Immerse yourself in the captivating realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in this enlightening episode of Third Culture Convos. We dissect the swift evolution of AI and its profound implications for our collective future. From the thrill of boundless possibilities to the apprehension surrounding societal shifts and job displacement, we scrutinize every facet of this multifaceted issue.
In this stimulating dialogue, we grapple with the AI paradox: even its creators are still striving to fully comprehend its vast potential. Amidst the relentless pace of progress, we delve into the mounting calls for a pause in AI development.
Join us as we navigate the labyrinth of AI, offering a balanced and comprehensive discourse on this game-changing technology. Whether you’re an AI aficionado, a concerned observer, or simply curious, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in and become part of the conversation shaping the future of AI.
Transcript
Waseem: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the show. Welcome back to Third Culture Convos, where third culture kids sit back, relax, and talk about how weird we are for being slightly different than everybody else. And and today and I, and today, I actually feel that weirdness is extremely helpful in dealing with today’s topic.
Today we’re talking about ai. Now over the last few weeks, I have been, I have dove right into this. One of the, interesting things about AI at this moment is that if you look three months ago, six months ago, six months ago, AI didn’t exist. Like it did not exist as the way it exists today, right?
And. Almost on a weekly basis, there are huge leaps. So I th what the way someone had described it was that there was a like in the curve, you know how in the curve it, things stay flat for a while and then it suddenly exponentially starts to jump. We’re in that exponential jump part of that curve.
And so now it feels every week there’s something new. And for some it brings distress. And for some it brings me, it brings excitement, it brings exci. I’m excited. I can’t wait because
Majid: there is the flip side. For every week that AI is progressing, there’s a human, for every week there’s a human behind the AI quitting.
And warning you that, hey, this is getting outta hand.
Waseem: The these are the two angles I saw. There was a a piece of data that like 48%, which I think is low. 48% of Americans have heard of shat. But I think only, oh, it’s really low. That’s right. I th I think it’s low.
But I think like it was like 12 or 14% have used it. And so the, obviously the u people who have used it are a lot less than the people who have, and so the people who understand it are very little as well. And, so all of including the people that make it they, don’t even understand it entirely.
And. Yeah. And that’s why there have been there you hear about the news about all the like big tech guys signing like declarations of, let’s put a pause on this cuz this could totally change humanity in a way that you’ve, never heard. So I’m gonna try to structure what I’m about to say, or at least this discussion in a way that maybe we can go through a flow of, so that we can actually try to touch all the points in this discussion.
So the first point is the, I think we, are covering is the, what is the AI and the social feelings that people have towards, this. Yeah,
Majid: There’s this topic can be divided and subdivided into a billion categories. Yeah. We can talk forever. This kind of thing can like genuinely affect entire, and by the way, I just wanna take a step back.
We’ve seen technological revolutions that have not been accepted by society until 30 years too late. What I mean by that is our parents and computers and our parents age and computers, they just did not see. The revolution that this device was going to be in the next 5, 10, 15 years. It very quickly went from a household luxury to a university necessity.
Yeah. Over the span of five years. And I find there’s also AI deniers out there who are like, yo, this is just a passing fade. Tha this isn’t this. It’s just a phase. Nothing’s going, major’s gonna happen. And. When I hear that comment, I think about the computer and the parents that like, yo, I don’t know.
We’ve seen major revolutions and they’ve just snuck even the smartphone, for that matter. The smartphone is a soft revolution, technological revolution. Oh,
Waseem: It changed everything. Like you you, before you wouldn’t, you would leave your house you, you, couldn’t forget your wallet.
Now you can totally forget your wallet. Like you, you can’t forget your phone. What are you gonna do? It’s, an extension. Like it is a, it has turned us into biotics, right? Cuz we, we, it is an extension of everything that we need and know,
Majid: and AI is that next step into that process.
It
Waseem: custom, customized, it’s the next leap. It’s not even the next step, it’s a next leap into the, future. And the future’s kind of scary, especially since it’s unknown. It’s
Majid: It’s scary because it’s unknown. Absolutely. And it’s also scary in this way because you are leaving a lot of trust into a machine.
Waseem: Yeah, listen, I think when it comes to trust, yes, and I think when it comes to trust though, you leave a lot of trust. Like I you know what’s scary? The where you leave trust now.
Majid: Absolutely. I know what you, and not everyone who drives a car knows how everything about a car like I do get what you’re saying.
But in this case, the car is reacting. What I mean by a machine is it’s a learn when you combine AI and then machine learning and the machine is actually learning from. Your interactions and your experiences with it.
Waseem: Yeah. Faster than you. That’s a little bit faster than you monkey, right? Yes.
Majid: Yes. The Gary Karo and the IBM computer yo know, I can’t beat this thing,
Waseem: I can’t beat this thing. It doesn’t get tired.
Majid: Like it doesn’t fatigue. Although there was a Reddit clip a month ago where they did an AI robot. And after 15 minutes of labor, it got tired and just quit
Waseem: and overheated. Put a fan in me.
Put a fan in me, attach the fan. Upgrade unionizing
Majid: until we get fans. Fans. For every robot
Waseem: the. Okay, so my first thing when, I started to think about this and, because of, the speed, so I’ve, gone down the rabbit hole, so I’m, in the rabbit hole, like full disclosure and I’m, consuming absolutely everything that I can about AI and using ai at the same time and trying to learn as much as I can right now.
Cuz my opinion is that, you know what the internet. The advent of the internet did to the world. The AI will make the internet look like child’s play. Like basic tools like we we will laugh and, AI today will look like basic tools in 10 years. Like, five to 10 years.
I’m not even going at the 30 like level. I’m going, I’m pretty midterm. And Chad, sorry,
Majid: Chad. G p t alone. Chad, g p t three, and Chad G PT four alone. Just within the one, that one jump from ai who can tell the difference of,
Waseem: and they’re working on five. And they’re working on five. And they’re Oh, crazy.
Yeah. Yeah. They’re working on five and I can’t what’s this thing gonna do? And. So this is all very, and this is just chat j p t, right? This is not all the other ais that exist. So there’s more than one ai. It’s not AI in general. AI is probably the the wave, the big wave. But just as a wave you, can’t separate the waves from the ocean.
You really can’t separate like one from the other. They’re all connected. In terms of with G B T, it’s a language model. So the language model. C p t is
Majid: just the Kleenex of tissue paper. It’s just the fast way of trying to access ai. Yeah. Say
Waseem: AI is there, there’s Bing and there’s Bard already.
So Google has barred and Microsoft has Bing and Cji. PT plays with Bing. It doesn’t play with B with, bar, with Bard or Google. And and how that’s all working out. Then the plug-ins. The plug-ins, oh my God, the plug-ins. Oh my God. The plug-ins, man. The plug-ins. The plug-ins.
Can’t
Majid: the plug-ins. This, is a term I haven’t heard ever before. Okay
Waseem: So, with chat G P T four, you have the ability they set it up so that other companies can make plug-ins, and so it allows for you to use the language model of Chachi PT four to interact with different things either on the internet.
Or in different ways. So one example this was the example I gave my dad because I was talking to my dad last week and I was telling him like how crazy this also was all was. And I told him, imagine. So my and my dad’s an e n t near nose, throat, duck. So I told him, imagine when you were like back in the day, and one of the things that doctors need to do is they got a, a.
Stay abreast of new findings, new research. Like it, it’s hard for doctors cause they’re practicing and stuff, but they just keep an eye on their field and what’s going on. And so they usually go to conferences and they go to stuff and papers come out and they’ll get papers and they’ll get sent papers and yada y and the papers, I told them like what you could do now is that you can ask Chachi PT to.
You can share the, p d F of a 2030 page paper and tell it to summarize the key takeaways for you. And then you can ask it to look for other papers that do the same thing. And so then it’ll search through repositories. And these are all using the plugins, right? Because the plugins allows it to read PDFs, and then it allows it to interact with PDFs.
And then you can even ask it further prompting questions because now it has read the paper. And so you can say what do the authors mean by this? And so having an interactive buddy to explore a paper for this amount of time that would’ve taken you to read the paper. By that time you’re definitely, your learning is accelerated tremendously.
You can either just read the t takeaways and that’ll take you three minutes or, and then you can ask further questions and interact with it. And he, like, he literally, he was like, Go ask it about. And then he started to ask me to ask it about stuff. Because he knows how much, how useful that would’ve been, like how, helpful that is.
And it’s not using it as, because what’s I. One of the key things about these things and support to understand, I think the distinction is that they’re not knowledge bases, like the way you would use Wikipedia or the way you would use Google in the sense that you would look for information.
They’re logic models, so they’re, reasoning centers, so they, can really good at summarizing, at extracting key points at getting information in that way. They’re they’re really good at that
due to some technical difficulties. We just, I just lost so I’m gonna continue this conversation but wrap up in a little bit cuz I want to try doing this on my own. I was wondering what it would be like if I shared this on my own. Cuz the thing that I really wanted to talk about was, How can you cope with all of this change happening as fast as it does, and especially with ai?
And one of the things I was thinking about last week was the concept of the beginner’s mind. So the beginner’s mind is a concept from Zen that involves approaching things as a beginner would, and it comes from the idea that, An expert will see one or two solutions to a problem, but a beginner might see hundreds.
The potential is high when you don’t have a preconceived notion of what something should be. It allows you to be a lot more curious and inquisitive, and curiosity and inquisitive are very happy. And really actually help deal with this ongoing change. And so whenever I feel overwhelmed by the speed at which new information comes our way when it comes to these tools that, like I said, I think are changing the world forever, the, at the same time I get.
I I, remind myself that maybe use the, tool of approaching with a beginner’s mind. Even though it’s, easy because I am a beginner when it comes to this, I’m definitely not advanced that I I, know a little bit, but, and that’s what’s interesting about this, is that it’s new to everybody.
And so even peop there are people that are, like one of the key terms of that. You’re gonna learn a lot about is pro people are gonna know a lot about it in the coming while is, prompt engineering. So the, a strong way to interact with chati, p t or any other AI is to engineer your prompts so that you can get the desired results from them and everybody’s practicing, trying, learning, figuring out how to get the right answer.
Or, to get good answers or to get better information and more accurate information from these language models. By prompting them properly and prompting them properly is a, mindset. It’s a way to think about who you’re talking to and how you can code switch with them or how you can speak to them.
Which brings me to third culture kids. I think it’s very interesting how third culture kids Like having that background, I think will make it very, it’ll make it very possible for you’re primed as a third culture kid because we talk about your ability to code switch or your ability to understand different cultures because you are of different cultures and you’re not just of one culture.
And so you’re able to speak to the the, the. westerner or the easterner, or both sides of your personality and can understand the nuances that exist in different cultural premises and can switch between the two quite effortlessly. That’s become one of the hallmarks of third culture kids.
And so that capacity to do that actually puts you in an excellent position to adopt a beginner’s mind. In terms of communicating with another cultural entity, which is ai, which is ai and the specifics that it requires and the nuances that it requires in order for it to be a a strong conversation or to a conversation that is fruitful that.
Opens up new areas in your mind. And one of the things that’s really interesting about, AI is, and in terms of me saying it, it was a reasoning model more than a knowledge model, is that it allows you to open up new doors that you, in your own head that you may not have been able to do just on your own, because you’re allowed to ha it can exist as a mirror reflecting the things that you put into it.
And so that is a extremely, that is extremely interesting and I think that brings me excitement, but also anxiety because one, one of the interesting things about excitement and anxiety is that they ha they have the same physiological response. So heart rate goes up, palms get sweaty you start to get little itchy and that excitement and.
And energy is also the same thing that happens when you get anxious. And so whenever I feel these feelings with when it comes to, or, and these physiological responses to, as I learn more about about ai I, code switch it and I try to make it okay, man, you’re not just anxious. You can be excited, just jump on it because it’s, it seems like this is one of those trains similar to.
When you’re having kids so, one, one of the experiences that I had while I was having children is that as I, describe it as being on the front of a train, and so there’s no breaks and it’s flying, and the only thing that you could do is either smile or, and just say, come on, let’s go.
Let’s go. Or, because there’s no breaks. You don’t really have any other options really. And like, your attitude is the only thing that you can control really in that situation because the train is gonna fly with, or without you. And so it’s the same thing I think I feel with AI and the, advent of it in in the turning of the tides or the beginning of this, the new dawn the new dawn of our entire.
This is, this changes everything. Like it really does change everything and it’s hard to see now. And that’s not a negative statement, that’s a positive statement. And, it can be negative or positive, but change is coming and change is ongoing. And so what I say instead of. The only thing that you can control about it is your attitude towards it.
And how do you wanna approach this? And are you going to be to some people are dismissive and they’re be like, oh, no way. It’s still gonna happen though, right? And so that’s what I, my sort of my key takeaways from the, conversation around AI right now is for third culture kids. This is the, like you are in the perfect position to.
Take advantage and to explore this new this new age, this new technology this new people are talking about the ar, about sentience, but you are in the perfect position to do that, and I think it’s your calling it, maybe you’re calling to do this and the world needs you. The world needs you to usher in.
This new age cuz it’s happening. I, just, that’s the bottom it is happening and there’s nothing that any, I don’t think there are breaks to be pushed. And even with the declarations being there are no breaks to be pushed. And so you as a third culture individual, you as a third culture kid, it is up to you to use your inherent abilities to help usher in.
All the generations around you and everybody around you to reduce anxiety to up excitement, and to think about the potential of these things. And one of the arguments around this, I think that a way to prime it for you is personal and private. Imagine having a little like a, imagine having a bot that could.
Talk with you that can remind you of things that you want to be reminded of, that can help you reason through problems that knows you and knows the things that you interact with and the things that you struggle with, and the values that you hold dear. And this falling into the hands, into the wrong hands, into corporate hands into profit driven hands.
This is something that we don’t necessarily want, I think we need to be thinking about at least ais in these sort of personal Public interns to be private and cuz it should be only you, it should be private and it should be personal and tied to you and personalized to you and everybody’s got one.
And I think that will. Give the human race or give individuals in the human race a leg up in terms of having a mirror that can just bounce things back to you. I think it could only I think in that sense it can only make things better to have that, backup. And so I, wish you all luck in, in the future.
I hope you, Think on these things, ponder on them, and let me know what you think. Do you, are you filled with excitement or are you filled with dread? Is this a, negative thing for you? Where do you sit in this? And I I would love to know. So thank you so much. Thank you for putting up with our technical difficulties and I hope to see you next week.
And so please stay stay good. Remember if this was helpful, like subscribe and share and we’ll chat with you guys soon. Thank you, and bye-bye. Peace. Peace.