Seeking Delphi™ » Podcasts

“We are all now connected to the internet, like neurons in a giant brain.”–Stephen Hawking

Unless you are living in a remote cabin completely off-grid, it has reached the point where you cannot avoid artificial intelligence. It’s in our search engines, it’s on our phones, it’s on the social media on our phones. It’s permeating the internet at a breakneck pace.

Annie Hardy, a fellow member of the Association of Professional Futurists and a senior visioneer at Cisco Systems, spends most of her working hours assessing the future of artificial intelligence and the internet. She joins me in this episode of Seeking Delphi, for an in depth look at where it’s headed.

Scroll down to find relevant links to podcasts mentioned in the program.

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Episode #66–AI and the Future of the Internet, with Annie Hardy

Annie Hardy

Relevant links:

Seeking Delphi #30 : Ambient Computing and Digital Twins, with Katalin Bártfai-Walcott (2019)

Malicious Life podcast #67: Triton, a Malware Designed to Kill Humans, Part 1 (2020)

Malicious Life podcast #68: Triton, a Malware Designed to Kill Humans, Part 2 (2020)

Seeking Delphi #54: The End of Jobs, with Jeff Wald (2021)

Be sure to subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and many other podcast outlets, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”–variously attributed

The above quote dates from the late 19th century. A 21st century version might well be, “everybody talks about disruption, but can anybody do anything about it?”

One person who has strong ideas on what to do about it is Roger Spitz. He is a former M&A investment banker and current venture capitalist and advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network. He is also a fellow member of the Association of Professional Futurists. His new book Disrupt with Impact, Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World, provides a roadmap for doing such.

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and many other podcast outlets, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Roger Spitz

Episode #64: Disrupt with Impact, with Roger Spitz

Disrupt with Impact on Amazon

Be sure to subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and many other podcast outlets, and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”–Charlemagne

This podcast originally aired in March of 2022

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”–Charlemagne

I wouldn’t call future fluency a a new jargon. I would call it a unique and practical way of looking at foresight–of integrating it into the culture of an organization.

Dmitriy Zakharov is a fellow alumnus of the University of Houston’s graduate foresight program. His recent volume Future-Fluent equates foresight with language. He breaks down it’s component parts into syntax and semantics and discusses how to implement this point of view of the future into your life and your organization.

In episode #58 of Seeking Delphi Dmitriy tells us of his journey to write the book, and explains what it’s all about.

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, and YouTube.    You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook. Now also on I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts

          Dmitriy Zakharov

#58: Future-Fluent

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, and YouTube.    You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook. Now also on I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts

“The internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us.””–James Veitch

Our daily lives are overloaded with information from more sources than anyone can can count. Your smart phone is substantially more connected to the world of information than the network TV newsroom of just a couple of decades ago. How does one make sense of it?

In this first of a new series, Two Futurists Talking, I’m joined by fellow futurist Mike Courtney, of Aperio Insights, to sort out our views on some recent news stories that have intrigued us. What are the possibilities that can emerge from our futurist points of view?

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, I Heart Radio, Podchaser, Blubrry Podcasts and many others. You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook.

Mike Courtney

Episode #63, Two Futurists Talking: Global IT Outage, Bird Flu, and Weaponized AI–with Mike Courtney

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, I Heart Radio, Podchaser, Blubrry Podcasts and many others. You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook.

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”–Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlett)

What is the fodder that feeds generative AI? Of course, there is massive software programming, but creating useful output requires data. Tons of data.

Anne Boysen has a masters in strategic foresight from the University of Houston and a graduate certificate in business analytics from Penn State University. Working in high tech for 6 years, she also works on foresight projects and uses data mining and analytics in her research. She is generally recognized as one of the top data experts in the professional futurist community. In this episode she provides an overview of the state of big data, and its importance in “feeding” today’s generative AI models.

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts and many others. You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook.

Episode #62: AI and the Future of Big Data, with Anne Boysen

Anne’s Outline:

Trends

Less public access and ethical considerations

If data is the new oil, the land grab is coming to an end. That time when anyone could grab a piece of the digital turf and put up their yard sign unsuspectingly is fading away. You still can, but you now know you may not own mining rights to the treasure beneath the soil of your homestead. 

This realization has made people more cautious, and considerations around IP and privacy make important data less accessible. Tech companies are also more protective of user generated content for liability reasons as well as their ability to capitalize on it. It wasn’t long ago that Elon Musk decided to put Twitter’s public tweets behind a paywall. I can not longer use Application Programming Interface (API) to access tweets to do sentiment analysis for my foresight research, which was vital to monitor trends I could not access any other way. Being able to take the pulse of public opinion was a phenomenal way for futurists to gain early insight into trends that otherwise would have stayed below the radar and the big headlines. This is monopolizing not only the data, but the AI models that feeds on this data.

So we see an inverse curve where there is more hope tied to advanced models, but less access for these models to feed themselves.

Thankfully, the way we store, extract, transform and load our data is advancing along with the models, so we can get more “bang for our buck”. Different types of data used to be stored in siloes, so businesses had a hard time accessing even their own data for analysis. It too lots of time for cleaning and combining. But with the entrance of Data Lakes, we can now store different data formats in combinable ways, giving us better access to unstructured data and then query different formats together. 

Another way to overcome data scarcity is through creating synthetic data. This is a way to make sure the core distributions remain intact but we add some “jitters” to camouflage certain aspects of the original data or create larger quantities.

There are different reasons why we may want to use synthetic data. First and foremost, we may want to remove personally identifiable information (PII). Even if we remove name, address and other identifiers from an original dataset, it doesn’t take many combined data points to reconstruct a person’s identity. The beauty of synthetic data is that we can remove all this and still keep the aggregate level distributions to see the main trends.

We can also use synthetic data to create more data. I did this recently in a deep learning model and it worked remarkably well. I was worried the synthetic data would overfit the model, but when I later got access to more original data of the same source, the performance stayed very close to it.

Of course this is a drawback with synthetic data. You don’t really get to discover the outliers, what we futurists call fringe or weak signals, so it’s just going to maximize the patterns we already have.

In this scenario we will still train large models even if data is less accessible. It may be tempting for some to train models using bad data or diluted derivative data produced by AI. This is like ingesting vomit. The “nutrients” have already been absorbed, meaning the variety and serendipity that existed in the original may be gone. This is very different from synthetic data, which keeps the properties intact. Many people mix this up.

A few words about Generative AI. Much Ado about not a whole lot at the moment. This has to do with an incongruence between the type of LLM GenAI is, the type of data it ingests, how it trains on it on the one and most real, “unsexy” business needs on the other.

Generative AI such as LLMs will probably help businesses in some hybrid form, but not as the “out-of-the-box” solution we see today.

Future of data conclusion

–Synthetic data will make up for reduced access. This will reduce important outliers and regress to the mean even more

–Peak access to random data is behind us

–Opt-in data will never be representative

Previous Podcast in this AI series

#59–Transitioning to AGI, Implications and Regulations with Jerome Glenn

#60–Investing in AI and AI in Investing with Jim Lee

#61–Keeping it Human, with Dennis Draeger

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts and many others. You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook.

“Anyone who thinks there is safety in numbers hasn’t looked at the stock market.”–Irene Peter

Nowhere do we hear more about artificial intelligence than in the world of investing. Nvidia and other major AI-related stocks are in the news every day.  Is AI over-bought and due for a correction?  Perhaps at the peak of Gartner Hype Cycle?  Beyond that, how much is AI being used to make investments, particularly by institutions?

One person I know who is well qualified to answer those questions is financial futurist Jim Lee.  He is a fellow member of The Association of Professional Futurists and alum of the University of Houston graduate foresight program.  He also happens to manage $100 million in assets for Stratfi (Strategic Foresight Investments, LLC)

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts and many others.

#60: Investing in AI and AI in Investing with Jim Lee

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts and over 2 dozen others. You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook.

http://www.andertoons.com

This episode was originally aired in October of 2019.  The inaugural ASCEND conference was cancelled due to Covid-19.  It was held virtually in 2021 and live in 2022.  The 2023 event will be held in October. Significant NASA accomplishments in the three plus years since this recording was made include the deflection of an asteroid, the first Artemis moon rocket launch, and the stunning success of the James Webb Space Telescope.

A new space race is upon us.  But unlike the two-way competition days of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, it is now a multi-player  race to dominate and exploit the final frontier.

Where does NASA sit in all of this, in the rapidly changing world of the second space race?  In Seeking Delphi episode #35, host Mark Sackler gets an overview of where the agency is headed, from former NASA program director for launch systems, Dan Dumbacher.  There’s also a very special announcement of the upcoming ASCEND** space conference, slated for Las Vegas in November of 2020.

**Accelerating Space Commerce,  Exploration, and New Discovery

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Orion Capsule. NASA

https://seekingdelphi.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/dumbacher-redux-final.mp3

Episode #35 (redux) NASA, the Next Ten Years, with Dan Dumbacher

YouTube slideshow for episode #35

Links:

NASA home page 

ASCEND space conference 

Dan Dumbacher biography  

AIAA 

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Follow me on twitter @MarkSackler

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”–Charlemagne

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”–Charlemagne

I wouldn’t call future fluency a a new jargon. I would call it a unique and practical way of looking at foresight–of integrating it into the culture of an organization.

Dmitriy Zakharov is a fellow alumnus of the University of Houston’s graduate foresight program. His recent volume Future-Fluent equates foresight with language. He breaks down it’s component parts into syntax and semantics and discusses how to implement this point of view of the future into your life and your organization.

In episode #58 of Seeking Delphi Dmitriy tells us of his journey to write the book, and explains what it’s all about.

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, and YouTube.    You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook. Now also on I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts

          Dmitriy Zakharov

#58: Future-Fluent

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, and YouTube.    You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook. Now also on I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts

“So I submit to my colleagues here today that hydrogen is not as far away as we think it is.“–Bob Inglis

In February of 2017, Seeking Delphi featured Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Inc. founder and CEO Bill Smith, in an episode entitled What Ever Happend to Fuel Cells.

Not much was happening in early 2017. The market for hydrogen fuel cells, and hydrogen in any form for that matter, had been stagnant for for over a decade.

Five years later, boy has it turned. Hardly a day goes by without reading something in the news about hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells. From mega green hydrogen grid storage projects, to long haul trucks–and even hydrogen power underwater and in space–the hits just keep on coming.

In this episode, Bill joins me again to discuss what has changed since he last spoke with us and–most importantly–where it’s is all headed.

You can subscribe to Seeking Delphi on Apple podcasts , PlayerFM, MyTuner,  Listen Notes, and YouTube.    You can also follow us on twitter @Seeking_Delphi and Facebook. Now also on I Heart Radio, Podchaser and Blubrry Podcasts

Disclaimer: I joined Infinity as director of corporate communication in June of this year.

William F. Smith                                                                                    Click image for website

#57: Update on Fuel Cells and Hydrogen

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