Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Carrie Bass. Welcome to it's techtastic. It is lovely to have you here. Thank you, Christian. Appreciate you, him. One of the things that just mentioned, as we're going to know each other a little bit, you're trying to find, foothold and how you can help a company be thoughtful and implement policies there a good way of describing what you're trying to do? That is.
Yeah. And what is interesting to me is being able to help organizations be able to do well by doing good. And so I spent a lot of time working previously with government organizations, but we also work with commercial and not for profit organizations patients too that are having a leaders that are focusing on being able to make a purpose Christian activity in their businesses, primarily transformation and change management.
There are a lot of companies that, you know, and there's nothing wrong with that are trying to maximize their profitability and shareholder revenue by using those tools. And AI was really good at that, but my folks as being on how does a company that wants to offer really sustainable value? How do they leverage this technology and how do they build their management thinking around it, not necessarily the technology. And it's an interesting question to ask because the human side of it your point.
I think it gets overlooked by frequently. Right? You probably can't read the whiteboard behind me, but everything on my whiteboard, you would think as a technology the eccentric person that that would all be architectural, but it's not. It's a diagram of the human interactions of a Christian, like, how things get decided shared out and then implemented.
And that flowchart's really interesting when it intersects something like AI because when you're at asking the Christian, like, let's say we have a bug in our software. Great. Today in the human interaction, where does that get tossed into the organization because that's the critical part. AI is going to change how that happens more than anything else. Yes. Because you can get that question to that are much closer to somebody that can do something about it theoretically. Right.
Or you could displace somebody and replace them with a tool to do it, which is I think where most people focus, and I personally don't. I don't think the technology is ever meant to eliminate the need for us. I think of all technology as enabling us as humans. And you're probably real familiar with your prior experience the deployment of the web and not everything. Dotcom, infrastructure into the deployment of the way that we do services now.
And part of that was the digital divide became exacerbated because all of a sudden now, not only do we go beyond the, you know, personal computer, but now you have to go to a whole new realm of dealing with social media, web content and then also being able to deal with the identification technology. Yeah. How do you confirm that I'm dealing with the right person?
Now imagine that in the AI realm that those same challenges that didn't get solved in the the net environment have now been manifested because you've now got those computer's feed. Yeah. Well, that's a very interesting question. I'm on the board of a company that's trying to solve that particular problem. And it's a fascinating one because if you think of passwords as kind of the the default security identification stance of the world, right, We no longer think that's best for you. Nobody does.
But a password today is easier for a machine to remember and track. That it is for a human to remember and use. Yes. So if you take that and go, well, wait a second. All the things that we try to do to make that harder make it much harder for a human and marginally harder for a computer. Exactly. So that's fundamentally flawed in a way that we can't solve the way that we've been trying to do it. We have to rethink it. I built a system that was trying to solve this problem 25 years ago.
And I was like, well, forget password. What's your favorite song, what's a lyric out of that song, have a very long input field with punctuation and all that. And that's that becomes your password. I was I thought that was pretty clever. Right? Well, it's not any more clever than a password. It was just it made it easier for a human than for a computer. Right? Right.
I think today, with the advent of AI and especially edge compute and some of these models that can run on cell phones, all of a sudden were to different phase entirely where it's almost the device that's the identifier for you, and that's a problem because if the device can be stolen, it can be lost. Right. But but that's where we're at. I mean, I I scan my face onto this.
If I try to log in on Google over on this machine, I get verified on this machine, right, like, that's how we do multifactor today, but that's not gonna work either when all of a sudden, like, a machine can generate an image in my face. That's good enough to fool this. Right. Which is probably already being done. Right? So what comes next?
And it's a really tough thing to answer because I think it ends up looking something like an edge AI tool that is just a approximation of you that can handle heavy compute tasks, like an encrypted algorithm that, uses heuristics with this device that say, yes, that still the same person. They still walk the same way. I think of, one of the projects I worked on a long time ago that I can talk about is we built a gate to tech on old CCTV equipment.
It was so low res that doing a facial analysis and determining it was you was useless. But every person moves a little bit different than every other person more so than your thumbprint being unique. And with just a few seconds of video, we could detect you based on how you moved even with crappy video. So if you take the idea that heuristic model of you and you have it in a device like this, that's like, oh, yeah. That's him.
He tripped every 58th step, and he sways his hips in a certain way and I can detect all that here. I can know it's you, and I can use a tool that approximates your responses to data request and has a long encrypted algorithm that can send off to confirm to other schools. It can do that. And it becomes secure even though the device could be stolen. Like, it still can't be you.
Yeah. I I'm, and I'm way over my skis because I don't have the technical background to talk about it, but I've been looking at blockchain information. And I've been thinking about that capability of being able to track computer transactions from one end to another across multiple devices. And I remember back in the old days, and I'm way way way older than you, like, back in the card technology days of computers, that there used to be a way that you would send, they've checked some.
Yeah. But information that was based on the originating organization and the computer and the calculations that there. And that checksum was sent encrypted that also that was unencrypted on the other end to say, yep. This was not manipulated in the flight in between. I'm thinking blockchain works something like that, but that information that you just gave, like, there may be some holy I'm a holy a fusion type of thinker also.
I'm thinking that there may be some fusion of that that basically says that I can walk around with my checksum, my unique identifier that confirms that it's me all the time and that you know, unfortunately, it sounds a little big brother ish or whatever. Yeah. High school is generating my unique signature that's associated with something about me and where I'm at or with this device all the time. Like, my phone is on me, so my check some notice me that has my phone.
So, therefore, any transaction that does not have my check sum cannot be assured to be me. Because I think trying to figure out what's true and what's not true, what's fake and not fake is kind of a almost an impossible task. Yeah. And and to your point that it sounds very big brother, it it is.
It's I think it's taken directly out of 1984 and, like, how we identify who's who, but at the same time, your point about knowing what's true anymore, the only way we're gonna be able to verify any of it is for it to have a bunch of that. Like, hey, it was a video of Christian and Carrie talking and, like, it has an identifier that says it is definitely carried and has a identify that says it's definitely Christian. It's not made up.
Like, that's the only way that we're ever gonna get back to truth here, it takes, to your point, the human factory. That's what you've gotta be thinking about. Like, I don't want the world broken. I wanna live in a world that I find joy every day, and I'm able to act with other human beings in a way that we all find love and compassion and enjoyment. And, like, we're all able to go forward that way. I don't want the dystopian nightmare of 1984 or or Terminator 2 or whatever. Right?
Like, that's not the world any of us want. And and for us to do that, we have to have some morals that guide us. Right. Like, I take them as a very humanist sense. Like, do no harm, like, type of good things, but also know that there are people that are bad actors. And, like, if you take the world view of there are wolves and sheep, well, there also needs to be sheep dogs. And, like, some of us to be the sheepdogs if we're capable.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, and and that's kind of the focus of the area that's most interesting to me. Matter of fact, at my advanced age. I even decided to go back and get the doctorate.
And so I'm I'm working on that, but the driving concept of what's getting me energized is the concept of, I call it societal excellence, where basically we take those concepts that we have been using the evolution of economics from macro to micro and being able to go from a labor based economy to a ownership based economy. And then being able to manage risk.
But also think about what is best and how do we continue to transform our education because what we know in the past becomes obsolete when we know better in the future, but we have difficulty because we're so married to our past that we can't really adopt the new things of the future. And that causes these societal issues that we're dealing with, particularly in, you know, you you can think in terms of the environment.
Fossil Fuels is such a dramatic step above, whale oil and, you know, and burning wood because you can now take fuel with you to cause all sorts magnificent things, battery transmission of heat and all those sort of things. But we've learned better now that fossil fuels has a Christian that's in the air we breathe and the other things. So what else can I do to get that same societal value of energy that's available anywhere ubiquitously?
But without the cost of the fossil fuel, Well, we're beginning to know those things, but we have married ourselves to the economy of fossil fuels. Lots of people and owners are making lots of money on this fossil fuel economy. And so it's very difficult for them to turn that loose because they don't see the advantage of giving what's giving them their wealth today. Even though longer term, we all kinda know that global warming really is real, air pollution is bad.
You you know, all of those things. Connecting the dots on that is really, really interesting. The fact that it used to be labor and the control of labor and that the means of manufacture was how you controlled industry, but now it's information. And even more so, it's almost a ten because most of the economy, like social media, and all that, or television, all media, is really how much of your attention can I capture? Right.
And when it comes to the energy side, the one thing that makes oil based energy so difficult to dislodge your point around ownership is is exactly right because the sun's always shining. You know, the wind's blowing. I have no control over that. Nobody can control that. Right now. I, like, don't give Elon Musk too much time, and he'll figure out how to control that too. But, like, that is not something that centralizes easily. Yes. Right?
I think that's the people that are fighting back about it. They're the ones that like, no. No. I've got control over almost all of US and world economy because I control thing, and I can turn it on or off as I want. And that goes away when you start talking about all the renewable resources that are being used. Yeah. And the thought process that I have has to deal with, you know, I, I've also gotten to be a, fan of Nasine to live.
I have a hard time reading his books, but you know, the scene wrote the black swan book, but one of the other ones, a book called Anti Frigility. And I really like his concepts there. Yeah. The idea is is that I there are fewer black swans than people really think, but I think really what causes what we consider black swans is really a failure of risk management and imagination.
And so if we really thought more clearly about our systems and the real purpose of what we're trying to do, then you would not be as chopped because we would not design systems as fragile as we do, which kinda gets us back again to AI and that the way that we build software.
And the way that we deploy these new technology systems is that we take a lot of risk, and the question is to be is, can we actually mitigate those risks in a reasonable way as we discover them because we're gonna use them before we know what those risks are. And AI is a really interesting problem because and and, you know, huge advantages that you come with it. But the the problem is software, for the most part, has been in the hands of a small number of people that were almost wizards.
Like, we learned the arcane knowledge that it was necessary to tell these things how to do what we wanted them to do. Right. And there's a lot of training that goes into that and experience that's necessary. Now that's grown. There's so many more people doing it today than there used to be. There's low code and no code platforms you can software. Right? But for the most part, there is some checks and balances in there to make sure that it's reasonably safe. Right?
But with AI, what AI really is is that curtains down now that the little man behind the curtain pulling the levers that's making the wizard do his thing, that's gone. Anybody can sit down and make anything they want with AI. Not quite that dramatically. Right? But not that far away either because for the first time, we don't have to talk a computer like it needs to be told how to do things. We can talk to a computer like we talk.
We can say exactly what we want it can ask us questions in a way we understand. So all of a sudden, our ability to leverage this technology to do whatever our heart desires, the barriers as low as it's ever been. And that's fantastic. At the same time, it's terrifying. Absolutely. Because the barrier to entry for bad actors is never been lower.
Absolutely. And, you know, I that's one of the reasons that I find this area pretty fascinating in one of the areas that I'm spending a lot of time finding experts to talk to and other is the opportunity and the risk are so dramatic now with AI, and it really it was building along the way with computer science but we finally now have that magic moment where the infrastructure, the technology, the hardware technology, and the software have now got to
the point that we can actually do some useful things, but we have not protected ourselves. We've not built that those people assist to be able to deal with it. 1 of the biggest areas of concern that I have is bias bias in the data collect bias in the training data, bias in the algorithm creation. And now when you couple that with the new technology and the new capability that all of a sudden you can implement bias dramatically ubiquitously at the speed of light.
Because there's so few people that know what actually went into what they created. You you know what I mean? I I can create something as you mentioned with AI tools that just took a big chunk of data. I said, I go out and learn. I don't know where it can learn from. I don't know who's telling it what to learn, but it comes back and it gives me something of what I need. There's a MIT doctor name is Doctor. Jod Wanlungwini, and she calls it coding in black and white as one of her demystifying AI.
But she started out learning about this difficulty by trying in her graduate studies to build a product that would be able to give enhanced imagery of people. Basically, it's like a magic mirror. Kinda, you know, you look into your screen and say, imagine mirror on the wall, tell me who I am, and it would, you know, modify your features based on some algorithm or whatever. But she had a hard time actually getting the software to recognize her. She's originally She's a child from Ghana.
Her parents are from Ghana. She's a born in Canada, I believe, and and became an American citizen. And, she's a dark skin. And so she had a hard time for the software even seeing her. So what she did is she got a plain white mask, kinda like those Phantom in the Opera mask. And held it up. And the software could recognize Oh, jeez. In order to recognize facial patterns. And that started her thinking about bias overall.
And so She created a organization called the algorithmic Justice League to be able to deal with the biases and all that that are in the development of these new systems. A lot of her thinking, some of it is is that she's saying we need to opt out of some of this. And I think that that's naive. And you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we do need to be aware of what's going on.
But at the same time, think about if we were to use that same knowledge and say, I want to solve the problem of how do I deal with income inequity? And so where there was red lighting before, I want you to take those same people and provide them with better financial terms that gives them financial success over time. So I mean, that same tool that can implement bias can also reverse ask just as easily, and the tool has no concern about doing either one of those tasks.
Yeah. Because it doesn't have any built in ethics or morality. It's It only has what we apply to it. And, unfortunately, that's what the tools have been showing is that we have a lot of bias. We have a lot of racial prejudice. We have a lot things that within us that we believe were gone or maybe, or, you know, maybe we're smart enough to know that it never went away, but the data is definitely showing that it's there. And to use your mirror again, that's exactly what it is.
It's a mirror in society and showing us where our biases are. And that should be something we can use to fix the problem. We can look at it and go, wait a second. What is this telling us about ourselves and our own society? How do we do it? Hey. Carrie, I love having you on. I just wanna say thank you so much for being on. I really appreciate it. If people wanted to know more, they wanted to hear about if they wanted to connect, how would they do that?
They can look on my website, www.makingreality.com. Again, my company is potential to reality dotcom. You can email me at info at makingreality.com, and I'd love to talk to you and, love to see about how you can make a difference in your environment. Fantastic, Carrie. Thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure. I look forward to talking to you again. Thanks for having me, Christian. Really appreciate it. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic.
I wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Overwhelmed by tech debt, discover Vala AI. The solution to tech challenges with this of a click. No engineering background? No problem. Vala AI enables anyone to effortlessly tackle tech issues, freeing up your time from tech headaches. Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where your tech solutions are just a click away.