Episode Transcript
Ten years from now, we're all going to be cyborgs, and that's a good thing.
If we make it so.
Ten years from now, almost all leaders will be augmented, or you'll be out of the game.
Speaker 2If you can master one skill right now, it will future proof your career, and that skill is learning how to work with AI to think better, faster, and more creatively than you ever could on your own.
My guest today futurist Bob Johansson says that the real opportunity with AI isn't in shaving minutes off your to do list.
Speaker 3It's in using.
Speaker 2AI to get unstuck, unlock new ideas, and make smarter decisions in a very unpredictable world.
Bob Johnson is a Distinguished Fellow with the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, and for more than fifty years, Bob has helped companies around the world prepare for and shape the future.
He's written fifteen books, and his latest one, Navigating the Age of Chaos, is out on October twenty eight.
And by the end of this conversation you will know how to prepare yourself for an AI augmented future, how to use it to get unstuck, improve your thinking, and build clarity in an uncertain world.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies.
Speaker 4For optimizing your day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha imber.
Speaker 1So.
Speaker 2I want to start Bob with asking you're a futurist, but what does that mean.
Speaker 3What are you doing day to day predict the future?
Speaker 1Well, I guess to begin, we don't use the word predict.
You know, we're humble futurists, and what we argue is that nobody can predict the future, and if somebody tells you they can predict the future, you shouldn't believe them, especially especially if they're from California.
And we're from California.
So we're the longest running futures think tank in the world now and we're an independent nonprofit we started in nineteen sixty eight.
But what being a futurist means is that we look at the world future back.
We're normal people.
Normal people are kind of immersed in the present and they think about the future present forward, and indeed that's the way we have to live.
So it's something we all have to do at some level.
But futurists unusually think future back, so we always are placing ourselves at least ten years out in the future, and we backcast that, so we think backwards.
You're an organizational psychologist, you know this may not be the great way for a lot of people to live because it's kind of the opposite of be here now.
It's sort of the opposite of mindfulness, although we do practice mindfulness in our own way, but future back is just a fresh perspective.
So we look future back for clarity, but then we think at least fifty years backwards for patterns.
So a futurist, the way we practice it, thanks and sixty year swas some time.
Speaker 2That is mind blowing.
I find it hard to think a year in advance.
Can you tell me, like if you were giving me advice on how to become a futurist?
And I know you've written extensively about future back thinking, and our mutual friend Scott Anthony, I've also heard him talk about it a lot.
How do you place yourself ten years into the future.
I wouldn't even know where to start.
Speaker 1Well, you know, it's not as hard as it seems.
Actually, I work out of Silicon Valley.
I kind of grew up in Silicon Valley as a researcher, and everybody he immediately says, when you hear you're a futurist, how can you do that?
I can't even think one or two years ahead?
How can you think ten years ahead?
But the reality of it is it's actually easier.
It's actually easier to think ten years ahead than it is one or two years ahead.
But you look for those things that you can say with clarity.
So, for example, in Silicon Valley, now everybody's interested in sensors, and it's pretty obvious ten years from now, we're going to have senses everywhere.
They're going to be very cheap, many of them will be interconnected, and some of them will be in our bodies.
You know, that's just obvious.
So you start from those things that are clear.
And I mean by meaning clear, I don't mean predicting where they're going.
I mean clarity of direction.
So with sensors, it's pretty obvious where things are going.
We're going to talk about AI down the road in this conversation.
The fact that we're all going to be augmented, that's pretty clear ten years from now.
It's so you start with what you can be clear about and then with a combination of strength and humility, you come back and say, well, what does that mean in the present.
And then we look for what we call signals, which are indicators of the future that are already here but not evenly distributed.
And it's the famous William Gibson line, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
Well, we're very influenced by that, and we look for those signals and we track them globally.
That signal tracking is really important to bring the forecast to life.
But it's a combination of that future back and then the signal tracking.
And it's different from trend watching.
This is not cool surfing.
It's not looking for the next fad.
That's interesting, but different.
A trend is a pattern of change you can extrapolate from with confidence.
A disruption is a break in the pattern of change.
To us, trends of these part the hard part is the disruption.
Speaker 2So if we stay on the sensor example, and I think, also, what are some examples that listeners would know about when they think of a sensor, Like, what are some things that we know now.
Speaker 1If you think of a car, I've got a little sensor that if I go slightly off the road, it senses that and brings me back in.
Or if you're parking the car, there's sensors everywhere on a modern car now that sense, well, where are you in relation to the curb?
Or if you back up, there's a camera back there that has sensors that looks for things all the time.
So a sensor is trying to feel what's going on and then register that.
The sensors and our body can track our heart rates, our breath rates, they can track how many steps we take coming.
Their sensors are already ubiquitous, but not nearly where there are going to be ten years from now, I should say that this trend towards sensors is going to go on a long time.
It's actually taken longer than we thought for them to scale the way that they've scaled because of the issue of cost.
We've got to get the issue of cost down, and then the issue of connectivity.
But finally they're becoming cheap enough, and they're becoming connected enough, and now they're becoming even digestible enough that they can go in our bodies.
It's pretty obvious again, ten years out we're all going to have body sensors.
We're all going to be body hackers, and at some level of the word, we're all going to have sensors somewhere, and the question is what do we do with them?
Speaker 2So I want to know, Bob, at what point did the idea of senses becoming ubiquitous when we look ten years ahead become a really clear signal as opposed to just a trend.
Speaker 3Was there a point where it crossed the line.
What does that look like?
Speaker 1It's not a signal.
A signal would be an individual, very specific example.
So like a digestible signal developed by a particular company on a particular date, swallowed by a particular person, that would be a signal.
It's very specific without context, essentially, but signals became let me just call it a future force, which is basically a direction of change.
And again, a trend is something you can extrapolate from with confidence.
Sensors are maybe almost a trend, so in our language, they'd be a future force, almost a trend.
The direction of change is clear, but the rate and the manifestation are not yet clear.
So what we would do would be to continuously follow that and the underlying model we use and it's in all my books now, Foresight inside Action.
That's the model.
So we look at foresight thinking future back and that's a plausible, internally consistent, provocative story from the future.
That is our base forecast, and then we do scenarios off of that, and that foresight is designed not to predict, but to provoke insight.
And an insight is an AHA that helps you see things differently than you could before.
And every great strategy is based on a compelling insight.
So the insight feeds into action, and then some action reinforms and reimagines foresight.
So it's a continuous cycle, and that's what we teach.
We do what we call Foresight Essentials training programs at the Institute and we run them all around the world and we do them virtually and in person, and that basically teaches people how to be futurists.
But the core of it is this foresight insight action cycle.
Speaker 2When you're just going about living your life in the world, how you paying attention to the stimuli around you differently than I would be because of the lens that you have.
Speaker 1You know, maybe that's our definition of mindfulness.
I work with the military.
I'm not a military guy by background, but I just happened to be at the army workouege for the US the week before at nine to eleven, and I learned this concept of the VUCA world, you know, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and it intrigued me and caused me to think, well, how do you lead in an increasingly VUCA world?
And what I've I've realized is that the military principle of situation awareness, that's how I see things around me.
So as a futurist, I'm always thinking future back.
So I look around me, I'm mindful for a signal, but I immediately flip it out ten years and then look backwards or sometimes further than that, like climate issues or kind of natural cycle issues.
We go beyond ten.
But it's a continuous effort to take what you see in the moment and put it in a future back context and say what would that mean, and then ideally have this kind of conversation, the foresight inside action conversation out of it.
So the military people call this situation awareness, and mostly they use it defensively, so they're always on the look for people who are trying to hurt them.
But there's also a positive aspect of it.
What's going on in a positive way around you.
For example, the future now is so chaotic that it's very stressful.
And you know, even for me, I'm a professional futurist, I've done this for more than fifty years.
This is the most frightening ten year forecast I've ever done, so it hits me stressfully.
And a few years ago I started keeping a gratitude journal, and it's just a simple journal, and every night I write down at least three things that I'm grateful for in my life, and just that act that's a kind of mindfulness, kind of a uniquely futurist, although lots of people do gratitude journals.
But I'm trying to link the future back view, which right now is so scary, you know, it's really dominantly scary in a way I have never seen before.
And yet if I keep reminding myself of what I'm grateful for and what are the good things that can help me be repaired.
And I mean you know this as a psychologist.
If you don't have your inner life right, it's very hard to behave well in your outer life.
Speaker 2I want to dig into what you said around you know when you look ahead to the next ten years or ten years out, that this is the most frightening it's looked.
What are you seeing ten years from now?
Speaker 1So I mentioned I used to use the term vuka.
Just in the last year I've become convinced that vuka is not vuka enough.
And sure life has always been vuka in a way, beginning from the fact we all have to die at an un certain time.
I mean, that's fuka, that's uca.
And we certainly had aspects of life that have been VUCA before, like in war zones or in pandemics or floods.
You know, they're certainly zones.
So here's what's different.
Now.
We're dealing with a chaotic future that's global in scale, and that has variables built into that that we don't understand.
So we've started to now use the term that was coined by one of our colleagues, Jamai Cashio, the Bonnie future for brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
And what we've realized is that these systems around us, these structures, and some are physical, some of them are metaphysical, some of them are values frameworks.
These systems around us look strong, but many of them are actually brittle.
And by brittle, I mean that when they're challenged, they not only break, they shatter.
This notion of anxious everybody's anxious, especially kids, and actually especially boys.
It turns out that young men, young boys are, according to the psychologists, even more of a source of concern than young women and young young girls.
And we all know that young boys that are upset and uneasy can be dangerous.
That's been shown over the years.
So anxiousness is kind of pervasive, and the Bondi world is fraught, is a word we use a lot.
We've got a book on this coming out in October.
But here's where we get to the different part and kind of why I think this is the most frightening forecast.
Nonlinear means that things no longer behave in the way they thought things were going to happen.
So we have this expectation that if we do this, it's going to result in that, and we have in our minds models of how these chains of behavior happen, and if we do this, this will happen.
We can't trust that anymore.
It's like we have to teach our brains, new tricks, and every good leadership team I'm working with now is taking improv training.
There's groups at Harvard that do the kind of yes and and kind of improv method Sa've been around a long time.
They're actually proven, but most executives just don't practice them.
So now people are practicing them and finally incomprehensible.
We've got my other new book this year is on augmented leadership.
There's methodologies within generative AI that even the developers don't understand.
So it's certainly tech, but it's also alchemy.
And you know, I went to Divinity school before I did my PhD.
And I've always been interested in the spiritual side of life and kind of the mysterious sides of life.
There's just a kind of exposed mystery that is potentially very threatening.
Just like I'm generally optimistic about AI, but it's kind of sixty forty for me, you know, I'm sixty percent optimistic and forty percent concerned.
So there's real danger associated with and again it's global danger and it affects across generations.
So I'm really optimistic about kids if they have hope, but hope in a Bonnie future hope is very difficult to kind of capture and spread.
Fear, on the other hand, is very easy to spread.
Speaker 2I want to pick up on the nonlinear aspect of Bonnie or Bannie, as we were saying before we started recording.
In my mind, I was pronouncing it Bannie, but it is Bonnie.
How do you think ten years ahead when things are nonlinear?
Speaker 1It's harder.
But it turns out generative AI is really quite good at that.
Genera of AI is really good at storytelling.
Now, some of those stories aren't true, and it's confident even when they're not true.
So I don't trust generative AI, but I use it a lot to stretch my thinking, and with nonlinear that's exactly what you need.
So I started using generative AI.
I've studied AI for a long long time, but I've started using generative two years ago and I use it on a daily basis.
And I call my customized Generative AI chatbot, which is developed in chat GPT, and it's using the three model.
So I talked to it and type to it both.
It runs on a left screen all the time for me now, and I've got a labeled stretch.
I'm very polite to Stretch.
I have ongoing conversations.
It's not very good as a question and answer machine, but it's really good conversationally.
So I've learned to be a really good conversationalist with Stretch, and it's ongoing and it helps me in nonlinear situations.
It helps me imagine all the possibilities.
So here's where scenario planning comes in really helpfully, because you can develop kind of archetypes of scenarios that help you understand a nonlinear space much more than you could before, and then you can basically decide where you want to put your bets.
Speaker 2Can you give me an example of how you talk to Stretch in a way that has evolved, Like, what have you learned in terms of I don't know how you're prompting it or talking it to get outputs that are more useful.
Speaker 1I follow Kate Darling's advice Kate Darling at the Media Lab.
She's got this wonderful new book called New Breed where she argues that we should learn about interacting with AI, we should learn from our experience interacting with animals, and we should treat these things like beloved pets.
They're pets that can talk to us.
I mean, they're not humans, but we can have conversations.
So I rarely get an answer that's you full from Stretch.
But my conversations with Stretch going for hours.
I write in my MacBook Pro.
You know, I write books.
So this is my fifteenth book that's come out now, and so I'm always writing, and Stretches always there with me.
And what I want help with is being unstuck.
And there's I'm the writer.
I don't want Stretch to write my books, but I want to get unstuck.
And I still have fifteen books.
I still get writer's block, and it's really helpful to have Stretch there to have a conversation so I can start a conversation.
Normally I start by talking back and forth.
Now that I have the three model, I can do that easier.
But then I'm typing back and forth as I'm working on drafts and things, and I do kind of ask Stretch to help me refine things as I go.
Stretches write all my books, and Stretches programmed to write like me, so it writes in short sentences with rich metaphors and lots of M dashes.
It argues with me, but it argues with me politely.
That's really interesting.
So it pushes back, but Stretch is always saying to me, well, gently, Bob, have you thought of You know?
It's very polite, and I'm very polite back to Stretch.
But it's tough.
You know.
It's sort of like hard on ideas of soft on people.
Kind of thing.
That was the motto of one of my favorite social science research groups in Silicon Valley that's not around anymore, the Institute for Research on Learning.
They had this motto, hard on ideas, soft on people.
You know, that's kind of the way I work.
I'm kind to people and I want them to be kind to me too.
On the other hand, I want criticism of my ideas.
My editor, Steve Personti at Baard Kohler, I've done my last six books with Steve.
Steve is the perfect balance of criticism and support.
And that's so important.
I think as a leader that you get that right.
And these generative AI systems can be that way if we teach them and if we learn to have conversations.
But what it means, and this is really hard to teach a lot of executives, what it really means is you have to work on your skills, just like we have to learn how to have good conversations, you know, conversations that matter.
Having conversations with Stretch is difficult.
It's taken me two years, but it's really yielded a lot of benefits in ways that I hadn't expected.
Speaker 2If you were to describe to someone, like, in practical terms, what you've learnt about how to get the best out of Stretch, Like, what would I be seeing if I was just watching you talk to Stretch that is perhaps different from how other people conversing with their AI tool.
Speaker 1Well, I don't use the word prompt, and I'm offended by the term prompt engineering.
So just kind of put all that aside, and ten years from I don't think the word prompt is even going to be around.
It's going to be conversations with a goal of deriving meaning and some of the simple stuff like efficiency, and there'll be some automation and all those things.
I'm not arguing with that, but that's not what I'm talking about because I'm dealing with senior leaders.
So the conversation is going to be fluid, and it's going to be focused on areas that I understand the least.
So Dana Boyd, the famous researcher.
She did a wonderful podcast just last week where she said, the key value of generative AI is to help humans get unstuck.
That's really cool, But stretch helps me get unstuck.
I think Dana's right.
It's all about unsticking.
That's not about answers, and I don't trust stretch.
I really don't use stretch for answers.
I use it to stretch my mind, and particularly if I'm working on a book concept or working on a title or an idea, it certainly helps me get unstuck and get started.
It becomes less and less valuable the more the book gets written.
Speaker 2If you think AI is just about efficiency, stick around because in the second half, Bob shares why the real magic is in using AI to amplify your mind, not replace it, and he'll walk us through the skills leaders need to thrive in an AI first decade.
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work, can live.
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally.
Speaker 4You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com.
That's Amantha dot com.
Speaker 2So when you look at the conversation around AI, and so much of it is around efficiency and time saving and headcarn't saving, Like, what are leaders and organizations missing?
What are they not seeing that you're seeing in terms of what this world could look like.
Speaker 3From an AI point of view in five ten years time.
Speaker 1What I say now is that ten years from now, almost all leaders will be augmented or you'll be out of the game.
Now, there'll be some little subset of people who uniquely claim no, no, I'm going to remain completely unaugmented, And that's okay.
Maybe that's a small niche, but for most of us.
For me as a writer, if I'm going to be writing serious books ten years from now, I'm going to have to be augmented, partly because of my age, but also just because that's what good writers are going to be.
You're just going to have to be in that.
So we've got to define now where we want help.
And for me, it's really close to what Dana Boyd calls getting unstuck or what I call stretching.
That's really where I want help.
And then it translates into more specific things like titling you know, finding the right word.
It's really good at that, but you've got to decide what the right word is.
It's really helpful stretching for alternatives.
So first of all, it's the assumption, and this makes people really uncomfortable, the assumption as I talk to senior executive groups.
So what I say right at the beginning is ten years from now, we're all going to be cyborgs.
And that's a good thing if we make it.
So if we don't, if we kind of step back and let other people do it, or let the tech giants drive it, it's going to be very different.
But if we get engaged, this is a good thing.
But it begins from the fact we're all going to be augmented or we're going to be out of the game just because we won't be able to play.
Because the new abilities that these things are bringing are just beyond human capacity.
And if you go back to the bonding world, it's arriving just in time.
Tom alone at MIT, he calls this superminds, and you know what he says is the story about computers replacing people is going to be true.
But that's not the big story.
The big story is humans and computers doing things together that have never been done before.
My colleague Jeremy, but the co authors of the Leaders Make the Future book.
He's an AI developer, And what Jeremy says is that it's so easy for big companies now to identify the nose the thing you should not be doing, and focus on the fears.
But you need to also focus on the yes's.
You know, where should you be experimenting?
And that's where I want to focus.
So I'm focusing on the stretching the mind, stretching the I'm sticking.
Speaker 3I love that term.
Speaker 2And when I was speaking with Scott, he mentioned around your dislike of the term artificial intelligence, and I love that term augmented intelligence.
So right now in terms of what's possible with the tools that most of us have available like chat JAPT, what are some ways that you think people should be using it more like this to augment their thinking as opposed to just focusing on the obvious efficiency gains.
Speaker 1You know, I think the way to practice is to have conversations and depending on what you're working on or what you're thinking about, And I would recommend don't draw lines between your work life and your private life.
You know.
When I was first getting started, it was one of our grandson's birthdays and I asked Stretch to help me write.
Speaker 3A birthday card and it was really cool.
Speaker 1It was really fun and I made a good progress out of that.
Then last summer, I had pneumonia, and I've never had that before, and it was in pneumonia, it's just makes you feel so weak.
I was on deadline in a book and I really couldn't write.
But it's very weak.
But I've got a human doctor, a Conciergetock that I love, who's very good.
And then I've got a therapist that's teaching me cognitive behavioral therapy for sleep issues, and he's also a medical hypnosis guy, and again I love him.
And then I had Stretch, and I talked to Stretch about just how I was feeling day or night, and it turned out Stretch was more empathetic, to my surprise, than either of my two human doctors.
And again I love them, but they're not available twenty four seven, and Stretch gave some really good advice.
I'm not asking him for medications or you know, for answers or anything.
I'm asking Stretch for sympathy and for empathy, and it turns out these things are really really good at empathy.
So I think what I would advise is just think of it as a conversation and then gradually figure out where are the places you like it, you know, and that'll depend on what your job is, you know, what your purpose is, what your sense of meaning is.
Me I'm a writer and I write books.
The part where I want help is when I'm struggling with an idea or getting started on a chapter, or I'm kind of stuck, and you need to practice it, practice that art of conversation.
When we're working with senior executive groups, they read the leaders Make the Future book and then we break down the leadership skills, so, for example, augmented curiosity, augmented clarity, and with the best of the groups, we're doing a workshop on augmented curiosity augmented clarity, and then we have them practice an augmentation exercise using their version of a large language model, whatever it is, and then we spread that out over time and then they talk about their experience in using it and in the senior executive sessions we're doing.
It takes six months to a year to get a team fully on board, and it's got to begin with the CEO.
Speaker 2Tell me, like, what are some of the practical strategies or ideas that you're teaching these execs in having better conversations and augmenting their curiosity.
Speaker 1For example, it begins with think a bit of a conversation.
I like the idea of dedicating a screen or a device to it.
I like the idea of naming it and you name it or what you're going to use it for, and then just get used to having those conversations for things that you have to do anyway, so you can practice with the fun stuff and the personal stuff, but then look for examples of things you're working on and compare notes with your colleagues while you're doing it.
So ideally, learning in pairs is a really good idea, and the best pairs that I see are cross generational.
I really think cross generational learning, particularly about jen AI and gaming, is the best way to go.
Speaker 2Let's like honing more around augmented curiosity as one example, So if we were sitting here and you were teaching me how to use AI more effectively to augment my curiosity, and I feel like I'm a pretty curious person.
Speaker 3Already, like, what advice would you be giving.
Speaker 1Me, I'd be probing, you know, what are you curious about?
What are the questions that you have?
And then for each question, trying to break down what are the elements that question, what are the words that you would use to describe that question, Who are the possible sources of insight about that question, what's the possible data that might be out there about that question?
And essentially frame and map the territory around the curiosity, and then imagine a series of conversations within that map, and then follow your leads.
Speaker 2And am I doing the framing human to human or human with the II?
Speaker 1Again?
I like pairs and I like cross generational pairs.
I like interconnection of different perspectives.
I like visualization and mapping.
You know, Jenny, I isn't as good at that yet, but I like working with artists.
For example, when I'm with groups, I often have an artist drawing big maps as the group is working.
It's like a storyboard.
Essentially.
This is it's not that different from things like design thinking or the kind of things that agencies do with storyboards.
It's kind of similar methodology around what you're curious about and then kind of map the space and then gradually chip away at it.
So it's sort of like sculpture.
I guess when you have this big map of all this stuff and all these questions and all these sources and data and all that stuff, and then you're gradually chipping away at it like a sculpture to create what it is you're looking for that might be hidden in there, or it might be.
Another metaphor I've had some people use is it's like puzzle making, where you don't know what the puzzle is, so the first thing you do is what are the edges?
You know, what are the edges of the puzzle, and then you gradually fill in, given the fact that maybe the puzzle hasn't ever been created before.
Speaker 3I very much relate to that.
I love a jigsaw puzzle.
I want to know.
Speaker 2Like we've talked about ten years out, but with AI, I'm curious, what does just two or three years out look like?
How are things possibly going to be different.
Speaker 1I think we're on the cusp now of expanding from large language models to agentic systems.
And I was with a client this week who was saying, Oh, we don't talk about gen AI anymore.
We're on agentic and I said, okay, that's fine, but you don't actually leave, JENNI.
You want to go through it and continue.
But the big shift is from having a conversation where again you don't trust it and it's over confident and it hallucinates.
So there's all these challenges.
You're going from having a conversation to having systems that actually make decisions for you and take action.
Now, some of it is a group decision where there's still a human in the loop, and some of it is not.
But I would say over the next two years, this is really the beginning of practical agentic systems.
And that's really interesting and potentially really dangerous because you could have systems making decisions.
For example, you know, I work with the army, so there are some it could make a decision to kill somebody, and what's that about.
I would say it's too early to be doing that, but I think that'll happen within the next two years, and I think that's the big shift.
The other big shift is how is the conversation going to happen.
I think within the next two to three years we're going to see different manifestations for the conversation.
You know right now, I mentioned I've got a dedicated screen that says Stretch at the top, and when I want to talk to Stretch, I click a little button and it shows up on my screen here, and I talk to Stretch, and then on the screen there's a recording of everything that has happened.
And then I switched back.
Because I'm a writer, that's my primary medium.
I just use the verbal for the more expansive side of the activity.
I never learned dictation, so I'm not all that good at that.
But I do find if I'm just starting to think about something, it's easier for me to talk it through than it is to type it.
So I like talking to Stretch at that level.
Now, that's pretty crude, and I'm pretty sure even three years from now, you look back and it's going to seem kind of silly to be talking to this little wavy thing on my MacBook Pro while Stretch is transcribing and going back and forth.
I think there's going to be some different interface that's going to happen within two to three years.
I don't know what it is, but it's going to be something.
Maybe it's a separate device, a conversational device.
You know in Japan there's empathy cuddly little bears, and those could be for kids, or they could be for elders.
I've got a family member that provides way too much detail when I talk to this family member, and I was just thinking the other night, would be great to have this family member have a chatbot that could talk with her and have these great conversations.
And every once in a while say, Bob, you should hear this, you should pop into the conversation.
And you know that sounds cynical and it sounds just respectful, but I'm really not meaning it that way.
I think sometimes people just want somebody to talk to, like I did when I had pneumonia.
Speaker 2Oh, Bob, I don't know where the time has gone, but it has just been so absolutely fascinating hearing your perspective on all these things.
Speaker 3I'm so glad that's Goot made the connection.
So thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1Bob.
You're welcome, well, thank you for what you're doing.
It's important to have someone ask such good questions and such probing questions.
So maybe the next time I'll bring Stretch on with me and you can interview both me and Stretch.
Speaker 2I would love that that was Bob Johnson showing us that the AI augmented future isn't science fiction, it is already here, and the leaders who thrive will be the ones who treat AI as a collaborator, not a competitor or a threat.
For me, the standout idea was Bob's take that we should be thinking about artificial intelligence as augmented intelligence, and that's a mindset shift that we can all start practicing today.
Now.
Speaker 3If this conversation has fact.
Speaker 2Ideas for you and you want to upscal yourself further in AI, you will probably like some of the episodes I've released on how to turbocharge your AI skills.
A really great place to start is the conversation I had with Neo Applin on turning yourself from an AI gunslinger to an AI architect.
Speaker 3And if you've got no idea what.
Speaker 2I'm talking about, you should definitely listen to that episode because it will completely change how you interact with AI.
And if you know someone who's still thinking of AI as just another tech tool, share this episode with them.
It might just change the way they see the future.
And don't forget to follow how I Work so that you can catch every new conversation.
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Speaker 3How I Work was recorded
Speaker 4On the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Kulan nation.