If you're in a situation where you
basically can scope the solution space
of everything that could possibly happen
you can use an artificial intelligence
system there to figure out what that
list is essentially.
[Music]
Hi I'm here with Dave Baiocchi from ReD
Associates.
Thank you Dave for joining us
at Cognizants AI interview series at
the AI Summit in San Francisco.
Happy to
be here.
I wanted to start a little bit
different than I started with a lot of
the other guests and I wanted to ask
what is a technologist doing at
ReD Associats?
So I like to tell people
I'm a recovering engineer and I started
off life designing telescopes for space
and I originally and then eventually
went on and did more sort of engineering
work.
But, after I spent more time in the
field I realized or I got concerned with
people developing technology for the
sake of technology.
And I started to
recognize that there was a lot more
value that we could give to clients if
we also started thinking about what did
it start with what do humans really need
rather than what's the greatest fastest
lightest thing we can build.
And so after
ten years at the RAND Corporation, which
is of course where we met each other, we
together decided that we could have a
bigger impact by trying to bridge the
technology with the social sciences.
So
while you are at Rand, you wrote a piece
on surprise and I want to dig into that
a little bit today because I think you
have a unique perspective on surprise
and now how it relates to AI.
So let me
just start with, like let's define the
term.
What is surprise?
So it's really
easy to start with a simple explanation
which is that it's something that's
unexpected.
But I think a more helpful
way to think about it is that a surprise
is something you want to try to recover
from and so one helpful way that I like
to think about is that a surprise is
something that you simply just don't
recognize.
And it's that time
it takes you from going from
I've never seen this before, I don't
know how to react to I think I've seen
this before I've seen elements of this
I've responded in other you know in this
way other times.
Maybe that might work
here.
The time it takes to make that
switch to move from unrecognized to
recognized - that's the key to being able
to implement an effective response to it.
So, as an example, this is why people say
like experience matters.
Right so if
you're in a situation where surprise is
going to be potentially detrimental or
you're really nervous about something
potentially happening to you, that's when
you want to wheel out your most
experienced people.
Because they're the
ones who have this library of past
knowledge to be able to make that change
from - I'm not sure what it is - ah, I
think I've seen this before.
How can AI help with this surprise
piece like responding making decisions
in the response to a surprise?
What's
AIs potential role there?
So I think
there's three ways that AI can make a
contribution here.
The fact that the way
you respond to surprises by going
from something that's unrecognized to
recognized and the way you make that
change is through this corpus of
experience.
You can imagine scaling that
type of mechanism via an artificial
intelligence system.
The second way is
sort of inspired by the NFL coach right
so if you're in a situation where you
basically can scope the solution space
of everything that could possibly happen,
you can use an artificial intelligence
system there to figure out what that
list is essentially.
And then the third
thing gets back to any activity you can
engage in that expands your field of
view of what might possibly happen to
you is a valuable activity and you know
we give that advice aside
from thinking about artificial
intelligence.
Now you can imagine ways
that AI can help you do that.
Right?
AI can help you think about like what
are the fringe events that might happen
and I want to be clear I'm not saying
that AI is going to completely scope
that space for you and so that you could
you know essentially identify all the
Black Swan events, that's never going to
happen.
But simply identifying one
two can help you think about new ways
that you might respond or new situations
you might be might want to be presented
with.
I mean where do you think from a
standpoint of being at ReD now and
thinking about the insights that our
social scientist colleagues come up with
how do you think we can bake all this
together?
I recognize that I have a lot
of work to do on becoming more familiar
with the methods they use and think
about starting with the human need first
rather than - we've got this amazing thing
and we're gonna get like this big and
like half the price.
Right.
And so getting
our next generation of engineers to
think about let's start with the human
need rather than I know like we can
build an invisibility cloak.
Like, we
should build an invisibility cloak that
actually meets.