#E44 Predicting and Guiding Humanity’s Future Using Data and Foresight With Sarah DaVanzo
About Sarah Davanzo
Sarah DaVanzo is Foresight Strategist and Futures Activist who boasts a remarkable 70% accuracy in quantitative data-driven futurism.
Sarah has a historied career, using her knowledge and expertise to help over a hundred businesses future-proof their operations, from startups and SMEs to mega-corporations. Sarah’s work as a “super forecaster” has landed her in globally renowned publications such as Time, The New York Times, Forbes, and Wired.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.
[02:04] Briar: Welcome to Hyperscale, Sarah DaVanzo.
[02:08] Sarah: Hi Briar. How are you doing? Hi from New York City.
[02:12] Briar: Yes, and I'm in Dubai at the moment, so thank you for joining us so early in the morning, and I'm very excited to be speaking with Sarah today. We're going to be covering all kinds of aspects and data and innovations and things that we all need to know about the future.
[02:30] Sarah: It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of Hyperscale, so thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure.
[02:36] Briar: Thank you so much, Sarah. So, you are described as a super forecaster and people have said that you boast a remarkable 70% accuracy in quantitative data-driven futurism. Tell us about this. What does this mean? What kind of methods do you use in order to get this level of accuracy?
[02:57] Sarah: It's a good question. It has to do with my perspective on the work or the space that I'm in, in futures. I think they're very distinctive two areas of futures work, and I actually think they kind of split off from a center note. So let's talk about one. One is, I feel is more on the futurism, which is strategic imagination. It's exploring the world and all the possibilities and the scenarios, and taking inspiration from many qualitative inputs. That's where you'd find your sci-fi literature. That's where you'd find your design fiction. And it's more of an imagining of the future. And that's one area. The other area is basically what I would call strategic foresight, but it's data extrapolation. And that's where the quantitative foresight comes in. So in the second area, which is an area I've been focused on really in the past 15 years, it's taking vast amounts of data… we can speak about exotic data in a second.
[04:07] But data sources from a wide range. And analyzing these data sources, these pieces of data, these signals by using predictive modeling, obviously garnering data from crowdsource data, obviously big data sets and extrapolating into the future with the help of AI these days, I've been working with artificial intelligence for strategic foresight for over eight years now, it's going on nine, and modeling out the likelihood. We know what the preferable futures and the plausible futures and the possible futures. Well, this is actually the likely futures, the plausible futures model. And then, you can measure that, if you track what you've been doing and where the models say on a particular topic. It's very easy to go back in time and see whether you are accurate or not. There are many apps and platforms out there for foresight professionals to bet on the future and put a point of view into the universe with accuracy and many of these gift scores. And it's a way to see how accurate you are. So I've been practicing these methods for now since I've been in the foresight world, which actually started in the 1990s.
[05:29] Briar: And how did you get into this space in the 1990s? What prompted you to start?
[05:35] Sarah: Well, actually like you, I was living around the world. I spent 10 years living in multiple countries throughout Asia, and then I went to Africa. So after multiple stints in Asia, the obvious China's and the India's and Singapore's and so forth in various different multinational corporations in marketing and innovation. I was hired by the South African gold industry after apartheid to do a global piece of research, which was the strategic foresight work after apartheid ended and the gold industry needed to figure out how do we reenter the market and how do we position ourselves for the future in terms of, education and job creation and skills development and industry and so forth. And so I led an 18-country piece of strategic foresight and worked with the minister of minerals and energies and the heads of the mining houses of South Africa.
[06:34] Sarah: And I was asked to stay and help to execute. At that time, I didn't know the language of foresight, but the gold industry requires you to understand fashion and need to understand science, whether it's space exploration, technology, obviously economics, money and literally financial instruments called futures. And so I was thrown into the gold world of the future of gold, which really requires you to understand steep, science, technology, environment, economics, politics, legal aspects, all aspects of life and consumers and humans and civilization, and have a point of view, a data-driven point of view. I was thrown into it from my experience in the gold industry, which actually I spent 10 years in the industry executing on the foresight strategies.
[07:33] Briar: And what are some things that you've predicted before in the past that perhaps you are the most excited about, that you would like to share with the audience, with your 70% accuracy?
[07:46] Sarah: Okay. Wow. So I look back on my career of working. I've been on the agency side starting up a foresight firm and leading it for many, many years and then in-house, in corporates and then with startups. And so a wide range of predictions, or at least forecasts, let's put it that way, or envisionings. Let me tell you about the biggest failure. I think that's a better example. So back in the 1990s through the data, through sensing, of course, we didn't have AI back then. But with the team collecting the intelligence, and also doing that second part, that imagineering, it became very clear that biosensors and technologies or sensors that would be embedded in your body were going to be a thing.
[08:42] Sarah: So in the 1990s, we worked to create the first, if you will gold, obviously metal, tattoos that you could put on your skin that would read your biometrics. And literally, I invented it. I have a patent for it, or had a patent. That's the funny start part of the story, designing it and working on my dining room table in South Africa with my team. So we saw the future of, the internet of me. And we knew that people were going to be life-logging and that health was going to be the ultimate currency. And we knew that there were advances in artificial intelligence and technologies that would make this possible. And so we set out to combine medical adhesive, like I just said, and a substrate of precious metals.
[09:36] Sarah: Anyway, long story, and this is the funny part. So as you know, you're all aware that is very much a thing today. It's a huge industry. It's in the multiples of billions. And if I had not let my patent lapse, which I did out of laziness, I would not be sitting here talking to you. I'd be on my private island somewhere. So, it's a great example of… I wish I didn't let that lapse… As you know Google very quickly in the early two thousands, there has been a lot of advances in the space of medical devices and basically building on the prior art. That was the art that we created in the 1990s.
[10:22] Briar: My gosh, what a story. And damn.
[10:26] Sarah: A big damn.
[10:28] Briar: Well, selfishly, I'm, I'm happy it didn't work out because you're here with me today. I'm getting a microchip next month. I'm very excited about it - in my hands - so that it can unlock my houses, my car, and augment my life in certain ways. But I love this idea of wearable tech. I can't wait until I can wake up in the morning and it can tell me what I'm low on in terms of vitamins or what I need to be eating so that I'm literally a perfect health of the specimen, so to speak.
[11:02] Sarah: We're both getting microchips because I'm doing the same thing. I've been exploring to see what's available in the New York tri-state area. I'm very intrigued by neural dust and neural dust, microscopic size is pieces of sand. Right now there can be cameras coursing through your veins. Neural dust is used actually literally in your brain to read your brainwaves, but also collect biometrics. And I just think it's a very exciting space. But then Briar, you and I with our microchip, we then augmented futurists. And so the work that we do, I was asked this the other day, did you use any AI to help you with the work or did you do it on your own?
[11:49] Sarah: And in this particular piece of work, I'm very proud to say it was about 72% me, and the rest of it was AI. Because I use AI as a foil, as a… create a partner, as a signal finder, a fact checker and so forth. And also a big data cruncher but there's going to be a tension, I believe, so you can hold me on this as super forecasting… Just like we have people who drive stick shift cars and have automatic cars. You have a preference. And some people I believe will be nats, or naturals, with no augmentation at all. And then there'll be you and me who will have augmentation proudly. And I would go even more extreme than having a microchip. There are a lot of things I currently do to augment my thinking and my processes.
[12:45] Briar: What do you currently do?
[12:47] Sarah: What do I do? So think about augmenting your thinking, you're seeing the future. You're analyzing the future. You are looking for signals about the future. You're reading data, you could think that you could be enhanced, certainly intellectually, cognitively and we could be enhanced physically to be able to actually ingest information. So those are the very basic levels. But, I think there's emotionally and I also think that we also experientially, we also can augment ourselves through experiences. So if you take those kind of four areas, which I think of it as like, see, feel, think, do, those are also correlated to four areas of curiosity. We explore visually, we think, obviously that's the most common assumption of how people manifest their curiosity. I think it's only one-fourth of it.
[13:43] But then we feel we are intuitive. We have visceral experiences that we take in information, and then we make and build things as experiments. And that's how we explore the world too, that's a fourth. So in all of those areas, for example, microdosing, certain psychedelics and technology, drugs, meaning, technological VR experiences. I've been actually using them since the nineties, lights and cognitive stimulation. They were very basic devices, and they make me think differently. Different kinds of visceral experiences also, all of a sudden for example I find that massage for me, deep tissue massage is not an everyday experience, at least in my life, so if we could make that an everyday experience, but the point is that when I feel that I can think differently about the signals, about the knowledge. When I have that kind of sensory experience, ASMR, hyper [sensitive sound], you would know that in podcasting, using sound and audio deep brain stimulation and also shallow brain stimulation. Cryogenics has been shown to change the way that you think as is intermittent fasting and sensory deprivation.
[15:08] Sarah: I've tried it out as a monk, gone and been into a hermitage with complete shutout to process information and think about topics and have epiphanies. So I think we can explore with our full bodies, as I said, seeing, feeling, thinking and doing the data and the concepts. And for me, it's been unlocking, but also the research that I've conducted, experimenting with these different techniques have also shown that people can up their game, if you will.
[15:41] Briar: I think those are really good suggestions for people to start tapping into. I sometimes worry these days that because we have our phones, it's so easy to get distracted. It's so easy to be sitting on the couch and scrolling on Instagram and not spending time to spend time in our thoughts and think and dream. Oh my gosh, I remember when I was a little girl, I used to dream all the time about the future and what kind of person I would become and who I would meet and what my life would be like. And I just don't think we do enough of that these days. We're so fearful of the media and the future and things and I just don't think we get excited enough.
[16:30] Sarah: I couldn't agree with you more. And you said something I want to come back to about fear in a second some research I've been conducting. But first on that point, there's so much science behind boredom about the art of noticing and slowing down. I don't know. I've seen so many signals just recently about mindful eating. And I think that's a very big trend, if you will. If you want to talk about trends in 2024 based on the books that have been published and articles and white papers that are coming up. And putting in practice, drink your eight glasses of water, but practicing mindful eating. And that's by the way, mindful eating is no technology, clearly. But you're deeply concentrating on the sensory input.
[17:20] Sarah: And there's a whole space for helping people on the spectrum, autism spectrum, deal with sensory inputs. For example, there's a professor, I'm sure I'm mangling the name Sapir who focuses on, really interesting sensory titillation to help with humans who have challenges with sensory inputs. But anybody can use a spoon that has nubs and textures on it. A fork that's not your normal tongs, a glass to drink from that is tilted or has some textures on it. There are devices today that are spoons, that have electrical currents that run through them that change your entire sense of taste and feeling of being full and sated. And that's where technology and the senses is, it's a great example. So I like to play with these kinds of devices whether it's deprivation rooms or sensory overload, I think it does make you present in the moment.
[18:40] Sarah: And that's something that you just touched upon, is being aware and looking around and not being fixated on the device in your phone that can be so distracting and addictive. But you did say something else too, about fear. So for now, probably close to, it's probably 12 years I've been conducting research with Gen Z or at the time, what was the youngest generation. So if you're going to say Gen Z today, what, 16 to 25 or something like that, in that space. So at the time, it was the early days. I do have to say I take a little credit for the name Gen Z being in our popular culture. I was a co-author of the white paper and the report that got millions of views in 2009 that put the words Gen Z into our kind of populous, our psyche.
[19:33] Sarah: It had been used by some social scientists in the 1990s, but really didn't come into play. So Gen Z's been in my space or at least the young generation because it's the future. And I've been studying specifically curiosity and exploration dynamics and how they explore. It was actually part of my master's thesis in education to see how we could make this generation more motivated and interested and curious. But also, I've been studying their perspective on the future. And I refreshed the research just a few months ago. And so here's the news flash, 83% of the Gen Z, and it was close to a thousand, all walks of life, mind you this was US, I have to just say that this particular block of research, I've done it globally, but this was for the United States.
[20:28] Sarah: So that is a developed market with a very particular point of view. So 83% of Gen Z in the United States, across wide swathes of ethnicities and so forth are very negative about the future so that's maybe not so surprising but to the point where they're paralyzed. Now, let's go dig into that a little bit more, when you look at the qualitative and what the follow-up questions were about. So first of all the number one cause is the climate. And that was rather interesting when I was in Dubai recently, in your neighborhood right before COP28 at the World Future Forum meeting, talking about the climate and regenerative nature. And the second is the issue that's bringing them down is the divisiveness and that's not just about cultures, but it's also about generations.
[21:25] Sarah: They are finding it insurmountable to be able to bridge the divide between understanding between the generations. What I found really interesting is the difference with men and women. So women are two times more pessimistic about the future than men, self-identifying men. And men are 50% more disempowered, feel more frustrated, more likely that they can't do anything. And what's really interesting, Briar, is that for me was the finding that the more affluent the people were. Now, mind you, it only went up to the age of 26, the more pessimistic they are. So the lower the affluence, the more optimism, and the more religious one is the more optimistic one is, and the less religious as we know the trend towards, knowns and not religiosity, at least in certain markets, then there's this optimism, which is maybe a little Pollyanna.
[22:31] Sarah: So I think this highlights a couple things. One is, it's not one slide, its many shades of gray about the perspective of the future. But it also highlights for me, Briar, the cultural differences in futures outlook and why we need more diversity in foresight. Not only as practitioners and other research I've done as shown the skew towards, 86%, it's white males at the average age of 52 as dominating the industry. We need it, but we need developing markets. We need developed markets. We need gender spectrum representation. We need able-bodied and those that have physical challenges or cognitive challenges. We need people who are incarcerated, people who don't have a different sense of life and temporality, people who are on their end of life involved in foresight. Think about that, involved in the research or helping us plan the future.
[23:33] Sarah: People who are terminally ill, people who are incarcerated, people who don't have options. And then you can go on and on and on, in terms of the different cognitive diversity we need introverts, we need extroverts, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think it's really important that, given that there's such vast differences in perceiving the world and also imagining the future and their future's outlook based on culture and also just about diversity and that we need to be much more inclusive in your field. Haven't you found that, I mean, don't you feel that it's a space for opportunity?
[24:11] Briar: I was very disappointed recently to hear that OpenAI's board was yet again all male. And I'm like, how are we here having this conversation yet again? Like when, I'm sorry, but females represent around 50% of the market of the population, how are we in this position where it's constantly people of a similar type, as you described, that are making decisions that could impact the whole of humanity? OpenAI is making some big movements in artificial intelligence. Don't you think we should have more diversity?
[24:56] Sarah: Absolutely. And it's akin to a handful of people who wrote our history. And now it seems like the same handful of people is writing our future. And it's like, cats and dogs, to put it as basic as that. If the world is men from Mars, women from Venus, whatever. But the point is that a world designed by dogs for dogs is not going to really necessarily be a fabulous word for butterflies and caterpillar, like insects and mice and cats and every other kind of, and unicorns. So I'm very passionate about this, about bringing youth into the foresight world. And I talk about those two directions of the field of being in some ways the more creative, imaginative, qualitative, humanities driven direction of the futuring space versus the stem and the data.
[25:59] Sarah: Because I'm hoping that it will attract people who sit in both of those worlds and they will find a home in the futures industry. Because you could have a bent towards STEM or data analytics, or you can have a bent towards writing and design and fiction and other forms of expression and imagination. And I want to make sure that it's very clear to our youth and to people who are new to this field that they understand kind of no matter where you sit, there's a role for you in the futures community.
[26:37] Briar: I think it's very interesting. And I think, so what you are saying is essentially we need to perhaps change the education into how we're teaching this at the moment because it is very STEM-driven. How can we attract more people into this space so that ultimately we have more diversity at the decision table? Is that how you think that we can really turn this around because it's in a situation now where I don't know about you, but I feel like we're constantly just banging our heads against the wall because it's almost like they don't want diversity or is it the fact that we're just not stepping up and saying, hey, I want to be part of it?
[27:17] Sarah: Yes and yes. So I'm with you a hundred percent, the frustration, and I do think it's education as in the big onion of education. Foresight is a skill of the future, like every team I've hired and managed over the past 20 years, including my present team of marketing, having strategic foresight chops, whether innately I'm not talking about necessarily pedigree but having an understanding that we need to be designing for the future, thinking for the future, reading cultural intelligence, trying to get a sense of the zeitgeist with data and also all the other mechanisms as I just said is part of the preparedness for a world that is going to be constantly changing. And I think it's a world of sustainable change. I don't think it's change management, that's like, oh, we're going to change and then we got to manage that one incident.
[28:11] Sarah: No, it's sustainable change. And that's an interesting and sustainable curiosity. How do we foster that? And so that is an educational modality. That was actually literally one of the reasons why I went to pursue a degree in education, just because I do mentoring, executive coaching on the side and with my teams and peers and colleagues. And I think that this is super important that we instill this mindset. But, then you get into: where do you learn about this field? I still think it's like this hidden, the futurist, it's like magic. It's like “Zoltar” in the company or if they're a consultancy, it's the wacky futurism group that does all the innovation. We need a good PR, we need branding to take your expertise and genius and apply it to the industry to help figure out the communications messages, to, A), create more awareness of this field, ubiquitous awareness, manage some of the messaging. I think it's got a little bit out of control.
[29:23] When I go to these conferences, which I do all over the world, I was in Dubai and I was at a different couple of conferences early in the year. It's very clearly we have academics. So you have academia who are in institutions, who study scenario planning, strategic foresight, design fiction, speculative fiction, various areas of expertise. And they are very good and in focusing on methodology advancement. And so there's a methodological, if you will, cabal in the academia world. Then you have artists and there are just this wonderful huge seething world of artists who are just out there in the wild, who are in the foresight and future space doing arts artworks about the future for the future, or what I call futures activism.
[30:19] Sarah: Then you have corporates who are in-house, of which I've had a couple of those roles, presently who are either in innovation or in strategy, corporate strategy. And they're reporting to the board and they need data. And they have to tell stories with great sense of confidence in the accuracy, because that's what they want because they're putting millions on maybe long-term planning or infrastructure or operations or innovations. And then what I feel like is then there's a world of consultants, which is a mixed bag of consultants who are agency owners and practitioners. And that's what is really interesting stuff there happening because they're competitive because they're competing for business, from some of the other areas. And as a result, they're constantly inventing and reinventing new ways to approach communications.
[31:17] Sarah: But I feel like there are these four buckets, there's agency consultants who are service, there's the enterprise or corporate strategies, there's the artist, and then there's academic. And then of course in the center, there's scientific foresight, which are people who are doing advanced research, who are actually, building the future and those communities rarely kind of overlap. Maybe it's just one community. Maybe we should think about some others in that universe, put our heads to it and think about other than those five distinctive areas I just spoke about, I'm sure there could be six or seven or eight others that we could think about if we had a drink.
[32:00] Briar: So yeah attracting more diversity into the space. I think it's interesting what you said about this rebrand I don’t know if you're aware, but we've been filming a documentary about the future and my journey into it and things, and we're actually producing it like reality TV. So we're inspired by the Kardashians for it. And that's really how I could see how I could play a role in this and ultimately bring all of this wonderful information that you and all of these other incredibly intelligent people share with me to the masses, to potentially the people that are distracted by their phones. So that's ultimately what I'm doing. When we talk about the future and you mentioned it's sustainable change, and you obviously spoke about how Generation Z these days, they feel quite pessimistic and I think that's really fascinating. But what is the future going to be like? Is it going to be positive? Is it going to be utopian? Is it going to be this dystopian future like threads on Reddit like to share?
[33:13] Sarah: Well that's a good point because I went to Burning Man this past year with specifically the viewpoint of, okay, if the future they say is resource scarcity, let's put it there, water scarcity. Everyone's aware of that, that we have to figure out how to be more gracious with our water and precious with our water and resourceful and so forth. So Burning Man in the middle of the desert and I was looking for signals of the future, and they're all over. It's all over there. And that's obviously a youth festival of extreme radical inclusivity. There are a lot of concepts that I think are really relevant to what we imagine, but also what the signals of data tells us about how we are changing as a society and what we can expect in the future, such as urbanization.
[34:06] Sarah: Literally, it's a pop-up city of 80,000 people in a week. And leave no trace, put it up, take it down and don't kill each other in the process of that, live in harmony, figure out problem solving, all of that, all the things you can imagine in a pop-up city. When I look at the success of something like that, I'm very hopeful about humanity's ability to cope with change. I mean, we can look at how we dealt as a world with COVID, a pandemic of that magnitude, for good… or for what it's worth. I mean the reality is that we're having this conversation, and I'm not wearing a mask right now, although it's virtual. But the point is, you get the idea is that we've found our way through it as a race.
[35:00] Sarah: And when I look at the youth in a place like Burning Man, being so resilient, being so creative, hacking their ways through disasters, through social challenges, someone gets hurt, how do you deal with that? There are different points of view because there are people from all over the world there and there are different ideologies, and how do you manage that conflict in a way that's humane and graceful and so forth? I saw so much of the future there. I imagined it was like living in Mars without, you do classically, if you're going to do innovation in a resource scarce way, sometimes you would think that you would do it in like a space environment or on Mars.
[35:52] Sarah: And what I saw there was hopeful. So my message to you, Briar is that I think our youth, Gen Z, especially Gen Z are looking for solutions. They're the STEM-influencers. I don't know, I'm going to make that up, STEM-influencers. They're the hacktivists, I don't know, I just make it up. They use science on their social media. And science is being taught on social media. People are being encouraged to make and do and hack. And I think that is a great signal for, back to your point about education, going to have to be hacked. It's modular, very different forms of education than we have presently in the one-size-fits-all process, in the linear process, I think we have to reimagine education.
[36:47] Sarah: But I see the kids and how they're dealing with challenge, not necessarily in a life or death situation, it's at a festival. But I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. I'm very hopeful. And at Dubai, when I was just there, what I thought was remarkable, I've been going to Dubai since the nineties, and this past trip stood out for me because it highlighted cultural tensions and the harmony of dichotomy. You would have the Gold Souk, which I've been going to since the gold days in the nineties, which is about as ancient as possible. The souks, that form of commerce, that form of retail compared to the most sophisticated smart buildings in the world, like same city. You have big dog robots around in the hotels or robots in museums.
[37:50] Sarah: And then we have camels, like you are seeding the rain clouds and you're dealing with drought, but also, using technology to deal with the environment. I just find it a very interesting society of contradiction. And I think that's the future globally. We're going to have to figure out. It's not always going to be chocolate and vanilla, and we've got to figure out how dichotomies can coexist in one space. I'm hopeful. We'll have the naturals and the augmented futurists, the natural futurists and augmented futures will coexist.
[38:31] Briar: Yes, as you said before, you and I will be the ones that will be lining up. We'll be walking around with robotic arms and all these crazy implants and things like this, but do you think it will potentially be the haves and the have nots? Do you think that the people that have this access to technology are going to be the ones that potentially have more money to afford it?
[38:57] Sarah: Yes. I see… Pendulums always swing hard before they correct. That's clearly what's already happening, to be able to afford chips and augmentation and brain computer interfaces and exoskeletons, who's got it. However, as a society, if we are aware of equity, and we are aware that, for example, the digital divide, was, oh, the internet will only be available to those who have and that will create this great schism, and then that will be, soil and green, or we're going to have snow crasher happening. So the point is though, as a society globally, we realize we need to provide internet service at a global scale for education and health and all of the commerce and so forth. And there are so many efforts by governments, by nonprofits now to provide internet as a basic service. And I think as society becomes aware, as long as we keep talking about it Briar, and making it very acutely aware that this is not accessible and it should be or we need to watch it, then at least we can keep it into the, we can't stave off advancement. I don't believe we should say no to the advancement. But I do believe that we need to be keeping it in the conversation, front and center about equity.
[40:25] Briar: I think it's interesting and very fascinating also to think back and to think how we just evolve and humans evolve and society evolves. I was reflecting a couple of days ago about life before my mobile phone, and I must have been about 14 or 13 or something like that. I was probably one of the last people to remember what life was actually like without it because my sister and my brother, they very much grew up with it, but we just adapted and we just adopted it. And now we're so used to being able to access the internet constantly on our phone. I posted a thread on Reddit recently about how I was getting my microchip, and obviously I got attacked by some people saying about the black mark and how we were warned about this in the Bible and about how terrible it was that I was planning on augmenting with technology. But someone actually commented back, thank you, that Redditor who stood up for me and said that in the past we spoke about credit cards in this way, we said that the credit cards were the mark of the beast.
[41:40] Sarah: Yeah. So there's always a wave of technology. I mean, from the beginning of time. So that becomes a threat because it changes the way that we live and we have to look at technology, I do believe with a critical eye. I mean, I don't know where you would go, where you're going for your microchip, who has access to that data? You got to think about the implications of it and is it reversible, of course. And how will you manage your data and your digital death when it comes to that, if you want to have a digital death, half of super forecasting sometimes is actually looking backcasting.
[42:27] Sarah: I know some people will say, no, you can't look at the past because we've had too many black swan events. And it's no longer linear. We don't have a linear trajectory but we have human nature and we are not evolving that significantly in 20, 30 years from now, we will be still be the same humans that by enlarge that we are today. And I think we study how humans react through time. It can be a very, very good signal of how we will react in at least our short and midterm futures. So I'm with you on the fear-mongering around that. I think it's not constructive, but I do think we need to be careful, just like I'm not going to inject any kind of chemical into my bloodstream just because someone says it's an elixir of youth. And I would be circumspect about that.
[43:20] Briar: Oh, absolutely. You've obviously been working with artificial intelligence for many years, as you explained to us earlier in the show. Do you think that this kind of fear of AI, do you think that it's justified in your opinion?
[43:38] Sarah: Well, I did some work with the defense in the US government some years ago in the early part of the two thousands. I'm not going to say too much because I don't want to say too much for obvious reasons, but there was a concern about the understandability, un-understandably, the black box of AI, and this is going over 10 years ago and a very serious concern about that. Recently I was giving a talk on artificial intelligence used for strategic foresight at South by Southwest. It's a kind of a media technology cultural conference in the United States. So this past year I had the fortune of speaking to someone after my talk who was from the US government and defense and research and we were talking about diversity in AI, the need for that, because one of the points I raised was, you you said rightly so, Briar, like, oh, the board of OpenAI. Yeah, well, OpenAI is one artificial intelligence platform. We need to have a variety, just like humans, cognitive variety, to be able to do the work we do. And the work I do, I use multiple platforms for one task because I want different inputs. And if I understand who's behind the coding, that's great. Sometimes it'll be a Chinese platform, sometimes it will be from another culture.
[45:09] Briar: What platforms would you recommend to someone listening to this?
[45:14] Sarah: So one that I'm playing around with right now, that is something called Perplexity. And it's because there are citations. I can go back and see exactly where it's scraped from and I'm able to actually go back and backtrack and see where all the information came from. I also use Heartbeat AI. Heartbeat AI is one of the outfits that I've been working with for quite some time that has, it's looking at the emotional interpretation of data. And you can read about it, so I'm not going to go through the whole description of what it is, but it's a very novel approach to mixing psychology and cognitive development with also artificial intelligence. So those would be two that I'd say that are interesting to put into your quiver, take a look at, just for having breadth of inputs.
[46:22] Sarah: So back to that point though, is have to be aware of just like human diversity, we want to have different races that we were talking about in foresight, but we also want to have AI diversity because we know exactly who the programmers are, how the brain thinks. And so, again, looking for platforms that are being developed in emerging markets and that are, even if they're just in early stages is I think a good practice, a good business practice. I know I'm not alone here because as I said, people have come up and spoke to me like, yeah, this is a problem and we need to talk about this. So there you have it. We want to make sure that we diversify our AI.
[47:09] Briar: Who do we ask to do this? Who could we hold almost accountable or responsible for creating more diversity in this space?
[47:18] Sarah: So a couple things is there are like United Nations has, there's focus on artificial intelligence. I don't remember the outfit. I know there's a body of it, but I think there needs to be an agnostic organization at a global level that takes us as policy. I wouldn't be surprised if Europe is a leader in this, because they are very sensitive about data and artificial intelligence. And the European countries and nations seem to be at the forefront of a lot of legislation, are putting in policies here. I think as corporations, for example, myself in corporate enterprise foresight I need to make this the standard and the policy. I currently employ this thinking and this approach with my team and working with data, working at foresight, marketing, consumer intelligence, business intelligence and so forth.
[48:21] Sarah: So I think companies, I think there's going to be governments, but probably it's not up for me, but probably some academia probably needs to do some research and quantify this. I did an interesting little experiment, Briar, I took the same prompts and I put the same prompt through a Chinese - in characters - with my Chinese research assistants, in a Chinese AI platform that was being developed and it was just from scientists and then OpenAI. And then I put it back through an image creation platform. So the interpretations were very Western US OpenAI kind of interpretation of the prompt, I'll tell you in a second. And the other was Chinese. And the prompt was: how well can robots be used in the year 2030?
[49:10] Sarah: Simple. How will the robots? Interpret it into Mandarin, English and then what's the image? In essence the images speak a thousand words. That's why I figured, this is how I can show the need for cognitive diversity or AI diversity. So the image that was generated in China was a robot that looked kind of fuzzy, looked kind of warm standing at the front of a classroom, green, chalkboard behind, teaching a class of very elderly people. And what was being taught were business skills and reading and writing because in China, as you know illiteracy in the rural aging population is one of the biggest social challenges that the whole country has. It's one of the biggest challenges societally, what do you do with this mass population of aging folks that are illiterate? And how do we lift them and help them? And so that was what the AI spit out from the Chinese programming, interesting. In the OpenAI, which is mostly American and Western, the image was an Amazon warehouse helping a worker load more boxes faster.
[50:37] Briar: Interesting.
[50:42] Sarah: Okay, so purely productivity, commercial productivity, same prompt. How will robots be used in the year 2030? Not should be used, not could be used, but will be used in the year 2030. Just interpreted two different cultures. And I think, so you can imagine those two images, that's why I'm painting them for you, how stark they are. By the way, the robot in the Amazon warehouse looked kind of like it was the kind of robots that builds a car, completely faceless, like scary, like pinchers and like that and it was also supporting the worker. So they could have been more different and that's my little example. So I think if we do these kinds of projects, maybe we create awareness.
[51:36] Briar: I heard about in China when children are watching TikTok videos, they have to be informative, scientific, educational videos. And I thought, how shockingly different that is to the kind of TikToks that the US young generation are presently watching.
[51:56] Sarah: Yeah. I mean when you have a society where, well it's a society that follows rules, let's put it that way. And there's more focus on the collective and that would represent lots of different countries all over the world. It is easier to put in place healthy behaviors, whether it's recycling or whether it's brushing your teeth or whether it's the way you are educated. And obviously that also comes with barriers and limitations. Usually then people start to squeal about human rights and freedoms. But irrespective, than those behaviors and potentially the use of AI and maybe more healthy in those environments where there's control and you get a country that's like a wild west like America and there are many countries around the world that are like that. It's, anything goes. And I use this as a strategic device in innovation and strategic foresight.
[53:03] Sarah: Think like a criminal, like literally if you say a technology at CES, going on, right now all the consumer electronics and all the technologies used to think, right now so what would you do if you were going to use that for nefarious reasons? How would I use this device? That is actually how video - VHS - was born. It was through the adult entertainment industry. Virtual reality got a kickstart from adult education. I'm just saying that a lot of technologies I can go on, I have a whole list of technologies that got its spurt from the underbelly of society, because you think about how somebody will exploit that for some kind of gain. And I think you get that activity in a lot of these markets that are free markets. So in that way they are using the technology to gain advantage, but maybe in nefarious ways, but then they leapfrog the technology you could say, good and bad. Anyway we have to look and see all the worst possible uses for our technology. And imagine that and that probably is what's happening on Silk Road or the dark web right now.
[54:17] Briar: So you spent some time training with NASA, didn't you?
[54:22] Sarah: Well, I went to space camp. Space camp, anyone can go to space camp. It just requires the interest. It was super fun. I highly recommend it because you are like acting and living with deprivation. You're suspended in the air in very uncomfortable outfits, and you work as teams, the command control centers, everyone's got roles. I think there are a lot of metaphors for business and just being a human in society about how you get along and work in different capacities. I was able to experience the gyroscope that's like you're spun around like superfast, your blood is coagulating in your extremities and do some really interesting kind of weightlessness feats, which gave me a feeling of what it would be like so I could have empathy for what it would be like to live in space or in the world with fewer resources.
[55:32] Sarah: Like I said, looking at the space industry is also we said like looking at the underbelly or thinking like a criminal, looking at that, but also looking at the space industry which is by the way exploration. So many patents have come out of the space industry. So many advances that we use in our everyday life came from space R&D. And so it's also a great space to look for the future and future living, future needs, need states and technologies and hacks and so forth. So I highly recommend something like that if you have the opportunity or absolutely apply to go to a space camp. I can see you, part of your research and documentary, maybe NASA's in the card.
[56:23] Briar: Yeah, I would love to. I was thinking the other day, I was actually saying to my boyfriend about how much I'd like to live on Mars, but then he looked at me, he's like, would you though? He's like, there's no nail salons. Went through all of these sort of luxuries, I guess, that I enjoy on a daily basis. And I was like, yeah, you know what? Actually, now that you've put it like that, maybe I'll just go to Burning Man next year.
[56:48] Sarah: Yeah. Come stay with me this year. I'm going to be there.
[56:53] Briar: Absolutely. And Sarah, just as we're sort of wrapping up this podcast, what for you is the number one thing that you would want people to take away about your work? What's the kind of message you really want to hit home for the listeners?
[57:08] Sarah: Not to be boring, but it is about diversity, inclusion and foresight, inclusion in the future and diversity, which is what I'm getting at, but also diversity in artificial intelligence. I think this is a topic we need to keep very front and center. I don't want the folks, the handful of people that wrote history to be writing our futures and controlling our machines and also yeah, because it narrows the possibilities. We know all the data, all the research that shows that as soon as you get into brain diversity or physical diversity that affects your brain diversity. And it unlocks ideas and problem solving. And we have some wicked problems. We have existential risks that we need the best manpower and woman power and human power on it and AI power. And so I think it would only being our doing a disservice to our world if we don't put the full force of effort behind improving the diversity in all of its colors to the processes of problem-solving, futuring scenario planning and unlocking possibilities. I think it's very hopeful.
[58:38] Briar: I agree.
[58:39] Sarah: So I'll see you in New York. You'll come to New York and we'll have a curiosity tour of the city to unlock your synapses even more than they currently are.
[58:52] Briar: Oh, we will. I'm probably planning on being in New York in about February time because I've got an apartment there. So yeah, we'll definitely hang out and we might scan each other's microchips or go get microchips together, coffee and microchips today, please.
[59:09] Sarah: That's great.
[59:10] Briar: Well, it's been so nice having you on the show. Really nice.
[59:14] Sarah: Thank you, Briar. I'm a big fan and I have watched several of your episodes of your documentary and I just fell in love with you when you spent your whatever, your days, your 48 Hours in the Metaverse. That was fantastic.
[59:29] Briar: Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you.
