Navigating Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence: A Call for Unity

how do you feel about artificial intelligence I've asked this question to thousands of people from all around the

world and now I'd like to ask you the audience so show of hands who here is an AI Optimist you're thrilled that these

tools are here you think these could benefit societ massively and you're excited to see where all this goes let

me see some hands for the AI Optimus in the crowd all right now who here is an AI skeptic you're thinking that the

risks here are big you don't fully trust the companies that are building these tools all right skepticism in the

room and who is somewhere in between you think the benefits are possible the risks are real and if we could just pull

everybody back towards this Nuance Middle Ground we might be better off so we have a real range of mindsets

in the room often times sitting right next to each other and I'm here to tell you that all

of these mindsets are [Applause] unhelpful they're unhelpful because

they're all rooted in a subtle kind of division I've asked this question on stages in meetups and in a community

that I created last year called human friendly this community was created to bring people together from across the

spectrum of optimism and skepticism about AI for Meaningful conversations and we realized that these conversations

would go in a predictable Direction depending on who started the conversation if the optimists started

the conversation they would start to geek out about the newest chat gbt upgrades they would talk about their

vision of the Star Trek future that is finally possible and if you pay close attention

you'll notice some people going quiet these are the Skeptics they're hearing something that

they perceive as a sort of blind arrogance so they'll go quiet and they'll go huddle up with the other

Skeptics if the Skeptics start the conversation they'll talk about their con their concerns they'll talk about

the history of companies coming out with innovations that left people behind and at first the optimists

wouldn't go quiet they'd pull out some familiar quote like AI won't take your job somebody knows how to use it will

they're trying to open the mind of the Skeptics and it doesn't work so they go quiet meanwhile The Inbetweeners would

maybe play Devil's Advocate or pick a side or try and get everybody to see each other's perspectives and it just

wouldn't work this sucks this is a

problem this is a problem because the stakes are high but it's hard to tell how high the stakes are by watching the

headlines one day you'll see Tech CEOs talking about how their Technologies are going to revolutionize Society for the

better and then those same CEOs the next day will talk about how we're on the brink of the

Apocalypse meanwhile commentators will say don't listen to anything that they say they're just trying to boost their

own companies for their own self gain so how are we supposed to decide for ourselves what this moment means for

our species I would like to offer you a framework today that you can use to make

up your own mind about what the means and where we might be headed this framework is based on three simple human

activities that we've been doing since the dawn of Time how we think how we decide and how

we create let's start with how we think Optimist will tell you this is great

news finally we're free to think about what we want to think about we can take all the menial tasks give them to the

robots and free our day-to-day to focus on what matters to us most the Skeptics will tell you not so fast our children

in schools aren't even turning in their own work these days our colleagues are writing and editing and sending emails

using chat GPT without even reading them themselves is this the death of humans thinking for

themselves how we make decisions Skeptics will tell you that technology tends to amplify our worst flaws at

human as humans so we have biases we have shortcuts we take in decision-making and

these will be Amplified with AI a few years ago Amazon tried to replace part of their hiring process with artificial

intelligence part of the purpose was to reduce bias in hiring they scrubbed all mention of gender from job applications

still the AI figured out how to systematically discriminate against women

candidates the optimists will tell you that this is an unfortunate outcome to a worthy experiment and if we keep

learning and if we learn by this example then eventually AI will be able to augment human decision-making

accommodate for these biases leading to better decisions being made at all levels of

society how we create optimists tell you good news here too creative superpowers are being distributed to every corner of

the earth before you had to learn for a decade how to be a good writer how to make visual art now you have creative

superpowers at your fingertips and everybody on Earth can create sophisticated things quickly bring them

out into the world this is a dawn of a new creative age Skeptics aren't so

sure they will tell you that there's something intrinsically valuable about human beings being at the center of our

creative work it was already hard enough for artists and creative entrepreneurs to make a living this is the final nail

in the coffin for these industries so what world are we living into here are we living Into The

Optimist world where we can finally think for ourselves we can make better decisions and we all have creative

superpowers or are we living into the Skeptics world where we forget how to think for ourselves we multiply our

worst decisions and we lose that spark of the human spirit and everything that we

create the second reason that this is a problem that we're stuck in these unfriendly mindsets is because your

voice belongs in the AI age when you raised your hand a moment ago to express your mindset about AI there's something

underneath of that there's a thing under the thing that represents your values your beliefs your desires for the world

that you want us to be living into and those desires belong in our future in the age of AI when we take these

positions along a spectrum that cause us to think that we're a polar opposite of somebody else we push ourselves out of

this conversation and we need you in this conversation the third reason that this

is a problem is that division will be the seed of our destruction I went to high school in a

school that was surrounded by Farmland I was one of a few students of Jewish Heritage in that school and I got cruel

jokes about it on a weekly basis and I would laugh along with these jokes because that's what teenagers

do this is my great-grandfather I'm named after this man Miko mikos grew up in Hungary what was then hungry he

fought in World War I and after the war his homeland was devastated his family's Fortune had been

stolen his people were suffering from famine so he traveled around the countryside

reclaiming his family's wealth and saving his family from starvation but still he could feel that

the division in his homeland was Rising that his neighbors were turning against each other and this feeling was him

sensing something that will eventually evolve into the Holocaust so he took a 5,000 m journey

across the ocean and went to New York City and I can only imagine how different the mindsets and the people

were there that he met and connected with and did business with from the ones he grew up

with so I feel that I have this deep ancestral message inside of me that our divisions if we let them rise and grow

will be the seed of our destruction a few years after high school I went to work at a high school

that was very different from the one that I grew up with in Trenton New Jersey this school was almost

exclusively black and Latino students and one day after class A group of students came to me said Mr Rosenberg

are you Jewish said my father's Jewish why do you ask and they said that means you're

a minority just like us so this experience of having my fellow students that I grew up with make

fun of me for my differences and these kids that looked like and felt like they came from very different backgrounds for

mine telling me that I was one of them has always stuck with me a few years after that I went and

joined my first tech startup that involved me getting on a one-way flight with a 5,000 m journey across the ocean

to move to Nigeria my job at this tech company was to work with people who are upand

cominging software developers from places like Nigeria Kenya Uganda South Africa and my job in particular was to

help them develop the cross-cultural communication skills that they would need to join the global economy and Rise

as Tech leaders in the world one of the dreams that we held for this work was to help the continent of

Africa transition from consumers of technology to creators of Technology ology so my Heritage my background my

career all of these things have left in me a deep seated conviction that while division holds the seedat of our

destruction our differences hold the key to our Salvation so in 2023 when AI started to

hit the headlines I was primed to see it through this lens so I started reaching out to the tech companies who were

building these products using AI to create new Innovations and put them out there into the world I had an agenda my

agenda was to help them get out of that Silicon Valley Echo chamber that has caused previous waves of innovation to

go the wrong way and get them to start talking to people around the world of all different mindsets and backgrounds

so that they can create tools that work for everybody I talked to CEOs I talked to

AI Engineers I talked to investors and startups and I kept talking to other people outside of those circles at first

for research I talked to artists and parents and Educators and organizers and Community activists and even retirees

about their perspective on AI and what I found was these conversations were even more interesting

and compelling than the ones I was having with the people in these tech companies and I found that the more I

asked this question the more people thought oh I haven't been asked this before I'm hungry to talk more about

this I'm hungry to connect more around this topic because it turns out when you ask people how they feel about

artificial intellig their answers are not about technology their answers are about

Humanity their answers are about the world that we're living into and the world that we're leaving

behind so I decided to form a community the people who were reaching out to me who had growing curiosity the more I

asked them their perspective and connected them with conversations we formed this community called human

friendly and after a month this community grew small But Mighty and spanned more than half the globe 12 and

1 half hours of time zones covered with our initial members after just a couple weeks of

launching so we brought people together for these conversations we hosted connective meaningful conversations that

led people to feel like they were going Beyond conversation and connecting with each other in forming relationships and

still we were hungry for more so the people in this community asked can we team up on a project can we actually

make something out of these conversations meanwhile open AI had a grant that they were offering $100,000

if you could come up with a way that we could get Democratic inputs into AI a way that we could get genuinely broad

inclusive input input from people all around the world into the development of these

Technologies so bear with me here because it gets a little bit technical as I describe the solution that we

proposed to open AI the first part of it is to go to communities and listen into the

conversations that they're already having with their permission for the sake of extracting beliefs from those

surfacing value statements that represent the variety of perspectives in that conversation not the top three

things that the majority of the people in the conversation agree upon but the true plurality of perspectives including

what a lot of people agree upon and the most key places of Divergence within the group and then we go beyond that we take

these belief statements that we took out of these conversations that are happening and we turn them into a survey

tool this survey tool is something that you can take to Signal your alignment with these beliefs and this survey tool

will give you two things the first it'll tell you what your mindset is it'll reflect back to you how you seem to

perceive this topic this moment and your desires for the future the second thing it will give you is showing you where

you're oriented in this map of human perspectives it'll show you who else in the community what mindsets are closest

to yours so that you can huddle up with them when you want to and which ones diverge from yours so that you can go

and connect across differences and create things things that make the most of those

differences so we put together this application we designed this whole process we prototyped it we got

inclusive input from people all over the the world from this community and we submitted our application to open AI

thinking this is an incredible solution I can't wait to try this out and open AI said

no so we built it anyway [Applause] we went ahead and created these tools as

a community and we listened to our own conversations that we were having as a community and we extracted the variety

of belief statements that we were hearing amongst ourselves and then we took the results and just out of

curiosity I anonymized all the results and gave them to chat GPT and I said chat GPT there seem to be three groups

emerging from this data we also used a fancy statistical tool called pois an open project that surfit three groups

and I gave them to Chachi and I said Chachi give me three memorable names for these three groups and it give me a list

explaining where they converge in their beliefs and where they diverge do you want to know what the

mindsets were the first of these mindsets is the Pioneer the Pioneer often maps to an

optimist Pioneers are thrilled about new technological innovation they're aware of the risks and the drawbacks of prior

Innovation but they see these as Solutions in the waiting problems that if we solve then we earn the right to

keep innovating into a brighter better future the second mindset is the guardian Guardians often map to the

Skeptics Guardians believe that there's something essentially valuable about Humanity that needs to be protected at

all costs they may support technological innovation but if it risks putting a threat to what is special about humans

and that human Essence that they want to pull the reins and reconsider it the third group is often mapped to

this sort of moderate position but I believe that it doesn't belong there these are The Navigators Navigators like

to listen to both sides and serve as an integrating role in the conversation many people who fall into this category

may have been peacemakers in the household growing up they feel a responsibility to get into the nuances

get into the textures bring people to the table these mindsets are not not on a

spectrum by identifying with one of them you are not far away from and other to another mindset these mindsets are inter

relationships I would even say these mindsets are inter dependencies they rely on each other for us to have a

humanfriendly future where do you see yourself in these

mindsets where do you see your friends your neighbors your family members your colleagues in these mindsets

I believe that these mindsets and the tools that we use to surface them and the community that came

together to build those tools represent waves on an ocean and this ocean represents a

culture shift that we are ready for this culture shift involves us breaking away from

polarities it involves us recognizing that we're ready to move Beyond a 51% takes all look at the world we're ready

to stand in what we care about declare to other people this is how I see the world this is how I want the future to

look and then say how about you once we get into those conversations feeling the Curiosity build the hunger

build to go further to develop connections and maybe even team up on a project that can bring us into a

brighter friendlier future so my invitation for you is to pick one of these mindsets

or if you'd like you can come up with a new one that you feel represents your truth and what you really care about and

want to see in our new world and then go out and find somebody else and ask them to do the same you

could say I am a navigator this is what it means to me this is what I want to see how about

you once you've done that once you've stood in your mindset in your identity declared to others what you believe in

what you care about what you want to see in our new world and you've asked them to do the same and they've done the same

and you felt this curiosity building this hunger building to go further then you will be ready to ask the new

question that I discovered by asking that first question a thousand times how will we live into a human

friendly future in the age of AI thank you w