Lorraine Bosse-Smith and Dev Nag, Expectations, Responsibility, and the Human Future in an AI World

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Intro Voice
Basis: The opening voice introduces Popp Talk and Mary Jane Popp in the third person before handing the program to the host.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane Popp, Host
Basis: The announcer introduces Mary Jane Popp by name, and she immediately welcomes listeners to Popp Talk. She conducts both interviews, reads the ACB Mechanical promotional segment, and closes the program.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine Bosse-Smith, Guest
Basis: Mary Jane introduces Lorraine as the founder of the Fit Leader Formula. The automated transcript renders her surname in several forms, including “Bossay Smith” and “Bose Smith.” “Lorraine Bosse-Smith” is the most likely consistent rendering from the transcript, but the exact spelling should be verified if publication requires certainty.

Speaker 4 – Dev Nag, Guest
Basis: Mary Jane introduces “Dev Nagg” as the CEO and founder of QueryPal, and the guest later spells the company name Q-U-E-R-Y-P-A-L. “Dev Nag” is used as the most likely rendering of his name.

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Speaker 1 – Announcer / Prerecorded Intro Voice: Are you ready for new dimensions and countless possibilities today and for the future? It’s an exciting new time, and the answers are out there. So join Mary Jane Popp as she explores the unique and unusual for a better life on Popp Talk and searches for the truth.

And here she is, Mary Jane Popp.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane Popp, Host: And welcome to Popp Talk. Thanks again, Mike.

We’ve got a good one for you. You know, I try to find all kinds of interesting things for us to discuss, to look at the possibilities, and maybe just open up the mind a little bit. Then you make your own decisions.

This time we’re going to do some fun things because, a little bit later on, artificial intelligence is coming. It’s there. I mean, it’s already being used. But how far can it go? What does that mean to you and me, and what’s going to happen in our lives?

We’re going to find out from Dev Nag. He is very much into the research of artificial intelligence, and we’ll look at it—especially in healthcare. Will there be a big-time revolution or risk, or maybe a little bit of both?

But before we do that, do you really know what you want to do? Do you take responsibility for what you do? These are all deep questions, but the question is, do we have deep answers? Let’s find out.

We all are dreaming, you know, from little kids on. You have hopes and ideas. Do you feel like maybe you’re falling short of your life expectations—from work, family, health, just about everything? And have you ever thought that your expectations just might be over the top, unrealistic?

Well, according to Lorraine Bosse-Smith, the root of all stressful situations is our own expectations. And if we want more peace and harmony, we need to explore those expectations to determine if they are fair and reasonable.

Lorraine is founder of the Fit Leader Formula. She wants to help people improve their lives. And by the way, FIT stands for [exact acronym expansion unclear; transcribed as “foundation in human behavior”].

Hi, Lorraine. How are you?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine Bosse-Smith, Guest: Good. I am doing well. How about you?

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Okay. You know, we have expectations from as far back as we can remember. From little kids on, they want to be a fireman. They want to be a ballet dancer. Then things change, and then they’re educated, and then they want to do this and they want to do that.

So isn’t it good to have expectations?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: It is. There’s a difference between setting goals and dreaming, like your song that you just had, right?

We all love to dream, but many of those dreams can be completely, utterly fantasy and unrealistic. And that’s okay as long as we recognize that.

A true goal, as you know, takes commitment, intentionality, and action. You’re going to have to work toward it. So you have to be committed enough to say, “Yes, this is what I want to do,” versus, “This is just fun dreaming about this.”

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah. Sometimes I think we need to be committed for thinking about something. You keep fighting and fighting and fighting, but then that’s part of the human spirit, isn’t it?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: It is. You don’t want to squash creativity. I am a creative person, and I’m never short of ideas.

As a businesswoman, I have to be careful because I could start chasing all these shiny objects and then never really get anything of value done.

So when it comes to creative ideas, I create either a digital file or an actual file folder, and I put these ideas in there. I’ll think, “Wow, I thought of this,” or, “Wouldn’t this be cool for an app?” or this or that.

Then I sit on them. I let them simmer.

Then I go back and look at them, and it’s hysterical. Sometimes I’ll look at my notes and I’m like, “What in tarnation was I thinking with that? I don’t know. Does that even make sense anymore?”

Or I’ll go, “Wow, that has some merit. I think I need to explore that a little bit more.”

Because the honest truth, Mary Jane, is we only have so much time and energy. So we don’t want to give it all to the fluff and the fantasy. We do want to save some energy and time for those things that maybe we really should pursue.

It’s kind of interesting. When you look at the idea, the concept of expectation, it can go all the way from simply survival to very lofty expectations and everything in between.

In relationships in particular, we get in trouble with expectation. I expect you to be on time, but perhaps in your family being 20 minutes late is the norm. Now I’m frustrated, and you didn’t think you had any problem.

So we need to look at our relationships from both sides. We need to look at what we’re expecting.

There are certain people who can only give what they can give. Especially in dysfunctional families, if you’re expecting what I call “turtles to fly,” you’re going to be frustrated and disappointed for the rest of your life because, guess what? They don’t have wings.

But on the flip side, we need to understand the impact that our behavior has on other people, which kind of addresses that word you used: responsibility.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Interesting. So we wake up with expectations. I mean, this is what I have to get done today. These are the things I need to do. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

I’ve got the everyday stuff. Good. But then what do I want to reach for? Like you said, have a goal, right?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Yes. And it takes time.

We live in such a fast-paced, high-tech world that we forget to be in a moment. We forget to look at our life.

This is a wonderful time of year when I encourage people to say, “What were you intending to do this year? Did you do it? What do you think prevented you from doing it?”

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah, but if we do that, we might get disappointed and be sad.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: But it helps us to say, “Do we want to repeat that, or do we want to maybe do it better next year?” Because we get a clean slate come January.

So it’s balancing out, not beating yourself up.

Sometimes if you look at your year and something didn’t happen, and if you truly take the time to say why, you might go, “Well, it really didn’t matter to me as much as I thought.”

And that’s okay.

I think we need to give ourselves permission to let go. We get so focused on goals that sometimes we have to say, “That really wasn’t the right goal for me. I was trying to be like so-and-so,” or, “I thought maybe that would bring me happiness, but you know what? It didn’t.”

Of course, in the work world, we are given many goals that we have to accomplish. But I’m talking more about your personal life, like you said—some dreams and visions.

I look at my life and my family. Everybody is musical and talented and has pursued it. So I felt this pressure all these years that I needed to do music.

I would try to take lessons, and I would never practice. I was supposed to do this, and I wouldn’t. I kept setting a goal, and then, like you said, I’d be frustrated, disappointed, and sad because I’m not a musician.

I finally had to admit to myself, “I’m an outdoor person, and all the time that it would take to be a great musician would keep me inside. That isn’t me.”

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah, you’d hate it.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: I had to say, “It’s okay to be me.”

That’s what each person has to do. What makes up you could be very different from what makes up a spouse, a sibling, a friend, or a family member, and it’s okay.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Got it. So how do we decide when we’ve had enough and we’d better find something else?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: You’ve got to give any new endeavor some time.

They say a habit takes anywhere from 60 to 90 days of consistency. So you’ve got to give it a chance and ask, “Am I going to commit to it? Am I going to give time to it?”

But there is a point where, if after 90 days you just haven’t, then either you’ve got to change the strategy of how you’re doing it or reevaluate the goal.

Our human behavior, which you and I have talked about—the different styles—matters.

We can try to do something the way we saw it on YouTube or from some influencer. We try to be them, but we don’t have the same personality. So what worked for them will not necessarily work for you.

Then look at the why.

Why is such a small word with a big, powerful meaning. Why are you pursuing this? What really did you want to get out of it?

Understand that, because if it’s a true why—like for me and my health—then the why matters.

In my family, too many people have died around the age of 50. Cancer is prevalent. My why keeps me at the gym. My why keeps me eating right because I don’t want to be the statistic in my family. I want to live.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah. Sure. So that why, right? At 90 days, reevaluate why in the first place you wanted to do it.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Exactly. If the why is still important, then you’ll be willing to look at it differently, try different things, adjust, and modify that goal to see if maybe you can get there.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Got it.

Now, you also talk about people taking responsibility, and you say mature people take responsibility.

I’ve got to be honest with you. I know some mature people, and they are not very responsible. So it depends on who you are, right?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: It does, and it also depends on whether you’re taking care of yourself.

Being a mature person is in the moment. You can be a mature person most of the time, but maybe you haven’t slept well. You haven’t taken care of yourself. You’ve had a very stressful situation in your life.

At that moment, that can hinder common sense and your ability to do the right thing. And responsibility really is doing the right thing for the situation. It is owning up.

It’s also learned.

So many dysfunctional families blame everybody else. It’s never your fault. It’s always, “Well, this happened,” and, “They did this,” and, “This circumstance,” and that. There’s no accountability, no desire to improve behavior. There’s just deferring responsibility to everybody else.

We can learn these things and think we’re a mature person, but we may still have some bad habits.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: That’s actually my philosophy too. A person who always blames somebody else—it’s easier. It’s a lot easier.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Oh, sure.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: It’s like, “They told me to do it. She told me how to get this done, but it didn’t work. So it’s not my fault. It’s their fault.”

However, if you take responsibility and say, “I did it because I believed that was what I was supposed to do,” that’s harder because the only person you have to blame is the one you look at in the mirror.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: It is, and you have to be ready.

There’s no formula for this or a single timeline. We’re all different people, and we’re ready at different times.

But when we are ready, we grow so much more when we look at it and say, “All right. Yeah, I could sit there and blame this and that, but ultimately I made the decision to do it.”

If you’ve ever been in a bad relationship, which I have, it’s so easy to say, “Well, they were a jerk, and they were this and that.”

But guess who was in the relationship? That would be me.

I chose to be in that relationship, and I chose to stay in that relationship for too long. That is on me.

Until I was willing to say, “I made a big boo-boo,” I wasn’t willing to grow and ask, “Why exactly did I do that?”

Well, it was low self-esteem. Then that puts me on a journey to say, “I need to work on who? Myself.”

Really, all we have control over is our own self.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: We all make mistakes. I don’t know anybody who’s perfect. But if you learn from the mistake, it’s not just a mistake. It’s a learning experience, don’t you think?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Absolutely.

If you can look at your life and say you’ve never made a mistake, then I can almost guarantee that you aren’t learning and you aren’t growing.

That itself is a mistake.

Any entrepreneur can tell you they’ve had failures. Look at the light bulb, right? How many times did attempts fail before there was one that worked?

Those were all stepping stones.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: I’ve said this before. I’ve said it on the air. When you make mistakes, you admit you made a mistake and you learn from it.

Now, if you keep doing it the same way and keep making those mistakes, then put the word “stupid” across your head.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Yeah. That becomes a pattern of bad behavior instead of learning and changing from it.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: And sometimes when you admit you were wrong, maybe it takes an apology. Say, “I’m sorry. I either didn’t do what I was supposed to do or I didn’t get it right.”

Some people just don’t want to apologize. It’s like, why? What’s the matter with that? It shows you’re a human being, for gosh sakes.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Yes, but there is this thing called the ego.

It has its place to help us, but if it gets to be a big, ugly monster, it really hinders us instead of helping us.

And the “sorry” thing—those who have trouble with that—this is one of my things. You want to see the ugly side of Lorraine? Somebody hurts you, says something mean to you, and then they say, “Well, I’m sorry you took it wrong.”

No.

Clearly, when you called me a jerk, there’s no other way for me to take it.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yes, no kidding.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: So when somebody is working on themselves, they would say instead, “I regret saying the mean thing. That was uncalled for or spiteful and hurt your feelings. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: But mean it.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Yes.

When you say that, it sounds so simple, but it’s so difficult for some people to do because it’s really owning up.

What I coach people on is this: relationships are messy.

You grew up in one tribe—your family—and I grew up in a tribe of mine. So we had different principles and different social norms. That’s what makes the world the world: differences.

You might actually think something you’ve done is okay because of those norms.

But even if it’s okay to you, if it wasn’t okay to me and it hurt me, then by apologizing you don’t have to say your entire worldview was wrong.

But you do care enough to say, “I recognize that it didn’t work for you. It hurt you, and for that I’m truly sorry.”

You don’t have to surrender yourself. You don’t have to roll on the ground, expose your belly, and flog yourself.

But you do have to acknowledge that there’s a relationship and, if you have one, it should matter. You would care enough to clean up the mess.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Now, you told me a little bit about wanting to be a musician because your family was all into the music world. But that’s an environmental thing.

How much does nature or nurture enter into our lives?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: It’s both.

We come wired, and I believe I’m wired musically inclined. I have a great ear for it. When I was younger, I could hear something on the radio and start playing it on the piano.

So I think my environment of music was there, and I had some natural ability in me.

But I’m still an individual who then chose to say, “Okay, even despite those things, that’s not what I want to pursue.”

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: It doesn’t make you happy.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: It didn’t.

I love listening to music, and it’s a huge part of my life. As a fitness instructor, it’s so important because it helps people keep going when they’re starting to run out of gas. It’s very motivating.

But nonetheless, it was a conflict with other things, this physical side of my life. I just had to choose. There are only so many hours in a day.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: But just taking responsibility—I mean, it’s not easy, is it?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: No, and it can sneak up on us.

You’re so right. We’re human, and we’ve all been late and rushed around like chickens with their heads cut off, and then we can get short with each other.

That’s where we take responsibility and say, “Okay, is this really this person’s fault that I’m frustrated? No. It’s not their fault that I ran into traffic.”

Put things in perspective.

Oh, my goodness, Mary Jane, we’ve lost so much perspective.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah. For some things, I try to look at as many sides as I possibly can. But I think our world has gotten to a point where you only listen to one side, and that’s dangerous. Don’t you think?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Yes.

Again, it’s a love-hate relationship for me with social media. We’ve connected with some people, found some long-lost cousins, and so forth.

But what’s happening with these algorithms is exactly what you said. I have this opinion, therefore that’s all they’re going to show me over and over and over again.

So what is that doing? It’s cementing in a belief system that I’m right and everybody else is wrong. You just haven’t figured it out yet.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Boy, we’ve got a lot of that going on right now.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Right. It just feeds it and feeds it.

We’ve lost most of our newspapers where, typically, a good newspaper would have a hot topic and one side of the column would be one person’s perspective and the other side would be another person’s perspective.

Neither told you what to think.

You read them, discerned, and came to your own conclusion, versus media telling you what you should think and feel over and over again.

So, yes, it has become very divisive.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Oh, yeah. And it’s going to get worse. It’s not getting better, and that worries me. It worries me about my country. It worries me about people caring about each other.

You’ve got to care.

Just because you have expectations, that doesn’t mean you step on people all the time.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: No.

Manners. I have a little booklet that I’ve written called Manners Still Matter.

I was raised to be polite—to say thank you and please, and open doors for people who have their arms full.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my arms full and some man in front of me slams the door in my face.

Well, gee, thanks for that.

We are so centered on self, and we wonder why the world is so crazy.

But we each have to work on our little space. Meaning, what do I have control over?

I can be nice to other people. I can say please and thank you. I can open doors. I can do the zipper merge instead of speeding up and trying to cut people off in traffic.

One by one, we could have some improvements, but each person has to decide.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: The other thing, too, is sometimes something as simple as a smile.

Once in a while I go to the mall. I don’t do that much shopping in a mall, but I do. I walk up and down the mall looking at things and I kind of smile at people.

The first time they see you do that, they think, “This is a crazy lady. Why is she smiling at me?”

But then the next time, if you pass them again, all of a sudden a little smile creeps up on their face too.

Isn’t that wonderful, that you’ve given someone the opportunity to smile and to be happy for that moment?

Maybe it won’t last, but at least for a while. What do you think?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Absolutely.

Even saying good morning, good afternoon, hello.

Here’s something I noticed. We just went on a very overdue vacation. It had been years since we took a whole week off.

We go to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and everybody is, “Oh, hello! How are you today?”

You’re walking around thinking, why?

Because everybody’s on vacation, so we’re all happy.

What dawned on me is happiness is contagious.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah, it is.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: We all show up—back to that word expectations—we expect that we’re going to have a good time. We expect that we’re going to be happy, and we smile and say hello.

All of a sudden we’re talking to people we’ll never see again, and we’re getting to know them while we’re sitting by the pool.

Why can’t we take that same mindset into our community where we live?

Why would we not want that kind of friendliness where we live? Why do we want hostility? I certainly don’t.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: It makes for a lot better life.

Instead of being sad and depressed or angry or egotistical, just say, “Hey, we’re all in this together.”

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: We are.

Something I do coming up this time of year is bake a ton of cookies for the holidays. Then I package them up and go deliver little packages of happiness and cheer—to the post office, the dry cleaners, my massage therapist, people in my neighborhood, whoever—just to say, “Happy holidays. Have a great day.”

Here’s just a little something that was made with care and love.

Whether they’re on a diet or not, whether they eat them or not, the thought and the consideration to take time for them, I hope, is planting some seeds of friendliness.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Absolutely. Especially during the holidays, because we’re stressed out enough.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Absolutely.

I’m busy like everybody else, but I make that time every year because I really do think we’re losing sight of the importance of relationships.

We’re doing so much.

I heard you mention a little teaser about artificial intelligence.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: We’re trying to eliminate the personal contact from our life, and that scares me.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Absolutely.

Now, do you have a website, by the way?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: I do. It’s TheTotalYou.biz.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: TheTotalYou.biz. Terrific.

And I know you’ve written nine books. So if they go there, will they be able to see the books?

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Absolutely, and a bunch of little topical booklets and all kinds of free information—newsletter, blogs, and vlogs—all just to look at your entire life, because it does all matter.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: We all need the help. That’s for darn sure.

And you have a wonderful holiday too. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

Speaker 3 – Lorraine: Thank you. Take care.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Lorraine Bosse-Smith.

You know, share a little bit of you with someone else. It’s very simple. I’m not talking about having to make a major donation or something. Just say, “I care.” We all can.

But artificial intelligence—oh, boy—we’re going to be talking about that. So hang in here with us, okay?

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Well, this is one we do need to know about because it’s here and coming on strong.

We’ve all heard about artificial intelligence, right? AI.

If you ever talked to Siri or Alexa, that’s AI. That’s just the beginning of AI.

AI is coming into our lives big time, from education and finance to healthcare.

What does it all mean?

For every good in technology, we’ve learned this: there can be good and there can be bad.

Dev Nag knows.

Dev is CEO and founder of QueryPal. He helped develop backend systems involving financial processing at Google and its advertising revenue.

So let’s put it this way: Dev is in the know of where AI can go—perhaps the good, the bad, and some of the ugly.

My main concern today is healthcare.

Revolution, risk, or maybe a little bit of both?

Dev, nice to have you with us on the show.

Speaker 4 – Dev Nag, Guest: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: I would think, in some ways, AI can be great in healthcare, especially with diagnosis. Is that true?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Absolutely.

We’ve seen AI applied to healthcare in a bunch of dimensions.

It’s definitely been used in the clinical world to help with diagnosis. It’s actually been used in radiology for multiple decades, going back before the recent AI breakthroughs.

But we’re now seeing it across many more fields with healthcare benefits—personalized medicine, genetics, et cetera.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: So, in other words, through its own network it can see perhaps more than humans can see?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Exactly.

One of the biggest advantages that AI has over humans is that it can see far more data than a person ever could.

Just to give you an example, ChatGPT-4 was trained on about seven to eight trillion words. Humans hear and read about 50 million words in a lifetime.

So ChatGPT-4 saw the equivalent of about 150,000 lifetimes of data.

And that amount of data is only going up with modern multimodal AI.

If you imagine what medical AI is looking at, it’s looking at far more data than any doctor could see in an entire career and being able to look at patterns, understand what was actually done, and examine outcomes at a scale that we just can’t get to.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: The other thing that worries me a little bit is artificial intelligence will give me the facts, the logical facts, because it has the ability to open up all these possibilities.

But there’s no emotion there, and emotion is important for humans.

Speaker 4 – Dev: Yeah.

A lot of service industries, I think, are probably going to be among the last fields to be directly affected by AI.

The bedside manner of your doctor, how your doctor talks to you during an appointment—these are not things that AI can do right now, or perhaps ever in quite the same way.

I think we’re always going to need that human touch in some functions, and healthcare is probably the leading example.

When you’re hearing bad news or thinking through some serious options, you want to have that sense of empathy and understanding about your situation.

Even if AI is providing some of the recommendations, you want someone to guide you through the process.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: The other thing, too, is they can mimic.

We’ve already talked about that. I’ve teased everybody on the air. I said, “You may be listening to the Popp Talk radio show with Mary Jane Popp, but it may not be me. It may be my AI,” because they can really mimic who I am, my style, my questions, all those kinds of things, right?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Absolutely.

As AI takes over many of the online interactions, it might be the case that we actually seek out in-person connections even more to compensate for that—to have something real and someone on the other side who understands us.

I could see that divide happening pretty fast.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Interesting.

Well, the good thing is that it can be personal treatment, because some doctors—and I’m not pointing the finger here, but maybe I am a little bit—it’s like, “This is what I learned about this particular condition or disease, so this is what the plan will be.”

Whereas perhaps—and you’ll have to verify this—AI can look at some other major possibilities because it’s all running through the circuits.

Speaker 4 – Dev: Exactly.

If you imagine all the data that makes up a person’s complete medical history—their genetic data, lifestyle data, clinical data—AI can actually understand that, or at least process all that data very, very quickly in a way that no human could.

So personalized medicine really will rely on AI getting more involved in these clinical settings.

The most recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as I’m referring to it here, involved work related to AlphaFold, which is healthcare AI.

You can imagine this being applied to predict how a drug might interact with your particular physiology compared with someone else.

So doctors who are thinking there’s a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone might instead be working with tools that can personalize care and understand the individual much better.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: What about drugs?

When you watch the commercials on TV, let’s be honest, the first 15 or 20 seconds are about the drug and what it can do for you.

Then the last 30 or 40 seconds, if it’s a minute-long commercial, are about how many terrible things it can do to you, including death.

Can AI be more logical about it and tell you what really applies to you? Because it can scare you to death.

If you see all the side effects, you think, “I’ll just live with what I’ve got.”

Speaker 4 – Dev: That’s a good point.

A lot of these commercials have to be very conservative and talk about all the potential risks, but they don’t all apply to each person.

You can imagine AI could do a better job of telling you what your actual risk is with this particular medication.

It might not be the whole laundry list of side effects. It might be just one or two things, which enables you and your doctor to make a better decision for you.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah, that makes good sense.

I’ve talked to people who have researched different medications and vaccines. Maybe one person had a bad reaction in a certain way. That still has to be included—that one person out of maybe a thousand or 10,000.

I would like to know if it was just one person. I might still be willing to take the chance.

There are so many wonderful things that I see coming with AI, but I’m also a little nervous.

In your opinion, how advanced can they get?

Speaker 4 – Dev: AI has gotten so good so fast over the last couple of years.

If you use ChatGPT every day, you’ve noticed over the last couple of years how fast it has been able to improve—the quality of responses, the breadth of knowledge, even the ability to do more advanced reasoning than it could at the beginning.

The speed is very, very fast. I think it surprised pretty much everyone over the last couple of years.

But we are, I think, better nowadays than we were two or three or five years ago at understanding how to apply AI responsibly in a way that’s safer and that serves humans.

We want to be in that position because we’re really at the beginning of this big revolution.

Now we actually also have people who study the safety of AI full time. There are companies like Anthropic that were founded around AI safety.

They have very good funding. They’ve raised billions of dollars to make sure they’re releasing AI in a very responsible way for society.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: What would be the irresponsible way?

Speaker 4 – Dev: I think one of the biggest risks of AI right now that we’re seeing—it’s not theoretical; it’s actually happening—is misinformation and deepfakes.

There are examples in the corporate world and in personal situations where people have taken deepfake videos and used them to trick people in business and steal large amounts of money.

In one famous case, someone actually did a video call using a deepfake and stole $25 million from a business.

There are many other examples where people have been scammed by someone pretending to be their child or grandchild and saying, “I need money,” or, “I need you to wire the money to this place.”

That’s happened. There have been a bunch of victims.

These are examples of very irresponsible use. We don’t want this to happen. They’re criminal acts, obviously, but AI makes it much easier than it was before.

So that’s an example of how we need to find ways to restrict AI usage in ways that prevent it from hurting the social fabric.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: What about whether AI can actually think or reason like a human being?

Speaker 4 – Dev: I’m not sure if you’d call it thinking. You might call it reasoning in some ways, in a very specific way.

There are lots of ways modern AI still fails. You can find these failure modes all over.

You can trick ChatGPT in lots of different ways with simple questions at times.

So it definitely has some kind of reasoning capabilities, but it doesn’t reason the same way that we do.

It’s much, much better than us at some things and much worse than us at other things.

So I’d say it’s kind of parallel in some ways but different from us.

Whether it thinks or not, it definitely doesn’t think like us.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: What about in a game against a human being?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Take chess. That’s a great example.

We had chess-machine software for a long time before the recent AI breakthrough.

Deep Blue won chess against a world chess champion back in the 1990s under IBM.

All those machines had to do was essentially look at chess games in the future.

They said, “Okay, we have the current state of the board. If we did this move and the opponent did this other move,” and back and forth.

They would plan out what are called rollouts—many theoretical future moves—and determine what might happen and which outcome is strongest.

It doesn’t require thinking in the way we normally mean it. It requires a bunch of programming to say, “Let’s look at all the different possible moves and see which has the strongest solution at the end of this.”

Those things are very easily reduced to algorithms and wouldn’t really match how we think about our own thinking in a deeper sense.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Do you think AI could ever become sentient?

Speaker 4 – Dev: That’s definitely a question above my pay grade, and probably above most people’s.

But if it does happen, I don’t think we’ll necessarily recognize the moment.

I would say people right now often treat large language models and modern AI as if they are sentient.

They react to them socially. They interact in deep ways and have long conversations. They’ll ask about personal matters.

You see that behavior right now.

So whether or not AI is sentient internally, we definitely treat it like it’s sentient.

That’s probably the more important part: how humans treat and interact with technology and what that means for how we interact with each other and for our safety as a society.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: And what about privacy?

Speaker 4 – Dev: That’s a great point.

For at least 20 or 30 years online, we had this period where there was pretty good privacy. That’s going away now.

You can take pretty much any picture of a face and potentially track it down to the person, even if that particular picture was never online before.

You can take very small writing samples from anonymous posts and often trace them back to a person. That has happened in various cases.

So the idea of privacy is either going to have to change, or we will adapt to being more forgiving of people and how they thought or what they said in the past.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: So if you wrote something anonymously, AI may eventually be able to connect it back to you?

Speaker 4 – Dev: It can.

Misinformation obviously came long before AI.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah, but it was limited in visibility. Now misinformation can be global and immediate.

Speaker 4 – Dev: Yeah. That probably speaks more broadly to the telecommunications revolution—the fact that people have this amazing, broad reach, whether the information is correct or not.

I do think AI makes it easier to take on the identity of other people or to say things in a much more articulate fashion.

I think that’s the danger: the leverage for people who have influence.

It makes our societal reactions more important.

How do we analyze this information online? Do we try to verify it? Do we look at the source in a deeper way? What does credibility look like?

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah, because I have a dear friend who has a daughter who is now a freshman in college.

The professor gave an assignment to write an article and then do a synopsis.

Now, you would think the synopsis should go to the professor, correct?

No. They sent it to AI to see what the AI says about the way it was written.

I don’t care what AI says about it. I want a human being to react to what my synopsis is and my topic.

That’s giving too much power to AI because I don’t know what they’ll do with it.

Does that make any sense?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Yeah.

I think the right long-term future is a balance between humans and AI.

I don’t think AI should take over roles that are so important.

Education is a prime example.

You can imagine AI can help leverage and democratize access. People who are far away from a public school or don’t have the resources to go to college could benefit greatly from having an AI tutor where they can’t get access to a human teacher.

But for other people, we’d love to have a combination of the best of both worlds: the empathy, understanding, and caring of a human teacher along with the scalability of AI.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Bottom line, because you’re heavily into this and you have much better knowledge than I have about it: does anything deeply worry you about AI?

Speaker 4 – Dev: I think the misinformation angle is probably the most concerning to me.

There are a lot of long-term fears about AI. Are we going to live in a future like The Matrix or Transcendence?

For me, I worry about how we react to information and all of that.

What do we expect our children to think about reality and facts and these kinds of conflicts and controversies when they see every possible opinion leveraged across all social media?

How do you make sense of the world in this chaotic maelstrom of all these different competing robots, essentially?

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah.

I don’t know if you ever saw the movie WALL-E. That always comes into my mind because basically AI or androids or robotics or whatever took over.

They did everything for the humans.

The humans didn’t have to think anymore. They just sat there like big blobs, on their screens and devices.

I can see it happening because if people can have somebody else do it for them, why not?

If we get to that point where we don’t have to think anymore, we don’t have to do anymore, we don’t have to be anymore, and we just let it all happen out there and lay back and do nothing, that can be the damnation of humanity.

Speaker 4 – Dev: I hope we can use that time and leisure to actually pursue the creative arts or things that are more challenging to us, rather than the future of WALL-E, where everyone is sitting in a chair and drinking a soft drink.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah. Exactly. Humanity.

Speaker 4 – Dev: We definitely want to avoid that. I think that’s definitely the wrong way to go.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: You wonder which way it will go.

In your opinion, what are the risks of AI? You mentioned some of them.

Speaker 4 – Dev: I think misinformation is one.

I think overreliance on AI in places where it’s not really meant to be used instead of humans is another important risk.

I also think there are going to be a lot of displacement possibilities as people have functions that are being augmented by AI and possibly require less demand on their time.

That’s going to be a big transition over the next 10 years or so.

But I do think AI will also have surprising solutions to some of the problems that we have right now.

I’ll give an example of a surprising solution that we may not think about every day.

Right now, the U.S. has roughly eight parking spots for every single car—about two billion parking spots for roughly a few hundred million vehicles.

We’re going to see those areas used in different ways as self-driving cars take on more of the transportation burden.

A lot of the problems we have, like housing problems that humans created, could be impacted by the future of AI.

If we’re able to create a transportation network around self-driving cars, we won’t need a parking spot for every car. We won’t need as many cars in general.

That could actually help mitigate some of the housing issue.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Hmm.

I’m trying to be as open as I possibly can because I talk to Siri, and it makes my life a little easier.

I don’t have to look something up, although sometimes I have to explain to Siri what I really mean. It’ll give me something local when I want something national or vice versa.

But it’s comforting to know that it’s there.

I don’t use it every single minute. I don’t even use it every day. But it’s kind of nice to know that it’s there as a possibility if I need the help.

I just don’t want it to tell me what I should be doing.

Does that make sense to you?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Right.

You want it to be a tool in its place and not an oracle or your manager.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Exactly.

I worry about that even with computers and young people because it’s like, no, it’s a tool.

I don’t want them to lose the idea of imagination and creativity because right now a computer or AI can do so much for you.

“Create something for me,” instead of the human person creating something.

I don’t want that to be lost, especially with young people who are growing up now.

I’m in a studio with three computers running the show. That’s fine. I’m using it as a tool, but I don’t want it to take over.

I still want to be in control. I still want to share information with my guests, which means it’s still human.

I don’t want that to go away.

I don’t want young people to grow up not knowing the human touch or how to relate to another human.

For example, I have a very dear friend who can actually take apart computers and put them back together again. She’s a whiz.

She works at this place where they have an entry-level position to hire for.

She said the young people coming in don’t know how to do anything on a computer. They can’t type. They can’t find things on the computer. They’re so used to their phone, their iPhone, and doing it that way.

I don’t want them to lose all the possibilities.

Does that make sense?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Yeah.

AI should hopefully be leveraged to increase our autonomy. It should not replace our autonomy at any point.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Gotcha.

Speaker 4 – Dev: Anyway, it does sound like you’re actually outnumbered right now by computers, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Well, yeah, that’s true. That’s kind of true.

And I’m allowing it, but I don’t allow it to take over. There’s just no way.

I’ve got a computer. I’ve got a laptop. I’ve got an iPhone. I’ve got all that stuff.

But there’s a place for each one of those, and not all of them every time, all the time.

I still want my own imagination. I want to be able to be creative and imaginative, and I don’t want anything to take over.

I’ve never asked a computer to create a mosaic for me or a copy of some great artist. I don’t want that.

I want people to create from their own imagination on a canvas or whatever.

I don’t want that to be lost. That’s the whole thing.

I want computers to enhance.

Speaker 4 – Dev: They should increase access to our imagination, not replace it.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Absolutely.

And privacy—I’ve given up on that, to be honest with you, Dev.

Somebody says, “Oh, you have to have all these privacy things here and privacy things there.”

I say, “It won’t do any good. There’s always a way to bypass it.”

Right?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Absolutely.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Darn it.

I guess I’m just getting too old and set in my own ways because I still like the idea that I don’t want everybody to know where I am and what I’m doing.

But that’s gone. They’ll be able to track me down no matter what and know what I’m doing.

That bothers me.

Speaker 4 – Dev: I think real-life conversation becomes more important because privacy may increasingly become the conversations that we have in our groups in person, away from the online world altogether.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: I hope you’re right.

But again, this next generation will grow up with a device in their hand.

There was a time when computers took up a whole block or building. Now it’s on our wrist.

What’s next? A chip in the head, right? A chip in the brain?

Speaker 4 – Dev: And now we’re surrounded by them.

Every thermostat, every appliance has a computer inside it nowadays. So they’re literally all around us.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Yeah.

I was looking for a new refrigerator, and the first thing I asked was, “Is AI in this? Is it going to tell me what I need and all this?”

If it is, it’s not the one I want.

It gets to that point where you’re going, how much? How far are we going to go with this?

I don’t want it knowing what I’m doing in the kitchen necessarily.

I still like some privacy, someplace I can hide and not have anybody looking into it or checking things out for me.

But you’re right. It’s on everything anymore.

Speaker 4 – Dev: If you can’t have privacy in the kitchen, where can you have it?

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Exactly. Thank you.

I don’t want them saying, “Don’t eat that ice cream because you’re going to get fat. Stop eating that popcorn.”

Anyway, do you have a website, by the way?

Speaker 4 – Dev: Yeah. Go to QueryPal.com, Q-U-E-R-Y-P-A-L dot com.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: There goes my iPhone, which I thought I turned off.

Okay. Go ahead, please, again.

Speaker 4 – Dev: QueryPal.com. Q-U-E-R-Y-P-A-L dot com.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Fantastic.

Again, thank you, Dev. I appreciate your time, and I hope you’ll come back and visit with me again.

We’ll try to get into a little bit more of all this stuff and the craziness that’s going to be going on in the world.

Speaker 4 – Dev: I’m looking forward to it.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: Thank you. Take good care now.

Speaker 4 – Dev: Thank you.

Speaker 2 – Mary Jane: And of course, folks, thank you for being with me.

I’ll leave you with this thought, real quick:

Learn from yesterday. Live for today. Hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

We always do that.

And live simply, laugh often, love deeply, and above all else, dare to dream.

Talk with you next time, right here on Popp Talk.