AI & Us

unfortunately a I can't do everything yet. But we are hard at work on season two of Sleepwalkers, and we're focusing on stories that really contextualize the implications of AI, what it's doing, what the future is, and how it's affecting us. You know, we had such a good time in season one of Sleepwalkers wrapping our heads around the

meaning of artificial intelligence. It becomes basically a principle of statistics prediction, how we're using data to inform our decisions, and how that's becoming ingrained in products and services and everything we do. Really, it's true the Pandora's box of AI has been opened, but we still have the black box problem that is true explainable AI. We can't tell what neural networks are doing yet, but people are working on it, and that's a story we're going to be

covering closely in season two. But in this bonus episode of Sleepwalkers, we're going to take a look back at some of the most poignant stories and interesting applications of AI that we talked about in the first season, and later in this episode, I'm going to give you a preview of a fascinating new company that's using AI to predict very specific consumer taste, as in preferences, not like

tasting clothing. Before we get through though us, when you look back at season one, what stands out to you the most? One of the things that stands out to me most is the story you did about liar Bird. Thank you, but seriously, the way they use an algorithm to create a deep fake of your voice. But in that particular piece, the questions it raised about mortality and would you want to hear your father's voice beyond the grave has stuck with me and I was one of

the most powerful moments in the whole podcast. Yeah so, Jose Satello, one of the founders of Liar Bird, had me sit down on a microphone for an hour and just speak which was a personal dream of mine, and then using that out me interrupting. Using that voice data, liar Bird's algorithms created a version of my voice that could turn any written text into something that sounded like me. But Jose actually explained it better. So can you hit the clip? Not an AI scientist, but we do have

the sophistication to roll tape. I know it might sound a bit like magic, but in reality, the way that our algorithm's work is basically they are just a battern matching algorithms, and so it's trying to figure out how to identify the patterns in your voice by comparing it against thousands of other voices a shoually tens of thousands of other voices, and trying to figure out what is

it that makes your voice unique. Once Jose's algorithms identified what was unique about my voice, obviously everything they had the building blocks they needed to make a fake. Then we sent Jose a set of sentences we wanted robot care to say, and he used another set of algorithms

to turn the text into what we heard. The way they do this is they use it's called a generative adversarial network again, which is a system where one neural net tries to trick another one a thousand times per second, So each time the second network to texts of fake, the first one tries again. It basically learns from its mistakes, and once it tricks its adversary, it's ready to show its results. In our case, liar bird pits my fake voice against my real voice until it sounds like this

sub dog Scara Karen. One of the reasons why this story has stuck with me is because it feels like we're just at the beginning of tapping the potential and the potential for harm of deep fakes. May be remembered as the year of the first significant deep fake crime. An employee at a UK based energy firm believed he was on the phone to his boss and followed instructions to transfer two hundred thousand pounds to a scammers bank account. That certainly won't be the last deep fatefore we hear of,

and it raises questions about responsibility and accountability. Who's liable in a case like this. Facebook has actually gone so far as to create a deep fake detection challenge to get the best minds thinking about deep fakes and how we might solve the problem and offering like a million dollar prize reach prize, which is like a dollar but it also shows how important the issue is, especially when

a company like Facebook gets behind it. Um. There's another side to deep fake technology that actually highlights this dichotomy and tech anology right now, which is that it can be used for menacing purposes but also really powerful and

beautiful applications. Jose goes on to talk about how liar Bird can be used with als patients and give them the ability to speak when they've lost all ability to speak, when it could give them the opportunity to speak in a version of their voice to their children again, which is quite profound. One area where I think technology is

a powerhouse for change is in medicine. Technologists and doctors alike are looking at AI to predict, treat, and diagnose, you know, everything from depression to cancer, and that's a very wide spectrum. And it reminds me of one of my favorite interviews that you did, which was your interview

with Saddartha. Muker g just so fascinated by this article he'd written for The New Yoker called AI versus m D which laid out all of the kind of benefits and potential applications of using AI in medicine, including some of the downside such as the black box problem of AI that you mentioned, not knowing why an algorithm has made a recommendation, and also another problem, which is that if we really too much on technology, it can erode

human skills. There is a fear that AI could move us into a very black and white way of thinking. The computer says you have cancer, or the computer says you to have your liver removed, said Arthur, who is one of the world's foremost oncologists and a Pullet Surprise winning author. Provided a different perspective. There is something very fundamental about the human brain, a scientist's brain, a doctor's brain, and artist's brain that asks questions in a fundamentally different manner,

the why question. Why did this happen in this person in this time? Why does the melanoma appear in the first calase? What is the molecular basis of that appearance. The most interesting mysteries of medicine remain mysteries that have to do with the why. Once we give up some of the diagnostic pattern recognition material to machines, it will be time to play. It will be the time to play in the arena of human therapeutics, human biology, the

complexity of the human interaction, the art of medicine. My hope is that medicine, in being more playful, will become more compassionate, more able to take into account individuals and their individual destinies rather than bucketing people in big categories.

It means having more time to spend with humans. You know, we are so constrained by time that even compassion gets three minutes, We won't become more robotic, will become less robotic as the robots enter our own So Dartha's point is that these tools could make doctors more efficient so that they can provide better care. It sort of takes the grunt work out of medicine and puts the patient

care work back in the doctor's hands. This idea that technology can actually allow us to be more human, make us more empathetic, is fascinating, and it also raises the questions about new types of skills that may need to be developed in an age of AI. Yeah, and Regina Barslay from m I T spoke a lot about this.

How doctors have to now equip themselves with new ways of translating data to patients, we still do not communicate it to the patient because I think now there is a walk to be done, not on computer science or AIPAD, but really on the clinical side. What is the best way to communicate it to the patient and what is um you know, the past that you're going to give them. It is not just enough to say you know you are high risk. You need to propose some suggestion and solution.

So currently the clinical stuff is thinking and looking at the ways of effective you know, clinical engagement with a patient. You know, I speaking of data. You all know Harri was another person who made you and me think about humans as reducible to data. I think he's mostly known as a historian and for his book Sapiens, but you spoke with him about the data we produce as humans and how that influences our relationship with technology. That's right,

which is the topic of his book Daus. And he has this phrase data is m to describe how we've kind of come to worship the data we create and our own technological creations. So what happens when based on all of our past behavior, AI starts to know us better than we know ourselves. Here's a clip from You are talking about exactly that. When we talk about AI, we tend to greatly exaggerate the potential abilities, but at the same time we also tend to exaggerate the abilities

of humans. People say that AI is not going to take over our lives because it's very imperfect and it won't be able to know us perfectly. But what people forget is that humans often have a very poor understanding of themselves, of the desires, of their emotions, of their mental states. For AI to take over your life, it doesn't need to know you perfectly, just need to know you better than you know yourself. And that's not very difficult because we often don't know the most important things

about ourselves. So, but let's say you could turn back the clock to being fifteen, would you have wanted to live in a world where there was sufficiently good sensors to monitor your eyes, your eye movement, you're breathing, you know, while you're going about your daily life, and then to interpret that and say to you you have all more likely than not you're gay. That's a very good question which will become very practical questions in a few years. And the way that I grew up and developed. It

would have been a very bad idea. I wouldn't like to receive this kind of insight from form a machine. I'm not sure how I would have dealt with it when I was fifteen, you know, in Israel in the nineteen eighties, and maybe partly it was you know, a defense mechanism. In the future too. It it depends where you live. Brunei has instituted the death penalty for gay people,

at least for people engaged in homosexual sex. So if I'm a teenager in Brunei, I don't want to be told by the computer that I'm gay, because the computer will then be able to tell that to the police

and to the authorities as well. So the apps we use, the product we buy, the number of steps we take, the delivery I ordered last night, that will becomes data, and that data can feed into neural networks to create statistical models of us and what we might do next, sometimes in order to diagnose a medical condition, and other times to sell us a product. Here's V again, looking to the future, say ten twenty years. The danger is if I still don't know that I'm gay, but the

government and Coca Cola and and Amazon and Google. They already know it. I'm at a huge disadvantage. So it could be something as frightening as the secret police coming and taking me to a concentration camp. But it could also be something Coca Cola knowing that I'm gay, they want to sell me a new drink, and they choose the advertisement with the shirtless guy and not the advertisement

with the girl in the bikini. And next day morning I go and I buy this soft drink and I don't even know why, and they have this huge advantage over me and can manipulate me in all kinds of ways. Well, as you've all brought up soda, I was not allowed to drink soda as a child. My parents tricked me into thinking that Seltzer was soda. I later found out

that soda is soda and Seltzer is water. And somehow the Seltzer of it all is the perfect segue because AI is not only being used to sell a product, it's also being used to create products like Seltzer in the R and D research and development phase. And for this bombs episode, Julian remember Juliana, a lovely producer, And I went to meet the company behind the gastrograph app, which is using consumer preference data to make predictions about

new flavors. People might like, I think you hate Nettle, think against Analytical Flavor Systems or a f S is tucked away down a side street in Chinatown, up in a third story walk up. It does actually and when we were there, the office was still waiting for furniture. You know, it had this We're going to disrupt the industry vibe. We moved in like a month or two ago. But it turns out you can't just buy office furniture.

We met the founder of the company, Jason Cohen, and we believe that in the future, in order to be competitive, you have to be targeted. That that there won't be any billion dollar brands right in ten years if you don't have an m b A. Here's what Jason's talking about. Think about the coffee you drank this morning, is it Third Wave? Did you get it from Starbucks or an indie roaster. Food and beverage companies are moving more and more towards knee markets. The problem is that they have

very old school ways of developing new products. But a FS is offering another way to reach those customers, and that's by allowing companies to formulate more specific products using AI. Here's Jason again. Usually the way that things are done today is you get some conceptual brief. You might say, we want to develop a new fruit flavored beverage for Japanese millennial women. Right, you would look at what other

fruit flavored beverages are out there. You'd look at your own product lineup and say, well, we already have a lemon flavor, and we're going to send out these briefs, and we're gonna send these out to these flavor companies. We're gonna see what other fruits we can get, and you're gonna wind up with very mainstream things. You're gonna wind up with peach and mango and strawberry and grapefruit, right, and maybe you'll wind up with something interesting like low

quad or uzo or dragon fruit. Right. And then you're gonna have your own consumer tasting panel internally hopefully uh and you're gonna have them taste it, and they're gonna have to like some of those more than your current offering or more than a competitors. After you've done all of this work, which sometimes costs in the tens of thousands of dollars in order to have the samples developed.

How the samples sent to you recruit the consumers, but the product in front of the consumers, that data is only ever usable once. Right. All you get from that as a binary yes no, sixty percent of the population liked more than the competitors, and so what we're doing is entirely different. Jason's team wants to take product development

out of the yes no binary. Instead of just saying coke or pepsi, they can calculate which parts of each soft drink people liked and disliked, and then a f s can make entirely new flavors based on what a person kind of liked about pepsi and kind of liked about coke. And finally, they can transfer those preferences to entirely different demographics. So what might someone in Mexico want to taste in their cola compared to what a Japanese

millennial woman might want to taste in her cola? This is what Jason believes is truly disruptive, being able to say to a brand, if you want to launch in Mexico, you should tweak your flavors in this way because we're actually able to collect this data, develop a data set, and make predictions. So we could take data from say, white, twenty to three year old college educated males, and use that to predict what every other population in the United

States is going to perceive in that product. And so we're taking an industry that has never seen predictions of any kind before and finally being able to actually predict things, predict who's gonna like it, how much they're gonna like it right, and what we can do to optimize it so that they like it more. We can actually create products that no one would have ever thought of, and no one ever would have thought that a segment of

the population would have liked. And this is something that we now do with the companies that we work with. We did talk quite a bit about developing a pine flavored beverage in Japan. When we first showed these results to a company there, they said, natzu desca, do you mean pineapple? Because it was just so out of the yeah, out of the ordinary. The way Jason and his team are able to get such nuanced data is with an

app they developed called Gastrograph. Gastrograph looks a lot like the flavor wheels they use in coffee and wine tasting to help people map out what they taste when they try a new product. We think of every flavor, romance, texture as a signature. You can have the five basic flavors bitter, sweet, salty, sour mommy, and then underneath that you're gonna have categorical flavors like fruity earth, the herbaceous nuts,

and seedge roasted. I mentioned that he's a professional taster, right, and then underneath that you can have subcategorical like citrus, or specific like lemon are very specific like Meyer lemon are very very specific like Meyer lemons as right, So all of those signatures exist in some infinite dimensional space flavor space. So, car, since you're such a Seltzer fiend, we demo gaster graph and got a feel for the

app by doing a Seltzer tasting. Yeah, we tasted five Seltzers that are already on the market that you'd buy, like seven eleven, and we rated different components of them. So if I tasted fruit, I'd rate that from zero to five, and I could add adjectives like strawberry or mango. You know, I'm not into like Seltzer two point oh

with like kumquat flavored sparkling seltzer. You know, I plane vintage, but a f s is Resident chemist Ryan On agreed to formulate a seltzer based on just our extremely small data set. Um, you'd probably be a pretty fast process. So we have tons of seltzer data. What we would want to do is um run through a couple of different flavors to get an idea of the types of things that you like, build a model specifically around that, run an optimization, predict a new flavor that you've never

had before, and then have you tried again. So after we did all of that, we went home. We sat in our hands, and then we went back to the office, which actually a little bit more furniture when we got back there to see if they actually could create a seltzer that both Julian and I would like. So it was a blind tasting. Here we go, all right, drink one pair. I don't know why I think such a thing against pears. The number two berries, that's delish. Let's

see what we got here. I wouldn't know huckleberry if it hit me in the face, honestly, but whatever, Number three honestly, curry. Do you not taste curry like there's spice? It's so interesting? One? Oh, I love it like hops and I'm si care just taste like grass? What are you? We're done? So the first thing you guys should tell us is which is your favorite? For me? Is number three? Just because I like the complexity of flavor. Three was a beverage too. I'm used to and I've probably had before.

Maybe three. I really enjoyed one I did not like. I don't like those flavors. We have to reveal. We're almost at the reveal can to clarify. Your job as a company is to predict future products that people will enjoy and come back to. Yes, So in that regard, three was a winner. All right? Oh my god, tes us. So we had to do one product that was going to be optimal for both of you, and we got it. It was number three. They nailed it. You could say

that we got flavor hacked up. Here. This this blue graph, this is saying that there's a you know, a seventy percent chance that you would give this a six? Did I give it a six? I think I did? You? Did? You both gave it a six? Um? So we were pretty confident on this, but we didn't have that level of confidence that we saw this. What I tasted is not something I ever predicted I would have liked, but

it's absolutely something I will continue to think about. It was such a unique flavor and it's actually something I would buy. It's just that I had never tasted something like it before. So when I first tasted it, I was like, this is strange. In the case scenario, gastrographs AI can help companies create foods that satisfying more specific tastes and even bring people more joy, and that's good

for business. Instead of making huge bets and trying to market a product to an entire country, a f S has created a way to make more specialized bets and help companies tap into those niches. And this isn't about AI reducing our experiences to data. AI is being used to change how we experience the world. More sleepwalkers after the break So, Karen, I would have been quite nervous to stand in the shoes of Jason and Ryan and the gastrograph team because I know that you're such a

connoisseur of Seltzer. How do they do? They did really well actually, and I think it's important to mention that they weren't trying to create something they thought I would already like, like I love cranberry, right. They were trying to create something that I hadn't tasted before and also liked. So it was really difficult, and I think it also shows that there's a bit of reversal in the way

that we do things. Companies have always used market research to predict consumer preference, but it's often based on things like focus groups or survey research. What we have now is massive amounts of data being funneled through an algorithm to deliver the perfect product for a very specific type of person exactly. That's the or yeah, age, demographic, socio economic race. They can target it to all these particular categories, and I think this is cool and also a little unsettling.

I think as humans, we like to be in control, you know. I like to think that my preferences are just that, my own preferences, and this sort of up ends that notion. You know, using pre existing data, I can kind of be read they're reading me, and that makes me feel a little less special. I do think it's cool that companies are trying to service niche markets, and I think that's a trend I would definitely get on board with as far as AI being used to

make predictions. And the reason this gastrograph pieces interesting is because it's a perfect demonstration that AI is not some thing which is going to happen in the future. It's here with us today. We can literally taste it already AIS in our lives. It's interpreting our data, is analyzing our preferences, is predicting our behaviors. But we're just starting to respond to what that means culturally. And so there's a lot of new technologies and new issues that were

very excited to get our hands dirty with on season two. Absolutely, and one of the important issues we're going to explore is bias and technology. It's easy to think that algorithms are neutral, but the reality is that technology is built by someone, and that person's bias can be built into a system. This Princeton professor named Ruha Benjamin has introduced a concept directly related to this, called the new Gym code,

which asks us to consider the inequities encoded in algorithms. Well, it's the algorithms and also the data they learned from right. I mean AI harnesses the power of processing huge amounts of data about things that have happened in the past in order to predict a future, and so we have to be very careful about what that data contains, or we might not like the future. It's bits out. I think it's a particularly relevant in the air of medicine.

We see huge, huge promise about honesting AI for better medical outcomes, but we also need to be very careful about how the data is being used and who has access to it, and how can you prevent your data from being used against you. Well, we have to think about the potential for data to harm but also to provide comfort and to drive innovation, sometimes extraordinary, very unexpected innovation. There are two stories I can't wait to dive into

in season two. One is about a doctor using AI to record and optimize conversational strategies with very sick patients. What should they say, how and when? Another is about using natural language processing to enable immersive conversations with holograms of people from history, everyone from astronauts to Holocaust survivors. In other words, using technology to bring history into the present and ensuring we never forget our past it's wild, so we're obviously looking forward to seeing you in the

next season. We have a lot of amazing stories lined up. We'd love to hear from you guys about stories that you want to hear or subjects that you want to hear about, So tweet us at Sleepwalker's Pod on Twitter obviously and on Instagram. We are Sleepwalkers Podcast. Yeah, thank you so much. We love your feedback and we're really looking forward to seeing you for season two very soon. Sleepwalkers is a production of I Heart Radio and Unusual Productions.

For the latest AI news, live interviews, and behind the scenes footage, find us on Instagram, at Sleepwalker's Podcast or at Sleepwalker's podcast dot com. Sleepwalkers is hosted by me Ozveloshin and co hosted by me Kara Price. Were produced by Julian Weller with help from Jacopo Penzo and Taylor Chcogin, mixing by Tristan McNeil and Julian Weller. Our story editor is Matthew Riddle. Sleepwalkers is executive produced by me Ozveloshin

and Mangesh hat Together. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.