaissance art, what are the different shapes and cups that people have made, and then it destroys the cup and it produces a new cup. It then looks at the new cup and goes, interesting, And then again, it goes back into his databases, go into different reflections and philosophical things, puts it back, and it keeps on going around and around and around without human intervention. That is 5D printing that's coming, and that's AI redesigning things, right? So if you guys want to, again, play around, Google, Google, um, AI design chair. So what these, uh, cool researchers did— us nerds, we're real cool people, we're just bizarre, but we find things weird, we come up with cool results. Is that they put in all the design for Danish design and Scandinavian design. They put it into an AI and they asked it to make a chair. When it was all done, it looked like this— bones all connected. But it actually created a chair that looked like the human body because the best support system in the world is the human body. So my point is, is that AI is already intelligent enough to replace us— not to replace, but to do these things. So if it's already that intelligent, what do you want to achieve? What is it that you question? You guys have this theory of wellness, right? There's the question. Here's the beautiful gift you get. What is it that you want to do with your life? That's a big question. What is you want to do your life? Then you turn this way to the AI and go, I want to do this, I want to do that, right? And we're getting to that point. We could actually have that conversation and the AI can actually start giving you things back. Well, you could do this, you could do that, you like to do this, well, why don't you think about that? We're getting to that point insanely fast. Yesterday's announcement, 80% of the coding is gone to getting to that point.

So we have a good question that ties to that. Give some examples of how AI can, can, um, be used to just improve our daily tasks. Let's say we wanted to use AI to maybe simplify our lives or, or do some of our daily tasks so that we could focus on something that was maybe more interesting to ourselves, like How would we, how would we do that?

I mean, but that's already happening, right? So Tesla's already driving the car for us with autonomous driving, right? Um, we have connected refrigerators that, um, as you put something in, it's sort of like Amazon Go with all their stores. As you take it off the shelf, it registers you bought it and it's automatically charged your card. So you have refrigerators that are just seeing you, do you take the milk, did you take the cheese, right? So all that's already happening. Your life is being simplified all the time. So for me, I get the question, but if you really look around, more and more things are being simplified. Fine. So what are you gonna do? What is it that you want to achieve? Do you understand? Is that you got to stop— look, that's a 10-year-old question. All this technology, all this innovation, people with the AirPods, you no longer have a string around your neck tied to your mobile phone. Now you got this little thing hanging out, right? All these innovations are coming. What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? This is, this is a big deal, but I think people run from it and they're scared because they're intimidated. They always had an excuse. No more excuses. What is it? Let's go, right? What? Come on, I'm burning to do this. I haven't felt this far since I graduated or since I got married or something. This is that really exciting moment, but it intimidates a lot of people. But this is where we're at.

How about in like the enterprise space? You know, we have a lot of clients, right? We get contacted a lot to, you know, make use of their data, to in things like AI and machine learning and to, you know, do some innovative or some moonshot-style projects to help them figure out how it works in their business environment. And we have a lot of people, by the way, that have asked this question and I don't know what it is. So maybe Logan or Thomas, you guys know, but a lot of people have asked like, you know, should we get training on GPT-3? And somebody asked, what is GPT-3? And I don't know the answer to that, but I mean, you know, how do we translate, you know, there is kind of this buzzword bingo part of AI, where our clients say, yes, we want some AI, or we would like to do this with our data. Like, what does that look like for, for a group such as ourselves? How do we, how do we engage in that space when our clients ask those questions?

Yeah, that's a wonderful, wonderful question. So I'll tell you how I engage, and then we take it from there. All right, so, um, when a client asks that, usually that's because AI is a trendy thing and they want to be a cool company and all that, right? That's usually where it comes from on the marketing team. Then you have the CEO who usually has an ego and they want to be as a— I want my tea company to be an AI company and things like that, right? So one of the things that I, when I talk to a company, it says, do you— before we do this whole, we could do the whole Post-it and do some mapping and, you know, workshop crap, right? And that's a necessary thing, but there's a big step you do before that. Is your culture, your company ready for AI? Why are you asking this question, right? Let me step back and share with you a meeting I had with a company. They brought their entire Nordic leader group team to me and I was with them for 4 hours, half a day. And I realized at the end of the 4 hours and I was, I would say, look, I gotta be direct with all of you. I said to the CEO, are you willing to do the following? You want to be an AI company, you want to be innovative, you want to do all these things. But I look around this room, the average age everybody in this room is 60-something plus. You all are proud. So I said, listen, this is the bottom line. Are you willing to tell everybody in this room, thank you all for everything you've done? You've taken our company from a startup and you've taken us to a multinational. We have grown our margins, we have benefited, we all have yachts, blah, blah, blah, right? We've had this wonderful run. But you are the masters of the past. But what's coming in the future, you're incompetent. You don't know any of that stuff. A lot of companies, when they ask this question about, I want to go to AI and all that, where's that coming from? And do you know what you're about to do to your company? Because a lot of people, a lot of leaders, a lot of bosses— I'm the boss, I've been working 20 years, I finally get to make decisions. I get to tell you what to do. That doesn't work in the world of AI. This, this AI thing doesn't talk back. It doesn't care. But if you got that incentive, you have that culture in your company, it's not gonna work with AI. That person will be AI's biggest enemy. And you have the CEO say, I wanna be an AI company, but the culture's clashing. So before you, you wanna be intelligent to your customer. You wanna love your customer, respect your customer. When they ask that question, Is your culture ready for it? Because yes, you wanna make money. Let's go build some hours. Let's charge them tons of services. Let's implement this. Let's put them on the cloud, right? You could do all that, but that project will fail because you have the culture of people who aren't ready for it.

Right.

So that's my experience. Every single time I ask why, and let's talk about your culture. And so in that meeting that Nordic meeting I was talking about, After I said that, you should have saw the room. They realized, and then one guy, I gave him credit. One gentleman said, you know, what do we do? Right, what do I do? I worked 30 years and finally I'm the CEO of Sweden for this company, and all I know is I came from the warehouse, right? And this is, so if you have a company that wants to make this AI step, Don't fire these people. I mean, that's not it. This is— but this is— if you're going to make that step, it's a different step. It's a different way of working, right? You have RPA, which, which is just repetitive thing, task, where it will do a task automatically. So you don't need to do all these repetitive tasks. You don't— you can get rid of probably a third of people warehouse. You don't want to do that. But if you do that with AI and all these robots and just intelligent engineering, what are you going to do? It's a cultural question. That's my— do you understand what I'm saying? Before you address this is a cultural question. So you have to address that first, and that's a, that's an intellectual question you got to ask the management team, the CEO. Do you know what you're talking about? And if they do, and you work with them on that, you work on what you're trying to achieve, and you understand, and they start understanding, wait a minute, before we do this, yeah, we have to look at our company. What kind of company you want to have? Who are we as a company, right? Then you go, okay, now let's do the AI stuff because the tech stuff is the easiest stuff. People, insecurities, the older us men get, the more insecure we get. Am I right, Andy?

Sure, sure, sure. Got some gray hair coming in my beard, you know.

That's called distinguished, that's not insecurity.

Thomas, I think we've got a question that's kind of connected to that, so, um, if I can interrupt. So if we use AI to simplify our approach to work Are you saying that we then need to think of something else to do? It would be good to hear how to add value to our workplace and actually free up our people to be creative, bring greater solutions to our clients. How do you advise we can do this?

Okay, so the ultimate goal for a client— be very specific— the ultimate goal for your client is for you to deliver the best services and benefits for them. So therefore, utilizing AI will save you time because it's going to do a lot of the analysis for you. Um, it'll look at thousands of different datasets if you set it up right and come back to you with, to say, with 87.24% certainty this scenario is possible, with 56.7%. So all that time when we typically did research and we looked at Excel spreadsheets or we looked at different information, it was laborious. It'll save you all that time. If we just look at that amount of time on that specific task, that could take you tons of time. For example, lawyers— how much time do they spend researching and looking, right? So you have all these new AI lawyer companies, and they're able to cut their— they're able to go to market with 50% lower prices and absolutely destroy the market. Go into Google now, type in AI lawyer robots, and then type in the word Israeli startups. There's tons of great Israeli startups who are doing this, and they're, they're, they're being bought up like crazy. Because they're absolutely destroying the legal market worldwide. Because the amount of time it took for lawyers to look and research previous cases with AI is only a few seconds, right? So with that extra time, now you get to do the task you were supposed to be doing, using your mind, using your head. I got an answer. Now what's the best for my customer? What innovative thing? Let me try this. Let me try that. Let me go to the AI. Listen, I want to try this, that, this, that. It's about being innovative and curious. It's sort of— I always tell people, is, is— I tell, like, I love telling this to people in the board of directors, these old men who are so— I tell them, go back to the sandlot. When's the last time you were back in kindergarten? You just played. The best projects come from those people who play with ideas. And you play and you ask the AI, you just try different things. That's the innovative thought. So the answer to your question, how to take care of your customer, is utilize AI to save yourself time and doing all the research. Take that inner kid inside of you, be inquisitive and curious, be crazy, and utilize AI and go back and forth with it. And that's— you'll come with the best solution possible to customer, and you yourself, you have a wonderful time doing it. Isn't that— I mean, so that way you don't say— the question was, I'm at work. I hate hearing that question because if you really love what you're doing, it's not work, is it? Right? My first job, I got— when I first moved to Norway, I always remember it as like going to a party every single day. And I hope other people have that feeling too. You shouldn't feel like, "Oh, I gotta go to work." So that's what I mean. This is— we're at that moment, you know?

So Thomas, like, given that, I'd say like, we have people on here, they're developers, maybe they're early in their career, maybe they've been writing code for 15 years and doing software engineering and and data engineering and things like that. And so I mean, I'll ask the question this way. Is it a waste of time for them to go study data science? Is it a waste of time for them to want to be trained in the different AI technologies?

No, not at all. No, not at all. So let's look realistically. This AI, the self-programming and all that, is still going to take a few more years, even though yesterday it probably cut off about 5 years from that time period. It's getting shorter and shorter. So it's not a waste of time. There's a lot of companies that need it absolutely right now. So the window of opportunity is absolutely right now, right? But since you guys and girls know this stuff better than everybody else, I want you to be more inquisitive than everybody else and start saying, what can I really do with it? What kind of questions can I do with it, right? And also start influencing the code. Logan and I, when we first met, we got into a wonderful discussion about ethics in AI, right? And Logan, you could kick in if you want to, right? We're really worried about this damn AI, the person who programs it, right? If, um, if you're in a bad mood, if you don't— if a dog bit you on the way to work yesterday, you may write a code today where any picture of a dog— damn little, you know, vermin, right? I don't know, but we're human beings. That code— I'm really worried about that code. Logan, do you want to share any thoughts? I mean, you have some great stuff from before.

Yeah, so And there's a couple of questions that I've seen come up in here about, like you said, is it even worth becoming a data scientist at this point?

No.

No.

No.

Yeah, I'm a data scientist in that I'm out of a job. And this thing is taking my job. And it hasn't. It's one of the things for people in our everyday lives, particularly on the periphery of our lives, asking what can AI help me do better is a great question., but particularly us as engineers and coders, is what can AI not do yet? Because just like working with some of like various frameworks, and often we've all come up when we're trying to use a framework to make our life easier in coding, and then you hit a wall. It doesn't do the thing you want it to do. And, you know, a lot of these self-writing AIs, these AIs that do, you know, that basically take 80% of the coding out, you're eventually gonna hit a wall where those services don't do what you want to do. And people like us are in a position to extend that. But in the same way, people like us are also the ones writing the code. You know, someone's like, how do I not accidentally make prejudiced code? And that's, that's a great question to be asking yourself, especially to make sure that people who are on the inside creating the AI are asking those questions, because it absolutely can happen. Because a lot of times what AI is doing is it's becoming a proxy to solve a problem for us. Google had this where they tried to use resumes as a proxy to hire good engineers, and they inadvertently repeated the history of hiring predominantly men because that was the dominant number of resumes they had in their database. And so all they did is create a proxy for history, not a proxy for the future. And keeping that in mind is really, really important to not create prejudiced AI because you don't want to repeat, repeat the sins of the past. But also what you put into the code absolutely matters. I'm in AI, I'm in data science because I want to be on the inside. Like we've talked about, like the ethics of it and where it's going. I want to be able to drive some of those decisions, make this more about an augmented world, like, you know, what you're so excited about, as opposed to an automated world where I don't have anything to do, you know. I mean, I have hobbies, but I want, I want to feel like I have purpose. And so, you know, Being engineers, being in the middle of that, we have that opportunity to influence.

You remind me— that was well said— you remind me of the influence. So this is not the world's greatest story, but it's a fact. Kodak, when they first started coming out with their film, Kodak picture film and movie film, back then they had to make a choice about skin tone. I don't know if many people know this. So they said that we cannot— our technology, we don't have the ability to reproduce everyone's skin tone exactly. We either bias it to where we optimize it for people with whiter skin tone, or we optimize for people with darker skin tone. So which— what do you think they chose, right? Whiter skin tone. So when you go look at older movies, right, everybody who's Black is just like pitch black. There's no— no, there's just like one massive color. Today when you watch a movie, you see people like me, you see Will Smith, you see all these different colors. Why don't you see that in the past? Maybe some people haven't noticed that. It's a bias that's built in. So back to your thing about biases, biases are everywhere. Biases is what makes us human, right? Some of you people like Trump, and then probably everybody wants to hang up from this call with me saying that or something, I don't know, right? But even that joke, it's just that biases everywhere. So don't feel bad. I mean, yes, do your best, but we're humans, we flaw, right? That's why we fall in love and that's why we argue and that's why we come back together. It's the way it is. But yes, you have a big influence. History is built— the bias is built into stuff that's changed the course of history. And here we are at it again. Do you understand how big this moment is, right? And all you who are programming now, I want you to be so damn excited. Yes, do your job. Go to your customer, give them the extra idea. This is that moment where you as a developer, you've been programming like nobody sees me, I don't get the respect I deserve. Talk, baby. I mean, you know, I'm from New York if you haven't figured out, I'm not originally from Oslo, right? It's too much emotion, right? Right. But speak your piece. This is your moment. You want to be, you want to make Bill Gates look poor? You could do that, right? There's always going to be the next famous person. There's going to be always the next Elon Musk. Why not you? All you have to do is speak and tell people what you feel and just be polite, right?

That's—

that's— this is such an exciting moment. The more you know, you coders, and you're not going to lose your job, you're going to take over the world. But if you don't say anything, most likely they'll keep you at a desk in some corner and just plugging away, and I don't think that's you, right? This is that go-for-it moment. Do we have more cool— that was good. Let's stick to the questions. Any more good— that's just good stuff.

We have, yeah, we have one here. When I ask all these great questions of what I want to do and the AI helps me achieve it, how do I prevent from accidentally having a prejudiced AI and thus do bad things, hopefully by accident, like hiring or raising income on prejudiced trained AI? I think you've kind of just been touching on that subject.

Yeah, I have a great answer for that. Okay, I'm gonna look deep into the camera now. Don't you dare ask the AI what you're gonna do with your life. That's not a question you ask the AI, right? That question, who are you, what do you want, what do you love, What do you hate? What moves you? What makes you cry? Who are you? Right? What, what, who am I? Where do I exist? Where do I want to be? That's not an AI question. That's for you. That's for you and a long walk. Right? That's where you start. Don't start with going to the AI and outsource it. Well, why do you want to outsource? Should I, should I take her on a date? A-A-A-Amazon Echo, Alexa, tell me. That's kind of crazy. Maybe, you know, that's good for people on Tinder, I don't know. But—

You mean we shouldn't have the Magic 8-Ball skill enabled on our Alexa?

Andy, you're showing your age, Andy.

Well, I will show my age. So I am a kid of the '80s, right? So all of our movies were about AI getting smarter than us and maybe not in a way that's like WarGames, hopefully not, or Terminator, but maybe something a little bit more like Minority Report, right, where you're guilty before you commit the crime, or we see prejudice in the judicial system. I mean, is there a concern that AI will start to run us in a way that it does point us a direction that maybe we're not too smart to catch on to till it's too late?

It already has. It already has, right? But it hasn't taken over. So the story I I remember when you say that is in the US, of course, they utilize an AI system to look at, to help judges who have too many cases. They don't have the time to review everything. They gave the AI the history, what was it, 50 years of cases and conclusions, and the AI read everything, understood the process, and then the AI looked at the judge's current log of cases, and the AI then told the judge on this specific case, there's a 92.4% Certainty this person is guilty, da, da, da, da, da, da. The thing ran for 2 years and then somebody finally asked, we should assess this. Has this AI been accurate? What happened was the cases they gave was predominantly people of color and every person of color was guilty. When the AI looked at the current judge's cases for the next following 2 years, anybody of color was like a 97% guilty rate, regardless of what the crime was. Right? Um, so they had to go back and they had to reevaluate, take those people out of jail, had to redo their trials. What a mess, right? So it's already being implemented. And the thing is, I mean, geez, look at Facebook. Here's a secret, and this is what you want to talk about, conspiracy. So I remember 4 or 5 years ago, uh, Zuckerberg standing up, I remember, on some stage, and he said, Facebook, we know so much about you. He goes, we know with 80% certainty where you will be 24 hours from now, what street corner, and who you're going to be with. They announced that 4 years ago. I have been since using Google and any search engine I could find to try to find that announcement. It's gone. I can't find it. But I remember him saying that. I remember everybody talking about it. Now you can't find that. Facebook— now that you guys are nerds, you probably know this. So if you're running Facebook in one of your tabs in your browser, Facebook is looking at all the other tabs that are open. And is watching you, right? I'm going— I could go on this. Look, you got to be careful because the AI is already gathering all the data about you. And then we were talking about Sidewalk the other day, where Amazon on June 1st in the United States, at least maybe global, Amazon's turning on this software called Sidewalk, which means all Amazon devices will talk to each other. So if my Amazon Echo is not connected to the internet, it's going to use— I forgot which technology, um, Logan, maybe you remember. I don't know if it's Bluetooth or— it's going to use probably Bluetooth or some other technology, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, and it's going to connect to other devices and it's going to keep on sending that message until it finds a device that's connected to the internet to send that onto Amazon, right? So what happened if I take a device and I put in the middle and I just want it to be a, uh, you know, just a responder, just to pass it through, a relay, sorry. But I'm going to record everything that's going on. This stuff is happening. So it already happened. AI is embedded everywhere, is utilized everywhere. Um, it came out that Facebook's technology is being utilized by something like over 50% of all the police departments in the United States for facial recognition. The question is, if not, it's already done. If whatever Twilight Zone, Black Mirror type scenario you want to think of, it's probably already done. The beauty of it is, what do you want to do with it? What do you want to do, right? Don't be intimidated, right? Protect your privacy, but there's things you can do. But you know, we're so far into AI. You know how, you know how technology's gone far is when it's got a lot of hype and it goes quiet. It went quiet because it's now everywhere.

Yeah, and I think it's one of those things, right, where— and it's hard, like this is a very two-sided coin kind of conversation, right? Because we talk a lot about the fears around privacy and prejudice and, you know, and bad AI decisions and things like that. And then there's this positive side of it, right? That, you know, that can be inspirational, that can be very powerful. And I think it's one of those things where we have to— I mean, I was even in the airport security line the other day and it was going very slow and there were like 3 of us. So there's no reason for it to go slow. But it was that thing of you kind of stand there and go, well, I'm giving up convenience for security, right? And I think with AI, there's a lot of that, right? That there's this side of it that's like, what's good for our careers? What's good for society at large? Because AI can help us make decisions we wouldn't make for ourselves that are more accurate and better informed. And on the other side of it, we have to then give AI all of this information and access to our lives in order to, to make that happen. And I think there is kind of this, this balance to it that's difficult.

It's a new market.

We're—

I was gonna say, it's a new market. We're exchanging our personal data for services in augmentation, you know, like you were saying. We're exchanging, you know, we're exchanging convenience for security. And times— a while back when I was still traveling, you know, I had, uh, I was getting ready. I tend to— I look like I'm in Philadelphia. I'm actually in California. So whenever I am, you know, traveling, I get up really early to have to be able to get out and get anywhere in the world at a reasonable time. And I was on my way to Philly and I get this little ping from Google saying, hey, we see that you're traveling to Philly. It's raining there. Do you want to pack an umbrella?

Nice.

Ah, nice. So NLP to read my emails, kind of creepy, I will admit. Read my emails. I hadn't turned that on. But you know what? I did not have an umbrella packed. It was bright and sunny and dry, bone dry in California as it normally is. And I would— I wouldn't have had a jacket. I wouldn't have had anything to deal with the rain, and I would have been very soggy for a week. It's like, I grabbed my umbrella. It was, it was useful. There was an exchange of data for a service, and, and that, that's a balance that we have to choose for all of ourselves, that what is that level of creepy for this service that we're willing to exchange. I'm willing to exchange Google seeing some of my emails for that. I'm not willing to exchange it to Facebook, so I don't have a Facebook. I don't feel like I get anything back from that exchange.

So that's personal choice, right?

Yeah.

And that's— and that— so one of the things I see coming down the road, and if any of you want to do a startup, make a lot of money, here's a free idea. Um, we have the fintech movement that you all know about, right? There's going to be a new bank, not just bank of currency, but the bank of my data. I need somebody to hold my data. Who's going to be the broker of my data to Facebook, Google, and any other company that's down the road? So there, there's— it hasn't started yet, but there's going to be a big movement if you want to make a lot of money. Just people's personal private data, right? And if I choose to give out my data, how do I profit? How do I generate revenue from my data that's being utilized all over the place? Because it makes— to me, it's insanity that people using the data and they're making money and I'm not, and I'm— it's my life. So this, this shift you're going to see coming. But I want to paint a very powerful, beautiful picture because we've been a little bit too much attention on the negative. Let's put some positive on the AI, right? So let's look at Neuralink. That's Elon Musk's company, right? So if you don't know Neuralink, Neuralink has come out with a little chip that you embed into your head. It's actually placed behind the ear, and it's a small little CPU, and it's got all these very tiny hairs. It had hundreds of hairs, and it goes— they put it, insert it into your brain, and it connects into the brain, right? And by the way, this surgery is all done in an outpatient in 1 hour. So they modeling like the LASIK, you know, when you go get your cataracts fixed, right? So they have a white robot, you lay down, and this robot inserts, puts in the Neuralink, pulls it out. Now, why do you want to have a CPU in your brain? Neuralink, this coming Christmas— I'm so excited— in 7 months, They will be inserting into somebody who is a paraplegic. They're paralyzed from their neck down. Okay, what the Neuralink does is not only a CPU, but is actually a supercomputer put in a CPU. It's got Bluetooth, it's got Wi-Fi connected, and it's connected to their neural network, right? And that neural network has been trained, it's got incredible amount of data. So that means that your brain is now connected to a neural network and tremendous amount of information. But the beauty of this is this: they take a second Neuralink. So let's say you got in a car accident and your spine was severed around C4 or C5 up here, whatever, and therefore you can't move your legs. You haven't been able to walk. They're going to insert another Neuralink at the point in which your spine broke, right at that bottom point where the messaging no longer goes down from the brain. Okay, so to put it in C5, it broke at C4 and C5, they're going to insert the other Neuralink here. So now when your brain says I want you to stand up. Remember, when you think it, because your name, your, your, your, your spinal cord is broken, the messaging doesn't go through. It's now going to send a wireless signal from the brain wirelessly down to C5. So it's going to supplement, it's going to replace the spinal cord, and the— but your legs and your whole lower body go, oh, it's time to stand up. So they've done this. If you again Google while I'm talking, Neuralink, and then the pig So they announced about 4 months ago, they came out with this video of a pig. And they actually, what they did was they watched the pig walk and the pig trained the AI on how to walk and how to gait. 2 months ago, Neuralink had a, they trained, not trained, they had a monkey, just give me room on this one. They put a Neuralink in the monkey and the monkey started to play Pong. If you guys like Andy are super old, some of the young people don't even know what Pong is. Where the ball goes this way, you move the thing, it hits it, and you put the thing back. It's like tennis. The monkey started to play Pong wirelessly. Wirelessly. But what this also means for the nerds out there, because you have Bluetooth in your brain, you'll never need a mouse again. Because you, you have Bluetooth. Whenever you think whatever you think, you can start writing reports just by thinking it. You can start controlling any Bluetooth device in the world. You could— so my point, to go back fact of what the beauty of it is that this December, people who are paralyzed, people who have Parkinson's where you're shaking all the time, one of the things they're doing is with Parkinson's that, you know, you're going left, you're going right. What the chip is going to do is going to do counter is saying, okay, you want to go left, now go right. So you counter it. So now you can actually, instead of shaking this cup, you could actually— the person with Parkinson's can drink a drink, um, the hot cocoa like I have. So as of this December, because of this training, because of the AI, your loved one, this person who suffered, who's been suffering or something, they actually will not have Parkinson's. They will not be disabled. They actually be able to walk. They'll be able to jump. They could— this is huge. And this is AI. This is monster. And, and they're not— that's not curing a disease, right? That's doing something else. You're sort of fixing, but you're not curing. The person still has that problem. Right? It's better than wearing an exoskeleton where you got to tie this whole thing to you, right? We've seen those videos. Now it's inserting a chip here, another chip where the damage occurred, and the injury occurred. And now mom, dad, your son who's 13 years old and played a football game and they broke something by accident, he can now— or she, she can have, you know, she, she was doing whatever, playing soccer. This is a big deal. This is AI. And we don't— we spend all this time on this negative Anybody ever has somebody in a family sick, wouldn't you do anything to help them? Come December, AI is, you know, this is a big deal. So let's spend some time on that. And then another one, and this is more on the business side, uh, there are now new contact lenses coming out. And I forgot the Tom Cruise movie, Mission Impossible, where he had the contact lens and you could do all that stuff, right? So that's real. Remember, anything on Hollywood is in reality. Okay. So you're going to have contact lenses. And if you have blue eyes or brown eyes like me, if they come color-coded, they too have wireless built in and everything. So when you're in a meeting and somebody asks you a question, you can just, you can think about the question. You could query the question. The answer will come back and you'll have all the information in front of you, but the person in the room won't be able to see it. You're able to look at a person and go, who the hell is this person in a meeting? Before I shake their hand, who is this? You'll be able to see, there'll be like a little bubble that appears. This guy's name is Bob, his kids' names are this. We're here, we're here now, and this is a beautiful thing. But we spend so much time on this, and that's why I'm saying, what is your— who are you? You want to talk about wellness? Figure out— so, well, you'll take your whole life to figure out who you are, but start asking yourself that question. Don't ask the AI that question. You ask the AI, you know what, I love— I, you know, I can't go to sleep unless I do this, right? In my life, I've started 3 startups, and my wife hates that fact because every time it's 4 o'clock in the morning and I nudge her, she goes, "No!" Because that means I'm about to quit my job and do another startup, right? It's the way of— it's just what happens in my house, right? So, you know, just because when I'm sleeping and then I have— but it's something that I have to bring to— that's just have to be born. I have to I quit my job. I got 3 kids. I got a mortgage. I don't care. This idea has got to live. This is what I want every one of you. If you had that thing inside of you, that unwritten book, that other thing that must be born, this is your moment. If AI is able to cure Parkinson's, paraplegics, Jesus Christ, I think he can help you with your idea.

Someone helpfully mentioned in the chat that the Tom Cruise film was Minority Report.

That's right.

That's right. We've got a couple of extra questions here. So what a new company should have as a culture to be AI-friendly. Are there any books on this subject, please?

Okay. I don't know any books, but I would strongly recommend that you listen to Simon Sinek. Last name is S-I-N-E-K. Simon is excellent in the area of culture and corporations. If you want, he has free presentations on YouTube. So Simon Sinek, beautiful stuff in there about culture and corporations. Great stuff in there that you don't need to buy a book. He has a book. He— oh yeah, his book is, um, Start with Why. Start with Why. Yeah, that's a phenomenal book, absolutely phenomenal book. As a matter of fact, get the audiobook, is worth it. Um, there it is. Yeah, start with that, right? This culture is everything. Culture, if you're a lot, you know, you guys, these are multinational, multinationals, you know, I work in nothing but multinationals. Culture is complicated. The time of COVID is even more complicated. Well, coming back to the office. So we had a meeting today and I was emphasizing to the different CEOs in the different countries the fact that on that first moment when people come back to the office, what are you planning? You actually have a chance to redo the culture of your corporation right now. What are you planning when that person comes right back into the office? This is a big deal. A lot of corporations, the culture is set. You actually can reset it because everybody's been gone for 12 to 15 months. When everybody comes back, what are you going to do? So I had thrown out a simple idea. If you have no any other idea, I want you to make waffles. And that you get there, the CEO, CTO, CIO, the more nerdy you are, put on an apron. I have a bunch of aprons I can lend you. I can FedEx it to you wherever you are in the world if you need a cool apron, right? Get there and make— I want you to make waffles. I don't want you to outsource it. And I want you to greet people. I want you to give it to them. I want you to say hi. I want you to ask them 'How are you? How you been?' You will set off a new culture in your company like that. You could, you, and you, because it's eye-to-eye contact, it's love. It's why does food represent, you know, you have grandmothers, you have moms and dads, they make food. Food is in so many cultures, is all about bringing people together. Simple idea. You can reset your whole culture of organization by that one gesture, and it costs you what? How much is a waffle? 5 cents? I don't know, it's almost free. It's a joke. Right.

That's a really good example, I think, Thomas, of where, you know, and we have some questions around what are the human traits that, you know, AI really lacks, right? And I think, I think that's where you're hitting with these cultural points, and that while AI can augment us and certainly help us be more aware of our needs and each other's needs and things we could be doing, I, I do think that there's this human element that without that, of course, it all becomes cold. We've all been living in these Zoom boxes, so we all understand how technology can try to replace real interaction but fails. And so, you know, I think that's a really good point in that there are, there will always be things, I think, even as advanced as we might get, and maybe one day we'll all have little Haley Joel Osmets running around like the Steven Spielberg movie. But, you know, I think that's a far, that's a long way off to me, right? It can mimic it certainly, but I think that human element is something that's really hard to replace.

Can I— let me, let me, let me tone it down even more. I've been high level the whole time. Let me turn it down. This is for everybody out there. I want you guys and girls, whatever, to hear my words. Here's the question I'm asking: do all you remember the first time you fell in love? Everybody remember that feeling, right? Everybody remember the first time you kissed somebody? Do you remember The moment before you puckered up. Do you remember when you were like, okay, okay, should I go for it? Should I not go for it? Oh my God, is this the moment? Do everyone remember that? Your head is sweating, your toes are like this, your stomach is turning, right? You're an absolute mess. Should I go for it, right? And it's just a kiss, right? Program it. Go ahead. You guys are good. You'd be a bunch of nurses and technologists, data scientists. Program it. Write that damn algorithm. Write that code. I dare you. For every single one of you out there right now listening to it who had that reminiscence, who were remembering, saying, yeah, Thomas, that feels good, I remember that, is different. Not one of us have the same damn reaction. We all sweated. We all thought something different. The hormones in our bodies are different. Program that. It's impossible. You can— we cannot— we will never ever be able to program love. We can make a simulation of love. But when you fall in love, when you fell in love with the person you're in love with today, when you see someone that's attractive, the things that happen to you is so unique to you. When someone is sick and your baby's crying, your baby's crying, whatever, and it hurts your heart, that's unique to you. We can't program that. There's no way. We can make assimilations based on studying 100 million people. We know that this, this, this, this, this, this happens. But you, you are so, so amazing and so unique, and that is your superpower against AI. You are. Do you have any more questions? I hope— was that okay? Did I get too weird on that one?

No, that was a great reminder. I think it was a great reminder. We're seeing some notions here in the chat around, you know, you know, just like, like, like you talked about Logan's personal choice. I think we all make personal choices. There's times when we want to be off the grid. There's times times when there are people that want to be off the grid all the time and they want to— maybe they're in a trade or they're an artist and they just kind of want to live a simple life somewhere, right? Um, and someone said a simple life with wine at least. But, you know, of course, um, you know, I, I think, I, I think you're right. I think there is still this human spirit, human nature for us that is, um, that we all know that, that we want these things in doses. Is it around us certainly at times when we don't realize it? Of course. Right? But I think, I think there are those life choices that we can make, whether they're for a period of time and you're going on your social media fast or whatever it might be, or, or if it's just a permanent life choice to say, this is what's healthier for me, for my life, to take on this, this, you know, um, you know, these characteristics. I, I think that still will always exist in, in, in human culture.

I think I agree with you, and it's to me quite obvious. COVID exposed how important you are to me and I am to you, how important even that annoying person in the cubicle over there— have they been driving me nuts for years? I actually kind of missed that idiot, you know. Can anybody relate to that, right? Um, And with that, regardless, we need each other. And that's what COVID reminded all of us, that— and as programmers, as technologists and all that, then how can you bring people together? How can we take care of each other? How can we love each other more? A matter of fact, I've used the word love a lot. I'm very comfortable with it. You've got to get comfortable with it. If you want to figure out who you are, get comfortable with saying the word love. It's not That's not a feminine word. It's not— this is all crap. I hate when people start saying this. Love is it. Love is like core of everything. Put that in the code. You want to put too much bias, put bias of love, you know, just, just swallow it, just fill it up with that, right? Human beings— COVID has shown we need each other. The digitalization during COVID we all became nerds, area, but at the end of the day, what was lacking was this. We miss it. Matter of fact, I was talking to one of my colleagues, and, uh, she lives alone, um, for the whole COVID thing. And I said, listen, I need to ask you this question. I mean to hurt your feelings, but I have to ask. When's the last time you got a hug? She says, 14 months ago. I can't imagine. No physical contact with someone else for 14 months. That— we were not made for that, right? So there's a big open area called being a human with tech that we haven't even tapped into, right? You know, so you guys, I mean, really, you have— there's so much work to do. You're not— so to go back to your original question, are you going to lose your job to AI? No, the more human you are, the more nerdy and human you are, the more you're gonna— AI is gonna be your— I want to use the B word, but I'm not allowed to curse because I'm trying to be professional. But you guys know what I mean.

I'm sorry, your helper.

Yeah, your helper, right? You'll make AI your helper. But this is the attitude and the perspective you should have. This is— we, you know, we've only begun.

Really.

And, and I think human beings, we need each other. We're too special. We're very— you know, AI can— you put an AI into a robot and the robot could look like me and all that crap. That robot will never be me, never be you. You're too special. You're too amazing. You're too— you are too much you, and that's a beautiful thing. Be proud of who you are. And now let's just let the whole world see it. That's it, baby. You know, this is nothing about fear, it's all about love. I'm a— look, I'm a hardcore nerd and I figured out a long time ago, love, that's it, that's it. The mind nerd background, telecom expert, AI expert, love. Very simple.

Thanks, Thomas. I think, um, that's a really nice note to end on. We're coming up to the hour now. We have got quite a few more questions, but we won't have time to address all of them. So perhaps if we send them to you after the session, maybe you could answer a few of them, if you wouldn't mind, and then we can share that with the recording of the session.

No problem. I can even put it on my podcast and stuff like that. So yeah, whatever you like.

Perfect. Okay, thank you very much for your time today. I'm sure everyone will agree it was a very Interesting session, and you didn't get to a single slide. This is true.

Yeah, mission accomplished.

Because listen, um, talks like this, you don't do these with slides, right? I'm sharing everything I got, all my epiphanies that I've gathered in life. It's called love. That's what this presentation was about, right? It's an example of you could be a nerd and you could be yourself. And hopefully I touched a lot of you, made you reflect, you know. So the hell with slides. Slides, slides are for people when you don't know what to say. Yeah, I'm done with slides. Um, I just want to say one thing. I said the podcast, just for all you, look, I have a podcast called Soul of Innovation. It's on Spotify and all that. If you like the way I talk, Listen to that podcast because I feel like sometimes when I do a talk, people are left with, yeah, yeah, and then the next day sort of dies down, and 2 or 3 days later people forget. If this actually meant something to you, this, this, this way of seeing the world, listen to the podcast. I don't make any money from his damn podcast, it's free, right? Just so that you have someone who wants to take care of you, right? As I always say at the end of every one of my podcasts, I love you from the bottom of my heart. I'm honest to God, to all of you, I love you. All right? Be a nerd, be proud, be everything, but love yourself. Okay? So I thank all of you for giving me this opportunity to talk. And yeah, this has been wonderful. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Thomas. Thank you. Thank you for talking with us today. We really got a lot out of it. So, so thank you. And we love you too. We love you too.

Thank you. Thank you. That means a lot. Take care, everybody.

Bye everyone.

All right.

Bye.