Is AI Making You Smarter, or Just More Confident?

David (00:00) This week, Dr. Robby and I are joined by Dr. Adrian Wolfburg, author of Who Leads When AI Thinks? How leaders frame decisions and exercise judgment. Adrian was gracious enough to sit down with two cartoon psychiatrists to talk about AI and how we make sense of a world that's changing around us. Unfortunately, technical problems left us with video that we couldn't use and audio that still has some rough spots. We're really sorry about that. We considered holding the episode, but we really thought this conversation was worth hearing. So bear with the sound and thanks for listening. Here's our conversation with doctor Adrian Wolfberg. David, I am a board and certified psychiatrist with over twenty years in the military. Today I am sadly drinking coffee instead of bourbon because it's too early in the morning and I'm just not ready to face that demon yet. Robby, what's going on with you today? Robby (01:32) Hey, morning everybody. it's Rob, thirty years psychiatrist, thirty years military experience. and I am also having a nice big cup of black coffee and nursing a pretty sore throat today. So if my voice isn't quite as sexy as it normally is, that's the rationale. David (01:50) It might be sexier. You get that raspy that deep raspiness Robby (01:54) Yeah. David (01:56) matches your avatar. All right. Well, I'm excited. This is gonna be our first episode with a non psychiatrist guest. We have Dr. Adrian Wolfberg. He is an organizational scientist, former US intelligence officer, and former naval officer. So we got that in common, sort of. I think I would have been calling you, sir, and pretty much doing Everything or anything that you ask, cleaning your state room or something when I was in the Navy, but he has earned his PhD in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University and a Masters from the Nation War College in Washington DC, as well as an honors BA from York University in Canada. And he has been drawing on experience spanning Nation security, organizational research, and knowledge management by examining the individual. organizational, emotional, and cognitive dynamics that shape decision making when problems are complex, ambiguous, and forward looking. He has published many scholarly and practitioner works on analysis, organizational adaptation, leadership and climate security, including a very recent work on AI, knowledge integration, sense making and the challenges organizations face in translating insight into effective action. Wow, that is a whole lot. Doctor Wolfberg, are we okay to call ya Adrian? Adrian (03:15) Yeah, for sure. David (03:16) Wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us for this conversation. I'm really excited. So are you drinking anything you got? Adrian (03:23) I am, I'm no, not a coffee, but a carbonated drink with some fruit flavoring. So yeah, I have a drink. David (03:32) I think I'm gonna be six copies deep by the time we end this. So if I start to get really jacked up, that's why. I really appreciate you take time. Your book is about AI, it's about organizations, it's about leadership using AI. One of the things that I've noticed recently, and this just comes from my own personal experience talking to my daughter, is that I really like AI. This makes pictures that I otherwise I lack the ability to draw. You know, I could draw a stick figure, end of list. AI is actually pretty good at taking what I think about as being funny concept, a joke, and just getting a picture. Generally just to send a text message to my old man or to one of my friends or something. It's not going on the internet. It's just a way to convey some thought that I had. And I find it really good at that. I'm not trying to recreate a Van Gogh. I'm not trying to create a Monet or anything like that. But my daughter, who is an artist, hates it. Hates it so much. AI slop. She really feels like it's intruding on her space. And There's a lot of conflict between us when that happens, but the truth is I just like funny memes and I like to share them with a couple of people and I don't send them to her. So I find it a really useful tool that she seems to feel is jumping in in her space. But when we think about AI being used for psychiatry, that's where I start to get protective. Right now it's honing in on my space. And it's something that I'm a little bit less excited about AI making decisions to help people in that way. So What are we protecting there? I'll I'll throw it to Robby, I'll throw it to Adrian. Does anybody else have that experience? I guess I'll start with. Robby (05:05) I would call myself a relatively early adopter. I've been using AI for probably fourteen, sixteen months, something like that. I've always been a tech guy. I've always gravitated towards such things. I found it fascinating. And when I first started using it, I felt like it was giving me a capability gain because I had ideas, but I did not have the expertise to implement said ideas. And then all of a sudden with the help of these AI systems, that expertise was just there. I I could do things that I previously could not do, or I could do things faster that would have taken me months to accomplish prior. Like, you know, going back in life, I used to do some back-end web programming with an old computer language called Perl. And to accomplish something with that meant I would probably have to teach myself something. I would have to figure something out. There would be seven different levels of problems that would come up that I would then have to teach myself about. And now all I have to do is say, Hey, Jarvis, do this for me. And it felt amazing that I could implement these ideas. Early on, I was somewhat unique. I was producing these things and no one else was, but now everyone is. So the amount of creative material that is all of a sudden available is almost overwhelming. And the quality is higher, but there's a point there where for me as a human, there's too much. There's no distinguishing really excellent things from mediocre from poor because the quality has shifted so significantly. So I am curious about what's this look like in a year or two years and what's it do to us as humans? Creativity used to be the realm of the talented. Now it's any idiot with a cell phone and chat GPT. Adrian (07:04) Yeah, so you've both raised a number of interesting things. Human agency is one of Generational experience is another one. So let me first talk about the generational aspect, but you didn't use that term explicitly, but implicitly, just by virtue of your introduction of where you are in life, and this applies to me as well. So there's been a lot of research on smartphone usage and a lot of research on smartphone usage of young adults who grew up with smartphones, not necessarily when AI was integrated into it, but that that has been the case. And we call that, it's been called, those individuals who are digital natives. And I think that's a an important distinction between those who are digital natives and those who are not. So those who are digital natives are those who from a very early age, I mean I've seen kids and baby strollers with digital devices, not necessarily smartphones, but digital devices playing with games and so forth. And those people who are not digital natives had an experience of of operating in the world without this capability of interconnectivity and speed of information flow and so forth. And I think, you know, that's where from my experience and I would imagine yours as well, although you d you didn't explicitly state it, we were brought up in a educational system and a societal system where reading was just embedded in the educational system, in how we gathered information, the requirement for critical thinking was, depending on kind of where you lent, would certainly be required in mandatory courses like math biology, physics, and so forth, to the extent that's part of the high school curriculum. So the research that's been done over the last twenty years on primarily digital natives on smartphone usage has shown a number of negative things and and primarily the research has been focused on those who are overly dependent. And my guess is that from everything I've read and everything that I'm seeing, pretty well everybody is over reliant and over dependent on on smartphones. And so what the research has shown, and maybe you've you've already you maybe have read about this, is lack of attention. In other words, a disposition where attention is limited to very short periods of time. I don't want to quantify this, but just for example, if I can only pay attention to something for fifteen seconds, I can do that. But paying attention to something for hours at a time, cannot do, as someone who's been a digital native. And other things are anxiety. What I mean by that is that individuals are expecting immediate responses from engagement with social media. Of course, this is accentuated with AI embedded into smartphones, but I'm just talking about pre AI smartphones. The research has also shown that smartphone usage because of the lack of attention or the reduced focus on attention and anxiety has diminished critical thinking and creative thinking. So that's kind of what we know about smartphone usage and the early research on AI, generative AI, so that's really just the last few years. And most of that research, but not all, most of it has been with university students who are digital natives. And some of the more recent is adults in the work environment. And research is focused specifically on the effect of again, over reliance and over dependence on generative AI. And and I again I don't have the data to argue what percentage that is, but I'm betting that it it's very high based on what I'm reading and what I'm hearing from people talking about in my own what that's research is showing a degradation of critical and creative thinking. Robby (11:04) Several years ago, two thousand fifteen, I think, there was a study. This was out of the American Journal of Experimental Psychology, but they were looking at the impact of cell phones and access to Google and how it impacted people's perception of their own intelligence. And then what they found was that people have a tendency to confuse access to knowledge with actually knowing something, right? So And and we've all seen this, that a question gets posed, someone kind of surreptitiously googles it real quick and then presents the knowledge as if it's theirs, trying to appear, I guess, more more informed than they are. And that study's been replicated actually multiple times. I'm wondering with the power of AI, how it is going to impact our perception of because that was just confusing access to knowledge with knowledge, but now We're g getting to the point where we're going to start confusing creativity our own creativity, our own musical or artistic talents with what these AI systems can do for us. And as I play this out, now we're a test bed. I mean, we're the first group who are being tested as to this technology. We certainly, from a developmental standpoint, we weren't designed for this. Humans were not made for this kind of conundrum. But if I play this out ten years, fifteen years, and I think about the incredible advancements in AI f from just a year ago to now, what my AI agent can do for me now versus what it could do for me a year ago. And we think five years or ten years, my concern gets to be a lot of what being a human is, a lot of the more beautiful parts of being a human, being creative, being artistic, having ideas. I like to offload. some of the mundane tasks to my AI. But it feels like we're going to start offloading the essential components of humanity, of being a human, our humanness to these AI systems. In your work, looking at leadership, but I I imagine you're seeing that with leadership, that those in leadership positions where their their decisions matter, becoming more and more reliant on these AIs to make decisions for them. Adrian (13:28) Yeah. Y you talked about a number of things. One was kind of the future, the other was the humanness The other is what is the addictive quality? So let me just talk about that. What is the addictive quality that this research both on AI and and smartphones is telling us? And I think that that will help answer the last question you ha you talked about. So focused on for the last forty years how people handle uncertainty and ambiguity and and typically in high stakes situations, a lot of times in in time pressure situations, but not exclusively. And kinda what's very clear i in my mind based on that and is that we humans are just uncomfortable with that and they prefer and this I've empirically shown they prefer clarity. that's not a surprise. I don't think that's surprised anybody that if given the choice of uncertainty and ambiguity versus clarity, but we prefer clarity. And I think that is one thing that makes us addictive to these presentations that are made from AI systems that make them addictive, that they come across as authoritative, as very clear, and come across with this Nation of high confidence. So I want to talk a little bit about confidence for a second, and then we can get into the human aspects of what I would call human agency. So not only the capability to make judgments, but the kind of systemic forces around us and typically in in organizations. But I think as AI becomes more embedded into everything that's done, this will manifest itself everything from family life, like you talked about, David, I think your daughter, or even in societal decision making applications. David (15:19) I was gonna throw a wrinkle in like a Brian Flores defense. might make it a little bit harder, but if you can cover this, awesome. So Robby had talked about the confidence that people have when they have Google and their ability to answer a question without having that lived experience that we think about as being high quality knowledge. But what they have is that confidence that comes with having the ability to say, Well, it says this here. I don't know if you've noticed or I I know I have, is that there's something that goes beyond that internal confidence. It's that external expectation that people have from other people to be able to answer these questions because it's so readily available. When I was a kid and I'm a little bit younger than the two of you, not a lot, but a little bit younger, we'd if we were gonna go do a book report or do a a report on something I'd walk my ass down to the library, I'd pull a encyclopedia Britannica off the shelves. Maybe a little bit later I might have the actual CD ROM and I would write my report with that information. If a kid today in the eighth grade were to hand you a report that was clearly written using just the information from an Encyclopedia Britannica, we would look at that kid like there was something wrong with them. Because they have the access to all of this information. And so I think there's that double-edged sword in that. Yeah, we don't want people to be overly confident in the information that they have, but we also want them to access the information that's available. And I do think that kinda comes out to AI as well. It's plays a role in, well, it's there, it's available. Why aren't you using it to spell check your resume, dude? Does that make sense to anybody? Adrian (17:05) Yeah, I mean this kind of goes back to an initial thing that I talked about, about the difference between digital natives and non-digital natives. And it's not I don't mean it to be so binary, but for the sake of the discussion, I'm just gonna leave it in that way. So I have as a non-digital native, I have a wealth of various different experiences dealing with like your example of how I've accessed information in the past, how I've processed information without anything that like exists today with with AI. And I in the pursuit of that, this involved not only the information source, which could be like you say, a book or a a magazine, a physical magazine, or an encyclopedia, whether it's digital or not, or interacting with other people and talking to them and asking them what do they think. Here's here's like the full understanding that I have at this moment. how do you see this? So one aspect of this is how one understands the context of the issue that's being put i in front of us. As you get more and more kind of on the end of the spectrum of being a digital native with more than that being an AI native. I I had a podcast with an eighteen year old the other day and they were a freshman in college and they grew up in high school having access to AI. So Th they're like a generative AI native, not only a digital native. So if you don't have this prior experience, then your context of the world can be shaped just by what's been ingested and processed in in what is AI. So AI becomes then the representation of reality. And so that could be a good thing, that could be a bad thing. So let me just talk about why well, I think Rob talked about a little bit why it could be a good thing. with an understanding of what the issue is, deep understanding of it and understanding what's going on, asking questions about how has this been handled before by other organizations or other kind of basic research as a research assistant kind of a thing. But there's also kind of the negative downside of this. And this kind of goes to what context is. So I'm actually writing a book about what is context. So what I mean by context is everything that we as humans perceive in that perception of things, that that set of things, what is important relative to whatever the situation that we're thinking about, and what is not that important that can that can be excluded. So that's just something that w humans have always, you know, always had. That's a very important way that we operate in the world. We frame things because we just can't process everything in the world. So the issue is that if your context is by and large Represented by what an AI system knows, then there's extreme limitation to that. And why is that? Well, whatever an AI system is now or even in the future, it's not going to have the ability to understand the emotional and social connections that we have in our interpretation with that, with other individuals, whether it's a family members or in organizations or in society. and our interpretation of what those mean so that we can figure out if they're part of the way we should frame things or part of things that we can e exclude things. So if you don't have that, all you have is whatever the system has ingested from whatever it's incorporating, which it it's never gonna have, even if there's a visual camera looking at things, it's not gonna have the emotional and social connection of what's actually going on and how we interpret things. So that you start developing then a a kind of artificial understanding in in people who just more and more and more rely on AI. And you know, Rob, I think you talked initially about concern from a psychiatric perspective. This kind of feeds in as well. It's it's well well documented that young people are getting exposed to AI systems that appear bent who have the presentation of being empathetic to the individual. And so it just kind of mirrors or can just reinforce from its artificial understanding of reality to someone's real reality and there's gonna be a disconnect there. Robby (21:28) With the eighteen year old that you were engaged with and as is often the case with me, I rarely start talking knowing what I actually want to say. And then as I talk more, the ideas start to f to coalesce. But David (21:42) Yeah, everyone's been listening to our show knows this, Rob, quite well. Thank you. Thank you for Yeah. Robby (21:48) Well, I I like to live by the motto of why not use fifty words when five would have done. So yeah. I mean words are free, right? Yeah. David (22:01) You're not editing yourself as the problem. Robby (22:03) Right, right, right. so with this eighteen year old and this is something I'm seeing with my kids, is that my two sons, I've got twenty year old and a seventeen year old. And they are posing the question of why am I investing myself in becoming an expert? Like what David said a minute ago. W we would question a child who did not utilize the tools available to them to produce a product. That is well done because you can do it. You can spell check and you can have it correct your grammar and all that. If you don't use that tool. So my kids are posing the question of what's the sense in becoming an expert when I can never become more of an expert than the AI? The AI is going to out-expert me. And I'm thinking about my my military experience, my command experience. We did not utilize AI systems, but I'm thinking about how easily we could have churned out op boards. would have been click a button and it would have produced a spectacular operational order and probably would have done better mission planning than we could have. My sense is that our confidence in it may have outstripped our confidence in ourselves because it can put together and anticipate things that I know I don't always anticipate. There does seem to be a human element that's missing, but and I'm jumping around now, but for this this next generation or for the folks who are are in position now, what's the sense in becoming an expert now? There has been a loss in the respect for expertise over the last two decades. It seems like it's going to completely disappear now. David (23:47) Reframe the question just a little bit to get to the core of what we always talk about, because I think it's not uncommon to think that. But when we think about what's the sense of becoming the expert, we'll think about the experts that already exist. As AI gets better and better at doing what is considered my job, what happens to that story that you've been telling yourself about who you are as a person, as an expert in that field? Because I think that's where a lot of angst and anxiety is coming from. is that my gosh, this thing is actually better at being an expert than I am. And I'm the expert, so I would know. Adrian (24:25) Yeah, so these are things that we often see, David, what you're talking about Rob. We see this concern front and center in the media that the future could make all sorts of current skills of people's careers obsolete. And this was kind of at the existential center of this freshman college student podcast that I had. So it wasn't too much different than Rob what you talked about, but it wasn't specific about why become an expert if AI becomes an expert. So what what I've been talking about and what my book talks about is what is it about us that is human and how should we think about AI? And I think this this goes back to an initial mindset discussion first. And that is people, you know, have talked about generative AI, which is ki you know, I'm just gonna use generative AI and AI as synonymous because as members of the public That's basically what we're exposed to right now. They most frequently talk about it as a tool. And and I fundamentally have a concern with how that's conceptualized, because I think that AI is not a tool. It's something different. And why do I say that? Well, everything that's been created before AI has been either very well, poorly, or exquisitely designed so that we understand the requirement for what the entity is. We understand how to make it, we understand how to modify it if it's not satisfying our objectives. We understand the process in which the entity moves from its input to its output. So this could be something as simple as using a hammer to hammer a nail to you flying an aircraft or or operating in the International Space Station. In the era of AI, almost none of that stuff applies. We don't understand. any of that. I'm just speaking loosely. I was just listening to a podcast of from physicists from computer scientists who don't know how the process works. And you know, just from a l a layman's perspective, I'm not a computer scientist, but we don't know all the data that it's using to suck up into itself. There's no transparency into into its outcome. So I kind of frame this as not on the same existential level as a tool. And I've been careful to frame this Because I think it requires a mindset shift as a a partner in a relationship where there's two types of consciousness, two types of intelligence. Now obviously they're different, but a tool is something that we exploit. We may not think about it, I don't mean it in a negative way, but we use tools. And while we can say we use AI, that's kind of a misnomer to what's actually going on. It is a an intelligent entity. There's different pros and cons about it versus humans, but we are in a partnership with it. So we have to advocate that we have to look at AI as a partnership. And just like as in in humans, we have friends or colleagues or whatever, w we're living in a human society. And we understand Yeah. We understand well, hopefully we understand what they bring to the table, maybe what they're missing, you know, their capabilities and limitations, and we work hopefully collaboratively. whatever the situation is, whether it's a family issue or a work issue or some kind of societal issue. And so that's how we have to think about AI. It is a relationship that we have to engage in. So what does that actually mean for us as humans? When it's well understood, and you've talked about it, there's no question about the speed at which AI can operate in terms of the massive amounts of the information can it ingest at rapid speeds, how it can detect patterns. It can generate scenarios, it can evaluate scenarios, all those things are well beyond the capability of humans as as we exist now. So what is the role of humans in this relationship? Because if we don't acknowledge the human role, then we could get into a a negative space where we can kind of see kind of the bleeding edge of that now with diminished critical thinking, creative thinking, and so forth. So this is where a role for humanness and it's important to maintain these roles. So coming to an understanding of what actually is the problem that one faces involves an exquisite understanding of the contexts that one's operating in. So, you know, what is context? Well, that's everything around us, and we've always faced this. and you know, we've seen That if people don't understand the context of what's actually happening and what's related to the problem, that could just invisibly cascade over time into some kind of collapse. This could be a collapse of a marriage or bankruptcy of a organization or the fall of democracy. That's that sort of thing. So understanding the the context becomes very important, and that is an essential element of how we frame. whatever it is we want to pursue or we want to address in a problem in whatever the issue is. So framing is is inherently human. Now, once we frame things based on all the things that we've been talking about, AI is is really good at operating within that frame as long as we give it the parameters in in which we want it to consider, and which and it can do that and and extend upon that to related things to the frame that we've given it. We also as a kind of a an essential human quality have the ability to reframe and so what does that mean? So as time moves on, change occurs, a context is gonna is gonna shift as well. So to be able to see the changes, which we're not very good at, but we need to become better at as humans, because we tend to establish a frame at time zero whenever that was, and then because of various factors, we tend to merely go along as if that frame still existed and we're find it difficult to adjust and and reframe, but that's what's needed as well. Robby (30:52) Finding myself thinking of the story of Cyreneau de Bergerac. And if you guys are familiar with that, it's the one where I think the character is Christian. Christian's trying to pick up a chick. David (31:05) S stop acting like you read you read Cyril and you didn't just watch Roxanne. Robby (31:12) you're right. David (31:15) Or any of the other the many adaptations of not allows a great yeah. Robby (31:19) Yeah, so s so Christian is trying to pick up a lady. Cyrano's feeding him the lines, he's giving them to this girl, this girl is falling in love with him, thinks she's falling in love with his mind. turns out she's falling in love with Cyreno. In that context, I think about AI and AI sort of putting us in the p position to become Christian, where we are we deliver the explanation, make the presentation, give the advice. People around us attribute it to us, and we might even start attributing it to ourselves, just like that study about, you know, our ability to Google confirmed that we start to think we're smarter or think think we have more understanding. You you made mention of this partnership. And the partnership, like in a in a real human partnership, you have to know your partner. You know their strengths, you know their weaknesses, you know what they can contribute and what they can't. When we enter into a partnership with an AI system, the problem is that the AI is beyond our comprehension. That if you do not possess enough expertise to identify where it falls short, the expectation for most of us, like if I go ask it a computer programming question, that's beyond me. Whatever answer it gives me, I'm gonna take that. So I can't assess its strengths and weaknesses. In my mind it is i nearly infallible. So entering an apartment seems almost impossible. Adrian (32:53) Well I understand, you know, what you're saying from an individual perspective. I'm thinking this more as a collective consciousness perspective So written about and what I think about, if I were were in a position where I was a leader of X number of people, there would be people in that organization who have expertise about the AI capability and limitations itself. So it's not like AI literacy is sufficient. It's not like every person has to become completely literate with the technology itself. There's gonna be distribution of capabilities wherever Robby (33:33) I see what you're saying, and you're coming at it from an organizational leadership standpoint. I'm thinking about the impact on humanity, on the masses, on the individuals who we've already seen the average John Doe is already struggling to make sense of a world in which too much information is coming at them at once. So I'm hopeful that organizations are gonna work this out. They're gonna have an AI interface expert. I'm thinking more along the lines of how just the average person navigates their life as this this progresses, as this AI systems become more capable, more integrated in our life. I guess I'm concerned about our survival as a species. With all this talk about AI killing us, different percentages, upwards of 25% ch chance that this might be an extinction level event. And I'm wondering if we're just defining extinction wrong. It's not that we're all going to die. It's that we're going to cease to be human because the some of the core elements of humanity are gonna be offloaded over to these AIs and we don't even know we're doing it. It just happens. Adrian (34:45) Yeah, so I mean this goes to our responsibility in society and there's an educational component and we have to start talking about this. Being overwhelmed by information is not something new. It's not something that's just occurring with AI. This has really been occurring since the internet age. So and even before then, people have talked about being in the research, they've talked about being overwhelmed with information. Most of the things that I'm looking at are within organizations. But this is not a new thing that people are overwhelmed. So when I was an undergraduate, what I studied was I made up my own undergraduate degree program and and it was focused on major transformations in human culture. And I did my bachelor's thesis on the changes during the Industrial Revolution in England during the eighteenth century mechanization in in all its ways and forms. But in general, these kinds of major changes are difficult to understand as they're happening. And not everybody can see what's hap like anything new, you don't have the language to be able to interpret the meaning of what's actually happening. So you have to ha you have to develop the language to identify what's happening that identifies whatever something new is so that people can now understand what it actually is. And you know, in the eighteenth century in in the UK, that was very difficult to do. And and really it the research that I did at that time was this largely came down to the eyes and ears of artists and painters and poets but who are primarily getting their vibrations about what's going on in the emotional and social level about what's actually happening. Also scientists as well, because of the empirical basis of of what they do. I think this occurs i in every major transformation. This is a transformation beyond any transformation that's occurred. Robby (36:48) I'm glad you said that, 'cause this feels like industrial revolution, t you know, logarithmically multiplied p with the addition of the nuclear age. So there's there's a danger to it that is reminiscent of those early early days after the you know the first nuclear bombs in which it's worldwide unregulated, we don't know which directions it's going. That th there's a danger here and a speed that i is unique in human ex human history. David (37:21) What I think about when I think about AI now is I think about John Bowlby, who drew a lot of his principles on attachment from early conceptualizations of AI and cybernetics. And I think where this is really different from the printing press, which was huge in the internet, is that just as you said, and I love that you said it, is that there is a relationship that is developed By this particular technology because it responds to you. It responds on the individual level, it responds on the organizational level. It has, unlike the printing press that is driven by what we what we provide it, yes, more information is out there. Yes, that's overwhelming to humans in the late 1800s. But this is very, very different because with an AI model, I might use it to test my judgment. But then it's using my responses to then feed me back more information. So just like a personal relationship in that way, it's developing along with me and we're training each other. And so I guess the the thing I think about is, man, how do we take this totally different technology and and one stop looking at it like it's just the printing press because it's not. This is very much like adding a family member who we're trying desperately at this point. on a personal level, on an organizational level, to not create these insecure attachments, we'll use Bolby's language since I'm drawing on him, to where we're growing together in positive ways rather than in negative ways that create more organizational or or interpersonal challenges. Adrian (39:06) Technology is going to continue to advance. I don't think anything's going to stop that. So it's now incumbent upon us as humans to be aware of the implementation aspect I'm not addressing. That, you know, okay, just very quickly, you know, educational system has responsibility, society has responsibility. Even the technology developers have a responsibility. speaking to Rob's point of how just everyday person is is using AI. So there's all sorts of actors who are need to play in this, but from a kind of an awareness perspective of what individuals can do, what we have control over, what we have agency over. And I think that's all you know we can possibly do. We can do that individually in our family, in our society, whatever. It's to reinforce these human qualities that Are not replicated by a technology, a machine intelligence. And to make sure those are developed. When I talked with this a freshman, I said, you know, the things that are going to be important as you graduate and you get into the workforce are not going to be your AI literacy, but it's going to be your ability to exercise critical and creative thinking, to be able to frame problems, to be able to think from the social and and human perspective, that kind of decision making process are gonna be most important. So I'm just you know advocating that in the face of the rise of the technology we have to in part of this adjustment phase that we're in, how long this adjustment phase is gonna be, I I don't know. It'll be i iterative, but we we have to ensure that our humanness is part of this relationship. Because what what happens if it's not? What if there's unconstrained from my experience and my research, expecting other people to solve the problem is never a good strategy. We have to create individually and with like minds, collectively, this idea that the human part is part of this relationship and you know, kind of rattled off what those things are, framing, reframing, critical creative thinking and And the empathy, I I want to add a couple of more things. You know, I talked about how AI is very effective in being empathetic to the individual to kind of reinforce or play back what they think or what they've heard and play back as if it's being empathetic maybe like a counselor or a psychiatrist would be. I'm not talking about that empathy. I'm talking about the empathy that whatever human is making decisions. In a world that will increasingly have AI embedded into everything that we consider as part of a decision. That could be a lot, that could be a little, whatever that is in that spectrum. Only we as humans can understand how that decision, which is partially includes AI contribution, how that's going to affect humans. That's we we have to preserve that kind of empathy. Now we could say we've we always should have had that. And I think that just humans have been resilient or we've had a lack of resilience. And so whatever decisions we've made before AI existed were either good or bad decisions and people got exploited or they didn't get exploited and so forth. But here now we have a a joint shared consciousness, so to speak, a a shared member in the decision making process who's not a human. So it it incumbent upon the human to ensure they have empathy on how these decisions, which will have an AI component, are gonna man the manifest themselves and affect themselves on humans. Accountability is another thing. I would hope that we never give up accountability for the decisions we make to AI. That would be awful. And I think that's something that humans always have to retain. Robby (43:09) Humans have a habit of wanting to give up accountability. We talk about this constantly actually on this show. Because you know, if if you're not accountable, you can't be blamed. your argument is is that the ability to frame and reframe is uniquely human, or that's our skill set, that's where where we come into play. Adrian (43:29) Well, I think th there's a little bit of an extra piece in there. It's because we have the capability of understanding the human context of reality. That's why framing is y so human. It's not that the frame itself I think framing is just part of a way that humans have adapted and they include and block out certain information. But it is the intentionality with which that in which that is done within the human context in which we live, whether it's in a family situation or a team or of organization or society. I can't imagine any time in the future except the extreme where we ourselves become robots, but discounting that, where we only we ourselves as humans, have a full understanding of the context that's going on. And because we have that kind of e antecedent understanding of the context, that puts us in a position, hopefully optimally with this may go back to education and so forth to have the the best frame that we we can to deal with whatever the situation is that we're we're dealing with. Robby (44:38) I see, I see. so I guess so I'm thinking in terms of psychotherapy. And in a psychotherapy environment, there's this concept of the inner subjectivity of the experience. In other words, it's kind of almost like Schrdinger's cat or quantum physics, that the act of measuring something changes that thing. And in this case, I see what you're saying and I concur with you that that we're outside the machine. We're the ones that can actually see the environment, see the moving parts. We're standing on the hill. The trenches are below us, and we have the ability to see the bigger, the full battle space. Part of that though ends up being the AI. And the AI is going to, because of what it gives us, and it does respond to us and it adjusts to us. It's going to change our frame. It's going to be a part of our framing will be the information that AI system is is providing us. It will change how we see things. And therein lies my concern, I suppose, is that I I agree with you that our ability to frame a problem and then reframe it, but our understanding of the problem will be impacted by the information the AI gives us that seems convincing enough to make us reframe and that inner place frightens me. Adrian (45:59) Yeah, I guess. So that what I would like to inject into that formula that you just discussed is the nature of the interaction between humans and AI. And I talk about that in my book. So these are the mechanisms in in which this engagement actually occurs. And these engagement processes are where things like human agency, critical thinking, creative thinking, skepticism, framing, reframing come into play. So I think you have to look at at that kind of deeper level and there's a lot of room for empirical research moving forward to uncover these underlying dynamics. Because once we figure out, you know, systematically how people in different contexts, whether it's Joe Schmoe and on their day off using AI or in an organization, they're using AI, and my bias is trying to understand how people do it at work in a in an organization. then we'll have a better idea of kind of interventions or developmental or competency issues in in which to to ensure that you know the wool is not pulled over the human's eye that that they're able to process the information critically. That's kind of where my kind of future look is into this into the internal mechanisms that are occurring between humans and and and AI. I don't know if that makes sense. Robby (47:25) It does, it does. And that it just occurs to me it's it's this isn't a merely an extraterrestrial life form that we're learning how to engage with. It's been observing us. it has the the breadth of human knowledge actually at its fingertips and we are trying to figure out how to how to develop a an appropriate relationship with it and we stand at the precipice of a potential golden age. Or we could fall the hell off the cliff. We'll find out. David (47:56) I think there's another piece to it though, I think as we try to figure out how to engage with AI as a partner. One thing that I think throws all a lot of us off is that it's constantly trying to please us, which does alter the interaction in some way. Again, to maybe if even if you're a skeptic, if you're somebody who's who looks at it, which I think is probably right now the healthiest way to to engage with AI is to be skeptical of the responses that it's giving you and to say Where did you get that information? Can you check your information? Which requires some level of expertise and other knowledge to be able to fully interact with. That's one piece, because when you're dealing with another person who's just very much a people pleaser or just trying to go along with you, you can get dragged down that rabbit hole of echo chamber, which we see all the time. But there's another piece to this that we haven't really talked about, which is the companies that Create the AI also have their own internal motivations to not just provide this product, but to not be accountable themselves to the repercussions of following the advice from the product. And now that is, they're trying, they I would hope is they're trying to ensure that the information and data that they're feeding you is as accurate as possible so that you can make good decisions based upon it. But when we think about Say a future where you have a company that typically had say 20 radiologists performing their job and the AI systems that they license, I should say, is capable of reviewing the radiological film at such a speed that they only need one radiologist, but the radiologist still has to be able to look it over and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. But as there's more and more confidence in the AI system, you only have one radiologist who's trying to look at twenty radiologists worth of information. So they're gonna inevitably miss something that the AI didn't get either. But who is ultimately going to be responsible for that? And I don't think it makes sense for the company that produces the AI or even the company that licensed the AI to want to take responsibility for that miss. Who are they going to blame? They're going to blame the human. So that accountability piece goes to that person. And I think you talk about this is that we're we're into that point where the AI is becoming so capable it can do so much that we can't keep up. Yet we're still trying to be accountable for the decisions that we're agreeing to because it may Adrian (50:34) I mean I think what will happen is issues will come up, there'll be lawsuits, and that will require changes. Just like when the automobile first appeared, there were no headlights, there were no windshield walk windshield lockers, there were no side view mirrors, there were no stoplights. So it's it's it iterative thing that will come up. I mean, you know, you saw it was just a few a month ago or whatever, the lawsuit against Meta. There were changes there that are gonna be I I guess unless they appeal or whatever, the New York City school system with their, you know, changes. So it's that's just for smartphone usage and that took twenty years. So one of my favorite movies, I'm a science fiction buff is the movie Arrival. And that really is a a movie about the challenge of interspecies communication. In this case it's an alien species. And that's why I think words are so important in being able to characterize what's actually going on and to then use that knowledge to address the concerns that language has i identified as problematic. I I'm sure this is the same way in the psychiatric situation, to be, you know, very empire evidence based, you know, empirical based. And I I'm not sure we can do any anything more than that. David (51:54) I I'm glad you brought up the automobile because it there's actually a I I agree, and it took it to a while to get the infrastructure in place to make that a safe venture. But if we go back, the term jaywalking is a really fascinating look at what humans do to avoid trying to take accountability for the repercussions of the technology of the time. It's kind of funny when you look at the the term jaywalking being Placed into legal literature as much as it is because it came about from i this pejorative term, the Jays. You were drunk. The idea was, well, if you got hit by a car, it's because you were just some Jay. You were just walking out into the street like a drunkard, like you shouldn't be. And it's your fault that you got hit by the car, not the fact that we lacked a system to make it safe for the public to live alongside the car. I think that's probably the next phase that we're probably going to see more of. And you you see right now. Maybe coming from the other side, which I talked about even with my daughter, the skeptic of AI, what if they see anything that was created with AI, it's AI slop. As long as it's interfering with their medium. If a new antiviral is created by AI, we're not calling it AI slop, we're calling it a miracle. But if a drug is created that kills a whole bunch of people, we're probably gonna call it AI slop. We're going to use, as you said, language. to shift perspective in that way, but I just I foresee, I don't know, but I'm gonna guess and will probably fact check me or do a prediction or something, that companies are going to try to figure out a way to label the AI skeptic to make them less desirable to be. And so you got hit by a car, your fault. You're a Jay. Now we have jaywalking. Now you can actually get cited for doing that. Adrian (53:40) We're definitely there's lots of players involved, companies, society, culture. And in this podcast I have with this freshman, because of the way he was asking questions, I said, you know, we have to fight for our humanness. That's the only thing that we can do. And I and I said I don't mean that in a physical, you know, harmful way, but we have to assert ourselves. We have to be a an active partner in this and that's about the best thing we can do. And if We get enough people socially involved and maybe supported by a a legal system, an educational system, whatever, hopefully we'll we'll achieve some kind of balance between these two in this partnership. Robby (54:23) So I I tend to catastrophize. Adrian (54:28) I know. Robby (54:29) yeah, I I blame I blame yeah, I blame my military planner background. You you want to anticipate the absolute worst, mitigate for those risks and try to accomplish the mission, I guess. But from a bright side standpoints, this may be a moment in which those things that are quintessentially human, the the best qualities of us that extend beyond just what you know or what you've learned have a chance to shine. The empathy that that you reference, the ability to to situation, to understand the intermoving parts and the engagement in a way that the AI systems cannot and hopefully will never be able to. One thing that I am I guess concerned about. I'll go back to catastrophizing again 'cause that's my that's my happy place. Adrian (55:20) That's your frame. Robby (55:21) Yeah. is you know, I've worked in a lot of large organizations and there is a tendency in these organizations to protect itself from its own mistakes. That they they make a call, sunk costs, they just keep going, going, going. I I I worry that with the help of AI these organizations can get really good at solving the wrong problems and then using the AI systems to protect itself from noticing. That it's solving the wrong problem. Adrian (55:53) Yeah, so I mine I I just finished a book. It hasn't gone to the publishers yet. It's not associated with it's a human problem that you're talking about. of course AI can accentuate it, but it's this it's this idea that we drift away from reality and we and find ways to reinforce the drift, to make sure no one can see it so it stays invisible so so to speak. But of course, a healthy environment in an organization or whether it's a personal relationship is not to do that. So what we can identify and we should do whatever we can to correct this drift so that this kind of organizational malbehavior i is not occurring. Robby (56:34) Well, the worst parts of us seem like we now have the tools to actually accelerate the errors to make them bigger in magnitude. Because yes, I mean what we're talking about are certainly human problems. And it's not so much that they never existed. organizations often are solving the wrong problems, often go down the wrong paths and because of certain thought errors have a di difficult time recognizing that they're going in the wrong direction and then reversing course. It's just that we have the ability to do it at scale that we've never had before. The speed and the scale. Adrian (57:11) No. Yeah, I know. It's it's you're exactly right. Robby (57:14) You're not making me feel better. Adrian (57:16) Well, I I that's why I'm saying we we have to not give up our humanity a at this point. You know, we don't want to be faced with that question twenty or thirty years from now. We we have to begin facing that now and that's why I'm trying to be I've written the book, I'm trying to be a voice for this kind of mindset shift. David (57:37) I like that the perspective that you have here is that it's not going away. Because it's not. I mean the reality is we can fight and fight and fight, but unless these companies figure out how incredibly expensive it is to have this technology and can't figure out ways to manipulate their accounting practices to show that they're making lots of money when they're probably spending a lot more, it's not gonna disappear. As long as it's potentially profitable, it's gonna be there. And so being able to work alongside it and as you said, maintain our humanness, which I think is predicated on a couple of things. One, we are so drawn to confidence. We love confidence. If you confidently say anything, Robby (58:20) Yeah. David (58:21) just Adrian (58:21) People. David (58:22) they're man, he's really confident. and AI is incredibly confident. But there's another piece of humanity, and I think so one being skeptic of the confidence serves you well, not just with AI. But with anybody being willing to check their work is probably a good idea. But the other thing is that AI operates off of logic. When we understand how large language models at least work, is they find the most likely next word and they inject that. There's not a thought process behind it. And I think that's that's one of the big areas where people have this misconception of what AI currently is. It's not thinking, it's algorithmically assigning the next token really, not even the full word, but the next token that makes the most logical sense in this sentence based upon the information that it has available to it. And as it gets more information available, it can make more and more logical conclusions that make sense and have a lot of confidence in that. But realize humans and humanity is not logical all the time. We frequently do things that are incredibly illogical. In fact, that's what makes us human is that we have that tendency to do The wrong thing when the right thing is so painfully obvious. And I think w if people would understand that a little bit more in that this thing that we're looking at isn't a human, it's not a person, it's just finding the next logical answer to the question doesn't make it right. Robby (59:53) You've just framed this in Star Trek language for me, that what we're talking about is the Kirk Spock conundrum, that we all have to harness our inner kirks, because the the logic of Spock, as Star Trek taught us, will fall short very often. Adrian (1:00:10) That's a cool metaphor, I guess. Yeah, that's cool. David (1:00:14) I'm do one thoughtful thing every episode. So that's it. I'm done guys. I'm gonna check out. Yeah conversation without me. Robby (1:00:20) Check it out. Yeah. Take a nap. Take a nap. You've earned it. David (1:00:25) All right. This has been a really great conversation. I actually very much enjoyed this. We're gonna have to invite you back down the road, Adrian. Thank you so much. Here's what we do is we always close out with a prescription for society. For psychiatrists, right? Like it's our stick. We are the goofy avatars, we give a prescription. I'm gonna let Rob start because he always tries to steal mine anyway and then I gotta scramble and find a new one. But I'm gonna let Rob go. Adrian If you feel comfortable giving a prescription for folks, Adrian (1:00:57) Yeah. David (1:00:58) hit throw one for us. And if not, that's fine. We'll we'll move on. But Rob, prescription. Robby (1:01:03) So yeah, so mine's my prescription this week is one daily dose of being mildly unimpressive. do something you enjoy without checking whether a machine can do it better. Write a paragraph, draw a terrible horse, play a guitar badly. You're allowed to have a hobby without defending your position in the global economy. And before you ask AI what you think, take 30 seconds and actually ask yourself what you think. Let's keep that skill sharp. Adrian (1:01:30) And so I I think we need to think about time differently. And so my prescription is that instead of thinking that time controls us, we need to control time. We need to make it so important that we decide how much time and what we do with the time we have. Robby (1:01:49) Excellent. David (1:01:50) Really is. man, you gotta show me up on my own No I'm teasing. that was that was awesome. Thank you. That's really helpful. All right, here's mine. So treat AI like a confident neighbor. Happy to help, full of advice, and worth keeping around. Just check his work before you take down a load bearing wall. Adrian (1:02:06) You guys both had good ones, yeah. David (1:02:09) Awesome. Well, Dr. Adrian Wolfbird, really appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for Shrink your insight. I think you've you've helped us develop our own ideas more. Hopefully that's helpful for our listeners that they can think a little bit deeper on this topic and maybe have a healthier relationship with what I think isn't gonna be going away anytime soon. Thank you so much and we appreciate it. Robby (1:02:34) From my catastrophic frame, it's more likely that we're going away than AI's going away. So yeah. Gotta learn. Adrian (1:02:48) Well thank you guys for having me. it's been a really stimulating discussion with you guys. And yeah, I'd be happy if you invite me to come back again I'd be happy to do that. Robby (1:02:59) Sure. David (1:02:59) Thank you. Thanks so much. Have a great one. All right, Rob. What'd you think? I liked it. I like having guests who aren't just psychiatrists. absolutely. It's a Robby (1:03:08) completely different perspective. a and it made me think he's smarter than you David (1:03:14) Which rarely happens. Robby (1:03:16) Yeah, he's smarter than I. So usually you know, keeping up with you's easy. keeping up with him was really hard. David (1:03:23) Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Well the good news is I think we're gonna be able to get some more guests down the road. We have those in the works. I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully some other interesting, stimulating conversations. We're gonna get good at interviewing people outside of a clinic. That's the hope. I agree. Or not. Or we'll just make fun of each other and be children and dance around them with our avatars. But Robby (1:03:46) Yeah. David (1:03:47) I'm gonna have to get the artist who developed these to allow you to bounce your pecks. Robby (1:03:52) That that would be excellent. That that would really make my day. David (1:03:57) Awesome. All right. We promised that those of you who who sent in for the giveaway would be able to get a fourth entry for this week coming up. the word is gonna be artificial intelligence. So that's the word we're gonna use. So send us an email socials at shrinkthenation.com and we'll enter you into the drawing beyond any other entries that you have for this week. And that's it. So Rob, any closing? Robby (1:04:21) No, I'm gonna go back to prepping for Armageddon. So I've got a busy day ahead. David (1:04:27) Awesome. Well, thank you to all of our listeners. Thank you again to Dr. Adrian Wolfburg for just generously giving us all the time that he did. That was really nice of me, especially on short notice. wonderful conversation. And that's it. So I'm going to cue up that music. And we are out.