 We're joined today, very fortunate to be joined today by our speaker, Mike Walsh. He's a futurist. He has written best-selling books about the topic of AI, about the topic of algorithms, which have been with us for thousands of years. And he's talking about this inflection point of where we are and how, what's the responsibility of all of us collectively in how do we take advantage of a lot of the advancements that we see around us. I met Mike at a AI forum in Texas a few months ago. Back then, GPT was not a thing. And so this is how fast things are progressing. And we see a lot of advancements in what we do. And what Mike is going to talk to us about is how each and every one of us play a role to lead not just people, but now lead algorithms, lead AI. What he's going to talk about is we all have a role to play whether we know how to code whether we we don't how do we steer these algorithms in the right way whether how do we judge that they're telling us what we should be using etc you know no event like this would be complete without me going to chat GPT and asking, what questions do you have for an AI futurist who's giving a talk about behavior? And I have a few questions. I'm not gonna impose all of them on you, but one of the questions was- Can I get chat GPT to answer for me? That would be fair. What was over time, how have you seen people's behavior modified in their affinity towards AI? And what have been catalysts that you think are modifying people's behavior? So it's actually a very insightful question. I have to be shocked. You know the funny thing about, we have to remember is that we as human beings are ourselves running our own version of deep learning statistical models. I mean that's actually, these systems were actually modelled on us originally. And sometimes if you think about it, superstition is kind of a form of overfitting in a machine learning model. We start to believe things that don't exist. And I think we do this naturally, and even kids do this, that when you start interacting with any kind of system, you start to build a mental model for what that is. And one of the examples I talk about in the book was someone talking about her young kids, who had basically figured out that if they keep typing the word robot into the browser, they would see the kind of ads that they like for Transformers, right? So this kind of five-year-old kid had built a mental model for how Google's ad search algorithm worked. And I think that's really, you know, something that we have to think about is that our behavior as human beings, whether it's in organizations or as consumers, it's constantly being nudged and influenced by these other algorithms in the marketplace. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that we have to be more conscious of in knowing that our ability to be manipulated and to be nudged is very vulnerable to these algorithmic systems. So we're being conditioned by the ecosystem around us, which is including algorithms in everything that we do for the sake of scale. And that's what you believe is conditioning us. The hope is that we bring some of that into aspects of what we do. And that we don't become stupid, like we're talking about. There is a scenario where we just become like in the HG World story, the LOI and the Molochs, right? We just become these stupid, highly pampered people that live in a society with all of this heavy machinery underneath us that we don't understand. Thank you. Question. Thank you. This has been fascinating. How should one decide which decisions and thought processes should be made by humans and which via automation? Yeah, it's a great question and I didn't get into this probably deeply enough. I kind of think of it as a pyramid where you've got, you know, highly, at the bottom of the pyramid you've got highly repetitive easy to document decisions, you know, where I bottom of the pyramid, you've got highly repetitive, easy-to-document decisions, you know, where I kind of think they're deterministic. Like, if the following five things happen, you know, if the kind of the sensors are reading this temperature overload and the thing's blinking red, the following five actions need to humiliate it. Honestly, no human being should be doing that. If you can document it, you should automate it. Then you've got kind of decisions that are kind of a bit of a gray area. They tend to be a bit more probabilistic. Like, you know, we're not 100% sure that what the right thing to do is, and there's probably some kind of feedback effect. So you kind of want to work with a probabilistic AI system that kind of says, well, you might want to consider the following three actions. You know, we're not sure, but there's a high probability of X. And then the human being and the machine are kind of in this training loop together. And this even happens with chat GPT, you know. As human beings enter prompts and they get outputs and they correct the prompts, the system gets smarter. And those sort of decisions, I think, are ones that you automate in that way. Truly human decisions, you kind of know. They're actually something that really touched the human experience or regulation or the choices we make as a society. Makes a lot of sense. And I'm trying to go through these questions based on your votes. And so one question bubble to the top have you done any work regarding how AI will power patients to be even more active in their own health care I've been going to see my doctor once and he had a sign on the door it said I don't I don't treat the following three people people who think they're in couples therapy professional athletes and people who go into Google looking for their their symptoms and I think this is going to be a real it's gonna be interesting dilemma I think for healthcare professionals because we're gonna be putting a lot of diagnostic and measuring tools in the hand of patients, and that's a great thing. Like I said, these aura rings are nuts. Because of regulatory things, they can't tell you your temperature, but they can tell you if your range is off. They can give you feedback about your sleep levels. This is like an accelerant for hypochondriacs and and I think but I think ultimately this is a positive development because you know we're actually going to create a different relationship between patients healthcare providers pharmaceutical companies where hopefully that data and the direct relationship allows us to actually really understand and optimize outcomes. And it has a big implication for us, you know, as patients, as we educate patients, as we educate healthcare professionals, where will they get their information? Will they rely on us or will they seek it somewhere else when the bar to entry and really distilling everything that is known out there is at someone's fingertips without coding. So I think this is a question we have to think about, not just for HCPs, but us as a GenMap. How do we interact with the outside world? Especially with the regulations now on drug marketing. You know, like we were talking about this before, about the science saying no drug reps, you know. But if you could be part of the experience of someone managing their wellness, where they can understand that better and you're facilitating that, you know, that's much more powerful than handing out a pad with your brand on it. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the importance of management being transparent. What is your advice for management when knowledge is power? Well, it's a tricky question. I think knowledge is power was the old paradigm. The old paradigm, very Machiavellian, you control the access to the information, you play people off against each other, you create and so on, certainly in discord in order to divide and conquer. But I think that model of sort of political leadership just doesn't work in a world where there is so much more information that's out there. And we can't have a hierarchical model anymore because it doesn't allow us to be agile and to compete. If you really want those fast results, you actually need to have a more decentralized approach to management and to teams, which means you can't have secrets and politics and hierarchies. You can't have the Game of Thrones leadership model, right, because people are going to devote more and more of their energy to survival rather than productivity. So you have a choice. And I think from an application to GenMap, there are a lot of things that we do exercise this autonomy, decentralization. And we're finding that some consistency also is needed. And so not really a lightning rod model, but we do need to have at times the GenMab way from an identity perspective knowing that there's a lot of things that could happen in a fairly grassroots matter. So we're still trying to get kind of a happy medium in how we do. But that's powerful I think, You know, the idea of the Toyota way or the GenMap way, it's kind of a heuristic, right? Because it's the way... that's your collective IP. You've collectively learned through all of these experiments in an emergent way that this is an approach that leads to good results, as long as it's able to be challenged. Yeah. I think it's challenging this whole concept of a secret sauce versus secret sauces within an organization. It's fascinating to contemplate what that is. This is interesting. How do you think a successful organization should value age and experience versus youth be innovating? Without violating any employment laws. How old was the question to answer this question? Without the, yeah. Well, you know what I, maybe to like answer this in a slightly different way, you know what I think one of the greatest tragedies is when people with an immense amount of experience leave organizations, you know, because they often take all of this implicit knowledge with them, you know, things that aren't in emails, in PowerPoints, in presentations. I mean, what is the sum of someone's contribution to an organisation? And when they leave, what happens to it? And I think we're so careless about that. And I think it's almost, in an ideal world, you know, at the later phases of someone's career, I kind of feel like we should be doing the most we can to actually having them train systems to take what's in their head and basically train maybe these transformer models. How do you take the essence of a great leader and basically build it into the cultural DNA of an organization? That's probably going to be, I think in the future, the most important part of the later years of someone's career. So you're advocating for more experienced people kind of contributing and capturing somehow the institutional memory. Exactly. What do we know and how do we then transact it with a lot of others? Yeah, like the GenMap way needs to constantly be refueled and refreshed by the experience of people that have gone before. Yeah. What kind of teaching materials should one expose a 10-year-old to prepare for the new world he or she will be working in? Minecraft. Okay. Seriously. I mean, Roblox, Minecraft. Seriously, I mean, Roblox, Minecraft, I mean, these are actually, I mean, if we grew up with Lego, right, then Minecraft was kind of like digital Lego, and then Roblox is kind of computational digital Lego, right, where you've got these fully functioning, I mean, you can actually build logic gates in Minecraft, but then on Roblox, you can actually turn that into a business. So these toys are actually tools, I think, for teaching kids. Yeah, I agree. Can you talk about the ethical consequences of AI, something we probably didn't touch on during the talk, but there's a lot of ethics bias and with any development that it's infancy, the nascency, there's a lot of room for correcting course and a lot of these go through a lot of cycles to get it right, but how do we focus on that and do we? No, it's huge and actually, you know, this is an area where people who might feel that they're not that technical will play such an important role. Because I would say that the technical parts of AI are becoming less important with time. It's just gonna be an API basically, you know, for many organizations. And a lot of these tools even, I think we'll say that Microsoft next week are rolling out as an API on Azure. so it's just not a big deal but the the ethical parts of it are critical and I think there's dangers at either extreme you know to take a completely you know non ethical view of these things is very dangerous and so you've got these people now basically trying to create AGI and hook it up to you know autonomous killer drones. I mean technology for its own sake, if we build a kind of a killer robot civilization it won't be because it's come to life, it's because some maniac you know at a weapons organization has built one of these things. So it's not going to be a mystery when it happens. It's not your toaster that's going to get consciousness and go to you, right? But on the other extreme, there's a temptation for governments to over-regulate before they understand. And for sure, you're going to see out of the EU some kind of crazy dictate, you know, which will ban aspects of some of these technologies before anyone even understands them. And the danger is that a lot of this regulation is kind of form of these technologies before anyone even understands them. And the danger is that a lot of this regulation is kind of form of a regulatory capture which is actually designed to preserve various incumbents who then will pay them large fines. So it becomes this kind of little like game, you know? It's going to be fascinating to watch how this is regulated, how this is reacted to from regulators from different parts of society you know this is a good question as we ramp up 2023 and and we've actually grown year over year consistently for the last five or six years 2023 is no different and so when we are looking for new talent, what are some of the predictors of people that could adopt what we're advocating for, who want to see as people who are change agents, maybe more friendly to this type of thing? How do you look at this? Maybe ask them to come up with some good prompts for DALI or the interview process. Okay. I mean, because, you know, they used to say that in the era of Google, there's no point teaching kids to memorize things anymore, right? I mean, Google essentially has become a form of extended memory. You don't need to know the dates of all the US presidents, right? That's no longer a test of intelligence. The test of intelligence is being able to ask an interesting question on Google. And maybe now in 2023, you know, being able to write an essay is not as important as coming up with a very clever prompt that generates the right one. Yeah. So maybe incorporating some of these new tools into the way we have conversations with potential talent will give us a sense of how open they are to these new technologies. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You keep saying, write, ask them to write. And I was watching my nine-year-old daughter interface with chat GPT and she's not the, I mean, she's figured a way and it's probably not very tough to just speak. She didn't want to type anything. She's just speaking, and then it's typing, and then that is giving you kind of the text output. But it's fascinating to see how so intuitive it is for a seven-year-old or a nine-year-old. And so I'm actually scared to see what that generation is able to do. When your daughter goes to university, the question which universities are already facing now is how do we evaluate her intelligence, right? Because if we give her a homework assignment, she can just basically spit something back from open AI, right? And then now do we need to check that for fraud? I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. Maybe we don't have written examinations anymore. Maybe we have oral examinations, right? We're basically in conversation, you're trying to understand, does someone really understand this topic? Now, if your daughter is going to prepare to understand something, she'd probably sit down with ChatGPT for quite long periods of time and ask intelligent questions until she builds her own mental model of that. Then we can figure out how smart she is. Yeah, that was a topic. You know things are mainstream when the PBS NewsHour is about chat GPT usually not the topics that you hear but that was all about universities reworking their curricula and one of the professors they interviewed said if I sniff any hint of AI you're gonna stand up and you're gonna have a oral exam verbal exam. And so it's very interesting, I think we're just imagining this. What do you think of the future of drug discovery using AI? Where should it focus? Well, actually, I mean, you've answered the question yourself in that I think the future of AI powered drug discovery is telling you where you should focus. I mean, that's the beauty of it, is that these tools like AlphaFold, they're not a threat. They actually allow us to really start to direct our energies and priorities in areas that have the greatest opportunity for discovering great candidates, right through know potentially reducing the need for wet labs and simulation and and we get a lot of the aspects of drug discovery and development we can actually speed up now you know and I think that's a wonderful opportunity yeah you know you talked about this being an ecosystem to do this and for us at Genmab we do work through a lot of partnerships. Partnerships with companies like ours, partnership with technologies, partnership with academics. How should we approach leaders and maybe conservative organizations that we're partnering with that are not ready to reimagine things and so we have a dependency. We may be all in. How do you convince a partnership to adopt this new way of doing things? It's challenging, and I think people don't need to buy into all of it in order to make a significant step forward. So you guys can be the kind of the hothouse for pushing the limits on everything, but you only need your partners to take one step forward in the new direction for it to be useful. I think that's been the problem in the past is that it's been very binary. You either totally embrace the radical 21st century disruptive model of pharmaceuticals or you're like back in the 1950s. And I think now, especially in the past to embrace stuff, you had to be a very large pharmaceutical organization. But now the way these tools are developing, whether it's via API or through partnership, actually being small is an advantage. Because you don't need to make the massive R&D investments in these tools, which actually just may not work. You can actually just cherry pick the ones that are the most relevant for your purpose. Yeah. You talked about this a little bit. Do you forecast a period where laws are not up to date for work that can be automated? Who's liable for things where robots, can you point to robots and saying it's their fault? It's sort of becoming the 21st century version of the devil made me do it. And I think where this is going to get a lot more sophisticated in that in the past we would blame the technologists. This is a program that's gone wrong. But increasingly I think the standard of liability is going to be around what if we decide to optimize this model around? Where did the data come from? Did we ask the right questions? You know, and I think that's something that even boards are gonna be ultimately liable for. You know, this idea I'm not a technical person, I'm not expected to understand, is not going to be sufficient. I mean, do you think the board of Southwest should not be held liable for the failure of the IT system? Of course not, because at some point there was a decision, how well are we going to fund this? What are we optimising this system around? And that was a strategic choice, because they chose not to be a hub and spoke model. They chose to be a direct-to-direct model, and that was the basis of this algorithmic failure. So these are management decisions. Maybe we take the last two questions. What do you think, and you alluded to interactions, what do you think the impact of AI will have on in-person interactions and maybe the extension on human mental health? I'm concerned, actually, honestly. I mean, I can't say I'm overly thrilled about this idea of people wearing earpieces plugged into AI supercomputers. I don't think that's necessarily going to create for great conversation. In that, I don't think smartphones have created teenagers with great social skills, right? Yeah. And we've already seen how this is playing out. So I think we are going to accelerate to a point where we're actually going to have to step back and re-look at things like social interactions and what is appropriate, what is etiquette. And if you look at some advanced societies like Japan, they already have very strict rules around how people should use mobile phones and what conditions. They've had to kind of to reconsider that as a society yeah I think this is the last question and there's a lot of others I think has to do with is your book available to listen to and I can yes that's how I read the book but this is interesting Humans need a quick win in order to go all in on change. What first steps can you advise that we take in order to win in an algorithmic future, no matter what our current state is? I think the quick win for most of us is getting some time back. And I think when you experience personally that using these tools is going to win you back and i think when you experience personally that using these tools is going to win you back some more time that you can now spend with your families with your hobbies just for your personal health you know that is a big win you know i think that makes sense and i think that's what it's to some extent the pandemic has taken from us because this is why remote work endless zoom meetings it actually took more taken from us, because this is why remote work, endless Zoom meetings, it actually took more time from us as human beings, which is why I think it was ultimately a false god and why I don't think it's the path forward.
ChatGPT, AI, and the Future of Work | Mike Walsh | Futurist Keynote Speaker
How will ChatGPT, generative AI, and other breakthrough technologies like AlphaFold transform not only how we work, but also the very nature of entire industries? Hisham Hamadeh, Vice President, Global Head of Data Science at Genmab joins futurist Mike Walsh to discuss how AI is changing human behavior, the transformative impact of automation on decision-making, reinventing culture and leadership models, and the challenges of ethical AI and regulation. 

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Follow Mike Walsh's channel for insights on the future of work, digital transformation and reimagining leadership for the age of AI: http://www.youtube.com/user/michaelwalsh?sub_confirmation=1
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For more information about booking Mike for a virtual presentation or workshop: https://www.mike-walsh.com/topics
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Check out Mike's latest book, 'The Algorithmic Leader: How to be smart, when machines are smarter than you'. https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Leader-Smart-Machines-Smarter/dp/1989025331
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