Artificiality: Minds Meeting Machines

The latest Big Ideas report from MIT Sloan and BCG makes for an interesting read but contains flaws, obvious conclusions, and raises more questions than it answers.We discuss this report and make some suggestions about how to think about AI based on the survey’s conclusions:* trust matters (no-duh). The data suggests if people trust AI they will use it twice as much.* ability to override the AI matters (no-duh). The data suggests if people can override the AI they will use it twice as much.* people describe an AI as a co-worker but the majority of people don’t even know they are using it. Huh?Another surprise is that people like AI that means they don’t have to talk to their boss. Who would have anticipated that?Nudges of the weekHelen: Synthesize Later. Integrate argument and counter-argument into a decision. Good decisions involve reconciling subjective judgments and resolving clashing causal forces. The best way to do this is to be deliberate and conscious of the need to synthesize. Schedule a meeting titled “synthesis” and set expectations that now is the moment to step slowly through each point of view, iterate, and nudge each side. Have each side make a list of the things that would bring them toward each other. Failing to do this contributes to a sense that the decision is stuck.Dave: Be Less Wrong. Let go of perfectionism and feel the relief of knowing that by striving to be less wrong, you’ll probably end up being more right.What We’re LearningHelen: The Neuroscience of You by Chantel Prat. Delivers on the promise of showing you how your brain is different. Really fun and engaging book to read and do all the tests.Dave: Learning from Helen! He’s been reading the first draft of our next book Solve Better Problems: How to Solve Complex Problems in the Digital Age. Complexity really is a different animal and it’s mind opening to understand why.If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe on Substack or your favorite podcast platform. And please leave a positive rating or comment—haring your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world's great minds. Seriously, a review on Apple podcasts is a big deal!And if you like how we think then contact us about our speaking and workshops, and human-centered product design. You can learn more about us at getsonder.com and you can contact us at hello@getsonder.com.You can learn more about making better decisions in our book, Make Better Decisions: How to Improve Your Decision-Making in the Digital Age. The book is an essential guide to practicing the cognitive skills needed for making better decisions in the age of data, algorithms, and AI. Please check it out at MBD.zone and purchase it from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or your favorite local bookstore. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world

Twitter as we knew is gone. Elon has fired half the full time employees and 80 percent of the contractors. It’s a brutal way to trim excess fat, reset the culture, and establish a loyal band. But is it a good decision? How could it go wrong?Elon is incredibly successful at running engineering companies. But if you look at his failures—the fixes he hasn’t been able to affect—they are all in the zone of people; specifically networks of people and machines. He’s consistently failed to accurately forecast driverless technology and he’s overestimated the capabilities of robots when it come to human-like fine-grained automation. Our key question regarding Twitter is this: is Elon grossly underestimating the people factor in Twitter? As Dave says in the podcast, “he's taking a group of people that work in a system, that have personal connections, have human connections, the kinds of connections that are required to be productive, and he's treating them like bits and parts in a car factory, or like working capital. Something that you can just discard half of and continue going with half of it. He completely misses the fact that people in an organization like Twitter require the other people that are around them.”One of the good things about Twitter was its intellectualism and commitment to getting better. By all accounts, the culture was one of making a good decision based on considering many (complex) factors. It evolved based on many selection pressures—advertisers, users, activists. Now it’s going to be a place where one person makes what they consider to be the easy decision with an ideology that a system shock is the best way to force a new equilibrium. Elon would rather fix than futz. This is potentially a perfectly rational strategy. Indeed it may be the only one given the company faces significant financial pressure (in part brought on by Elon’s previous decisions). But the problem with how it’s been done at Twitter isn’t the speed the scale, or even the cruelty. The problem is that it’s all about creating complete unyielding loyalty. A Twitter where you’re either with Elon or against him. We aren’t the only ones to point out the irony of the situation. Almost overnight, the so-called champion of free speech has created a total FIFO (Fit In or F**k Off) employer.Will Twitter still operate as a global public square? What will happen next?Helen: I’m 80 percent confident the answer is yes. We’ll adapt: that’s what humans do. And Elon has an engineering challenge here that he can act on: it’s a financial engineering challenge. Dave: Yes, but people will be more cautious. “I think people will be more cautious. I think having a singular billionaire, slightly autocratic feature, a figurehead makes decisions willy nilly, throws people in or out, has thrown away all of the guardrails or any form of ethics, is going to have a long standing impact on the platform. So it's going to make people a little bit more wary about it being the trusted place. Dave’s Nudge OTW: Break Up Problems EarlyA company struggling to make the company decision framework function. The real problem? It’s hard to make a decision framework (who could decide what) work before you even know the problem you have. The nudge helped Dave step back and see that the real problem was that people need to understand that they are dealing with different types of problems—hard decisions, complicated problems, complex scenarios.Helen’s Nudge OTW: Plug the LeaksA great nudge for improving willpower. No decision is too small. Which means no action is too small either. Stop focusing on the big mass of motivation and focus instead on the trajectory or velocity. What you should do for an hour, do for 15 minutes instead (for example, writing or working out).Final Thing Helen: Klara and the Sun. The latest book from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. Wonderful story about the relationship between an artificial friend and a teen. Says Helen: “I think it is clever because it doesn't beat you over the head about what an artificial consciousness might be. It requires quite a lot of discovery to figure out exactly how Klara is operating in the world, what the nature of her conscious perception actually is. The more you know about AI, the better it is because you see so many different angles into the way that an artificial mind might process the world. And ways that could lead to enormous flaws in relying on artificial friends.”Dave: Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell. He’s an old friend of Dave’s from Apple who has a lot of wisdom about people and products. “Sometimes the people you don't expect to be amazing, the ones you thought were B's and B pluses, turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They're modest and kind of just quietly do good work. They're a different type of Rockstar.” Says Dave: “I totally agree with him. This is so under appreciated. Those people won't show up very high on Elon’s list. I would imagine that he probably threw out a whole bunch of those people because they don't show up at the top of whatever performance metric he's using.”If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe on Substack or your favorite podcast platform. And please leave a positive rating or comment—haring your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world's great minds. Seriously, a review on Apple podcasts is a big deal!And if you like how we think then contact us about our speaking and workshops, and human-centered product design. You can learn more about us at getsonder.com and you can contact us at hello@getsonder.com.You can learn more about making better decisions in our book, Make Better Decisions: How to Improve Your Decision-Making in the Digital Age. The book is an essential guide to practicing the cognitive skills needed for making better decisions in the age of data, algorithms, and AI. Please check it out at MBD.zone and purchase it from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or your favorite local bookstore. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world

We all likely want to improve the organizations we work in. We might want to improve the employee experience, improve the customer experience, or be more efficient and effective. But we all likely have had the experience of feeling like our organizations are too difficult, too entrenched, and too complex to change. Any organization—large or small, public or private—can feel like a faceless bureaucracy that is resistant to change. So what can people do who want to affect change? How do you accomplish things that can seem impossible? To answer these questions, we talked with Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai about their recently published book, Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team. Marina and Nick have deep experience in one of the largest, most complex bureaucracies in the world: the U.S. government. As technology leaders in the Obama White House, Marina and Nick undertook large change programs. Their book contains their stories and their advice for anyone who wants to affect change. We find the hacks in their book quite valuable, and we wish this book had been available early in our career when we were both in much larger organizations. We love the fact that their hacks focus on the people and working within a system for change—not the move fast & break things mentality of Silicon Valley. Above all, we appreciate that it’s clear that Marina and Nick thought deeply about what they would have wanted to know when they embarked on the significant technology change programs they undertook in the White House and Veterans Administration. Marina Nitze is currently a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis response firm that specializes in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina was most recently Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education. Nick Sinai is a Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, a VC and private equity firm, and is also Adjunct Faculty at Harvard Kennedy School and a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Nick served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House, and prior, played a key role in crafting the National Broadband Plan at the FCC. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

How will AI change our jobs? Will it replace humans and eliminate jobs? Will it help humans get things done? Will it create new opportunities for new jobs? People often speculate on these topics, doing their best to predict the somewhat unpredictable. To help us get a better understanding of the current state of humans and AI working together, we talked with Tom Davenport and Steve Miller about their recently-released book, Working with AI. The book is centered around 29 detailed and deeply-researched case studies about human-AI collaboration in real-world work settings. What they show is that AI isn’t a job destroyer but a technology that changes the way we work. Tom is Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, Visiting Professor at Oxford's Saïd Business School, Fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte's AI practice. He is the author of The AI Advantage and coauthor of Only Humans Need Apply and other books. Steve is Professor Emeritus of Information Systems at Singapore Management University, where he previously served as Founding Dean of the School of Computing and Information Systems and Vice Provost for Research. He is coauthor of Robotics Applications and Social Implications. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

We humans make a lot of decisions. Apparently, 35,000 of them every day! So how do we improve our decisions? Is there a process to follow? Who are the experts to learn from? Do big data and AI make decisions easier or harder? Is there any way to get better at making decisions in this complex, modern world we live in? To dig into these questions we talked with…ourselves! We recently published our first book, Make Better Decisions: How to Improve Your Decision-Making in the Digital Age. In this book, we’ve provided a guide to practicing the cognitive skills needed for making better decisions in the age of data, algorithms, and AI. Make Better Decisions is structured around 50 nudges that have their lineage in scholarship from behavioral economics, cognitive science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Each nudge prompts the reader to use their beautiful, big human brain to notice when our automatic decision-making systems will lead us astray in our complex, modern world, and when they'll lead us in the right direction. In this conversation, we talk about our book, our favorite nudges at the moment, and some of the Great Minds who we have interviewed on Artificiality including Barbara Tversky, Jevin West, Michael Bungay Stanier, Stephen Fleming, Steven Sloman and Tania Lombrozo. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

We all do things with other people. We design things, we write things, we create things. Despite the fact that co-creation is all around us it can be easy to miss because creation gets assigned to individuals all too often. We’re quick to assume that one person should get credit thereby erasing the contributions of others. The two of us have a distinct interest in co-creation because we co-create everything we do. We co-created Sonder Studio, our speaking engagements, our workshops, our design projects, and our soon-to-be-published book, Make Better Decisions. We’re also interested in how humans can co-create with technology, specifically artificial intelligence, and when that is a good thing and when that might be something to avoid. To dig into these interests and questions we talked with Kat Cizek and William Uricchio whose upcoming book Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice. Kat, William, and a lengthy list of co-authors have presented a wonderful tracing of the history of co-creation across many disciplines and societies. The book is based in interviews with 166 people and includes nearly 200 photographs that should not be missed. We hope that you all have a chance to experience their collective work. Kat is an Emmy and Peabody-winning documentarian who is the Artistic Director and Cofounder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. William is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also Founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. Their book is scheduled to be published by MIT Press on November 1st. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

How should we respond and react to artificial intelligence and its impact on the world and each other? How should we handle the risk and uncertainty risk caused by the permeation of AI throughout our lives? To tackle these questions, we talked with Gerd Gigerenzer about his recent book, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World. We talk with Gerd about the impacts of big data on making decisions, the increasing use of AI for surveillance, the risks of trusting smart technology too much, and the broader impact of technology on our human dignity. Gerd is the Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the author of several books, including Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings, and Risk Savvy and the coeditor of Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions and Classification in the Wild. He has trained judges, physicians, and managers in decision-making and understanding risk. We thoroughly enjoyed Gerd’s book and recommend it to both those new to AI who may be looking for an approachable introduction and to those expert in AI who may be looking for a new perspective to think about the future of our digital world. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

We all want decision-making to be easier. We want simple tools and frameworks that provide a process for no-regrets decisions. But it just isn’t that easy. Despite how much we understand about the science of decision-making, the act of making decisions is frequently quite difficult. And the quantity of data we can now access to support decision-making doesn’t make decisions easier, it actually makes them more complex. So what to do? In his book, Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, Eric Pliner argues that the best way to approach complex, subjective decisions is to first understand your own subjectivity, morals, and ethics. In this episode, we talk with Eric about his book, how he advises leaders to make decisions, the importance of aligning intent with impact in the world, and how to think about the role of data in decision-making. In addition to being an author, Eric is CEO of YSC Consulting where he works with leaders and organizations on leadership development, organizational culture, and strategic diversity and inclusion initiatives. As frequent listeners know, we spend a lot of time working with people on how to make better decisions and it was a true pleasure to talk with Eric about how he approaches this topic and how he helps leaders tackle difficult decisions. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

We’d all like to be healthier—to sleep longer, have lower stress, and have more energy. But is it possible for an AI to help us accomplish this? And how would that experience feel? What data would we need to provide? How would the AI encourage the behavior changes required? Would it feel like a friend or a bully? Would it work at all? To answer some of these questions, we talked with Tom Hale, the new CEO at Oura. Oura makes a fascinating device that monitors a long list of signals from your body all through a ring on your finger. That ring connects with an app on your phone that gives you lots of data about your health. Perhaps most interestingly, in addition to the facts about your health, the app provides suggestions for what you might do differently. And it provides those suggestions in a way that seems cautious about making too many conclusions, leaving the true agency with you. Neither of us owned Oura rings before our conversation so we couldn’t bring that experience to the podcast. But after our conversation we both decided to buy one and give it a try. Our sizing kits are on the way and the rings will follow soon after. We’re planning to record our reactions to the rings so subscribe, if you haven’t already, to get an alert when we publish our experience. Prior to joining Oura, Tom was President of MomentiveAI, previously called SurveyMonkey, Chief Product and Operating Officer at HomeAway, and a long-time executive at Adobe Systems. Tom’s personal experience with the Oura Ring before becoming CEO is what tipped the balance and got us to be some of his newest customers. We’ll be interested to hear if any of our listeners do the same. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai 

We all love stories—they are one of the most important ways that humans communicate. Stories create heroes to root for and villains to revile. Stories create realities and help us align our values and objectives with others. But how do stories change in a world that is awash with data and is overwhelmed by large tech companies that try to motivate—or manipulate–us with stories using data that we don’t see and can’t comprehend? To help answer these questions, we talked with Frank Rose about his recent book The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World. Frank’s book is inspired by his Strategic Storytelling seminar at Columbia University and is a wonderful resource to help understand the power of narrative thinking. In addition to being a senior fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, Frank is the director of Columbia’s pioneering Digital Storytelling Lab and a frequent speaker on narrative thinking and on the power of immersive storytelling. Frank’s writing and journalism career started in the punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice and continued as a contributing editor at Esquire and then Wired. He has written several books including West of Eden about the early days of Apple Computer and The Art of Immersion about how the digital generation changed storytelling. We greatly enjoyed talking with Frank about one of our favorite subjects: telling stories in a data-driven world. About Artficiality from Helen & Dave Edwards: Artificiality is a research and services business founded in 2019 to help people make sense of artificial intelligence and complex change. Our weekly publication provides thought-provoking ideas, science reviews, and market research and our monthly research releases provides leaders with actionable intelligence and insights for applying AI in their organizations. We provide research-based and expert-led AI strategy and complex change management services to organizations around the world. We are artificial philosophers and meta-researchers who aim to make the philosophical more practical and the practical more philosophical. We believe that understanding AI requires synthesizing research across disciplines: behavioral economics, cognitive science, complexity science, computer science, decision science, design, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. We are dedicated to unraveling the profound impact of AI on our society, communities, workplaces, and personal lives.  Subscribe for free at https://www.artificiality.world. If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world’s great minds. Learn more about ⁠⁠Sonder Studio⁠⁠ Subscribe to get ⁠⁠Artificiality⁠⁠ delivered to your email Learn about our book ⁠⁠Make Better Decisions⁠⁠ and buy it on ⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠ Thanks to ⁠⁠Jonathan Coulton⁠⁠ for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.artificiality.world. #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #futureofai