When you sign up to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival, you don’t know which listed speakers will be there on the same dates as you. I was really hoping to hear David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, Krista Tippett and Brené Brown. I got three out of four (sorry, Jonathan), plus dozens of other impressive speakers I may not have known about previously.
Brené was clearly the headliner. So I was intrigued when they matched her up on a panel of two with Kate Crawford, seemingly because the two wrote books with roughly similar titles: Atlas of the Heart and Atlas of AI.
I haven’t written about this session until now because I’m not 100% sure what to say about it. Here’s where I’ve landed: I learned a lot about AI from Kate Crawford, and I fangirled over Brené Brown while wishing she had been given a platform to talk about her core expertise.
But a month later, it remains one of the sessions that keeps coming to my mind. Here are some of the nuggets that have lingered for me — the conversation was mostly about large language models like ChatGPT, so they were using “AI” here for shorthand in that context:
- We are getting AI to do our most human things.
- AI is becoming smarter than us by making us dumber!
- If today’s senior leaders are being relied upon to bring the human element to AI, beware, because “we suck at what makes us human” — those skills were seen as ‘soft’ in the leadership training of the 80s that largely shaped today’s leaders.
- AI is largely being done to us, not for or with us. The concentration of power in the hands of very few is remarkable. And powerlessness is our most dangerous emotion. People never behave well when backed into a corner.
- AI can be a “giant misinformation machine” — beware, for example, of “hallucitations” – articles from supposedly reputable authors, institutions and journals that are actually completely fake.
- We believe AI when we shouldn’t — our brains crave certainty, AI flatters us and reinforces our biases, and we default to believing machines. AI is consulting Reddit, not Carl Jung from the grave! Be careful how much credit you attribute to it.
- AI removes the mess of vulnerability — struggle is better for us than convenience.
- It’s not too late to pull back and improve this. We added seatbelts to cars and regulations to cloning — AI can be given guardrails too.
But the most memorable moment for me as a transitions coach? Brené, off script, saying “I’m in my f%@*k it era. Don’t let anyone scare you off of midlife — it’s fabulous!”
That’s what I came to hear.
