How AI Shapes Human Identity and Flourishing | Swapnil Shrivastava (Adobe)

If you have got very, very strong attention and observation, you will be a much better application designer than I am.

Welcome to Vlad on Leadership, interviews with technical leaders and operators about the leadership questions AI just made harder. I'm your host, Vlad Moskovski. I partner with senior technical leaders and CEOs of small to mid-sized companies who are excellent at the job, That's keeping them stuck. I know a little bit about this, but our audience doesn't. And I want you to tell me, what was the inspiration for having that as your background? And what's with the hands?

I thought like I created all this for this interview, but yeah, this is like genuine playfulness that I possess. So, and then so nice, Vlad, you talked about the inspiration because actually that is a genuine thing. So when I came to US for the first time, probably in 2005, I went to Adobe office in San Jose. And in that building, they run this, this 4-piece puzzle, like since, I think, '86 or '88, whenever Adobe was formed. So Chuck Gresky and John Warnock, they were like playful people. They had that kind of, you know, pattern running on the top of the building, which you can see, and people have deciphered. Of course, it was super complex. That was my original inspiration.

Hmm.

And then when I started working from home, see, when you're working from home, this same boring background always. So there has to be some dynamic element that you can see because you are the one who is seeing yourself all the day.

Hmm.

So that, that was the original intention and inspiration. And so I started with intention last year when I showed you, probably you came to the house, it was attention is all you need. It was written on left and right and there were human figures. These things are taken from IKEA. So that was a different puzzle and it was an open challenge for my team to solve that puzzle. Of course, that was easy. I've encoded those figures into the date. So whatever the date was today, those figures will do something. And of course, one of my engineers, she's a machine learning engineer, she cracked it. And yeah, I was super happy.

So, so not only do you lead a team, you lead a team where you challenge them to try and solve a puzzle that's sitting in your room that they see every time they talk to you. That's so great. That's so clever.

It's— and not everyone is curious like that, Vlad. So it sounds, it sounds so amazing, but not Believe me, I was, I was also very happy. And I do this during the winter shutdown. And I was like, oh, everyone will be like super curious, but nobody is. Only few people who are, who are just driven by curiosity.

You know, this is a great interviewing strategy, actually. I'm surprised no companies do this, is you interview the candidate and you have a puzzle in the background. And this is the true test of curiosity, is not what kind of questions they ask you, but can they notice the background in the the puzzle in the background. And then the brilliance of it is, can they solve it? If they solve it, you're hired.

Of course. See, that shows— I always look at like what— see, looking at the person, if you have a peek into their surroundings, you will gauge a lot.

Yes.

Right. Of course, you can always frame these things. But yeah, coming last thing I want to tell about the background, manifest the future by inventing it. It's my original thought. And there is some connection between those hand gestures And the phrase. I have never given this kind of hint to anyone.

Okay. Okay. So that's, that's the clue. So if anybody is watching this, if you can crack the code, write to me and you will win something.

Oh, I'll definitely give— I've given a gift to her, whoever cracked the last.

And Swapnil will give you a private flute lesson.

Much more than that. I'll give you a gift.

All right. So Swapnil, my first question to you besides this, which is really just fun and shows people, it shows me a lot about your personality. And what you value. You said that you've been really deep into AI, and conversations that we've had in the past, I get the feeling that you have a particular perspective on what AI is doing to people right now and what the challenges and opportunities are. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because you're in a huge company that in some ways, you know, big companies right now have— they've always had an advantage. I think right now they have less of an advantage than they've ever had. Tell me what you're seeing.

But yeah, there are a couple of things special about my perspective. And as you rightly said, I'm looking at all this being in a company, big established company with established business for last 40+ years. And how are we embracing? Earlier, whoever got money and business and end users will always carry on with things, right? Right now with AI, I think somehow humans discovered an intelligence, how to encode that intelligence and And the way it is working is the more scaling that you are doing, the deeper the pockets that you have, the better you can train those models. If you have the frontier models, then you are in the race. Otherwise, you are just catching up. So only these frontier model companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, these are in the race. Everyone is just trying to catch up and see what is happening in the world. And Adobe is also trying to understand that. See, we, it's not that we don't have intelligence. We have amazing research teams. Okay. But for last 40 years, we have been researching how to be creative, how to empower creativity, how do we be best in this business of offering tools to the creatives. Now suddenly we invented intelligence which can do the creativity. So a lot of designers are also like struggling for their job. We are also trying to understand where do we fit? Where do we take all our knowledge of building these creative tools? How do we implement it? put that into the models or into the agents, which is written on top of the models. How do we do it? So all of us are like, see, there was code red in OpenAI because of Gemini and Banana. It's code red in Adobe, and we were trying to find what is the right solution. Do we have an agent along with all the players that are building these chatbots, or we have our own chatbots? Writing chatbots is so simple, like anyone can sit during the weekend and write it. So all the teams are writing their chatbots, having their, but it's, it's code red. So unless we all join hands and see that what, what is happening, where are we, where is AI taking us? It's, it's not that we are taking AI anywhere. If you, if you look at the way this whole technology has emerged, and so interesting, last week I gave a talk on AI to all of my product managers, around 100 people.

Mm-hmm.

how AI evolved, what's inside LLM and all those stuff. So it's so contextual. What I see is the genie is out of the box. Okay. Now there's no, we are, we won't be able to control it. It's only, we know how to work with it. That's the only way.

Yeah. Yeah. It makes me think about this, these conversations that people are having about AI alignment. For those that don't know, AI alignment is about These intelligences are moving so quickly, they're evolving so quickly, literally in the spans of months, new versions are coming out that are more intelligent than the ones before, and they're being benchmarked. And pretty soon, these intelligences are going to be so intelligent that we won't know. We won't, to your point, Swapnil, we're not going to be the ones in control so much. And as I understand it, the alignment issue is Will they be aligned to human benefit and human flourishing? And this is the word for me for the week, human flourishing.

Right.

Will they have their own agendas? Because if they have their own agendas, who knows what kind of reality will be created? And so, so this alignment piece is really interesting to me. And it makes me think also of the way that you put it, Swapnil, makes it almost seem like the intelligence wants to emerge. It is born through us. It is not a tool that we make. It's the way Michael Pollan in his books talks about how apples and marijuana have almost used us to, to, to get ahead, evolutionarily speaking.

I feel the same, actually, Vlad. This is so interesting that you mentioned, and I did not know about it. But before I get there, I want to understand What is human nourishing? Like, if that is the word of the day, what did you get into? Flourishing, flourishing, human flourishing.

So, so to me, and, and, you know, I advise quite a few companies and startups who are building things on top of these tools. And, and to me, there's a lot of stuff out there that makes life slightly more convenient, slightly better. A lot of these tools, Don't even claim to go that far. I really think that technology is one of our most incredible superpowers. I love technology, but why, why build it if not for the betterment of life? And then if you're going to support human flourishing, you have to know what is flourishing. How do you know if you're flourishing or not? And I'll give you a concrete example. I was coaching an engineer the other day. Someone that I support is in a fast-growing startup. And I asked him, I said, so, so what are some of your biggest challenges? He said, well, honestly, when I wake up in the morning, anxiety hits immediately because I know the expectations are just going up and up and up because the tools are there. I'm not coding anymore. I'm not focused on one project. I have 6 agents running at the same time. I'm task switching between all of them every 5 or 10 minutes. It's so hard to keep track of all this in my head. And frankly, I'm really not enjoying life. And so we started working on, okay, well, what does that mean? How do you enjoy life better? And part of it was his relationship to Slack. Part of it was his relationship to task switching. We had to put in some systems. So, in a way, he's more productive. Is he flourishing? No, he's actually maybe more miserable than he was A year ago.

Yep. Completely agree. And this connects so well with what you said. Marijuana, Apple, AI. AI is sucking blood out of humans. At least that's what I feel last weekend. And I left coding years, like 6, 7 years ago, but now this is so addictive again because what you're doing is, I was, I'll tell you the interesting stuff. All my family members were there in the house. I was playing flute. And in the front, my agent was running. So I will, and I, it was—

Is this the beginning of a joke?

It's like sitting at like almost at the corner of the room and I was playing flute and then agent kept on running. And when it returned, I will go back. I'll give another instruction to the agent. It'll run for another 10, 15 minutes, and then I'll continue playing. That happened for almost 2 or 3 hours.

Mm-hmm.

And I had a great output after that. That's another thing that on that weekend, I exhausted all the limit of, you know, Claude Desktop. But the thing is, it is becoming so addictive. Why it is becoming addictive? Because it's feeding on human attention so much. It's like magic. Nobody of us has seen any sort of work like this, that you give an instruction. The next best thing was an intelligent human sitting with you. And you give instructions and it was humanly impossible, the kind of instructions that you're giving, you will see the feedback after probably a month, right? And you see it after 10 minutes. It's like magic. So everyone is getting through that. And as humans, we will try to optimize on it. And some people will lose control and everything, and then there will be a reform in the workspace. But yes. It's real.

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See, everyone is saying that, you know, there's the maker, everyone, there's a new job called maker that will be there in all, all that is, it's a rosy way of putting things. And when you say maker, everyone is a maker. See, if I'm, I'm have experience of writing software, It doesn't matter anymore. If you have used the software, if you can explain how we have used the software, if you have got very, very strong attention and observation, you will be a much better application designer than I am, despite of my 17 years experience in coding. Because most of the time as engineers, you, you would have solved coding problems, which are no more anymore. Like you have, you know how to draw or like drive stick shift. But that whole world is gone. Nobody drives that. Okay.

It's all automatic now.

It's all automatic. And it doesn't even matter that you will think for some time that, oh, I know stick shift. It doesn't matter at all. The world is not there. Like, see, for example, maps. We used to go, when I was a kid, we used to go everywhere around the town without any maps. All of us, right? We are into that age. Now nobody, nobody, like I have seen, if they even have to go to a familiar place, they will show the map because it gives you additional information. Like ETAs and other stuff. So the world is changing. Everyone is Claude augmented. That's the word for me today. Claude augmented. Okay. So when everyone is Claude augmented, what is one, your identity? And second, what is your strength? If you have any identity. So see, in terms of identity, yes, we will have identity. And you were alluding to that. You touched upon it. I, at least as of now, Do not have an objective function. And I'm coming to that own discussion. AI at the core is just a next word predictor. Okay? We don't have anything else other than that. There's no reasoning, there's no intelligence, there's nothing. It's just next word prediction. Okay? So whatever we want to call. Now with that next word prediction, with a lot of good training, good architecture, evals, and human brain and all those stuff, You create such kind of machine which starts to feel like reasoning or intelligence. Okay. That's what we have. So for this machine, there has to be an objective function. There has to be a context through which it will start. Okay. There has to be a seed to start the tree. So that seed will be given by human. Mm-hmm.

Okay.

That's at a very abstract level, but at a very concrete level, human judgment Okay. Will be the identity. If you can judge something, okay. And that too, you have to be a better judge, which AI doesn't have. Okay.

Now I hear the word taste a lot. Is taste and judgment the same thing?

It's exactly the same thing.

Okay. Okay. I don't know if in 3 years my sense of taste will be any better than Claude's. To be honest with you.

It will be. It will be.

You think so?

Oh, yes. See, and that's— this is what I heard in one of the AI talks. Measure of everything is human. Okay, be with me. I don't know what point I'm getting to, but something is coming up. So measure of everything is human. End of the day, the best interface with a human to extract the opinion or the judgment, where will be the systems that will come into play? And by which I mean that, see, right now the interface between me and Claude is such a weak interface, right? I need to think about something, then I have to convert that into words and all this stuff. It'll be eventually the thought processes. Things will soon be able to read my thought processes, right?

Right.

Because thought process is a physical process. And of course, we humans have invented how to read them. Eventually AI will make sense out of it. You know, Elon is working on it and so many people. So that would be the interface of the future. But at the same time, people who can think about new things, right, will be at the forefront. Rest of the execution process and everything will be super fast because rest of the things are going super fast.

Okay. So creativity will be the new cutting edge.

See, what is creativity? Let's, let's come to that. What is creativity? And because once we define that, then we will be able to feel, because these things are like very subtle what we are talking about. Things are going to shift a lot.

Yes, yes, yes. Because, because you talked about new ideas. And so I'm curious for you, like, let's say you have an idea for something. If anyone can execute whatever they think of, Then what you're saying is, it's the coming up with the thing. It's— and to me, if I break that down, that really is about how do I view the world? Do I have good judgment and discernment to understand what is the problem that I want to solve or the thing that I want to create? And then do I have a good enough and deep enough way of understanding that thing. That, that's my breakdown. So I'm curious, what is yours? What would you add or change to that?

See, Vlad, see, these things are very, I would say, patterns which can be understood. So all the things that you talked about, if you break it down, they are sort of rules which you have learned. Right? Training. So if you have learned it based on data or based on your information, based on information, AI will be able to learn all that. Okay. All parts of systems. So eventually what Willard has done or what Swapnil has done, AI will be able to do it very easily.

Okay. So if these are all patterns, who is Swapnil outside of the patterns?

Yes. So that is where I think humans, some humans will go. Okay. I want to come back to your statement of human flourishing and, and, and connect it with the observation of man is the measure of everything. By the way, do you understand this statement? Man is the measure of everything.

Maybe you can explain it more, cuz I think I understand what it is, but maybe I understand it differently than you do.

So I think this was extracted from a quote from Pythagoras. Pythagoras is the same guy who, who invented Pythagoras theorem. That men is a measure of, you can look at the world or look at a human being and understand that what is happening in the world. Okay. If you think, and the same example, if humans are forgetting about stick shift, that's the world we are in, right? So looking at the men, you can measure what is happening. Is the environment improving his or her intelligence? And when I say men, I mean like either men, women, or just like a represent, like Like, I represent mankind. You represent mankind.

Yes, mankind.

So Sam's statement shook me deeply that any, any kid who is born after ChatGPT will never be more intelligent than ChatGPT. Okay. He said that. He said that. And, and all of us know that is true. That's the worst part. Okay. So you know where I'm going.

But lead me there.

So if, if as humans we are getting to be common because all of us are getting trained by the same intelligence, okay, we will become very, very common. We like the same things. We will, and social media is already doing that. And social media will be much more smarter. And see, ChatGPT knows more than me about myself and more than me about My wife knows less than what ChatGPT knows. Like we have been together for 21 years. So these intelligences are going to program every human being. It's only few human beings who will understand this and try to get away or probably try to conquer that and understand at a deep level what is it to be human. And this is the only statement that I'm going to make because it is connected with Jadoo Bhai, Jadoo Krishnamurti. That the reality is beyond thoughts. If you know how to go beyond thoughts, that is where the truth is, because thoughts is always limited. They are just the repurposing of memory, and thoughts and AI are the same thing. Okay? If you can think, AI will have that information. It's only the place where you go beyond thoughts, that is where everything is. And And I don't want to get into that side of things because this is an AI podcast, but we will have another session.

I mean, this is fascinating to me, Swapnil, in a way, because I do think that everyone is talking about AGI and superintelligence and all these things, right? But it's still at the level of data, information, thinking.

Yes.

And your question of if AI becomes superintelligent, AI will for sure shape how we think, just as I actually saw this really funny TED Talk recently that someone sent me, and they were showing statistics that ChatGPT was trained at some call centers in Nigeria. The initial data was trained by call centers in Nigeria, and in those call centers in Nigeria, there's certain words that are used more than, let's say, in North America or England. And it was showing up in ChatGPT's responses. And furthermore, now we're starting to see that those words being used by more and more North American people because ChatGPT is biased towards those words percentage-wise usage.

Wow.

You know, so, so in the same way that algorithms shape what you see when you're scrolling, the same way I completely agree with you is that we will be shaped by these tools. Because it's so easy to be influenced, and we are all influenceable, no matter how intelligent you think you are. So, there is something to be said about what is there past this or beyond it, and it's the place beyond thought.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And, you know, I just ran a workshop, a session in San Francisco, with the question being, What is the connection between AI and your identity? Like, what do you make of it? And the thing that, the main takeaway from this conversation that I had with about 25 people was that if the doing is done by AI, so it becomes less relevant. What's left is the being, back to your point. So I'm curious, you have a teenage son.

Yep.

What advice do you give your teenage son who up until recently, I believe, was actually quite certain that he wanted to go into computer science? I don't know if that's still true. So what advice do you give him for the future?

And actually that question is in turn like people who have kids in certain age or kids who are watching this one, what is the advice that I can give like to a 16-year-old? What I would say is follow your passion, and it can be beyond studies also, because right now the world is transforming. We don't know this will be the way humans are going to live. This will be the way humans are going to study, or this would be the way, these are the kind of things that we will study. Everything is going to change. So what is not going to change is your age. You won't be 16 again. Okay. So that's what I tell to my son, and now his aspirations have changed. Vlad. So he wants to be a DJ. So last couple of years we have been going to a show called NAMM, National Association of Music Merchants. It's a huge, it's like CES of music.

I know it.

You know it? Yeah. So we have been going there. He has been participating in DJ battles there. I'm amazed that 16-year-olds can do that. So that's what, follow your passion, whatever you are good at. Think from that perspective that try to master it. Try to do one thing good. If you like something, go for it. If you like music, go for it. Eventually, your thought processes or your doing will be enhanced by AI. But being that person, being that character is the most important thing. Practice to do that and have fun, man.

Yeah.

I spent a poor childhood, but my son did not. So that's the thing I see.

Okay. So there's some improvement from generation to generation that you could say.

It's going up.

Good. That's excellent. And I, you know, I love your emphasis on mastery, especially. This is something that I personally really believe in. And I think that we in the Western world maybe overemphasize too much the work and the identity around the work rather than passion and mastery of whatever your craft is. I think the new word is going to be craftsmanship.

Yes, I completely agree. I think mostly, if everything goes right, which I'm not hopeful, humans should have more time to themselves, right? See, what are our basic needs? What are the basic needs of humans? Eating. That's it. Eating and having shelter, right? And in 10 years, if we have robots which can do these things, which can grow food for us or make houses for us, that's it.

I would actually add that there's one other need that you haven't mentioned.

Love?

Love, connection. You know, there are these studies that were done, and I think they were done very inhumanely in Eastern Europe, maybe not even intentionally, but these babies were born And they weren't touched. They weren't given—

How long did they live?

Not very long.

Just because they were not touched, but they were fed and everything?

Yes.

Wow.

They would choose touch over food.

Wow. Because I did not have that in my vocabulary and I was like, will I die without love? And that makes sense now that I will die without lunch, without Without love.

You might go a few days without lunch, but without love.

See, as a grown-up adult, it's difficult to think that, but I believe if there was a study, then, you know, it makes sense.

You know, honestly, this is the thing that does concern me a lot more than job loss is the loneliness epidemic. The fact that people are more isolated now than previous generations and the generation before that. And my hope is that people who use technology and not being used by it really start to question, how am I living and what's important to me? Because to me, when I looked at just recently, what are the categories of things that are important to me? Relationships was very, very high up there.

Yes. So definitely, see, there's 2 parts to the, like, physical necessities and mental necessities, right? So in terms of mental necessities, yes, once the physical— physicality, your animal body is taken care of, your human body needs will arise. And that's where I think I miss the relationship and love. Yes, completely agree. Like, And it's so interesting that you mentioned about this loneliness epidemic. What I feel is, and I've seen it all, Vlad. So I was born in a village in India where like there was scarcity of resources. So in a household you will have 20 people and then not a lot of resources. So you will share everything. Okay. And then to a place where you have like 2 acres to yourself and like you're just 2 3 people living in such a place that you don't get to see human beings around. As you move up this level or change, you see different kind of relationships or humans turning into different sort of personalities in that. And a lot of time it is driven by technology. A lot of time it is driven by economics. A lot of time it is driven by how fast you are moving in your life, how much you are working. But that's the first thing that gets dropped, relations and love, because that's easy, right? You won't die without that. And that's what most of us professionals who are giving their blood to AI, that is the first thing that is getting hampered.

It's so fascinating. You drew these 2 juxtaposed pictures of 3 people living on 2 acres and 20 people living in a small house.

I've lived both.

Yeah. And, and there's a question that's arising for me and I don't know exactly how to ask it, but I'm wondering if you could pull, is there anything that you miss of those early experiences? Is there anything that you miss that is in that, you know, your, your 3 people on 2 acres life?

See, you, of course you miss all those, you know, this food that you miss or the simplicity of things that you miss or the thing that don't have to worry that everything is super expensive, or if you don't work for a month, what will happen to the finances and all those stuff. In India, a lot of people are living on such a meager amount of money that even if they lose jobs and other stuff, they still continue to live. And I'm not saying for everyone, people who have accumulated certain wealth, if they have. So the simplicity part of those things is very— like, I miss those parts. But there are other parts to it which I completely do not miss. Yeah.

So, you know, I wanna come back to your background of manifest the future by inventing it. So my last question to you, Swapnil, is how are you manifesting your future?

For manifestation, first thing you need, you need to understand is you need to think about the future. Okay. So what is that? What is the future that you want? Okay. Is this future in alignment with what is happening In real life, yes. So the future that I envision is AI is out. That genie is out of the box. Okay. And it's what I feel like AI is like a kid which is growing up. Its initial you know speech is taught by Nigerians, and and that's what that kid is teaching other people. And and that's how it is going to be. See what it's in a very infancy stage. The only way I leave a mark. is I learn about this whole domain, the AI domain inside out with all you got. And I got a lot of mathematics and computer science in me based on my academics. So what I'm doing is I'm learning everything about AI and my objective is to create a system to disrupt Indian, the teaching of Indian classical music to the next generation of human beings, not just Indian classical music, any sort of music to next wave of humans. What I realized in 5 years, last 5 years is music Is such a beautiful medium for human beings to get in touch with themselves. No other medium will like get you inside, inside yourself. Only music does. So if I can teach how to teach this AI how to be very efficient in teaching human beings music, I would have done my job. So at least future flavors of AI will know how to, you know, put humans at, you know, meditative states and other stuff. So that's my objective, but first I need to understand this beast.

I'm a huge fan of technology, obviously, but I also really love the arts.

Yes. And music. I know you love music also.

And I love music also as well. And so I love that you are combining technology for the purpose of doing something in the arts, which I think does contribute to human flourishing.

Yes, absolutely.

And you're inventing it. So there you go.

And, uh, Vlad, I just want to say I'm probably just a medium in between. I'm not doing all these things, so I'm just getting driven. So I've been driven right from my childhood. And, and, and the reason you asked me like why I shake up things, I still feel like a kid inside. Okay. So as a kid, I was fearless and which I am still, and, and that, that gives you a lot of superpowers.

Excellent. Thank you. Well, I think I'll leave us with the word, may there be resonance.

Yes. May there be resonance.

It's, it's straight out of music theory.

Yes, yes, yes. It was nice talking to you, Vlad. I really enjoyed this.

It's a pleasure, Swapanil. Thank you so much.