Artificiality: Being with AI

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 

Many of our listeners will be familiar with human-centered design and human-computer interaction. These fields of research and practice have driven technology product design and development for decades. Today, however, these fields are changing to adapt to the increasing use of artificial intelligence, leading to an emerging field called human-centered AI. Prior to the widespread use of AI, technology products were powerful, yet, predictable—they operated based on the rules created by their designers. With AI, however, machines respond to data, providing predictions that may not be anticipated when the product is designed or programmed. This is incredibly powerful but can also create unintended consequences. This challenge leads to the questions: How can we design AI-based products that provide benefits to humans? How can we create AI systems that learn and change with new data but still provide consequences intended by the system’s designers? These questions led us to interview Ben Shneiderman, an Emeritus Distinguished University Professor in the department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Ben recently published a wonderfully approachable book, Human-Centered AI, which provides a guide to how AI can be used to augment and enhance humans’ lives. As the founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, Ben has a 40-year history in researching how humans and computers interact, making him an ideal source to talk with about how humans and AI interact. 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 can we augment our thinking spaces to increase creative solutions? How can we make those solutions real by mastering complexity?” Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau ask and answer these questions in their ambitious and visually stunning work, The Nexus. In their book, Ottino and Mau take on a big subject—how to augment your thinking by integrating art, technology, and science. It is a thought-provoking and curiosity-enhancing book—perfect for rewilding your attention with its glorious footnotes and gorgeous visuals. Our takeaways (not to plot bust) for being a Nexus thinker: * Experiment—the world is too uncertain to spend too much energy and time overly planning and analyzing, whether it’s from data or from intuition. We have to learn to dance between data and intuition, to be in both the rational and emotional at once. * Develop the art of coexistence. We are trained (and like to think) in terms of black and white, A versus B. We have to learn how to hold opposing ideas at the same time and yet be still able to act. This is hard but artists do it all the time and leaders can learn. * Complex systems require us to think more and more in terms of tradeoffs. And complex systems exhibit a property called emergence, where literally behaviors we can’t predict emerge as a result of the system. The job of leaders is now to create conditions that allow for successful emergence. * The best opportunity to tackle the world’s greatest problems—those of unprecedented complexity—is by working at the Nexus, where art, technology and science converge. Ottino and Mau challenge us to think beyond the boundaries of our specialities and training, to be curious about how others in unrelated fields discover knowledge and find their creativity. It is thinking for our age, where design becomes the method for discovery. 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 hear a lot about harm from AI and how the big platforms are focused on using AI and user data to enhance their profits. What about developing AI for good for the rest of us? What would it take to design AI systems that are beneficial to humans? In this episode, we talk with Mark Nitzberg who is Executive Director of CHAI or the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI and head of strategic outreach for Berkeley AI Research. Mark began studying AI in the early 1980s and completed his PhD in Computer Vision and Human Perception under David Mumford at Harvard. He has built companies and products in various AI fields including The Blindsight Corporation, a maker of assistive technologies for low vision and active aging, which was acquired by Amazon. Mark is also co-author of The AI Generation which examines how AI reshapes human values, trust and power around the world. We talk with Mark about CHAI’s goal of reorienting AI research towards provably beneficial systems, why it’s hard to develop beneficial AI, variability in human thinking and preferences, the parallels between management OKRs and AI objectives, human-centered AI design and how AI might help humans realize the future we prefer. Links: Learn more about UC Berkeley CHAI Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your email Learn more about Sonder Studio P.S. Thanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music 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 

Barbara Tversky, an emerita professor at Stanford and a pioneer in spatial cognition, reveals how our understanding of space influences abstract thought. She discusses the limitations of language in reflecting our cognitive processes and the creative power of sketching. Tversky explores the challenges of self-driving cars, emphasizing cultural differences in driving behaviors. Her insights challenge current AI designs to consider spatial reasoning as a crucial element, demonstrating that our relationship with space shapes not just thought, but also how we interact with technology.