The Boundless Podcast

💬 “AI is not your salesperson, stop asking it to do that. AI as a mechanism to support your consumer in their own needs. This idea is a big mind-shift for brands, because their first instinct with AI is to try and use it to sell more. Think, make sure you work for the consumer first. A happy consumer leads in the end, to a happy brand.” @Raj Balasundaram

This is a conversation with Raj Balasundaram

🎙️ Raj is an Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing Evangelist. He is a tech storyteller, mentor and teacher simplifying complex digital challenges into common sense to passionately advocate customer-centricity marketing techniques. It is his second appearance on the Boundless podcast, and we are delighted to welcome him back.

🎧 In this episode, Raj and I talk about the trend towards using AI to serve individual consumers needs at scale. The implications of this are significant, particularly in the fashion industry. Raj described the problem that the fashion business experiences in detail, the over-stocking, the discounting, the environmental footprint and the waste, before and after-sale. He explains that AI has a solution to this and describes what will have to happen with the technology, from the brands and through the consumer for us to get there. It’s an incredible vision and one that will disrupt the whole industry, creating a step-change in the supply chain and the revenues. Although Raj is a Senior Vice President in an innovative AI company, he comes on to the show to share his own personal views and beliefs.

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💬 “It’s not easy for one human being with one set of experiences to understand the implications of AI, and that’s the challenge for a decision-maker. When AI generates a prediction, it can be crazy smart or simply crazy. A leader needs to learn how to tell the difference.” @Karen Silverman

🎙️ Karen is the CEO and Founder of The Cantellus Group an innovative advisory group helping business to successfully navigate applied AI and frontier technologies. She was formerly a managing partner of Latham & Watkins, LLP San Francisco office, where she led the firm’s partnership with the World Economic Forum.

Karen is a leading voice on harnessing the power of advanced technologies and building trustworthy AI and frontier technology systems. She is a globally recognized leader in corporate antitrust matters, having successfully guided hundreds of transactions through complex regulatory challenges and enterprise-critical government investigations to completion. In 2019 Karen was named by the Financial Times as a Top Ten Innovative Lawyer and by the California Daily Journal as a Top AI Attorney in California.

🎧 In this episode, Karen and I talk about what makes AI and frontier technologies such as Blockchain, Augmented and Virtual Reality and bioengineering different from previous technologies and the implications of these differences. We discussed what a CEO needs to know and do to navigate frontier technologies and the big challenges that persist with trying to successfully adopt and scale AI in the enterprise. Karen talks about what her company does to try and address these challenges and where she sees significant innovation opportunities for businesses.

We had a robust conversation about the challenges ahead for HR leaders as they work towards incorporating an augmented and digital workforce and we spoke about business ethics with AI and about knowing where and when to draw the line of data use. Karen explained that we may be better to legislate specific AI use cases rather than the developments or models.

She warns against AI applications suffering the same challenges that genetically modified organisms technologies have, where GMO was viewed as uncontrollable, unnatural and undesirable.

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💬 “Amazon wants to win at e-commerce by removing the sale. They'll send you stuff in the mail and you'd send back what you don’t want. The genius behind that is not that their AI so brilliant that they'll still make a profit, even with the stuff you send back. The genius is that there is no sale. You can't compete with Amazon for a sale, if there isn't one.” Richard Foster-Fletcher

🎙️ My Friday Co-Host is Dr Naeema Pasha. She works for Henley Business School partly focussing on future strategy, vision and operations of business education. Everything from people engagement to tech adoption.

🎧 In this episode, Naeema and I discussed our insights and observations prompted by this week’s episodes with David W. Sime and Geoff Keeling. Our topics included:

💡 1.) new kingdoms and monopolies in VR
💡 2.) persuasion and influence in new media
💡 3.) flipping AI influencing our biases, to AI illuminating our biases
💡 4.) human decision making and climate change
💡 5.) AI and behavioural psychology

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💬 “The point of AI is to satisfy people's preferences, but there are two ways to this. One is to adjust the world to fit the preferences. The other is to adjust the preferences to fit the world. And it seems like the latter is what's increasingly going on. That’s definitely not what we want, so we need a plausible criteria for when somebody’s preferences are being unduly influenced in a way which is not appropriate.” Dr. Geoff Keeling

🎙️ Dr. Geoff Keeling is a Research Fellow in AI Ethics at Stanford University. He is based in the Center for Ethics in Society and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Geoff’s work is about the safe and ethical design of emerging technologies. His current research is about the ethical design and regulation of machine learning in medicine; and the ethics of automated vehicles. Geoff’s broader interests include ethical decision-making under uncertainty, alongside foundational questions about the nature of rationality, reasons, evidence, and probability.

🎧 In this episode, Geoff and I talk pragmatically about how capable and useful human decision making is when we objectively examine the torrid state of nations, equality and the climate. There’s a huge amount of bias in that question, but it’s something that I want to hear the experts answer, albeit many people do not agree with the premise of that question. Geoff addressed this and we examined the role of the individual and society in decision making and the associated payoffs and exactly what reasoning we wish machines to do and when? Also whether this would be better as reactive to situations or pro-active? For example, should machines be permitted to pro-actively intervene when they recognise opportunities to save lives? We talked about the differences between AI meeting needs and influencing needs, and I asked Geoff how thin the line is between influence and exploitation. We talked about Cambridge Analytica and I asked if this group of people could work out how to exploit our innate human biases, could we instead use AI to illuminate these biases.

Coming to autonomous vehicles, Geoff explained and explored the trolley problem, something he wrote his thesis on in 2019, and he was quick to rationalise the limitations with this idea in self-driving cars. I asked him how two non-experts could have a useful and relevant conversation about autonomous cars, avoiding the pitfalls and the hype. I asked Geoff where it’s useful to think and talk about Artificial General Intelligence at this point in history.

We came full circle and again I asked Geoff about human decision making and whether our perspective is limited to a few living voices. I gave my own thoughts on how we largely ignore the needs of animals, nature and the unborn and finally I asked Geoff what people ask him about his work at dinner parties. It was a real privilege to spend time with Geoff, he was very generous with his time and enthusiasm for this conversation. I find his perspectives to be fascinating, and I hope you do too.

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💬 “There's VR hardware out there which is suspiciously cheap. This raises alarm bells. For example, to use one particular headset, you have to log into that social media channel. That’s a company that wants your data.” @David W. Sime

This is a conversation with David Sime

🎙️ David is a multi-award winning AR and VR production manager with over twenty years of digital media experience. David works with Google and the Chartered Institute of Marketing and directs the immersive media agency Oncor Reality. He is a published author on the application of Virtual and Augmented Reality in both mental and physical healthcare.

🎧 In this episode, David and I talk about the risks and dangers of immersive, always-on technologies such as augmented reality. A future that we are accelerating towards where the blended physical and digital worlds become unrecognisable from one another. I asked David about the potential of monopolies ruling in this new digital kingdom, on the hardware, software, APIs and most importantly the data. He has grave concerns about this. David is an XR enthusiast, he leads a business promoting these technologies and is positive about the benefits it offers the world in terms of collaboration opportunities, training and development, reduced travelling and therefore reduced greenhouse gas emissions. But importantly he remains pragmatic about the challenges ahead to keep this technology open and inclusive and protect the public from deeper data harvesting and new technological monopolies.

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💬 “An organisation should be a learning organisation rather than a knowledge organisation. You see you never really have knowledge; you just acquire things and then they go. But if you're a learning organisation, you have to continually change and adapt. It becomes your nature.” Dr Naeema Pasha

🎙️ My Friday Co-Host is @Dr Naeema Pasha. She works for Henley Business School partly focussing on future strategy, vision and operations of business education. Everything from people engagement to tech adoption.

🎧 In this episode Naeema and I discussed our reactions to this week’s episodes with Celina Lee and Miguel Montero de Quadras. Our topics included:

💡 1.) AI opportunities in Africa
💡 2.) the benefit of using AI competitions for problem solving
💡 3.) Where Africa can leapfrog developments
💡 4.) creating a learning organisation
💡 5.) the problems with hoarding data in the enterprise

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💬 “80% of the knowledge your company has collectively is in documents. Documents describing processes, but also emails, casual conversations and presentations. If you want to be a knowledge driven company, you will have to put all this knowledge into one single place. You might call it a digital brain.” @Miguel Montero de Quadras

This is a conversation Miguel Montero

🎙️ Miguel is the founder and former CEO of Atomian and currently its CTO. He is an industrial engineering graduate from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and he also holds a degree in Software Engineering from the Open University of Catalonia. Miguel began developing the Atomian product while he was still a 24-year old student and worked on it for 18 years. He is a pioneer in cognitive computing and used an original system to reproduce human cognitive processes based on symbols, data structures and algorithms.

🎧 In this episode, Miguel and I talk about how companies can harness AI to make themselves more human. The emphasis being on both those words. To be more and to be human. He recommends taking care of your admin and repeated processes with automation technologies and then focussing on using AI to extend the reach and impact of your human employees. This is only achievable Miquel says, when you move beyond being an information or a data company to being a knowledge company. When you find a way to digitally collect and harness all the knowledge that your company has and call upon it to make the best possible decisions. He describes this process, like a company having a digital brain.

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💬 “We can’t compare someone who has a data science degree from a top university in the US to someone in Nigeria getting their data science degree without consistent electricity. Data Scientists in Africa have different insights to problem solving and when they bring these to a company, to a job, to a team, it’s incredibly valuable.” @Celina Lee

This is a conversation with Celina Lee

🎙️ Celina is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zindi, based out of Cape Town in South Africa, Zindi data science competition platform, dedicated to solving Africa’s most pressing problems by bringing together a community of data scientists who collaborate and compete to come up with the best possible solutions.

🎧 In this episode, Celina and I talk about Data Science and AI projects in Africa. We discuss the unique perspectives that Data Scientists have across the continent and we explore her business Zindi in detail. I’m fascinated by open innovation and by the ways to crowdsource ideas and harness external independent individuals to solve problems. This is for two reasons, the first is that I think more companies will succeed in innovating when they can learn how to fluently access and harness crowd wisdom and because when companies do this, their perspectives will be broader and their biases illuminated and potentially neutralised. Celina is passionate about her work, which actually extends to many countries around the world that contribute to her platform. She has over a thousand data scientists that compete in competitions to solve AI problems. They have a real-time leaderboard for each project to see who is making progress, and to succeed, data scientists team up and collaborate from all over the world. Perhaps with Zindi we are getting a glimpse into the future of work.

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💬 “I think when we look at AI ethics, sometimes we feel it is a simple choice between good and bad, but the choice can be between bad and bad, or good and good. And those are the more complex conundrums where simple solutions or simple slogans aren’t appropriate.” Dr Naeema Pasha

🎙️ My Friday Co-Host is @Dr Naeema Pasha. She works for Henley Business School partly focussing on future strategy, vision and operations of business education. Everything from people engagement to tech adoption.

🎧 In this episode Naeema and I discussed our reactions to this week’s episodes with Stefan Jansen and John MacIntyre featuring Michael Berns and a mention for Kieran Gilmurray.

Our topics included:
💡 1.) algorithmic trading and #ESG
💡 2.) the importance of EQ in finance
💡 3.) autonomous businesses
💡 4.) the most useful ways to discuss AI ethics
💡 5.) thoughts on GPT-3

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💬 “Most AI is invisible. It's embedded behind software systems like social media or in industrial systems. I think there's a greater public consciousness that AI is ubiquitous, and a growing concern about what this ubiquity will mean for autonomous decision making in and on our lives.”

This is a conversation with John Macintyre

🎙️ John is the Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences, and Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Sunderland. He has a PhD in applied artificial intelligence, focussing on the use of neural networks in predictive maintenance. During the 1990s John established a research centre – the Centre for Adaptive Systems – at the University, which became recognised by the UK government as a Centre of Excellence for applied research in adaptive computing and artificial intelligence. He has successfully supervised PhDs in fields ranging from neural networks, hybrid systems, and bioinformatics through to lean manufacturing, predictive maintenance, and business and maintenance strategies.

🎧 In this episode, John talks about the recent developments in AI that are making the technology broader in capability and wider in scope. He cites the recent GPT-3 release from Open AI as an example. An AI trained on 175 billion data points. John is highly focused on the ethics of AI and so this theme came up many times in our conversation. He talked about the challenges with encoding mortality and the need to slow down sometimes and challenge the work that is going on. John talked about the difficulties we had during the early stages of COVID-19 to make decisions as the data was limited in use. He talked fluently about the types of safeguards and controls that we need in place to use AI ethically, especially as most AI is invisible to the public. We talked about the need for more diversity in AI teams and how this can help with downstream problems like inaccurate facial recognition systems and he drew parallels to the efforts to reduce the impact of man-made climate change.

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