Jesse Hirsh engages Chris Hood in a thought-provoking discussion about the ideologies surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and the inherent gap between its promises and reality. The conversation opens with a critical examination of recent announcements from the Trump administration regarding AI investments and the illusion of progress that often accompanies such news. Chris Hood shares insights from his upcoming book, revealing a significant seven-year gap between public perception of AI capabilities and their actual technological advancements. The dialogue emphasizes that while AI holds potential, many of its touted achievements remain speculative, and the reality often lags behind the hype. As the discussion progresses, both Jesse and Chris explore the potential consequences of this disconnect, including a possible “AI bubble” that may burst as consumers and investors realize the limitations of current AI technologies. This notion is further compounded by the increasing awareness among consumers about the difference between marketing hype and actual product capability, leading to skepticism about the future of AI investments and innovations.
The discussion takes a turn towards the philosophical, as Chris Hood proposes that the current discourse around AI reflects a broader ideological belief system—equating AI with infallibility. This belief is scrutinized through various examples, from the simplistic use of AI in everyday applications to the more complex implications of relying on technology to address non-existent problems. Hood argues that the marketing strategies employed by tech companies promote a narrative that positions AI as a panacea for all issues, neglecting the reality that many solutions do not require AI. Through anecdotes and critical analysis, the conversation reveals how this ideology can lead to misguided expectations, potentially undermining genuine advancements in technology and critical thinking skills.
As the episode draws to a close, Jesse and Chris pivot to the role of gaming in fostering critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Chris discusses how video games can serve as a medium for developing collaboration and compassion, while also recognizing the challenges posed by the increasing use of AI in creative industries. The conversation underscores the importance of maintaining a customer-first approach in technological development, advocating for a model where technology serves real consumer needs rather than the whims of corporate hype. Ultimately, this episode serves as a clarion call for a more nuanced understanding of AI, urging listeners to engage with technology critically and thoughtfully, lest they fall victim to the illusions perpetuated by the tech industry.
Takeaways:
a:5:{s:22:"transcription_uploaded";s:4:"file";s:18:"transcription_html";s:91:"https://transcripts.captivate.fm/transcript/050064aa-13b1-4d6f-8b84-b45586b98ed9/index.html";s:18:"transcription_file";s:95:"https://transcripts.captivate.fm/transcript/050064aa-13b1-4d6f-8b84-b45586b98ed9/transcript.srt";s:18:"transcription_json";s:96:"https://transcripts.captivate.fm/transcript/050064aa-13b1-4d6f-8b84-b45586b98ed9/transcript.json";s:18:"transcription_text";s:54211:"Jesse Hirsch 00:00:01
Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:03
Welcome to Meta Views, recorded live in front of an automated audience.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:12
And today we're coming back to two subjects.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:16
I think we'd like to talk about one AI and the other ideology.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:20
So we're going to talk about the ideologies of AI.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:24
Sounds like quite a provocative subject.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:27
And our guest today, Chris Hood.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:29
Chris, we like to start every episode of Metaviews by talking about the news.
Jesse Hirsch 00:00:37
And, you know, we do this partly because, you know, the history of media, quite frankly, has a lot to do with using the news as a way to stay current, sort of stay up with it all, but also because we have a daily newsletter here at metiviews, and perhaps serendipitously, our latest issue sort of looks at what we're calling the illusion economy, and it suggests that while AI certainly in my lifetime, is reaching a very substantive level, it's never kept up with its promises.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:13
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:13
It always seems that the narrative of AI is one step ahead of what is actually being delivered.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:20
And so this was us speculating on, will there be consequences to always having that debt of expectations?
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:27
And we use the executive orders and the big announcement in terms of, you know, the Trump administration aligning itself with AI as one of the themes or pillars of its policy agenda, whether real or not, because we'll have to wait and see.
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:44
But really, this is when we turn to our guest and say, is there any news that you've got an eye on?
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:52
Is there anything that you've been following?
Jesse Hirsch 00:01:56
This could be personal news, could be world news, could be industry news.
Jesse Hirsch 00:02:01
What do you think our audience needs to know or should be paying attention to, given how chaotic and overwhelming our world tends to be?
Chris Hood 00:02:11
Yeah, I think we could touch a little bit on the announcements that came out yesterday, press release, et cetera, about Trump administration coming out and in supporting and talking about how they're going to invest in the AI space.
Chris Hood 00:02:26
But I think you also have to understand and read between the lines which you're alluding to, which is that really what they're talking about is building infrastructure, building buildings to support AI development.
Chris Hood 00:02:38
Very little of this is actually in the AI progression or what AI can become.
Chris Hood 00:02:46
And there's a big difference between buildings and infrastructure and energy to support AI and the capabilities of AI itself.
Chris Hood 00:02:57
There's a lot of theoretical stuff that is out there.
Chris Hood 00:03:00
There's a lot of, you know, we talk often, and what my book is about is a lot of the hype that is out there.
Chris Hood 00:03:07
And I think, you know, you.
Chris Hood 00:03:09
You just sort of touched on it, where the marketing or the description of what AI is is usually ahead of where AI is.
Chris Hood 00:03:20
In my book that is getting ready to be published, the research that I did actually shows that the belief in AI, what we believe AI is capable of and what its real capabilities are is about a seven year gap.
Chris Hood 00:03:38
And I kind of alluded to, you know, too much Star Trek, too much sci fi in terms of the media interpretation of what AI is capable of versus again, you know, there's just not enough, I use Columbo as an example, any big, you know, TV fans, not enough actual research and understanding and investigation into what AI is capable of.
Chris Hood 00:04:04
And so because of this gap, we are talking about things like the cure for cancer, which will AI help us cure cancer?
Chris Hood 00:04:13
Absolutely.
Chris Hood 00:04:14
I firmly believe that that is what it will be capable of doing.
Chris Hood 00:04:18
Will it do it next week?
Chris Hood 00:04:20
No.
Chris Hood 00:04:21
Will it do it within the confines of building this building and then we can solve cancer?
Chris Hood 00:04:26
Probably not.
Chris Hood 00:04:27
At some point though, and I believe probably in my lifetime AI will help us cure cancer.
Chris Hood 00:04:34
But it's not going to do it next week.
Chris Hood 00:04:36
It's probably not even going to do it this year.
Chris Hood 00:04:38
We've got a ways to go for it to be able to do the things that we're talking about it doing.
Chris Hood 00:04:43
And so we go back to this recent news in the press release.
Chris Hood 00:04:47
You've got to make sure that you understand what's actually being discussed.
Chris Hood 00:04:51
We're just talking about building more buildings to support and house computers that are going to help us build the AI of the future.
Jesse Hirsch 00:04:58
Although the energy issues and the energy needs of AI are such that I've been skeptical as to whether government as we know it is nimble enough to create the policy environment to make that happen.
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:12
And you're quite right to say it's a long timeline when you still have to build the buildings and build the energy plants.
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:18
But let me ask you as a quick follow up, what do you think the consequence of this is?
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:23
Right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:24
That perhaps the vagueness or the lack of nuance that says all jobs are going to go away, cancer will be cured, which sure, inevitably those things may be true.
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:36
But I think you're correct in saying the timeline is not going to happen anywhere near as fast as I think the popular perception is offering.
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:45
Is there a consequence to that?
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:47
Is that going to create know a second AI Winter where the funding for a lot of these startups is going to go away?
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:54
Is that going to create, you know, consumer disappointment?
Jesse Hirsch 00:05:57
I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
Chris Hood 00:06:00
Yeah, I mean I have predicted that there may be an AI bubble burst this year.
Chris Hood 00:06:05
In 2025, we'll get to a point where the returns on AI investments are not happening at the rate by which investors are hoping they would.
Chris Hood 00:06:15
People and consumers more precisely, are becoming a little bit more aware of the difference between hype and reality.
Chris Hood 00:06:23
Like when you hype that, hey, an AI agent is going to be able to do everything for you and then you buy a product and it doesn't do everything for you, you're stop, you're, you know, you're.
Chris Hood 00:06:34
At some point in time you're not going to invest or, you know, your personal funds into those types of products anymore.
Chris Hood 00:06:40
And so, yes, also, we just have too many investments in AI.
Chris Hood 00:06:45
There are thousands of AI startups that are getting investments and at some point in time, again, you just have too many.
Chris Hood 00:06:55
And so, yeah, it's very possible that maybe not a winter in terms of traditional AI winter speak, but some sort of potential bubble burst, maybe similar to the dot com, where financing stops, where some of the really strong AI products begin to materialize.
Chris Hood 00:07:16
But look, we're looking at somebody like a Google that is investing billions of dollars into training new models.
Chris Hood 00:07:23
And it's not even at a point where it can sustain what it's saying it can sustain, you know, in terms of deliverability and accuracy and privacy and results and all those, those things that consumers expect out of it.
Chris Hood 00:07:39
And so, yes, I think most definitely the end result may be that we have a little dip down in the next year or two years before we really get back into the groove of building products, AI products that are actually meaningful.
Jesse Hirsch 00:07:55
Now, paradoxically, we've kind of bled into our second segment that we have at the start of every show, which we call WTF or what's the Future?
Jesse Hirsch 00:08:07
Partly because we are a future centric podcast, we like to encourage our guests, our listeners, to be imaginative when it comes to the future.
Jesse Hirsch 00:08:16
But this is also meant as an intuitive question.
Jesse Hirsch 00:08:19
We want your kind of gut response.
Jesse Hirsch 00:08:21
What do you see in the future, Chris?
Jesse Hirsch 00:08:23
What's on your event horizon that you think our audience needs to know about?
Chris Hood 00:08:28
Flying cars.
Chris Hood 00:08:30
And they'll be here tomorrow.
Chris Hood 00:08:33
I'm going to hype it.
Chris Hood 00:08:36
Look, it's interesting because I'm about to release my second book and I'm actually begun research for my.
Jesse Hirsch 00:08:44
Can you share the title?
Chris Hood 00:08:46
Yeah.
Chris Hood 00:08:47
The second book that is due out, depending on when you are listening to this particular episode, is called Infallible.
Chris Hood 00:08:56
And it's a play on words of infallible.
Chris Hood 00:08:59
But we put the AI here, it's sort of like, there you go, we get the little AI and fail in the middle of that, so we get the infallible.
Chris Hood 00:09:12
But the next book that I've begun to research is what do we see as being the trends for consumers in the future?
Chris Hood 00:09:20
And I'm not talking about necessarily what are the next trends.
Chris Hood 00:09:24
I think there's a lot of hypothesis on what we think the next trends are.
Chris Hood 00:09:28
What's the trends after that that we think will actually occur?
Chris Hood 00:09:34
A good example of this is I think there's a lot of people out there that feel like the metaverse will become a thing.
Chris Hood 00:09:41
And so in the next five years, we might be able to do virtual shopping.
Chris Hood 00:09:46
Maybe VR is a little bit more powerful forms of ar.
Chris Hood 00:09:50
Maybe we get some integration into other forms of senses, like, can I get scent out of my VR experience?
Chris Hood 00:09:58
Can I get taste out of my VR experience?
Chris Hood 00:10:04
And so if we think of the metaverse and VR types of shopping is the next thing.
Chris Hood 00:10:12
What's after that?
Chris Hood 00:10:14
And I think that's where we have to begin to explore.
Chris Hood 00:10:17
And I think it is definitely multi sensory.
Chris Hood 00:10:20
We can again, leverage lots of different types of mediums to kind of think through this and everything from Ready Player One, the movie to or Book to Star Trek.
Chris Hood 00:10:31
Do we see situations where we go into, you know, Star Trek's.
Jesse Hirsch 00:10:38
The holodeck.
Chris Hood 00:10:40
Yeah, holodeck.
Chris Hood 00:10:41
I said it right for a minute.
Chris Hood 00:10:42
I was like, what's the thing?
Chris Hood 00:10:44
So, you know, do we see a holodeck type of experience in our future?
Chris Hood 00:10:48
There's a lot of things out there that we can look forward to in terms of what has been designed in our mediums.
Chris Hood 00:10:56
And I do think that we're going to strive for some of that.
Chris Hood 00:10:59
Like, instead of airdrop delivery by drones, will we get to a teleportation system that I can actually place an order on the future Amazon and have it delivered instantaneously to me, I think there's a lot of really interesting perspectives when you think about not what's next, but what's after next.
Chris Hood 00:11:21
And think about it from that perspective.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:23
Right on.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:24
And to your point about VR, I always thought, you know, while VR is meant to collapse space, I'd like to see it collapse time.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:31
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:32
You know, allow me to spend five minutes in the VR and think it was eight hours.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:36
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:36
And have that type of immersive experience on a coffee break.
Chris Hood 00:11:41
Yeah.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:41
But again, to your point, we're getting into the sci Fi side of this, and if you wouldn't indulge me in a Brief tangent.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:48
Before we get into our kind of feature conversation, I sort of saw an argument you were putting forward which I thought was interesting, which was that customer journeying is obsolete.
Jesse Hirsch 00:11:59
And I felt you were almost evoking it there when you were talking about the changing ways in which we are experiencing reality.
Jesse Hirsch 00:12:07
Might you briefly unpack that as a final appetizer before we get to our main meal?
Chris Hood 00:12:13
Yeah.
Chris Hood 00:12:14
Well, if we think about customer journeys and in the traditional sense, a business that partakes in what we call customer journey mapping, which is actually going through the process of outlining the touch points they're called in terms of, okay, they found us by social media, they came to our website, they got to the shopping cart, like that type of experience.
Chris Hood 00:12:36
They made a purchase, the purchase was successful, and then after that purchase, then they get an email notification like, whatever that journey is, we call that the customer journey.
Chris Hood 00:12:49
But if you start to kind of dissect this in a couple of different ways, the first thing is they're called touch points.
Chris Hood 00:12:55
Well, I've argued that we no longer actually have to touch anything, so the mere terminology is probably outdated.
Chris Hood 00:13:03
Next, no one goes through a linear process in their life anymore.
Chris Hood 00:13:09
So if you go to the grocery store, odds are you're also probably paying a bill on your phone while you're at that grocery store.
Chris Hood 00:13:18
So we have all of these intersecting types of experiences that create a multidimensional style of mapping, one by which it's not necessarily what's happening from the moment I come into your store to the moment I leave your store.
Chris Hood 00:13:35
There are these intersection points where I might be engaging with other customers or other products and brands that are directly either in relationship to your product and brands or even a competitor.
Chris Hood 00:13:49
Like, if I'm in a store and I don't like the prices, I'm looking up your competitors while I'm standing in your store to find other, you know, other pricing and other opportunities.
Chris Hood 00:14:02
So the more you recognize this kind of multi dimensional and even multisensory style of experiences, then you could argue the traditional customer journey map no longer applies.
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:15
Well, and it's funny, you evoked my own experience, which is I'm often listening to podcasts while I'm shopping.
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:22
And wouldn't it be wild if in the middle of that podcast they're like, oh, Jesse, go check out aisle five.
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:28
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:14:29
That would be a very interesting, perhaps anticipatory way of, to your point, an experience, not the journey.
Chris Hood 00:14:37
But see, there's a great example.
Chris Hood 00:14:39
Like, you're listening.
Chris Hood 00:14:40
You're grocery store shopping or you're at Target, you're listening to a podcast, a personalized ad comes on for the store you're in about a product you're looking for.
Chris Hood 00:14:50
Believe it or not, that technology is already available to us.
Chris Hood 00:14:55
We can already do that.
Chris Hood 00:14:57
And yet we are continuously kind of trying to silo out people's experiences to say, well, look, while you're in our store, we're only going to focus on the things that you might do or need to do while you're in our store.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:13
Yes.
Chris Hood 00:15:13
And not be able to share, reveal.
Chris Hood 00:15:18
You know, we could talk about privacy concerns potentially on that or any other number of aspects.
Chris Hood 00:15:23
But it's not that the technology can't do it, it's that the companies are unwilling to do it.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:29
Well.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:29
And I would go and we should move on to the main course because I could talk about this for a while, partly because I feel, and I'm thinking about my grocery store in particular, they are risk averse to creativity.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:44
They barely are pushing the flyer.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:47
That hasn't changed in three decades.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:50
They are not at all thinking about the customer experience.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:53
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:54
They're treating it like it is this old school market and it isn't.
Jesse Hirsch 00:15:58
And to your point, the technology that they have available to them, even just within their own app, within their own loyalty marketing is phenomenal.
Jesse Hirsch 00:16:09
And I wish they did more.
Jesse Hirsch 00:16:11
So it's frustrating having these kind of what ifs when we know they don't.
Jesse Hirsch 00:16:45
Man, I hope his computer didn't die.
Jesse Hirsch 00:16:57
Come back, Chris.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:21
Okay, good.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:22
It was just the Internet, not your computer.
Chris Hood 00:17:25
Yeah.
Chris Hood 00:17:25
Oh, man.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:26
Oh, look, it happens.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:28
I, I live in the country, so.
Chris Hood 00:17:32
I'm near Los Angeles, so we've got winds and we've got fires going on.
Chris Hood 00:17:38
So if it goes out again, I will apologize.
Chris Hood 00:17:40
And anybody who is listening to this.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:42
And is like, hey, the beauty is it happened while I was speaking and then I was able to pause.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:49
So we will pause again and it makes a very convenient edit point.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:53
And we were right by the feature.
Jesse Hirsch 00:17:55
So it works.
Chris Hood 00:17:56
If it goes out again, I apologize.
Chris Hood 00:17:58
And I'm beyond your Internet.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:02
Yeah, it's beyond your control.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:03
And like I said, I've had it happen to me and I'm a speaker and I've had it happen during a virtual gig during the pandemic.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:10
So I can relate.
Chris Hood 00:18:13
Well, let's, let's, let's go quick.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:15
Yes.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:15
Okay, take a pause and then you're going to see the screens and we'll rock and roll.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:24
Now, Chris, I got to ask you only because as a wordsmith I love playing with words.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:30
The ideologies of AI.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:33
You gotta unpack that for me because I love the way Unfailable, which I thought is a fantastic title for a book.
Jesse Hirsch 00:18:41
And I noticed ideology was kind of front and center on the COVID So please help us understand the ideologies of AI.
Chris Hood 00:18:50
Well, it really boils down to this belief system.
Chris Hood 00:18:53
We sort of touched on it before.
Chris Hood 00:18:55
The belief in what AI is capable of doing has created this.
Chris Hood 00:19:01
This ideology about AI.
Chris Hood 00:19:03
It's almost a religious state where, you know, I, I use some examples in here, but everybody overnight became an AI expert there.
Chris Hood 00:19:14
The things that were in the past that weren't AI powered all of a sudden now are AI powered.
Chris Hood 00:19:19
It's like your email.
Chris Hood 00:19:21
Oh, powered by AI.
Chris Hood 00:19:22
Well, your email has actually been powered by AI for about five years now.
Chris Hood 00:19:26
You know, like, all of these things have all of a sudden become, you know, infallible.
Chris Hood 00:19:34
Like, you know, that's.
Chris Hood 00:19:35
That's what I wanted to play off of is that this, this belief system in AI has created an infallible belief that is, in a lot of cases, wrong.
Chris Hood 00:19:48
And so a lot of what I cover in my book is kind of trying to dissect why we have this belief system and trying to pinpoint the difference between fact and fiction, but really positioning it in a way that, that belief in AI, in AI is driven by marketing and is driven by, you know, we can look at a lot of different examples in our past, whether it's like the snake oil salesman on the side of the road to, you know, the gold rush of, you know, the California.
Chris Hood 00:20:27
I mean, anytime in history, I've used the pet rock as an example.
Chris Hood 00:20:32
Or, you know, the pet rock from the 1970s is really no different than what we're selling right now.
Chris Hood 00:20:38
In AI, you package it up, you put a pretty bow on it, and it's supposed to solve all of our problems.
Chris Hood 00:20:44
And that is not the case.
Chris Hood 00:20:46
And that is where, you know the title and this concept of infallible, because it is obviously, and it's not infallible.
Chris Hood 00:20:57
And what that ideology is.
Jesse Hirsch 00:20:59
Are you concerned at all that, you know, over the next four years with a bullshitter as the President of the United States, that that is ideology will be further amplified?
Jesse Hirsch 00:21:12
Or do you think that there's only so far that pushing this forward into the future works?
Jesse Hirsch 00:21:20
At some point, businesses start going, wait a minute, this isn't doing what you said it would.
Chris Hood 00:21:25
No, I.
Chris Hood 00:21:26
It's coming from investors and it's coming from corporations, big tech that want to sell it I mean, that's what this is.
Chris Hood 00:21:33
It's.
Chris Hood 00:21:33
It's a sales grab.
Chris Hood 00:21:35
It's a money grab.
Chris Hood 00:21:37
And, you know, there's some really good examples of this.
Chris Hood 00:21:40
I don't know if you've seen the commercial from Salesforce with Matthew McConaughey, who's sitting out in the rain and saying, you know, basically the premise is, you know, I'm out in the rain, my food is getting soggy because I didn't use an AI agent to help me reschedule my dinner reservations.
Chris Hood 00:22:01
Well, if you really dissect this, it becomes pretty obvious that it's nothing more than sales and fear of missing out if you want to say FOMO and, you know, and, And.
Chris Hood 00:22:14
And trying to appeal to our lack of intelligence.
Chris Hood 00:22:17
Right.
Chris Hood 00:22:17
I mean, at what point in time do we actually believe that we're so ignorant that we can't tell that it's raining outside, you know, and.
Chris Hood 00:22:26
And that we can't change our reservations on our own?
Chris Hood 00:22:29
Why do we need AI to do that?
Chris Hood 00:22:31
Or why would we believe that the restaurant is going to keep our reservations outside and serve us outside while it's raining?
Chris Hood 00:22:40
Like, these things are creating problem statements for which there is really no actual problem for, and billing it as well.
Chris Hood 00:22:51
I can solve this fictitious problem that.
Jesse Hirsch 00:22:54
You have, but when does the other shoe drop?
Jesse Hirsch 00:22:57
I mean, is it after, you know, these companies have bought these products that don't have a return, that don't, you know, fulfill the expectations they had?
Chris Hood 00:23:06
If it's not AI, it's going to be something else.
Chris Hood 00:23:08
Right now, it's AI.
Chris Hood 00:23:09
The flavor of the year is AI.
Chris Hood 00:23:11
And what you've seen is last year, towards the end of, well, pretty much 2023, moving upward to the end of 23 was generative AI.
Chris Hood 00:23:21
Then 2024 was all generative AI.
Chris Hood 00:23:24
Everywhere you looked, it was generative AI.
Chris Hood 00:23:26
And in the span of, say, November of 2024 to January 2025, it became AI agents.
Chris Hood 00:23:36
They shift the narrative.
Jesse Hirsch 00:23:38
Right.
Chris Hood 00:23:39
Why did they shift the narrative?
Chris Hood 00:23:40
Was because they started to recognize that the populace was.
Chris Hood 00:23:44
And consumers were less interested in generative AI because of the flaws that it has, so they needed to reframe into some other AI that is supposedly more powerful and more beneficial to you.
Jesse Hirsch 00:23:58
So it becomes a moving target that we never reach.
Chris Hood 00:24:01
Exactly.
Chris Hood 00:24:02
So I would say if we don't hit that bubble burst, like I'm suggesting, we might, then somewhere towards the end of this year, depending on people's realizations of AI agents and people getting a little bit more familiar with what AI can And can't do that.
Chris Hood 00:24:19
It will be another form of AI that will become the focus.
Chris Hood 00:24:23
And so we talk about a hype cycle.
Chris Hood 00:24:26
What we're actually seeing is that forms of AI are layered on top of each other to continue the hype upward.
Chris Hood 00:24:34
So we never get to the point where we become familiar with what reality is.
Chris Hood 00:24:40
And all of that is intended to directly drive sales.
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:43
Right on.
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:44
And that's what makes it an ideology in the sense that you're chasing an idea you're, you're not actually chasing.
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:50
It's, you know, it kind of evokes, you're chasing the white horse, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:54
It's the heroin addict who never actually achieves the high, but becomes a junkie nonetheless.
Jesse Hirsch 00:24:59
Cause they're chasing that myth.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:02
And I wish I could share your optimism and confidence that, you know, the air will run out by the end of the year.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:09
I mean, on some levels, their money could run out by the end of the year.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:14
Because it does seem that the anthropics and OpenAI's of the world are burning, burning through billions literally at a pace that is just not at all sustainable.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:24
But at the same time, your argument makes me worry that they will just keep putting out new and more ridiculous targets that allow them to keep pushing this further and further and further.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:36
Meanwhile, maybe it's military spending, maybe it's public sector spending that becomes the next sucker.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:43
The way in which maybe companies will start waking up to the idea of now, we shouldn't be spending money on this.
Jesse Hirsch 00:25:48
If, you know, Elon Musk and the rest of the crew get the US Government as the big customer to be throwing money at this, that could sustain them for a little bit too, right?
Chris Hood 00:25:58
Well, yeah, but again, we've got to understand that it's AI today.
Chris Hood 00:26:05
I mean, look, 10 years ago, there's an app for that, right?
Chris Hood 00:26:10
Like everybody needed an app.
Jesse Hirsch 00:26:11
Before that it was a.com.com, right?
Chris Hood 00:26:14
So AI just happens to be the thing right now.
Chris Hood 00:26:17
But, but let's see.
Chris Hood 00:26:19
Imagine if quantum computing became bite sized and you could have a quantum computer, build your own quantum computer at home, right?
Chris Hood 00:26:27
Like you can go out to the local tech store, buy all the parts, build your own PC, come home, have a gaming system and be, you know, in heaven.
Chris Hood 00:26:35
But what if quantum computing got commercialized, you know, beyond where it is today?
Chris Hood 00:26:40
Well, I guarantee what you'll see is all of these commercials out there saying, well, you don't have a computer unless you have a quantum computer, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:26:47
Your home is going to be invaded unless you have quantum security Right.
Chris Hood 00:26:52
I mean, we talked about smart home smart cars.
Chris Hood 00:26:55
Like, the reality is a lot of these things aren't smart.
Chris Hood 00:26:59
They're automated in efficient ways.
Chris Hood 00:27:01
But the difference between what we would consider smart and like, I've argued often, like even automobiles, I get the great argument that, you know, agentic AI is this next big thing because it's autonomous, just like smart cars.
Chris Hood 00:27:18
Well, I hate to break it to you, but actually smart cars are not autonomous.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:22
But you're evoking, I think, a deeper philosophical question which I will articulate as bluntly as I can, as politically incorrect as I can.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:31
Are people getting stupider?
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:33
Yes.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:33
Right.
Chris Hood 00:27:34
Absolutely there are.
Jesse Hirsch 00:27:36
Because that seems to be what the context is.
Chris Hood 00:27:38
There's a couple of different sides to this.
Chris Hood 00:27:41
They're believing what they're told and we are lacking the critical thinking skills.
Chris Hood 00:27:48
Now, I'm not going to get into politics one way or the other, but we have seen the ability of critical thinking skills broadly decline over the last several years, or, you know, five, six, seven, eight years.
Chris Hood 00:28:01
And what generative AI has done is allowed us to continue to believe in what we're told.
Chris Hood 00:28:10
And so before you could watch a commercial and you could be like, oh, that's not true.
Chris Hood 00:28:15
Now we watch a commercial like AI or else you're going to be out in the rain eating dinner and we actually start thinking, wow, that must be true.
Chris Hood 00:28:23
Right.
Chris Hood 00:28:23
So, and look, I also teach, I'm a professor at a university.
Chris Hood 00:28:28
I teach courses.
Chris Hood 00:28:29
What I have noticed in the last two years is that as the increase of generative AI has gone up and as students have started to use generative AI for their assignments, the average grade has dropped.
Chris Hood 00:28:46
And so the more that people use generative AI, the lower grades are getting.
Chris Hood 00:28:52
And you could say, well, that's because, you know, they're, they're cheating, whatever.
Chris Hood 00:28:56
It has actually nothing to do with it.
Chris Hood 00:28:58
It's because they're not actually comprehending the materials.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:01
Yeah.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:01
They're not putting the thought in.
Chris Hood 00:29:03
Yeah, I posted something.
Chris Hood 00:29:05
Generative AI is not necessarily making us smarter, it's making us copy and paste experts.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:11
Yeah.
Chris Hood 00:29:12
Because that's all we're doing is we're just kind of copying, pasting directly in and then you don't comprehend what it is.
Chris Hood 00:29:17
So yes, critical thinking is going down or going away.
Chris Hood 00:29:21
We as a society are getting dumber in the process and we are just being force fed things that whether we want it or not.
Chris Hood 00:29:32
Here's what you're going to do now.
Chris Hood 00:29:34
And we, we've accepted it.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:37
And it strikes me that the Fallacy of the ideology of AI is that it thinks when instead we need to be doing the thinking.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:45
And there are many people who don't understand that.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:48
So they are delegating their thinking, which means there's not any thinking happening at all.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:55
It's just word salad with the copy and paste.
Jesse Hirsch 00:29:57
And as long as it gets a C, then maybe they're happy because they get by at the seat of their pants.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:04
But let me take a relevant tangent and this is something I kind of wanted to ask you only because I feel to your point, the AI narratives have a force of gravity where in the consumer realm I think it's easier for us to engage it.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:21
But I saw that you have an interest in the gaming industry.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:26
It strikes me that in video games there's a different potential in theory for critical thinking, a different potential for different experiences.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:35
And the video game industry, I think to your criticism, has kind of swallowed the AI ideology wholesale.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:44
And we've seen this with the waves of layoffs that happened last year in the gaming industry.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:50
And I'm not seeing anyone who has a confident view of what the future of the video game industry is.
Jesse Hirsch 00:30:57
And you're clearly a very smart critical thinker.
Jesse Hirsch 00:31:00
So I'd love to hear your take on the potential of video games, the current state of the video game industry, what your angle is on that, given what we've been discussing around the air of bullshit surrounding AI.
Chris Hood 00:31:15
So I'll kind of start with a few things.
Chris Hood 00:31:19
One, the layoffs within the video game industry, honestly actually have nothing to do with AI.
Chris Hood 00:31:28
It's more business leadership, financial greed we'll toss in there.
Jesse Hirsch 00:31:35
But by that definition, I would argue all layoffs fall under that category.
Jesse Hirsch 00:31:42
But they're using AI as a cover, right?
Chris Hood 00:31:47
Yeah, I would say not in the gaming industry.
Chris Hood 00:31:50
So again, historically, AI has been in gaming for over 50 years.
Chris Hood 00:31:55
All games pretty much have an element of AI in there.
Chris Hood 00:31:59
So what we have to look at is the difference between AI within the games to help build logic based systems to help make games more interesting versus AI being used to replace humans to actually be creative and develop video games.
Chris Hood 00:32:16
Right.
Chris Hood 00:32:17
So two different use cases.
Chris Hood 00:32:18
The use of AI to replace humans in the development process has only recently become a thing in say like the last year.
Chris Hood 00:32:28
But the layoffs really had nothing.
Chris Hood 00:32:30
It wasn't like somebody said, hey, we're going to lay off a bunch of people and we're going to replace them with AI bots and things to help us escalate.
Chris Hood 00:32:38
I think that has been a natural correlation over the last year, but the layoffs actually had more to do with poor financial decisions and again, ultimately greed.
Chris Hood 00:32:51
And so also in the gaming industry, just more broadly, the gaming industry goes through these natural loops, which means it takes, it takes usually four to five years to develop a game.
Chris Hood 00:33:05
You publish that game and then at the end of that time you're usually actually letting people go before the next game comes up.
Chris Hood 00:33:14
So a combination of you had Covid, you had overhiring, you had a lot of ramp up, that all had to get settled out.
Chris Hood 00:33:23
And it just so happens that all of that was happening at one of the natural cycles which created the highest amount of layoffs in industry history.
Chris Hood 00:33:31
All of that just was coincidental.
Chris Hood 00:33:34
And I don't really attribute any of it, maybe 5% of it to actual AI.
Chris Hood 00:33:40
Okay, so putting all of that aside and putting it into context, we are at a position now where AI is starting to take roles away from creatives, natural talent.
Chris Hood 00:33:52
And especially when we're looking at a creative industry where you want real artists and you don't want generative AI stuff, it is becoming an issue.
Chris Hood 00:34:02
Gdc, the Game Developers Conference, that happens every year, they just did a State of the Gaming industry report where they survey all of the game developers and it clearly shows that there is a big concern with the introduction of generative AI into the creative space.
Chris Hood 00:34:20
So I think this is a topic that's going to continue to get noticed, it's going to continue to escalate.
Chris Hood 00:34:26
No different than what we are seeing across the board.
Chris Hood 00:34:28
When somebody says, well, I don't need any customer support people, because I can just let AI do it all for us, right?
Chris Hood 00:34:35
That is going to eventually have a boiling point, a tipping point.
Chris Hood 00:34:41
And I think we're going to see some reversals both in gaming and across other industries as it relates to removing jobs.
Chris Hood 00:34:50
Because if you really want to think about this long term, in a paradoxical point of view, if we get to a point where AI makes companies more efficient to the point you don't need employees anymore, well then who are your consumers buying your products?
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:08
Yeah, I mean this was when people used to talk about advertising becoming so precise and specific and meeting people's demands before they need it, it kind of to me concluded the same thing.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:21
Well, that's the end of capitalism, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:23
If people don't have demands, if they don't have desires, they're not consuming.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:26
You just have one company meeting it all.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:29
And then again, that's a completely different economic system.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:32
So this is why I really like your approach around ideologies.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:35
Because when you follow the logic of a lot of this stuff, it just doesn't make sense.
Chris Hood 00:35:39
That's right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:41
It results in a world that is so absurd, you're like, no, it's not going to play out that way.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:46
And I suspect you and I are both of a certain vintage that we remember the things that were promised in the dotcom era, we remember the things that were promised in the social media era.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:57
And they didn't happen.
Jesse Hirsch 00:35:58
Other things happened.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:00
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:00
Like, you know, they still had transformative effects, just not the ones that people were predicting at that time.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:07
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:08
Like it usually works out in a different way.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:10
And I feel something similar is happening now that these tools are doing stuff perhaps more modestly than people are claiming, but they are not going to result in the society or the direction that everyone's talking about.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:24
It's going to be something completely different.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:27
So I wanted, within the notion of games, you know, I've often felt, and I mean this in the context of critical thinking because I feel that that is where we struck in this conversation.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:39
The key pain point right there is the false solutionism of Silicon Valley where they're looking for solutions to problems that don't exist.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:48
But critical thinking is a problem that really does exist, that's having consequences in our politics, consequences in our culture.
Jesse Hirsch 00:36:57
I am curious what role you think play can have in fostering critical thinking.
Jesse Hirsch 00:37:04
I say this because you clearly have a lot of critical thinking.
Jesse Hirsch 00:37:09
To what extent, either as a parent or as an educator, do you think about how to foster that critical thinking?
Jesse Hirsch 00:37:18
And again, as someone who has an angle in the gaming industry, do you see potential there or no?
Jesse Hirsch 00:37:25
Is this about getting people to read books?
Chris Hood 00:37:32
I think one of the things that games broadly do is even if we.
Chris Hood 00:37:40
Let's just set aside critical thinking for a minute and just focus on logic, you could say they're one and the same, but for the conversation, not one of the same for the conversation.
Chris Hood 00:37:55
Let's just say logical puzzles, like even putting together a jigsaw puzzle, playing a game like chess, where there's some logic involved.
Chris Hood 00:38:09
If gaming did nothing more than allow people to enhance how they logically look at the world, then that's a great starting point.
Chris Hood 00:38:21
I think the critical thinking part is a skill that one we're not teaching in schools or we're not teaching well or behind the individuals who are teaching critical thinking.
Chris Hood 00:38:33
There's often bias or other forms of agendas that prevent true critical thinking.
Chris Hood 00:38:41
And so I'm not going to say that you can't learn critical thinking skills within a game, especially if there's a storyline like let's say you're given a quest and the quest has multiple different paths and then you're trying to figure out how do I optimize this process so that I can go on the right path strategically.
Chris Hood 00:39:03
And again, maybe there's some logic in there and how to determine that outcome.
Chris Hood 00:39:08
But you're also going to be critically thinking through the steps to figure out how you're going to approach this and how you might solve that particular problem.
Chris Hood 00:39:18
Gaming can introduce critical thinking skills.
Chris Hood 00:39:22
I think gaming has a higher opportunity to teach things like compassion, collaboration, communication, teamwork, all of those types of things that we need when we are actually having conversations with each other.
Chris Hood 00:39:38
I might not see eye to eye to you on whatever the factor is, but I'm going to respect you enough to listen to what you want to say and then be able to critically think about what you want to say to be able to have a conversation.
Chris Hood 00:39:50
So if we can teach alternative skills that are also being not taught appropriately and we can do that in gaming, then the next step becomes, well, okay, how do we really get to those critical thinking steps?
Chris Hood 00:40:06
And unfortunately, the biggest problem with critical thinking is being able to accept that your answer is wrong.
Chris Hood 00:40:17
And we are in a world right now where if I've used kind of the basic argument, if I say the sky is green, somebody out there is going to say, no, the sky is blue or the sky is black because it's nighttime.
Chris Hood 00:40:37
And no one, very few people would be willing to actually walk outside and look up at the sky and see if it's actually green.
Chris Hood 00:40:46
And there are.
Chris Hood 00:40:48
Go ahead.
Jesse Hirsch 00:40:49
I was going to say you started with no one and then you said very few people.
Jesse Hirsch 00:40:53
And I think that's the key nuance because you're absolutely correct in the sense that if one says red, the other says blue.
Jesse Hirsch 00:40:59
If one says up, the other says down, down.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:02
And there is a knee jerk reaction to the discourse in our culture.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:07
But I also liked where you went in terms of you started with logic and at first I was sort of failing to see where you were going with it because I actually think the potential with games is not just logic, but emotion because that's what you sort of got to with compassion and collaboration and, you know, disagreement.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:29
Right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:29
Like I would love to see games teach conflict resolution and conflict mitigation because there's a lot of conflict in games.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:36
So there, there would certainly be, you know, you could earn points, earn badges, right, for, you know, helping to mitigate such incidents.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:44
But I, it's the emotion side that I think makes the sky is green, sky is red.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:50
Because people lose.
Jesse Hirsch 00:41:51
They, they a become overwhelmed by their emotions, they become threatened by other people's emotions and they're not able to kind of balance their logic and their emotions in equal measure so they can empathize with who they're disagreeing with, find that common humanity and go, well, why do you see the sky as red?
Jesse Hirsch 00:42:10
That is a very peculiar situation.
Jesse Hirsch 00:42:13
And to have that kind of dialogue.
Chris Hood 00:42:16
Going back to Star Trek, and I use it often, it's the Spock versus Kirk analogy, right?
Chris Hood 00:42:21
Are you a Spock or are you a Kirk?
Chris Hood 00:42:23
And you know, we could argue that none of us, you know, is, is either.
Chris Hood 00:42:27
But that is how we argue.
Chris Hood 00:42:30
That is how we also critically think.
Chris Hood 00:42:32
And when you are so passionate about a particular topic that you can't see past the reality of that particular topic to accept that you potentially are wrong, the lacking of a logical process, then you can get into critical thinking.
Chris Hood 00:42:50
Well, let me actually go research this.
Chris Hood 00:42:52
Let me actually go and look it up online.
Chris Hood 00:42:54
Let me read other reviews.
Chris Hood 00:42:56
Let me look at both CNN and Fox and see what they both say and then try to determine, like, there's.
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:02
So many things, or assume that both of them are completely wrong and there's a third option.
Chris Hood 00:43:07
And then you can ask yourself, now, why would they both be wrong?
Chris Hood 00:43:10
Oh, ratings, oh, advertising dollars.
Chris Hood 00:43:12
Like, there's natural process that you can go through, but if you're unwilling to ask the right questions, then you're always going to believe you're right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:22
And this is where I'll push back very slightly on something you perhaps even unconsciously said in the middle of our conversation where you said, well, you know, I don't want to get political.
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:32
And I think, especially Americans, I think what you mean to say is you don't want to be partisan, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:38
You're not trying to champion a certain part because you've been political this entire conversation, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:44
Like everything you're saying is a small kind of politics.
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:48
It's, you know, not partisan, it's not ideological.
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:52
It's again, going back to a public interest or a public good, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:43:56
Where you're sort of suggesting that in a democracy you need an informed citizenry, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:01
You need people who have literacy, who have critical thinking, who can understand policy and legislation so they can then debate it and participate on it rather than go bad guys, bad policy, you know, or whatever the kind of jingoist dialogue goes.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:20
So in trying to wrap this up, I want to bring us Back to ideologies.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:28
Let's put this purely in the business context because I think you made a really good argument in terms of the sales logic and the marketing logic of how AI is being driven, often pushed.
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:39
What do you think the counter is to that?
Jesse Hirsch 00:44:41
If you were speaking to a company, if you were speaking to a board of directors and they're like, Chris, we're feeling overwhelmed with the amount of trusted vendors that we've been working with forever and they are now telling us we must upgrade to this AI package or we must start training for these new AI features.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:01
What is your strategic advice on how they cope?
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:04
Right.
Jesse Hirsch 00:45:04
Do they just hold their breath and go underwater and go with the flow or is there a saner strategy here?
Chris Hood 00:45:12
Yeah, there's an easy strategy.
Chris Hood 00:45:15
That's the beauty of this, is that ultimately it's going to boil back down to who are your customers and what do your customers want from you?
Chris Hood 00:45:24
And I think too often we get into this hype mode, fear of missing out something.
Chris Hood 00:45:32
Somebody tells us like this is the next thing to slice bread, you have to do it.
Chris Hood 00:45:36
And we decide, oh, let's jump on board without actually determining if it matters or not.
Chris Hood 00:45:43
And so if we use a really simple critical thinking pathway, it's do my customers want something and then how am I going to build it?
Chris Hood 00:45:55
I've preached a lot of times about it's customer first, technology last.
Chris Hood 00:46:01
And what we're doing right now is we are putting technology first and then trying to figure out how our consumers are going to use it.
Chris Hood 00:46:10
And so what you end up with is, you know, two really easy, quick ways to kind of think about this is if you go into your grocery store again, you usually have now an option, I could do self checkout.
Chris Hood 00:46:25
And I'm sure there's plenty of people who want to do self checkout and that's fine.
Chris Hood 00:46:28
It's there now for you.
Chris Hood 00:46:30
There's a lot of people who completely disagree with self checkout and will want to go to an aisle where there's an actual person helping you.
Chris Hood 00:46:37
Well, if I go to say Taco Bell and I go through the drive thru right now, I am forced to communicate with an AI agent who is taking my chatbot, who's taking my order.
Chris Hood 00:46:49
Now we could argue maybe the, you know, things are a little bit more efficient, they understand you, you know, they can upsell you more efficiently, all those things.
Chris Hood 00:46:59
But I don't get the option like you're forcing that on me.
Chris Hood 00:47:03
Now if there was a way to say like I want to talk to a real person or I'm okay with talking with, you know, your chat bot, then great, you're providing the option.
Chris Hood 00:47:12
But too often when you start with that technology and then try to shove it down your consumer's throats, your consumer is going to leave and go to a product, a brand that doesn't shove it down their throats.
Chris Hood 00:47:27
This is why we see like Discover, the Discover card that all their entire advertising campaign is.
Chris Hood 00:47:34
Yeah, you can call us and talk with a real person, not a robot.
Chris Hood 00:47:38
So customer first, technology last.
Chris Hood 00:47:42
And just to kind of finalize that topic, if, if I say, what is the problem I'm trying to solve for my customer and I talked with my customers and I figure out what that product in that pain point is and what they need, there are a thousand different ways I can solve that, and several of those are probably not with AI.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:03
I desperately want to live in the utopia that you describe in which critical thinking is not only pervasive, but part of the organizational decision making structures.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:18
Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like that's the world we're currently living in.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:21
But hopefully, Chris, with your work, we will get there.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:25
Our final segment of every show is our shout outs.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:30
And this is really just to acknowledge that all of us kind of stand on the shoulders of giants, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:35
That we've all been influenced by others.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:38
So just like our new section, is there anyone you want to shout out?
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:42
Could be personal, could be great.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:44
Living, intellectual, dead, intellectual, Hollywood B movie star.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:50
Again, we're trying to put you on the back of your feet.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:52
We want the intuitive answer.
Jesse Hirsch 00:48:54
But who would you shout out to let our audience know more about today?
Chris Hood 00:48:59
Oh, I don't know.
Chris Hood 00:49:00
The one.
Chris Hood 00:49:01
The two people who popped into my mind because you touched on movies and obviously I'm a big movie fan, would be Steven Spielberg.
Chris Hood 00:49:09
And then closely aligned to that would be Michael Crichton.
Jesse Hirsch 00:49:12
Oh, right on.
Chris Hood 00:49:13
Michael Crichton.
Chris Hood 00:49:14
He passed away.
Chris Hood 00:49:15
But I have several of his books sitting over here.
Chris Hood 00:49:18
And I'm often also asked, like, who's an author that inspires you?
Chris Hood 00:49:22
I think the way that he writes and the way he brings some of that critical thinking, as we've talked about some of that real world perspective into the fictitious is really inspiring sometimes.
Chris Hood 00:49:34
So if you haven't picked up a Michael Crichton book, any one of them doesn't matter, just go pick up one.
Chris Hood 00:49:39
You can pick up Jurassic park since you're probably already familiar with it, but go pick up any Michael Crichton book.
Chris Hood 00:49:44
Read it.
Chris Hood 00:49:44
It's really intriguing, the thought process and the way he goes about things.
Jesse Hirsch 00:49:48
And not only that, I find his books are fun to read.
Jesse Hirsch 00:49:52
Like the pace moves fast and you become enveloped into the story.
Jesse Hirsch 00:49:59
I wish we had more storytellers like that.
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:02
I didn't know that he died recently.
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:04
Shout out to Ridley Funeral Home, but he excellent example in terms of our shout outs Now, Chris, I have to thank you very much for giving us a critical perspective on AI.
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:17
We've been trying to dig into AI as part of this podcast and it has been difficult to find guests who have the kind of critical thinking perspective you have.
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:26
So let us hope that it is infectious and that everyone listening now starts thinking about not just the customer, but the community, right?
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:35
The people who are fundamentally the users of this software and as Cory Doctorow would say, whether we need the inshinification of these services rather than keeping them functional and working as they should.
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:50
You can find meta views on all the usual social networks.
Jesse Hirsch 00:50:56
We appreciate, Chris, your time, we appreciate our audience's time and we'll be back soon.
Jesse Hirsch 00:51:04
Thanks again everybody.
Jesse Hirsch 00:51:05
We'll talk to you in a bit.
";}