EP#192: When AI moves faster than truth - with Sree Srinivasan

Speaker A: By the time a lie goes around the world, the truth is still putting on its pants.

Speaker B: Welcome to the GovComs podcast, bringing you

Speaker A: the latest insights and innovations from experts and thought leaders around the globe in government communication.

Speaker B: Now, here is your host, David Pembroke. Welcome to GovComs, a, uh, podcast about the practice of communication in government and the public sector. My name is David Pembroke. Thanks for joining me today. We welcome back a former guest of the Gov Comms podcast who we spoke to six years ago in the early days of COVID when SRI turned his house, which I presume he is still in today, into a broadcast studio and started speaking to the world. He opened up the microphones and, and people poured in. And indeed my wife started following him here from Canberra, Australia, and she said, you should talk to this guy. He's really interesting because of what he's doing, what he's talking about, and the way that he is going about communicating. So we'll come to that story in just a moment. But Sri, for the last 10 years, has been working on his own, working as part of his business. And his main focus over the last number of years has been working with people about artificial intelligence. What else would someone like SRI be involved in? Because it's really sree talking to the big, the small, the middle, the in between, everyone trying to understand just exactly what is artificial intelligence and how is it going to change the way that they work. SRI was born in Tokyo, raised in Manhattan, Bhutan, the former Soviet Union, Myanmar and Fiji. And he joins me from his home in Manhattan. Sri, welcome back to Gov Comms.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. It says something about you and the podcast that I remember that interview from six years ago. I even got a T shirt out of it. Nobody sends anyone a T shirt, and you sent me one all the way from Australia. I was so excited and grateful you mentioned my podcast and my work at the beginning of the pandemic. We have moved since then, so I'm going to show you and your audience where I am. This is on, um, the eastern side of Manhattan. Even if you've not been here, many people will recognize the UN headquarters right there. That's global headquarters. That's the East River. That's Queens, which many people have heard of even if they've not been here. That's Roosevelt island. And this is a, uh, beautiful but very hot day here. It's almost 35 degrees Celsius. And I am, um, Uh, I was just complaining how cold it was. It felt like last week, and now I'm complaining. How hot it is here in New York.

Speaker B: Fantastic. That's a beautiful place to. To spend your days as you talk to the world about artificial intelligence and what's coming. But before we get into the AI conversation, which will be no doubt compelling, take us back to those moments in Covid where you really just decided to strike out and get moving and start talking. What was it that motivated you to start to create content and to start to engage and bring people into your world there in New York City.

Speaker A: Thank you. That was, if you remember, New York was the epicenter of the crisis in the world. The allegedly the most advanced, the richest country in the world, had the worst outcome of the pandemic, the highest number of deaths, percentage wise and in full count. It had a terrible failure in every level of government, from the municipal level, from the neighborhood to the municipal to the state, to the national, federal level, to the presidential level. It was a total disaster. And it happened in real time. We're now speaking in May. Back then, six years ago, May of 2020 was the worst of it, as you will remember, as your viewers and listeners will remember. And when it just started right at the beginning, I said, I want to learn as much as I can about the pandemic. So I just started a call. Uh, it was basically an audio thing. I started and said, talk to us. Tell us what you're seeing, what's going on. And it, uh, almost. Not the first day, but the second day I did it. I got a nurse calling in from Virginia who, I didn't know who said, what you've been talking about is so helpful. They're not giving us any information in this hospital in Virginia. That day I decided, I'm going to go live every single day as long as people are interested. And we went live for 250 straight days, including holidays, weekends, Christmas, New Year. Every single day. We went because we needed to convey the information. And we had hundreds of doctors, nurses, experts, including the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, was able to join us to try and frame the conversation and understand what's going on. One other part of it is as there was also a financial disaster happening and in America, a race relations disaster happening at the same time. The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed man who was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. That town of Minneapolis is back in the news because they're fighting ice, the government entity that's deporting people and sending them off to El Salvador, Rwanda, things like this that we'd never imagined would happen in America. So back to 2020. The show became a lifeline, as many people said, for them. But I always said it was a lifeline for me, locked up with my family on the Upper west side of Manhattan at that time, watching my twin children who were 18 and their final year of high school. Uh, you would never have wanted, David, for your high school experience to be swapped out for being stuck at home in a Manhattan apartment with your parents for the last 18 months of high school. That's what happened to my kids. And so it was a very difficult time for everybody. But we all got through it when we could and do what we could. But of course, a tragedy of immense proportions, as we know, and as I said, America, with something like, you don't fact check me on this, but these are directionally correct. 5% of the world's population, almost 20% of the world's deaths. That sums up how America responded to the greatest crisis since World War II.

Speaker B: So it was a crisis and an unusual, uh, unprecedented time. But what did you learn about effective communication through that undertaking?

Speaker A: I learned that people care about hearing accurate, interesting, well researched information. People care about that and they care about it around the world. We had, the last time I looked at the stats, we had crossed almost in the first five months or so, or maybe even less. More than a million listeners and more than 100 million impressions on social media because we tracked all that. And what I learned is that where it's so important for governments to communicate effectively, it's so important for, uh, politicians, bureaucrats, CEOs to be effective communicators. If they're not, everybody suffers. And I learned a lot about communications. I learned a lot about myself. I learned about the, the generosity of folks, speakers who agreed to talk to us. We had Nobel laureates participate in some of our shows. We had bestselling authors, we had journalists, we had doctors, scientists. And I also learned that there is real poisoning of people's minds by social media, by things like WhatsApp and Facebook. Facebook. And all of these tools which, uh, bring the world together, have done so much good in the world and so much bad in the world. All of that got accelerated during the pandemic. And I saw it firsthand.

Speaker B: How important was it that you were consistent that you turned up every day?

Speaker A: Yeah, it was, it was important. By the way, my family, which was very supportive at one point, said, sri dad, you gotta get outta here. You gotta go do this somewhere else because we can't sleep. I would start every night at 9pm Eastern time so that I could get people in Asia and I could get people in Australia, I could get people on the west coast of America. European live listenership was obviously very low. But they would pick up their, it would rerun on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. We were live on all of those channels every day and the consistency mattered. And by the way, my family found a neighbor who had escaped to out of the city and had me go work there to do these shows so that they could sleep in peace. And we, the idea that how you tell stories matters, when you tell stories matters and how you do it matters as well. We used a tool called Streamyard which allowed us to not to have a one way conversation, not broadcasting, but also having a two way conversation. We could bring in comments from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, et cetera. And people could see that and respond to that. And I could say Jane from Perth is saying xyz. And that made a difference as well. And we were able to ask questions of very important people from just being on this show. And this is a show we created out of nothing. And that's, that's all part of the social media that makes so much good in the world, as I said, and so much bad in the world.

Speaker B: So let's unpack both of those things at the moment. Certainly the good is clear, it's obvious. And the bad as well with bad actors, people who with mal intent deliberately publish false uh, information. Where do you see it at the moment in terms of that balance between the good and, and the bad? Particularly as we start to think about the impacts of artificial intelligence across every part of the content ecosystem.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a big part of the crisis, right? That what was problematic during the age of the telegraph is now was accelerated by the Internet, by accelerated by the telephone, then by the Internet and then by social and now by AI. A very famous saying that by the time a lie goes around the world the truth is still putting on its pants. There's versions of this many different people have been, that's been attributed a lot of people. But this idea that lies travel faster than the truth has been around since the age of the telegraph. And we have seen firsthand what that does in terms of creating panic and problems in every international situation. What happens with social media is the ability to connect instantly lots of people at the same time. The good and the bad. AI then takes that and makes it worse. Why does it make it worse? It makes it worse because it's the same people that are running everything on, over on the street, social media side. So many of them now have power in AI. Someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who has done immense damage to young men and women around the world with his decisions, uh, about how to tweak the algorithm. There are thousands of cases against Meta, as you know. Now, there was one adjudicated just in the last couple of weeks, and you saw that they were found guilty. Meta and the company was found guilty of doing exactly what I said. They had a chance. They'd write a note to Mark, Research would be put in front of Mark saying, we are doing damage to young girls. We can tweak the algorithm, reduce that danger, and our engagement will fall off. But it'll pick up in six months. So shall we adjust it? You, me, almost everyone we ask would have definitely tweaked it, but you know what he said, Carry on, it's okay. And that's all written down and now in court. And people have found this. And so this is the state of the world now that those people are now in charge of this and the crisis that we're dealing with, and they've learned no lesson, They've been not held to any account, and we all pay the price.

Speaker B: But isn't the problem now that these hyperscalers, these large companies, are just so big that they live beyond regulation? Government around the world doesn't seem to have an appetite to want to regulate against some of these, uh, impacts that are proven and are known. And even there's not that big an appetite, it would seem, to invest in digital literacy to better prepare people to be able to be more aware of disinformation and misinformation. So where do you see it rolling in the next, let's say the next 12 to 12 months to 2 years?

Speaker A: Thank you for putting that timescale narrow, because that's how fast all of this is happening. I came back, David, just last month from a tour, an AI speaking tour of five countries in Asia. And I would love to get to Australia and let's see if we can work on that together. I went to Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Turkey and India. And what I saw there was exciting to see how much AI is being used. But I also saw every mistake we've made in America being made there. One thing that's dramatically different is the impact of China and how China and Chinese companies are approaching AI versus the way we in America have approached AI. And that has made a big difference. And we can talk about that if you like. But what I learned there is that we are all repeating the mistakes of social media. I Like to say, I work with people not doing social media. Sorry, m not people working on AI or not people doing AI, but people who are having AI done to them. We ask. They never asked us for any permission for any of the things they're doing to us. And. And they're accelerating the work that's happening. Do you remember the movie Don't look up, which is on Netflix during the pandemic? There's an extraterrestrial crisis coming and the idea is, let's not talk about what's out, what's happening. Don't look up. That's what's happening. Now look at we're fighting. I've lost count. Two or three wars at the same time. As a species, when we have so much to do to prevent the environmental collapse and crisis and to prevent the AI collapse in crisis and there's nobody talking about it. I'm hoping you will tell me that in Australia things are different, but here no government is talking about it. No politicians, no bureaucrats, no NGOs. Civil society isn't saying, this is a huge crisis and we need to get going right now. And if we don't do that, it will be a huge problem. It is already a huge problem, David, and I'm not sure we can pull it back.

Speaker B: So just take us through that. What do you see as the mistakes that have been made in the United States that have then propagated, uh, around the world?

Speaker A: Yeah. By the way, can I just say something nice about Australia for a second? Your ban on the cell phones and social media for young kids is an inspiration for the world. Second, whenever we talk about tech, we talk about the tech bros who are running Silicon Valley. And most of the tech comes from Silicon Valley, most of it is tech bros. Some of them who are very progressive people who wanted the world to get better, but decided to throw their lot in with Maga and have done complete 180 degrees turn, 180 turns on how they behave and how they look at the world. So into that comes one woman who I'm very happy to say is from Australia, whose tech product I use multiple times a day that I recommend to everybody, and that's Melanie Perkins and Canva, a company that's $40 billion that has changed the world and has shown the value of doing work. You can do good work without being completely consumed by the idea that everything you do has to. Not just you do what you're doing, but you also somehow are good at everything else. You're good at running countries, you're Good at taking over the world. That is not, at least as far as I know what she's about. And so I praise Australia for generating Melanie.

Speaker B: So those mistakes, what have they been?

Speaker A: Yeah, the mistakes have been almost what I was talking about. These tech bros in charge within each company, there is no one to say no. Mr. Zuckerberg used to have Sheryl Sandberg, who was the adult in the room who he brought in, and she kept his worst instincts in check. Though she was also involved in the 2016 election stuff, but at least she was there in terms of Musk. He has no one to say no. And as when there's. You don't have someone to say no to you, someone to control you, someone to keep you in check, you do the most terrible things. Uh, I need people to keep me in check. I tell my family, I tell, I don't need to tell my family. My 22 year old twins are always ready to tell me when I'm wrong, how I'm wrong and how often I am wrong. But my team, I tell them push back. And you need that, you need leaders who can say push back. And if you push back, things get better. And these companies, so the problem starts at each company, there's no one to say no. Then the Silicon Valley culture, uh, these bros who are all about getting one up on each other, spending money, trying to, they're all at heart, many of them are libertarian, which means that they believe in no government or limited government. They believe in all kinds of things that are not mainstream in America but are hugely influential in Silicon Valley. Those ideas permeate around. So that's a mistake we have made. We also see on a daily basis that we all let this technology happen to us. Uh, I will take you back, David, to 97, 98, 99, when the BlackBerry was popular. And you will remember that before that time it was easy for you to work from. And again, maybe in Australia it was, uh, it was always different. But in America, you work nine to six, you would check your email, maybe once at night, your boss would wait till the next morning to hear from you. Is that the case anymore? No. Thanks to the BlackBerry, which we asked for. We begged our bosses for the leash that would ruin our lives. We begged for it. We said, give us more, give us the latest version. We want this leash. And we asked for it and we got it. And you saw everything that happened as a result of it. So these mistakes in culture, society are all things that are happening to us and I'm hoping aren't happening In Australia and New Zealand. By the way, as you said at the top, I went to Fiji for high school, which is exactly as great as it sounds. Where we looked up to Australia and New Zealand, these were the epicenters of the world, the great cities and capitals of the world where we didn't care at all about America except Hollywood and except music. We did not care about England, we didn't care even though it was a colony as. But everything was about uh, Australia and New Zealand. So I want those countries to lead again in these other areas as well.

Speaker B: You mentioned that on this tour, uh, that you went through in parts of Asia you noticed that there were differences and that those differences were driven by the development and adoption of AI in China. Can you explain that?

Speaker A: People ask me why have things gone so wrong with AI in America? And I say compare it to China. In China the companies that are involved in AI, many of them are like the ones in America, made their money in something else, in social media or other things. But in China they have done the heavy work of working on infrastructure, on AI architecture, they're working on building humanoids, they're working on fixing problems that are difficult and they're using of course state sponsored support, but that's their focus. Where in America these tech bros decided to go after the things we love to do, we love to write, take photographs, make art, be creative. Those things they targeted instead of the hard things of infrastructure and other things they're doing in China. So right there is the difference. Because you can make so much money getting people fired because you can optimize at the margins the ability to read documents and make it look like you're being creative. They went after that in China. They may have parts of that, but they have this heavy infrastructure work that they have that I think is better for, for society in China and will have knock on effects around the region, uh, at the same time.

Speaker B: And so you were saying that you were seeing some of those impacts when you were in India, uh, and those other countries that you visited.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I was there. I was actually supposed to be. My tour is supposed to start Dubai and Shanghai before going to Singapore. And because of the war, it was a couple of days after the war, I couldn't make it to those two countries, those two cities, in all of those places. What I saw is that the understanding about Chinese AI platforms is just an uh, alternative that people are looking there, whereas here there's a blindness. We're looking at the same things. ChatGPT as well as Gemini and all of those, those four or five platforms are where we're looking. And I spend my time here telling people, look at Deep Seek, look at these other channels so that you can understand that this is where, partly where things are going and where things can be better.

Speaker B: Okay, so your business now, as you say, is about education and about improving people's ability to manage AI in a positive way. Uh, can you take us through, uh, what does that education look like? What are you teaching people?

Speaker A: That's great. Thank you for that opportunity. I will if I can. I will share with you, if that's okay. My, my brochure so people can get a sense of what it is I do. And what we're looking at here is, uh, a brochure of mine where we are trying to figure out workshops, policy prep and more on, um, trying to use it for introductory folks as well as intermediate and advanced versions. Uh, our work is on AI strategy, AI policy, AI scenario planning, and the ability to help people understand. I need to update this. It says workshops in 12 countries. It's actually in 16 countries. And I've been writing essays about this. I've, ah, written more than a dozen essays about where we are. One of the, one of those said we need the liberal arts more than ever. Which of course surprises folks, considering that if you remember, David, 10 years ago, we were telling everybody, code, code and learn how to code. What's the first thing these machines can do? Well, learn how to code. So we have to look at that as some of the things that people worry about. And by the way, I look at this as connected to what I went through as teaching about the web back in the day. I used to teach how to use the Internet before this photograph, by the way. I used to have hair, David, and the computers used to look like that. I used to teach classes on email and tell people how to use email. Why people prefer the fax machine because you could see the signature, see the letterhead, you could see even a tiny phone number where it came from. So people knew the importance of trusting information. And that's a workshop I'm doing on the right at the Southern Poverty Law Center. They're the people who kill the Ku Klux Klan and are, uh, bringing down those hateful statues of the Confederacy, which is still a thing in the United States, if you can believe it, under 50 years after the war, after the Civil War. And I've been tracking how many social media workshops I've done, how many AI workshops I've done 25 cities, 16 countries and about 6,500 people since 2023 in 108 sessions. And we talk about what is generative AI, why is it useful, why is it scary? Prompt tips and tricks, use cases, live demos and we customize it. And for the advanced classes we do advanced prompting, new tools and tricks, advanced use cases, video, audio, music, illustrations, lots of hands on work, even in zoom. And we love doing this. This is the teacher in me of 25 years being a professor at Columbia Journalism School, Stony Brook University. We cover the ethics, how it changes, what we do with content and how we see the world. A roadmap of what's ahead. And then we customize it. We say remote or in person. No group too small or too big to do this. And they can be 20 minutes to three hours to three days. I should also add, I now have a two month class which meets for four times over eight weeks. And we do that. And of course more hands on work. And there are some very kind things that people have said including that it's about cutting through the hype and the misunderstandings of AI. So I'm going to stop the sharing and just say thank you for asking that.

Speaker B: No problem. So listen, let's just look at a couple of those things and think about delivering some benefit to the audience about how perhaps they can think about something like AI strategy. What should people be thinking about as part of their teams in terms of developing a, an effective AI strategy?

Speaker A: Number one thing, don't let it just sit with the tech folks, because the tech folks are great, they're important, but it has to be a, uh, 360 degree approach to this. A lot of these policy manuals. Think about the last time you worked at a big company. When did you look at any of the manuals, any of the handbooks? Did you read anything? The answer is no, you did not. Because it came from on high. It came in from legal. HR and tech would give you this policy instead. It needs to be from the bottom and from the top. You need a committee. This is the playbook that I use. Get a committee together, survey the entire organization. What are people doing? How are they doing it? What do they like? What do they not like? What do they want out of policy? People are crying out for guidance, they want help and companies are not giving it to them. So you form the committee, you do the survey, and then you look at your own structure, your teams. What makes sense, does it make sense to allow people to use AI for these silos of work, but not these silos of work? Uh, where can the cross work help? Where can you do something that's so interesting that can, it can help you in terms of being more efficient and upgrade the value of the work. In what I do, I tell folks, if you're, you want AI just to in order so that you can fire a bunch of people, I'm not your guy. There are lots of people who do that. What I believe in is that AI can raise the level and quality of the work you're doing if you do it with great intentionality. And there are specific pathways to do that can be customized and done in the right way for the right teams at the right time. But also I tell everybody that there are things changing so quickly in AI that you cannot have a policy that Even if it's 360 degrees, that isn't evolving all the time, you've got to meet every three months, maybe even less than that, and say, what's new? What's changed and what can we change? And if you don't do any of those things, you're going to be stuck because things are going to outrun you no matter how open you are to this. I'm working with multiple organizations now on their AI and their policy, their strategy, their scenario planning. And to every one of them I say you can save money, you can save resources, but are there interesting ways in which you can make people more excited about doing their work and get them more engaged? Because otherwise everything is going to be about cutting. I can tell you in my very small business that I could probably, with installing the right AI tools, save 15% of my people, my human costs. But do I want to save that? Not really. I would rather do more work, expand the pie and give more opportunities to my team. That's why I went into business for myself, to work with people I want to work with and give them people want purpose. And we should say this, let's move away from me, David, and talk about the coming apocalypse, uh, of jobs. Goldman Sachs estimates that countries like Japan and the US will have jobs up to 25% of their jobs be turned upside down by AI. And on the low end, countries like India, 10%, let's say they're off by a factor of five. Okay. That still means tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are going to lose their jobs. And each job lost is not just that person. It's their family. It's the grocer down the street, the dry cleaners. Everybody's affected and nobody's talking about this. And as much as the environmental crisis is real and is upon us. This is more imminent than that. And therefore we need to be acting yesterday. But nobody's acting, nobody's asked, talking about this. There are some NGOs that talk a little bit, but there is no interest at the highest levels, at least in this part of the world. Please tell me it's different in Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker B: No, I can't give you any, uh, confidence that is in fact taking place because I don't think people are so uncomfortable because it's beyond. People can't see the end of it, People can't see the resolution to it. So therefore they don't want to talk about it. Certainly the political class doesn't want to talk about it because they don't have the answers. But at the same time they want to be able to appear that, yes, you know, we've got this under control. But so how do you prepare people for uh, a change that has already arrived, that these jobs are, uh, disappearing or have already disappeared, particularly for people leaving university or college and looking for a job. And there's obviously a lot less jobs available, whether they be intern positions or graduate positions. It's already here. How do you prepare the young people for what is coming? And then how do you prepare everybody for the change that is now ever present?

Speaker A: Very good question. And something that I think about every day. Uh, I have very young people close to me. One is going to law school, one is going to get a master's degree in international policy, public policy. And I worry about what world they're going to be coming into in uh, a year, three years, et cetera. I also look at the environment around us and there is massive amounts of distrust with what's happening. You may not, this may not have reached Australia yet, but it's graduation season in America and you know, they always have these very fancy commencement ceremonies, as they call them, where they, where they have, or big time speakers give talks. I presume that's the same case in Australia. And at every, any time in any school where somebody has said the word AI and started talking about it, they've been booed, sometimes booed off the stage. So angry young people are about AI uh that maybe it's not their fault. Maybe it's the fact that for the last five years we've been saying ceaselessly that your job, you're not going to get jobs. So maybe they don't want this thing to be to happen to them. Right? Maybe that's uh, what the insight is. And we don't even know that's what's happening. So that's one of the things that we all need to be thinking about. The fact that how do we use AI in a way that people will want it and will help them in order to do their work that they need.

Speaker B: Just to that point, I was speaking to a friend of mine who's a lecturer in, in the journalism school at one of the universities here in Canberra the other day. And to that point he said exactly that, that the students are angry about, uh, the fact that they have started down this journey, particularly those who are coming towards their graduation, that they've spent all of this time learning all of this craft only to evolve into a world where the machines are able to do a lot of what they've already been able to. What they've just spent three years and a huge amount of money to acquire those particular skills.

Speaker A: Yes, I mean that's. It is exactly why people are upset. Can I give you, um, just a slightly different example of why we should all go up? In America, there's this big fight against AI data centers. I presume there's also an issue in Australia. Of course, you have a lot more land and a lot more space than we do, so you have an advantage. I can't remember, my son isn't near me. Others, I'd ask him very quickly to size Australia versus America in just raw size, but because the population, it's so different. Right. So stepping back in 1998, I, uh, compare 1998 to 2026. In 1998 was when the Internet revolution really took off in a mass way. And, and now it's AI in a mass way. The difference between those two times is that two out of three Americans surveyed in 1998 were optimistic, excited about the Internet, thinking it'll help them with jobs, it'll help them connect to grandma, it will change the world for the better. They'll watch new things. That was in 1998. Today, two out of three Americans are scared, worried, frightened of AI. And that dichotomy of that will be part of the reason we are like this. And we're all going to suffer as a result. So that's one thing we need to know. So what is being done to us, these AI centers, data centers, people are fighting it. So Elon Musk has an idea. Let's put them. They need to be cooled, so they have to put a, uh, lot of water has to go over them. That's why they need so much water, and that's why people are fighting it. So let's take it and put it up in space. Let's build data centers in space where there's no temperature, so you won't have that issue. So some people say, oh, that makes sense, let's try that. But who will ask us? Who will give them permission to do that? Some of your audience may know that there are these things we call the SpaceX trains. He has linked so many satellites across the world that on, um, many nights in many places, when you look up, you see a chain of SpaceX, what they call SpaceX trains. That are these satellites that are like that. And who asked us? So he now wants a satellite is of a certain size, a data center is so much bigger, and he wants to put that in space. That will just happen if we don't speak up. Things like this, the inevitability of this has to be pushed back on. I interviewed a Great writer named C.J. farley who has written what has been called the first great AI novel, not with AI, but about AI and life in AI. And he says we must fight back. Don't presume that this is all just going to happen. We have to fight back. But if we don't fight back, David, then we are in fact letting it happen to us, like the BlackBerry, like social media and everything else that has taken over our lives to such detriment to so many people.

Speaker B: But do you see any signs of fighting back? Or are people just so used to rolling along and there's a learned helplessness of, uh, it doesn't matter what I say anyway, things are just going to happen. So there's this sense of why bother?

Speaker A: Yeah. Learned helplessness is a great concept and a very sad concept, but is something that we are, we're seeing in real time. I can tell you that the ways in which this is happening is that people think there's nothing can be done. They don't think there is power, that they have the power. And we have to tell people that they have that power. And we have to push, but that's the reality. No way I can fake it or fix it or do anything about it, but that's the reality. But, David, people are trying to push back, but we need government, we need international, we need other support to make that happen. And when we don't have that, we pay the price for it. Can I show you a photograph that kind of illustrates to me the issues in one image? And this is an image that they made in Time magazine. It's the Time magazine cover for Person of the Year. And they are replicating the image on the right, which is in 1930s when they were building what's called Rockefeller center in New York, one of the famous buildings in New York. They're building that whole center. And look at the difference between the two. On the left you have these billionaires who are not talking to each other in it's badly made even it looks like AI slop. They're all doing their own thing. And look at the right. These gentlemen who are poor people, risking their lives, building with their hands are doing important work and they're bonding. There's other images of this where they're eating lunch. And that contrast is very striking to me also. They call these people the architects of AI whereas these people are the builders that built New York and great cities around the world. I, uh, am happy to see there are two women on there, Lisa Su of AMD and Fei Fei Li of the Stanford Human Centered AI Institute. But all these other men are. Some of them have done really good work and are doing really good work. But some of them, like Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, everything we hear about them is just problematic. One thing after another. Dario from Anthropic is now a good guy, and you've seen him, the Pope and he are working, are issuing a statement about AI and ethics and all of that stuff. But let's not forget, he built his empire on stolen material. All of these people did. Not the. Not, uh, Fei Fei, Jensen or Lisa, but they took other people's work for free and built their empires on it. I'm a big fan of Demis Hassibis, who won the Nobel prize at Google DeepMind. And I'm reading a book about him written by Sebastian Malaby that I recommend to everybody. But you know, he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, not for something that you would think would be more technical, but because of the work that he has done. He is changing the world. I had the opportunity to meet him at the Nobel Prize afterparty just after he won the prize. And I recommend to everybody his Nobel Prize lecture on accelerating scientific discovery. It's something that everyone can understand and everyone can see the possibilities. This is why we can't just say bad things about A.I. uh, because it can cure disease, it can change the world, but too much of it is too bad, too fast.

Speaker B: Let's just see if we can draw on that string and finish our conversation today on an optimistic note. Uh, and certainly this notion of accelerating scientific discovery using AI uh, in other ways, I know, even in the application of the tools in the work that we do, it's made us more efficient, it's made us more effective, we're able to produce more. Uh, and so there are positive impacts there. But where else do you see the positives around AI? Because there is an inevitability about its usage that it's not stopping, it's not going away. So there will be a future that is AI enhanced. And how is it that we can get to this in a positive way?

Speaker A: One of the slides that I use is, uh, a comment from Daniel Pink, who I love. I tell everyone to find his work. He's terrific. He talks about technology in a interesting way. He says that AI will not replace humans, but humans using AI will replace humans not using AI. And that's the best way to think about that. So everyone has to learn how to use it and how to implement it, how to enhance their life and work through it. And I tell everyone to just start by looking at ways to use it in your daily life. Once you use it for life, you can use it for work. Use it for work. You can be somebody who's still employed because your bosses are going to look around and say, oh, those people don't know anything about AI. Uh, we're going to get rid of them. So be somebody who knows something about AI. Uh, take classes, read things. Sign up for things. Sign up for my newsletter if you can. Uh, you can just find it on substack or on LinkedIn. Sreenet.substack.com these are ways in which you can learn more about this stuff and we can then be employable. The other thing I tell folks is that there are. The pace of scientific discovery can be so fast and so big that it needs support. And this is where that China comparison is important, because in China, they are doing the work on the really complicated stuff, and that makes a difference when you're trying to do things for the greater good. For infrastructure is what I'm so obsessed with, because American infrastructure is so bad. We for health care. American health care outcomes were the most expensive and were something like 18th, 20th, 30th best in outcomes in health care. So those are all things that AI, if directed, can help and make a big difference. But that's not where people are putting their attention, at least here in the United States.

Speaker B: All right, Sri Srinivasan, thank you so much for giving up some of your time today. And we'll let you get to your wife who's been away for a month. I'm sure she's excited to uh, to see you on that warm New York. Uh, I do hope the weather improves to your liking and keep up the good fight and keep working away on AI. And yeah, I would encourage people to just jump onto substack and to sign up for the latest information from SRI Srinivasan as he continues his exploration of the world of artificial intelligence and more broadly, communication. So, sri, thank you so much for joining us today and to you, the audience, thank you once again to coming back to Govcoms, uh, a fascinating conversation there today with sree and really I think that anxiety that SRI communicates about lives in many of us as we seek to understand, seek to apply, uh, and seek to wrap our arms around just exactly what this new opportunity looks like and how it will be deployed in order for us to strengthen communities and improve the wellbeing of citizens. So anyway, interesting times ahead for all of us and I think one of the things that we can do is keep talking about it, uh, and keep having conversations so people can take a few more steps forward on their journey into what is, uh, an ever changing world. And a world, as SRI mentioned very eloquently that it is moving fast. There are changes taking place all of the time and when you see the size of the investments that are going into these data centers, uh, it is really the big story in terms of the development of industry and government around the world. So anyway, a big thanks to SRI today and thank you for coming back. Once again, A rating or a review, please if you. It does help us to be found. Uh, we have been broadcasting since 2016 and we do have lots of ratings and review, but more the better because as I say, it does help us to be found. So if you'd be kind enough to do that, we'd be delighted that you would be able to find others who could enjoy in these conversations. Thank you very much for that. You can find us on all the social media platforms, uh, and again enjoy that content as well. Uh, until next month when we come back with our next episode of GovComs. My name is David Pembroke and it's bye for now.