What’s in this podcast?
As AI becomes more capable, the question for leaders is no longer what technology can do, but what people should do.
In this episode of Hub & Spoken, Jason Foster, CEO & Founder of Cynozure, is joined by Ollie Pickup, Human Work Evolution Storyteller, to explore how organisations can embrace AI without losing the qualities that make people indispensable. Together, they discuss why removing every ounce of friction from work may come at a cost, whether businesses are unintentionally cutting off the next generation of talent, and why trust, judgement and human connection will become increasingly valuable in an AI-driven world.
The conversation explores the changing role of education, the impact of AI on graduate opportunities, and the responsibility organisations have to develop future leaders rather than simply automate entry-level work. Ollie also shares his framework of the “Seven Cs”, the human capabilities he believes will matter most as machines become more intelligent, from curiosity and creativity to communication, compassion and critical thinking.
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Episode timings
00:00 — Introduction
07:16 — The risks of AI for work and society
18:13 — Rethinking education for an AI world
24:11 — Preserving human agency and trust
30:09 — How people learn to trust technology
33:19 — Technology, jobs and moving up a level
37:03 — The responsibility to use AI well
41:12 — Optimism, human flourishing and closing
The following interview transcription has been edited for length and clarity.
00:00 — Introduction
Jason Foster:
Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. Today, I’m super excited to have Ollie Pickup with me.
Ollie is a human work evolution storyteller, and I’m really excited to have him on the show to talk about this idea: as AI gets smarter, what makes humans more valuable?
It’s a topic I’ve talked about a few times on the podcast and during presentations at industry events. I’m excited to have Ollie on the show because he knows a thing or two about this space.
Ollie, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you.
Ollie Pickup:
Thank you so much for having me, Jason. I’ve been really looking forward to this one.
We met a few months ago when I was moderating a session at Data Decoded, so it’s quite nice for you to be asking me the questions this time. We got on really well there, and hopefully I can provide some insights for your listeners.
Jason Foster:
Great. The first insight is: what the hell is a human work evolution storyteller, Ollie?
That’s the big one. We might spend the whole episode talking about it.
Ollie Pickup:
It’s a good question.
I coined the phrase ‘human work evolution’ because, having moved into the technology and business space, every conversation seemed to jump to the future of work or the future of AI, leaving humans as an afterthought.
I realised I was more interested in what humans can do with technology, around technology and, actually, without technology.
I want people to be the carpenter rather than the nail at the other end of the hammer. I want people to be able to use technology in the best way possible. I want humans to be the lead dance partner with technology rather than being led by technology.
The idea of human work evolution also came from a place where I needed to evolve in my career. I was a technology and business journalist writing for newspapers and magazines.
Then, in November 2023, ChatGPT was launched and I had FOBO: fear of becoming obsolete.
I thought, ‘My goodness, this generative AI technology already looks quite good, and it is definitely going to eat into my bottom line as a writer. I’m going to have to evolve.’
As I went through that process, worked out my values and thought about what I was going to tell people and discuss, the idea of human work evolution emerged.
Being a human work evolution storyteller is now very much what I do. I don’t think people always consider the human capabilities needed to survive and thrive in this AI world.
That’s something we’re going to talk a lot about today. There is perhaps a paradox here. We’ve developed AI to take out the drudgery and remove all the friction, whereas that might actually be where a lot of the good stuff is for humanity.
Jason Foster:
Reflecting on that final point, a lot of the time in business you’re trying to remove friction. You’re trying to remove the problems that slow you down.
But when you look back, the juice often came out of the friction. It came out of the argument, the pointless meeting, the catch-up with someone over coffee or the thing that slowed you down.
Sometimes slowing down is good.
I completely agree that AI makes us faster. It can make us more effective. But is it making us better? That is something we should definitely explore.
Going back to your history as a writer, what were the big themes emerging before ChatGPT around technology, digital and the way humans work?
Was there anything in the evolution of how that was changing that you were covering at the time?
Ollie Pickup:
It’s interesting to reflect on it now because I started out 20 years ago as a sports journalist, believe it or not.
Then my first child came along about 12 years ago, and the weekends became quite sacrosanct. I couldn’t cover a rugby or football match on a Saturday, then do a Sunday-for-Monday report, if I wanted to spend any time with my family.
So, around 2014, I pivoted into technology and business.
Jason Foster:
A bit more nine-to-five.
Ollie Pickup:
A little bit more, yes.
I remember my first piece on AI was probably about a decade ago. It was very much, ‘The Terminator is here,’ and looking forward to that kind of scenario.
I think that has been one of AI’s problems. We have this science-fiction doomsday narrative, which hasn’t been particularly helpful. There are a few narratives that aren’t very helpful at the moment, but perhaps we’ll come to those.
When ChatGPT was launched in 2023, we were also just coming out of lockdown and the pandemic, and there was still a bit of collective trauma.
Before then, I remember writing a lot about big data and how AI, and perhaps quantum, which is the next big leap we’re going to be discussing, were all coming together. There was this idea of convergence and that it was going to make life simpler.
I take your point that we want AI and other technologies to remove the drudgery. What concerns me is that, by doing that, we may inadvertently degrade some of the skills that are so important for humans.
Before generative AI, there was this idea that AI might solve everything. I think we’re still in that space to some extent.
There’s a joke, although I can’t remember who it’s from, that business leaders talking about AI are a bit like boys in a playground talking about sex. Everyone is talking about it, but no one actually understands it.
There was a lot of that before ChatGPT, and there is still a little bit of it now.
People are slowly beginning to understand what AI is good for and what it isn’t so good for. Hopefully, I’m able to help enlighten people about where they may be going wrong.
07:16 — The risks of AI for work and society
Jason Foster:
Let’s go down the doomsday track for a minute, because you’ve mentioned a couple of things you’re worried about.
When it comes to humans at work and in wider society, what worries you about AI or technology more generally?
Ollie Pickup:
There are two worries that come immediately to mind. One is short term and the other is longer term.
In the short term, I think there has unfortunately been a myopic approach from businesses and business leaders towards the lowest-rung jobs, particularly graduate jobs.
Graduate jobs in the UK are down by, I think, 42% according to Adzuna in the last year. They previously said that, since ChatGPT was launched in 2023, they had fallen by two-thirds.
That is for graduate jobs. It doesn’t include non-graduate jobs or first jobs for people leaving school.
There is this idea that the bottom rung of the ladder is being sawn off.
At the same time, business leaders want their recruits to have creativity, communication and collaboration skills. But I think we’re sawing off that bottom rung for the generation that is just finishing school or higher education.
That is a short-term worry because where are we going to get the leaders of tomorrow from?
How are we going to give people the skills to understand the businesses, industries and sectors they’re operating in if we don’t give them those jobs?
The data is still not conclusive, but I think you can conclude that AI, or investment in AI, has chopped away some of those jobs.
I think this will come to a head in the next five years or so. Businesses will think, ‘My goodness, we got that wrong. We closed off our pipeline, and now we’re struggling and having to pay a much higher price to bring people in.’
There needs to be some recalibration.
My longer-term worry is about two prevailing narratives.
On one side, you have what might be called the AI martyrs. These are people who think AI, a bit like the Terminator scenario, is going to take over.
They think it will crash over us like a wave, we’ll lose our jobs and everything else, and we’re effectively just waiting to be retired.
On the other side, you have what might be called AI zealots. These are people who think, ‘I’m going to delegate everything to AI. I’m going to get AI to write my emails and do everything else.’
There’s a name for them now. They’re called sloppers.
It is easy to do. By nature, humans are lazy, so we will take the path of least resistance and use those shortcuts.
These two narratives are also peddled by the AI companies.
But there is a third way, and I think this is where I’d like people to land: AI agnosticism.
It means acknowledging that AI is a tool and that it is here, but remaining the lead dance partner and the carpenter. Don’t be subsumed by it.
Most importantly, don’t let your cognitive muscle atrophy.
Like any muscle, you need to flex it. You need gravity, resistance and tension for it to grow.
What we’re seeing now is the reverse Flynn effect.
You may be familiar with the Flynn effect. In the 1930s, it found that, collectively and globally, IQ was increasing because of various factors, including better education, better access to education and better tools for educating people.
But in the 1990s, it took a bit of a nosedive.
Then, from around 2010, when the smartphone became ubiquitous, we saw a massive decline.
My longer-term worry is that this was already happening before AI became a big thing. What is going to happen over the next decade? What is our collective intelligence going to look like?
If we don’t have that tension and we don’t have these communication skills, what is society going to look like?
I feel as though we’re losing the essence of what it means to be a community because we are so often deferring to AI and, before that, using social media.
There was a great long-read essay in The Atlantic last January by a guy called Derek Thompson, who is brilliant on the future of work and human work evolution.
He talks about the antisocial century. The central thesis is that the better technology becomes, the more reclusive we become.
Those are my two main worries: the short-term problem with graduates, non-graduates and early-career people, and the longer-term question of what we’re doing to our brains and society.
Quite a big one, I suppose.
Jason Foster:
It is a big one, and I think they’re connected.
Our ability to think, use our brains and build the required mental muscle is important during early development and at the beginning of a career.
But it’s also important towards the end of a career and during retirement, when we need to keep our brains active to avoid things such as dementia, which I believe is increasing.
It matters at every end of the spectrum.
I use the phrase ‘not outsourcing our thinking to AI’, but it isn’t just about the thinking. It’s about the mechanism and the process you go through when you’re thinking and working together.
Those things are really important.
Another reflection I had while you were talking was about the danger of blaming AI for everything.
You brought in social media when talking about community, isolation and people becoming more insular.
There are a lot of big macro factors that have contributed to that, including what happened after COVID. We need to be careful not to blame AI alone.
There is also a point about graduate jobs.
It’s easy to say that, because everyone now has ChatGPT, organisations don’t need graduates. I think that misrepresents the value a graduate can add to an organisation.
It can also become a convenient excuse for not recruiting, cutting costs and saving money.
We need to be careful when we pigeonhole AI into a box and say, ‘Look at all these bad things.’
To be fair, I pushed you down the doomsday route and you gave me the doomsday scenario. I’m not pushing back on you, but there is a wider point we need to consider.
Ollie Pickup:
I think that’s right.
Ironically, there is great pressure on business leaders to invest in AI, but the graduates and people beginning their careers now are probably the most digitally fluent and AI-fluent of all.
Perhaps the hierarchy needs to be upended.
Jason Foster:
It is ironic.
I remember when I first started working and smartphones were becoming a big thing.
The concern was that you had a whole group of junior people entering the workplace who were used to smartphones and apps. They would then encounter big corporate ERP and CRM systems and think, ‘What the hell is this?’
Those systems were so far removed from opening an app, clicking around and being able to use it. You needed training courses and education.
It feels similar now, but in the other direction.
You have people who have grown up in a digitally native, social-media-native and AI-native world. If we’re going to create businesses that can work in this way, we need more of those people in the organisation.
Connected to your point about chopping off the bottom rung and losing the leaders of the future, there is also a potential benefit.
AI can raise everyone up a level because you don’t necessarily need five years of experience to do something anymore. You have a tool that accelerates you and helps you become at least one or two steps better than you were.
The example I’ve used before is music.
I’ve always wanted to be good at music, and I’m rubbish at it. But I now have AI that allows me to make music I love. I can share it with my friends, they love it, and I could probably put it on Spotify and other people would love it.
I’ve gained a skill that I could never acquire before. I tried guitars, pianos and everything else, but for whatever reason I could never do it.
I’m sure I could have put my mind to it, but AI has given me an accelerator. It has made me better at something, or at least moved me a couple of steps beyond where I was.
It creates an interesting dynamic between something that could destroy us and something that can enlighten and enable us.
Ollie Pickup:
That is AI agnosticism. It’s about using AI as a tool.
That’s where we need to land.
18:13 — Rethinking education for an AI world
Ollie Pickup:
I don’t think the education system is fit for purpose in light of this.
I have a monthly long-read newsletter called Go Flux Yourself, which tries to help people navigate human work evolution. You featured in it, Jason, after our panel session.
I speak to quite a few people for it.
I spoke to the headmaster of a prep school in Edinburgh, who said the problem they’re finding is that children at the age of 13 can’t concentrate for long enough.
They come into the school and can’t do the concentration and deep work that Cal Newport talks about.
That links to something I discussed with a woman called Daisy Chris Dulu, who is Director of Education at No More Marking. She’s a great thinker in this space.
She talks about how we are entering a stupidogenic society.
We have developed what might be called an obesogenic society, where we take shortcuts, produce highly processed food and feed it to the masses. It wasn’t necessarily intended, but it has made people fatter.
That is what we have to worry about when we cede too much to technology.
The headmaster told me that arguably the lowest point in his career was when Ofsted came in to conduct an examination. Some of his teachers said they didn’t have enough iPads in a particular room, so he rushed in a load of technology.
He now says that technology isn’t necessarily the answer.
I think that realisation is beginning to happen.
How children are taught needs to change. They obviously need to use AI at some point, but perhaps we need a system where it is introduced gradually.
I was reading about the possibility of treating it a bit like cinema classifications, where children under the age of 15 can’t watch a film rated 15.
Perhaps AI could be introduced gradually. Maybe it’s unworkable, I don’t know.
The biggest issue at the moment is perhaps at higher education and university level.
How can universities continue to offer that value proposition?
Children in the UK are likely to be saddled with around £70,000 worth of debt after completing a university degree. They may or may not gain practical experience during that degree, and there is no guarantee of a job afterwards.
I spoke to Fiona Aldridge, a leader at Tech Skills UK, about this recently.
She suggested there may be an argument for a system similar to the way medics in the UK complete a longer course but also undertake rotations and gain experience that way.
Again, that might be difficult to make work. But something needs to change to catch up with where we are.
Jason Foster:
System change is always slow. That’s the challenge.
I spoke to Osama Khan on the podcast. He was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Aston University at the time.
He talked about how important it was that the organisation didn’t reject AI or focus only on using tools to check whether students were cheating.
You probably still need to do some of that, but the bigger question is how we reinvent the way we assess and judge performance.
People don’t need to remember reams and reams of text anymore. They don’t need to spend hours searching a library or spend all their time crafting early drafts.
How do we reinvent the way we assess performance, education and a person’s ability to do whatever the course is preparing them for?
It’s a big, difficult thing to change. The national curriculum and Ofsted are slow-moving systems, particularly in the UK.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, or that we shouldn’t have a longer-term plan.
Ollie Pickup:
There’s a quote I keep coming back to in my work. It’s from Dame Minoush Shafiq.
Until a couple of years ago, she was President of Columbia University in America. She left for political reasons and came back to the UK. She’s British and is now Chair of the V&A.
Until very recently, she was also the Chief Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister, although that has changed, so I don’t know whether she still has that role.
The quote is from 2018:
‘In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains. In the future, they’ll be about the heart.’
Jason Foster:
I love that.
Ollie Pickup:
It has helped me form this idea of which skills will be critical as machines become smarter.
I counted seven Cs: collaboration, communication, compassion, courage, creativity, critical thinking and curiosity.
Some of those might still be perceived as soft skills. But as machines get smarter, these capabilities will become more in demand.
One of my worries is that these skills are often developed through parents committing to extracurricular activities, whether that is sport, drama or music.
AI can, in theory, accelerate progress. But if human skills become more in demand, it could also create a kind of middle-class boost, which seems particularly unfair.
Jason Foster:
It creates a broader divide.
If you need to top up the education system with other training, education, courses and extracurricular activities, that creates a wider divide.
24:11 — Preserving human agency and trust
Jason Foster:
I don’t know whether you’ve seen it, but Reed Hoffman and Greg Vito have written a new book called Super Agency. It was a New York Times bestseller and came out relatively recently.
They talk about what the future could look like with AI.
One of the big themes running through the book is the insistence that human agency is going to be important.
That includes human judgement, creativity and ambition. Those things have to remain at the centre of the system, otherwise we lose agency.
There is some irony in the fact that we’ve called the latest incarnation of stringing AI together ‘agentic’. We’re giving agency to something else.
When we talk to organisations about designing agentic solutions, we say they cannot forget the importance of retaining agency, responsibility and ownership for the decisions being made.
They also shouldn’t put a barrier between themselves and their customers, so that the organisation and the customer no longer have a relationship.
You have to maintain agency in all directions.
That feels like a good way of capturing the seven Cs you mentioned. They have to remain the most important thing.
Ollie Pickup:
I moderated a session at London Tech Week about the future of agentic commerce.
All the infrastructure is there. The rails are there. But people still don’t entirely trust it and don’t want to give away the agency involved in making the final purchase.
I asked the people in the AI arena to put their hands up if they would give that trust away completely.
About 10% of people said they would.
It comes down to the need for trust and relationships.
Jason Foster:
I bet that 10% was higher than it would have been a year ago. It might have been 5% then.
People’s experiences and learning dictate their level of trust.
Would I give an agent the task of booking my summer holiday for me and my family, including sorting out all the flights? No, I wouldn’t.
Would I ask it to recommend and possibly book a ticket at the cinema down the road? I probably would.
It depends on the use case. Where is the line?
Our expectations of AI are also much higher than our expectations of humans.
Do we trust every human? No.
Do we listen to every opinion we receive from every human we ask? No.
Do we sometimes ask the human who we think will give us the answer we want to hear? Yes, we do.
AI is more like having a human in our pocket than many other forms of technology, but our expectations of it are much higher than our expectations of almost any human we come across in our day-to-day lives.
Ollie Pickup:
That’s right.
I heard Rachel Botsman speak. She’s an expert in trust, and she had a great definition:
‘Trust is having a confident relationship with the unknown.’
I really like that.
You might trust AI to book cinema tickets for you and your family, but where does that confidence begin to ebb away?
Going back to the skills we need, Daniella Amodi, Co-founder and President of Anthropic and the sister of Dario, studied literature at university.
She encouraged people to learn how to communicate, study the humanities, develop emotional intelligence, be curious and stay compassionate.
In the same month, Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan, who you might think of as one of the most hard-nosed financiers in the world, said young people should focus on communication and critical thinking.
He said they would have plenty of jobs if they did that.
It has also been interesting over the last few months to look at graduation speeches in America and hear the booing whenever AI is mentioned.
There is definitely a tussle happening here.
Jason Foster:
There could be an anti-AI movement.
There is certainly an anti-smartphone movement bubbling away, with people switching to dumb phones and stepping back from social media.
At the moment, teenagers who are about to be banned from social media are complaining about it.
But recent studies comparing people with no social media use against different levels of usage found that people’s sleep and concentration improved when they weren’t using it.
I think we’ll see something similar happen with AI over time.
At the moment, we’re still in the ‘isn’t this magic?’ phase. For many people, it looks, feels and smells like magic because of how clever it is.
To be fair, good technology often feels magical or becomes invisible. Those are the two things that tend to happen when technology is good.
It will take time before we move beyond that phase, but that will be an important evolution. You go through these change cycles.
30:09 — How people learn to trust technology
Ollie Pickup:
It comes down to public perception.
Rachel Botsman talks about the first cash machine, or ATM, which was installed by Barclays in Enfield in 1976.
It took a decade before people really trusted it.
Strangely, part of the problem was that PIN codes were associated with spy films at the time, and there was a stigma around them.
Perhaps The Terminator and other science-fiction films haven’t helped with trust in AI either.
Jason Foster:
It’s interesting you mention that.
I talk about early self-service banking in the first edition of the book I co-wrote with Barry Green, Data Means Business.
I used it as an analogy for how long it takes to move from having someone do something for you to doing it yourself.
It took a long time to educate the world that you weren’t going to speak to your bank manager anymore. You were going to take money out yourself, pay by cheque, pay online and use other forms of self-service.
Even now, some branches still need to exist. It isn’t because people can’t do things themselves. There is sometimes an innate desire to talk to a human.
In some ways, AI is the ultimate self-service tool for skills and knowledge that people previously couldn’t access.
It has accelerated people towards that.
You also mentioned community earlier. I think there is going to be a huge desire and thirst for more human connection as the future comes closer because people have become more isolated.
The more community activity we can do and the more time we can spend together, the better.
That’s why I quite like some of the return to work and office time. In some ways, you’re creating bonds that stopped being created when everything became so remote.
I wonder whether we’ll have a similar experience with AI over the next few years.
Ollie Pickup:
People thought the ATM would cause obsolescence in other forms of accessing money.
As you said, branches have declined and closed across the country. But there is also a yearning to go back to something closer to the 1970s or 1980s, when you had to visit a bank branch.
That experience means something very different to different generations.
We still have cash, cards and different forms of money. I haven’t used my chequebook for quite a while, admittedly, but it still exists.
When we’re told that something is going to sweep away everything else completely, we should be wary.
33:19 — Technology, jobs and moving up a level
Jason Foster:
This is the second time we’ve talked about technology, and particularly AI, taking away roles and positions.
Did the ATM take away some bank tellers and bank managers? Probably.
But it also began to create something new.
I talked about this on the podcast and during a presentation at Big Data London in 2018. The subject was what you do when AI can do everything you can do.
The interesting thing, when you look back at technological innovations such as the ATM or the lift, is that roles do change.
A lift used to have a person standing inside it, pressing the buttons and closing the door behind you.
Some of those specific roles move on, but the people and the industries around them often rise to a higher level of abstraction.
The example I used was the invention of the shipping container.
The person who developed it was driving his truck to a port and waiting while people unloaded the goods onto the dock and then moved them from the dock onto the ship.
He thought, ‘Why don’t we lift up the truck and put it straight onto the ship?’
He essentially invented the shipping container.
That removed many people who had previously done the manual work, but it also helped create an entire shipping industry and enabled global trade.
It created new ways of building, designing and architecting ports. It created roles for crane operators and supervisors who needed to monitor, measure and manage the flow of goods through the port.
The roles moved away from hands-on work towards designers, supervisors and leaders who were shaping new business models, new areas of work and new roles within the port.
The people who weren’t able to evolve themselves, their skills and the work they did were less able to continue.
Those who could move themselves up a level of abstraction were able to do so.
You’ve done that yourself.
You saw ChatGPT come along and, as a writer, thought, ‘People are going to be able to write nearly as well as me.’
They can’t, by the way, using AI. The sloppers, or anti-sloppers, might contest that.
But you have raised yourself up a level of abstraction.
You’ve moved from the written word, which is being attacked by AI, into other forms of communication and storytelling that work for you.
If you hadn’t done that, perhaps the specific thing you were doing would eventually have become obsolete.
Ollie Pickup:
That’s easy to say.
I enjoy going out of my comfort zone, and I’ve enjoyed the transition from writer to speaker. It’s a thrill to move outside your comfort zone.
I love that story about shipping containers. I’ve been thinking about it since I heard it.
But the idea of moving up a level of abstraction assumes there is a bottom rung you can stand on while you learn.
As mentioned earlier, graduate vacancies are down 42% in the last year.
I’m worried that we’re sawing off the rung and telling people to climb.
The shipping container created new rungs even as it destroyed the old ones.
I want to make sure business leaders are answering this question: are we building new rungs, or simply removing the old ones and crossing our fingers?
37:03 — The responsibility to use AI well
Jason Foster:
That is definitely a responsibility.
I hope this doesn’t end up in greenwashing territory, but organisations have a responsibility to take account of the fact that this is going to happen.
Everyone is trying to strip costs. Organisations might decide not to recruit or to remove a group of people and replace them with AI because it will be cheaper.
From a commercial and P&L perspective, you can understand why businesses make those decisions.
But these are often the same people who are worried about the future of work, what people are going to do, the removal of the bottom rung and where future leaders will come from.
There is a responsibility somewhere in the middle to take charge and create the future we want.
Perhaps it’s naive to hope that the boards of FTSE 100 companies, or executive teams in private-equity-backed and venture-capital-backed companies, will care about this.
But the more people who care, and the more organisations that adopt something like a one-in, one-out mentality around people, skills and work, the more chance we have of creating what we want rather than the dystopia we see in science-fiction films.
Ollie Pickup:
Absolutely.
There are issues that have been well discussed. For example, AI can be very biased because of the information it has been trained on.
It can be biased against women. Only around 12% of AI researchers in the world are women.
There was an experiment in Germany where a woman and a man with the same qualifications asked what salary they should request. The figure recommended for the woman was around 40% lower than the figure recommended for the man.
There are inherent problems we need to be very careful about.
There are also examples of AI being used simply for the sake of it.
I was on a train in London recently. I live in south-east London and was taking the train into the centre.
The guard announced, ‘I’m in coach six. Come and find me if you need me.’
But he had used an AI voice to make the announcement. He hadn’t used his own voice.
Jason Foster:
The script was AI-generated, or the voice itself was AI?
Ollie Pickup:
The voice was AI. He had outsourced it.
The way we think about this is partly influenced by Alan Turing’s imitation game.
This goes back to the 1950s, when Alan Turing, the great codebreaker, asked whether machines could imitate humans and pass the imitation game.
As a result, over the decades we have tried to create machines and technology that can do what humans do, if not do it slightly better.
What we need to do instead is use technology to compensate for human weaknesses.
Collectively, there has been a big problem there, and people are still falling into the so-called Turing trap.
Jason Foster:
I’m completely with you.
We’re obsessed with recreating the human rather than making humans better. It drives me mad, although you can understand why it has happened.
I also agree about using AI where it needs to be used rather than plugging it into everything.
You see many brands simply slapping AI onto what they do.
I saw a charity advert on television the other day that said, ‘We’re doing our work… with AI.’
It wasn’t explained. I presume they simply wanted to say ‘AI’ in the advert.
People need to be careful about where they apply it and where they don’t.
41:12 — Optimism, human flourishing and closing
Jason Foster:
We’ve been considered in our conversation, but we’ve also wandered into dystopian territory and discussed the things we’re worried about.
To end on a positive note, where does your optimism come from?
You’ve talked about the seven Cs and the skills AI can’t replace. Does that give you hope and optimism that we have a job to do?
Ollie Pickup:
I think so.
Going back to the train guard outsourcing his speech to AI, those human moments provide something important.
When someone is able to show their personality on a train, you know what it’s like on a Tube or a train, it creates a much greater experience.
Keeping that in mind is crucial.
I also went for a routine health scan recently. Nothing was wrong, it was simply a check-up.
AI was used to analyse around 2,000 images of my body and determine whether any marks were problematic. There was then a follow-up.
It was incredibly impressive. The scanner produced a kind of 3D scan of me.
There are great examples in healthcare where AI can be a liability, but it can also be a lifeline.
I know they are making great inroads in areas such as dementia.
But with medicine and surgery, there is still the question of trust. Where is your line? Would you trust AI to perform the operation?
AI is a lifeline, but it is also a liability.
Those are the two words that capture where I am with AI.
I am optimistic about what can be achieved. But we need to consider the longer-term consequences.
We haven’t even discussed the ecological and environmental effects.
The hope is that the combination of AI and quantum technology will create solutions that save the world. I’m not quite as positive as some people are about that.
I am optimistic, but we need to find the right use cases to achieve human flourishing rather than using AI simply for the sake of it.
Jason Foster:
And we need to keep our agency along the way.
Ollie Pickup:
Keep our agency, yes.
Jason Foster:
It has been fascinating talking to you.
I think we could talk for hours. I’ve got a million more things I wanted to discuss, but we’re out of time.
I massively appreciate you joining me on the show and bringing all your thoughts, experiences and examples from other people you’ve heard discussing this.
I love that so many people are talking about it because we have to.
Thank you so much, Ollie. I really appreciate you being here.
Ollie Pickup:
Cheers, Jason. Thank you very much for having me.
Jason Foster:
Thanks everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode.
Let me know your thoughts about the future of human work evolution. Ollie is available to have that conversation at any time, I’m sure.
I’ll catch you again soon. Thanks for listening.
Ollie Pickup:
Of course. Cheers.
