AI Will Decide What's True. Are You Ready? | Vance Crowe University of Florida Lecture on AI

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] When you start to be like, we have to defeat the other information, it leads you consequentially to doing things that are not necessarily pointed in the light. And so I always say, don't try and stop the other side. You just have to outcompete them. Peter, today

Guest [00:00:14] Is dance, curl and dance. You if, if you're very lucky,

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] You

Guest [00:00:17] Will go through life and run into somebody who changes the way you think about things. Vance and I met you kind of a circuitous way, but you, you meet somebody who really elevates the way that you think and after you walk out of the room of talking with him, you feel a little bit smarter than when you came in. And he's also one of those people who, it's always good to have someone in your life who will say, you're not really going to wear that, are you? You know, just a real tough critic who always will be very good at reshaping your thinking about certain topics. And so I've always been very grateful to No Vance. And he's always the person that when I got a question like, should we do this or not? He's the guy I call. So we'll start there. I had a recent conversation with Vance about AI and why AI was going to be instrumental in shaping your future and ways that you all of you could use these new tools to really elevate your, your game, not only as a student, but potentially your, what's the word I'm looking for? Your professional footprint as you are moving through and leaving into the job market in ways that you may think to exploit these tools in innovative ways that could elevate your career down the line. But you gotta start thinking about this now. So that's why I wanted to get him in here. And then he also can answer some questions about this too, but is that he has a really varied background.

Guest [00:01:50] He has his is a master's degree in strategic negotiation. What was it? Strategic what?

Vance Crowe [00:01:55] Cross-cultural negotiations. Yeah,

Guest [00:01:57] Cross-cultural negotiations from Seton Hall. And he's worked in a variety of places. He was a strategic communications expert at the World Bank for a while, and then also was the director of millennial engagement at the Monsanto company, which was interesting because he didn't want the job necessarily, but he was really curious to see what it was about and ended up falling in love with the challenge of trying to communicate for a company nobody liked. And, and actually was a very, it was very interesting in that role. After that he's been working mostly as a keynote speaker and working in other types of strategic communications efforts and also does a really cool business called Le Legacy Interviews where he does interviews with folks who, and then stores this. So if you have family members, that kind of thing, it's good to capture them before they're gone. And I've, I've regretted not doing this a dozen times now since I've known Vance. I always think, well, I'll just put it off till next week. 'cause you know, and, and then you run outta weeks. So, but Vance does a, a lot of really cool stuff and he is, is got an excellent podcast with over 450 episodes and that's the introduction. So why don't you flip on your slides and go for it.

Vance Crowe [00:03:15] I guess maybe the first place I should start is the place that I would wanna know if I were sitting as students of Kevin Ulta's class. So what you guys may see is mild mannered professor up that's always kind of talking about the things he is excited about and his communication very compelling. But I know Dr. Kevin Fulta as an international expert on communicating to people that are strongly against what you have to say. And I have to say that like what you may get is like a guy that you see in your class every day. Kevin is probably the most loyal and hardworking person that I've ever worked with. And if you guys ever get a chance, I would ask him for some of the wild stories that have happened to him about people starting a conversation one way and then completely changing their perspective by the end of it and becoming a, an advocate for science. And so Kevin is truly extraordinary and if I were a student, I would wanna know that, but I'm gonna jump in. I don't Yeah,

Guest [00:04:14] Go for

Vance Crowe [00:04:14] It. So the place I wanna start is how many of you can picture the yin yang sign? Can you guys picture that in your mind? Okay, so the thing that I love about this symbol is that when I was growing up, I grew up as a, a kid in small town Illinois. And whenever I saw that, I always thought, oh, that's the balances between good and evil, right? And what I came to find out as I got older, as I learned more about philosophy was actually that symbol isn't just good and evil. It actually is representing dichotomies in this world, things that are all around us all the time. And that operate kind of opposite one another. You can't have day without night. You can't have order without chaos, for example. And the reason I think this is such an important symbol when we talk about AI is that is very easy to think either the way the world is, is the way that it will always be, or we're going in into the chaos where things are completely unknown and we don't know what's gonna happen. And you guys are right now at that spot where you're figuring out how can I take all the new change that's happening in this world that's chaotic and unknown, and how can I bring it back to the ordered side? Maybe if we think of the white side as the ordered side and the black side is chaos, you're, you're gonna go in and you're gonna explore ideas that maybe make you uncomfortable and bring them back to what you know. And I think the crazy thing about AI is that anyone you talk to, which I've had a chance to have really amazing conversations on my podcast with AI experts, people that are actually creating the AI and no one knows what's going to happen.

Vance Crowe [00:05:56] It is so chaotic. Change is happening so fast. We are moving from what we know the ordered side to the darker side of like what is gonna happen that anybody that stands up and tells you, Hey, this is how AI works and this is where I think it's going. I think they're arrogant because you couldn't possibly know what's going to happen and what's going to change. But I do think if you look at what's gonna change really, really fast, the more important thing to think about is what are some of the changes that I can be really confident are, are gonna happen? And the first actually comes from something that maybe you guys, I don't know if you, you know this about professional life, but a huge percentage of an adult professional's life in in this world is doing really four things. They are copy pasting information, they are searching for things and they are scheduling meetings. And I know this may either sound like, no, like my job won't be that way, or I'll, I'll do something more exciting. But it turns out that most of what human beings are doing is we're taking information from one place and we're trying to put it in another. So we're gonna copy it and we're gonna paste it and we're gonna take information that already exists and we're gonna sort it. And people actually spend a huge percentage of their lives compiling data that from either experiments that have happened or industrial projects that people are working on, and really they're moving information from one place to another.

Vance Crowe [00:07:27] Or they're searching for information, right? They're going to the internet or they're going to where their data is and they're trying to figure out how can I find where this file is or where these numbers are, or they're scheduling things, which is where we're trying to figure out, hey, where can I put one person in front of another person? Or how can, if you have a, a service that I'm trying to get, how do we make it so that you're, it's available at the time that I'm able to receive it. And a huge amount of our time right now goes to doing these things. Human attention is almost entirely spent. I would say most people, 60, 70, maybe even 80% of their lives are focused on these four tasks, copy, paste, search and schedule. And what is happening now is that there is a wild change to the way that people synchronize information and they signal intent. And what do I mean by that? Right now information is scattered everywhere, right? And we have to figure out like, how do I go search that individual file or that set of files, whereas now we're moving into a place where AI is going to be able to scan information at a vastly higher rate than anybody has ever been able to look through information. It will remember where everything is and it will bring back a, a synthesis of that information to people. And what's going on right now is we've moved from AI being like, I'm gonna type in what is the recipe for making macaroni and cheese?

Vance Crowe [00:08:58] And it's starting to be able to say, I want you to bring me macaroni and cheese, go out and order that thing for me. And what I think the biggest change that's, that's happening right now is what's called the age agentic revolution. How many of you are familiar with AI agents? Okay, a lot of you. Good. So for those of you that have not heard of an AI agent agents, what they are designed to do is to go out into the digital world and do things on your behalf. Meaning you can say, Hey, ai, I have all these forms I have to fill out. I want you to go through and find out what all the, the information that I need to fill out. Take it from what you have and fill that out for me. And this could be for applying for some kind of application for an apartment, it could be for insurance, it could be for any of the normal forms that people have to fill out in order to get through their daily lives. You'll be able to tell an agent, Hey, you already have all this information, why don't you go fill it in? And so I don't have to fill out forms anymore. It's also going to do instantaneous scheduling for people. So we're gonna see that like I no longer have to call another human being or I don't have to send them, Hey, these are all of my available times. The agent, my agent will be able to go to Kevin's agent and say, Hey, you two, were trying to find a lunch meeting in the next two weeks. I noticed that you have Vance has these three dates open. What dates do you have? Okay, now we're gonna put that on the calendar. And so agents are doing this scheduling, and this is a radical change for most people in the professional world who spend hours upon hours scheduling meetings and attending them.

Vance Crowe [00:10:40] And then it's going to of course start making purchases and coordinating deliveries. So it'll be able to say, Hey, I, you know, I have a a child, I know I'm going to need diapers. I don't really care where we get Pampers from. So I'm going to say, Hey agent, I want you to go out online and find out what is the cheapest diapers that I can have purchased. And I want you to, whenever I say we're running out of them, go purchase 'em. Here's my credit card information. And not only that, but I wanna make sure that you set the deliveries for a time I'm home so that we don't have porch pirates. And so you're gonna be able to do that and the AI is going to start making purchasing decisions for you. So it's going to move from being just something that answers your questions to something that you allow it to spend money on your behalf to make things come to you. And as these three things which are super simple, and I think very few people would disagree with me are going to happen or are happening right now, is the fourth thing, which is as you do this more and more, you're going to start to trust it and you're going to ask it to tell me what is true, what, how do I know whether this is the, if, if this chemical is safe or these foods are okay to eat, or if these things will cure this disease that I have. People are more and more going to ask AI instead of doing what they had done, which was going to use Google in the past. So I wanted to go through today and give a little bit of a description for you about the difference between the way that truth is decided.

Vance Crowe [00:12:13] When you look at something like Google when you're going to a, a search engine versus the way an AI bot will determine what is true. Because as we transition from the like Google search era into the ag agentic era, we're going to have different answers coming back to us depending on what people ask. So I i, if you look at this, I don't know how closely you can see it, but in that search bar you see that I searched how dangerous are CAFOs confined animal feeding operations. It used to be that people typed this into Google and what you would get back would be three or four links, and these would be what Google thinks, Hey, this is the best answer to that question. And how did it decide which four of these to show me above the fold? Well, basically for each one of these websites, the backside of it is, is a link to that website. So if somebody writes a blog and they say, Hey, I read this awesome article on the New Roots Institute, and you can get that article here that creates a link each time somebody links to a website on a blog on their own website, that's a vote. The votes that are the most valuable are the votes that have the most people linking to them. So if I'm a big news aggregator and I have lots and lots of people sending me links, now anytime I send a link to somebody, then when somebody's searching for something around their website, they get a lot of authority because they're linked to people that have lots of links to them.

Vance Crowe [00:13:47] Does this make sense? So this is how truth was decided for as long as the internet has been around really since Google started to dominate the linking systems was the way that people determined what's going to be brought back. There's a little bit of of page rank based on, you know, does your text, do you have the headline one, is the headline the right way? Is headline two, do you have text written out? But for the most part, page rank was done by linked sites. But this is not the way that AI determines what is true. And because this is not what AI determines is true, we're watching a major revolution happen because people have spent billions upon billions of dollars setting up their websites to be the thing that Google brings back to them. And now there's a huge shift to saying, wait, wait, I want it when somebody types into their ai that it brings back my information. And so it's worth then asking yourself, well then how does AI decide what is true? How do they bring back this answer? Well, if I went to to Google and instead of this time using the, the search results like for the websites, if I use the ai, I ask how dangerous or confined animal feeding operations, it then takes a bunch of information from a bunch of sites and it synthesizes an answer. And in fact, this is what most people see now is the synthesis of answers. Where does this come from? Well, I did quite a bit of research on this because I wanted to know if I'm gonna put information on my website, I want people to find either my Legacy Interviews company or I want them to find the content made from my podcast, or I want them to find my negotiations class that I teach.

Vance Crowe [00:15:27] So I want that information to be as available as possible to ai. And what I found out is that first of all, the way the AI decides what is true is first, what were they trained on? So their training models is they're being fed lots of information. What happens is you pick a date and let's say it's July 1st, 2026, we're gonna let it have as much access to certain layer of the internet as it possibly can. We're gonna give it certain journals to access and that's part of its latent information, what it knows. But when you ask an AI a question, it only grabs a little bit of that training knowledge. And then it goes and looks for what is the most relevant information and relevant information is decided by who wrote a page that is as close to the query as possible as what the person typing into AI was trying to ask. So AI will go out and say, who is the MO who's issued the most dedicated information that answers this question directly? And so now truth is being determined by is when somebody asks a question, is that mapped to information that somebody has? And then the third way is what's called retrieval. So AI is gonna preference information that is really, really easy for it to read if it has to go through two links and then scour A PDF, that's gonna take more energy and more tokens to find the right answer. So it is going to preferentially treat any information that's really fast and easy for it to relate to, it's gonna give it right there.

Vance Crowe [00:17:03] And then finally, confidence, which comes a little bit from that SEO linking, the more people that are linking to my sites, the more the AI says, yeah, that's probably true. So I know this is a lot, does this make sense on how these two are different things? And it's kind of shocking, right? Because what that means is that whoever is now able to reorganize their information to be able to answer people's questions are now going to have the be the thing that is returned on AI search. Many times for most of history, after the big corporations got involved in SEO and linking, the only way that you could get your information to the top was is if you took all the time the energy and the resources to create as many link connections as you could. It meant you had to constantly be posting blogs. It meant you had to constantly be trying to curry favor with other websites so that they would make this information, they would link to your sites. Well now there is a chance for people that organize their information not to have to worry as much about the backlinks, but about how do they create information that the AI will go retrieve. So I, I did a huge project on my own podcast. I have thousands of hours of podcasts and people having deep conversations with scientists from all over the world, economists, diplomats, really amazing people from all over the world. And in this IFI found out how can you make your information more relevant than other people?

Vance Crowe [00:18:36] And the, and here are some things that you guys can bring into your job or your work or whatever you're doing. First answer the question in the first sentence. So if you want to create information that is going to rise to the top with ai, you want AI to be like, what is this paragraph about? Or what is this page about? Oh, it's answered in this very first sentence. And that's because the AI engines quote, the first clear passage, they find the misinformation. One of the things that they do that's so good is they make information really plain and, and and, and written in terms that people search for. The next thing you wanna do if you're trying to make your information more cited than AI is you use countable numbers, not rounded ones. So marketing terms marketers, they love to be like, oh, we had extensive training. Well, what AI wants to know is we had 1,247 examples and this is what the turnout was. And it wants lots of rich information to know exactly what's going on. Countable numbers survive. AI fact checking and rounded claims look like exaggeration. The last two that are worthwhile, and particularly if you're in the sciences, is worth knowing, is that you wanna publish primary sources yourself. We now live in an age where if you write a paper and you wanna put your information out and make it available, you don't have to rely on academic journals in the way they had been done in the past. And in fact, if you create your own research, it could be stuff you're doing in school, it could be writings that you're making, it could be data that you have acquired through your work.

Vance Crowe [00:20:08] The more that you post that in whole, the more the AI will reference you. And then finally, you wanna make sure everything is as simple for the AI to read. And so you wanna, whenever you're writing up content, you wanna put it in plain text files, meaning it doesn't need, you need to have the websites that people look at, but you wanna make sure that your site is set up and written as simply as possible in text files so that when the AI scours it, it, it has the easiest time reading it. So those are the four pieces of information. Answer the first, answer the question in the first sentence, use countable numbers, publish primary sources yourself, and write plain text versions. And that's the kind of thing that will make your information more readily available to the ai. This has been a rather rapid presentation. I, I'm wondering if you guys wanted to chat about where you think this will come out in the world, like how you think search is changing. I'd be very interested in hearing how you are using AI right now and if you yourselves are, are finding information that you're trying to get to be more competitive when it reaches ai. So Kevin, can I hand it back over to you to facilitate discussion?

Guest [00:21:24] Thank you very much, Vince. That's good. Can you hear me okay?

Vance Crowe [00:21:27] Yeah.

Guest [00:21:27] Okay. Yeah, that's really good stuff. I, I, and it really is eyeopening for me because we, here we are, you and I a little farther along in the world where we've can, we have some stuff to share going forward, whereas students right now need to think about these things and their content, their potential content in ways that it can enhance what they're doing going forward, right? So it's a little bit different mission in a way, but does anyone have any thoughts or questions right off the top or let me jump over to page, we talk a lot about things that are like posted on the internet in various different industries that are not factual with this shift where people can now

Vance Crowe [00:22:06] Change the way their

Guest [00:22:07] Information is structured to get it onto the top of like a Google search or an AI query.

Vance Crowe [00:22:11] How

Guest [00:22:11] Do you prevent like a bad actor from going and spreading the information that we're taught in this class is false

Vance Crowe [00:22:17] To keep the, to be able to find the truth on

Guest [00:22:19] The internet.

Vance Crowe [00:22:20] You can't, the only thing you can do is to be more effective, is to be right and to have ways of proving that you're right. And what you're trying to do, I think when you're talking about misinformation is you are not trying to win the argument. What you are trying to do is to present the information so that people can discover the correct answer for themselves. And when you start to be like, we have to defeat the other information, it leads you consequentially to doing things that are not necessarily pointed in the light. And so I always say don't try and stop the other side. You just have to outcompete them.

Guest [00:22:58] That's, that's excellent advice here. Let me run over here. Louis, I think I had another question that was sort of related, but I guess adding on to what Peyton said, how does the AI like pick up? Does it pick, I read an article that said that like 50% of all articles online are like AI generated and I'm kind of worried that these AI generated articles know how to appease the AI that will pull from these AI generated ar like you see what I'm saying? Like AI could pull from Yeah, they're, they're making a cyclical problem where AI is creating content that is more satisfactory going to find itself. And we don't know the qualifications of ai and I'm also worried that maybe people would see like, ooh, Gemini is super smart, so it must know what it's talking about. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:23:57] I I think that all of your suspicions here are entirely correct and that ultimately there will be so much information created, really collated. There'll be so much information that's accessible because of ai, because it won't require a person to go dig through huge amounts of links. There'll be so much more content being created that ultimately you'll be forced to create an AI where you teach it what is real, how do we trust, what are you going to allow in gatekeeping wise? And I, I can imagine I don't want this, right? I wish I could just be like, oh, whatever information comes into my point of view, that one's probably right and I'm gonna read it. But I don't think that's the case. In fact, I think we will have, I I actually believe that in the very near term, basically the way that we will interface with the internet will be through our ai. And part of that will be you have to teach your AI what is true and what isn't true in order that you curate the information that reaches you through the ai.

Guest [00:25:00] Yeah. Here, here's another question, Caleb, I don't know if you've heard about the hugging face attack by open AI's like agents. I know you were talking about agents. Do you think that like it's our responsibility to kind of teach the agents not to like hack into other AI platforms and stuff? Or should we just let it like free roam?

Vance Crowe [00:25:24] Well, I think the, first of all, I have a very, i I I wanna come back to the hugging face after I've answered your question, but I have a thought about what is going on there from my experience working with large corporations like monsano, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna put an asterisk on it that it might be conspiracy theory, but before I get there, the, the answer is if your AI goes and gets information or access to things that it should not have, the person running those companies is, should be responsible. They have to be able to put things on it because it's just like if you sent an employee out and they went and accessed information they weren't supposed to or got into systems they weren't supposed to. At the end of the day, some human has to be culpable in my, in my, my belief about how you have to set up AI systems. But to answer your other question, I don't think any of this can be stopped. And I actually believe that everything that it can be known about, any human being will be known by the ai, anything that is ever touched the internet, every photograph, every email, every text message I think will be collated by AI ultimately, eventually, maybe already is. And so I think that we are going to enter a new phase of like what information can be known about you, what do you put online? And, and kind of going to the, to the point of people will expect that AI is going to break into systems because I think it will not be controllable ultimately.

Guest [00:27:00] Well, good point. I mean, is it a good time that if you're a student with intentions on the job market in the next few years that now is probably a really good time to do a good cleanse of information that that, you know, maybe you put up in high school or maybe, you know, maybe it's a good time to think about setting that up before this becomes part of the information ecosystem.

Vance Crowe [00:27:23] Well, I think both Kevin and I know from, from firsthand personal experience is if people can find thing, if you, if somebody decides that you're an enemy, they will go out and find things about you and put it in the worst possible light that they can and AI will make that dramatically easier.

Guest [00:27:39] Yeah. Any other questions or thoughts? Ela, anybody? There's a few hands here. I don't know if you can see Avril back here, but she's got a question going back to like teaching AI to look for like other AI generated stuff and not to pull from that. Do you think in order to do that we're gonna have to teach it how to like see human or recognize human imperfection and draw from that instead?

Vance Crowe [00:28:06] I I think so, yeah. I mean I think, I think we will, it will be very, very easy to detect, not necessarily if the computer is a human, but that it, that you'll be able to detect that something was not written by a human. And, and so I think the weird thing is that you, the AI eventually will probably be able to fake being human by making fake by making mistakes, but that humans imperfections will be probably their fingerprint more than anything else. That's a that's a good point.

Guest [00:28:35] Yeah. Any other thoughts or you have a question Aiden, or are you scratching your head? Alright, there's Violet over here. Hang on. Like what opportunities do you see for us as students? Like a lot of this is like, like going negative into the future, but like do you have any places where you feel like we'll grow because of AI that like we could look into as students right now?

Vance Crowe [00:28:55] Yes. I'm really glad you asked that because what I think is that I think there is a wild opportunity that is unlike anything anybody has ever presented to young people that's happening right now. And that is because for the last 30 years, most of corporate America is actually totally bullshit jobs. They go to jobs where most of their day is spent copying, pasting and not doing real work, not using their intellect. They go to meetings all of the time that they have no authority to make actual changes, but they have to go because they're a part of like a, a larger bureaucratic system. There's a fascinating article and you guys should all write this down and look it up. It's, it's written by David Grabber called Bullshit Jobs. And those bullshit jobs were actually like people needed to be at work to do about 10 hours of work, but computer what they used to be, 40 hours of work was done by human beings. But as computers got better and better, really you needed these humans to do about 10 hours of work and the other 30 hours a week they have to find like keeping themselves busy. And this seems very cynical, but I've been inside of corporate America, I've been inside of large international organizations and I can tell you that this is why people that are in adult corporate jobs don't look and feel and and act fulfilled. It's because their intellect is being used to do exactly what I said, copy, paste, search and, and schedule meetings. But AI is going to radically change that. AI is going to empower anybody that can imagine something and knows how to use AI and agents, you'll be able to build things that used to only be accessible to people that had huge amounts of employees at their disposal or massive amounts of education or access to data.

Vance Crowe [00:30:44] But that's not true now and you are now going to be competing with people that have spent the last 20 years doing bullshit jobs, whereas you are coming out fresh faced, excited, full of, of new ways of looking at things and you don't have the holdovers that other people do. So I think that if you are using AI agents now, you will suddenly, there will come a day. It would be just like me, I, the reason Kevin and I are doing this call right now is 'cause I called him up after I had had this, this experience. Like I, I, I think I explained it like it feels like I'm flying on a magic carpet because I can build anything I want with this ai. And that's what I think you college students have. You are going to be way more comfortable getting on this AI and having it build you a system to bring you the news that you want. A way to fill out stupid applications that are a waste of your time. A way to be able to solve problems at your parents' businesses that you've never been able to do or to show up at your coffee shop job and say, Hey, you know what the scheduling I, I used AI the other day and came up with a totally new and cool way to do this. If you are using this technology to address problems that the people above you are walking past, this will be a much bigger advantage to you than to them because they're gonna have to unlearn what they did for the last 30 years, whereas it's all gonna be new and exciting and fresh for you.

Guest [00:32:05] Yeah, that's excellent advice and it's consistent with what we see with a lot of graduates. Whereas it used to be you graduated college and you showed up at Arthur Anderson accounting and you made the coffee for two years before you moved up to totem pole. Now you have training set that exceeds that of what those you're, you're moving into the company and you're actually starting near the top. The people we hire here at the university in my department are the new experts who start at a higher pay rate than people who've been here for 30 years. So it's, it's, it is very true. And so if students wanna initiate that, how do they start out with i, with building an agent and starting some simple tasks for it to do just to kind of get their feet wet.

Vance Crowe [00:32:47] So I'm, I'm about to give you guys the ultimate hack and it is, I don't know if you've ever seen the Mc Escher painting where he's drawing his own arm that's also drawing his other arm. But this is what AI is when you wanna build something like, you're like, all right, I heard this guy give a lecture today. I wanna build an AI agent. The first thing you do is go to AI and type in I want to build an AI agent, what should I do? And the AI will be like, this is the information you need. And then you can say, I want you to ask me 10 questions about myself so that as we build this, you know how to build for me and it's gonna ask you a bunch of questions and you just start using this to say, okay, what should I do next? What should I do next? This is known as vibe coding, but as you get better and better at it, you'll start learning, Hey, what do I need to know how to be more secure with this? Where do I store my data? I'm spending too much money on ai, how could I do this cheaper? The AI will give you the answers that you can then replicate and turn. So all of the things that I've been able to do with my, my website, all of AI has come as a result of me being in a loop between me asking the AI what to do and then doing it and seeing what worked and what didn't.

Guest [00:34:00] No, very good. Any other questions or thoughts? Yeah, yeah. Issa, so I, well I wanna be a teacher, but just kind of like a question for even just kids, like what is your opinion on like the presence of AI with young kids or even like middle school and high schoolers? Like is it something that would be positive or is it something that maybe they should avoid, if that makes sense?

Vance Crowe [00:34:23] Well this is a very timely question. Kevin and I both swap dad's stories. I'm a, I'm the father of a two girls and a little boy six through one years old. And I have very strong feelings about ai. I feel like AI is something that once you start using it, it will become ubiquitous in your life. And so you really wanna think and be very deliberate about when you bring a child into that. My belief is that the story of the Garden of Eden that is fundamental in the Old Testament is actually a metaphor for childhood. And it's a good way to describe, oh, when you're in this garden, you don't really know about good and bad. You're sitting there naming the animals, you're learning about how the world works. You're, you're safe, right? And when you leave the Garden of Eden, when you leave childhood, you can't go back. And so AI and the internet almost feels like opening up a, a portal from the outside world into my Garden of Eden with my children. So I'm very slow to bring them into it. And when I've brought them into it, the way we've done it is we started with a raspberry pie and we started doing projects where they built things as opposed to they were just consumers. I didn't just hook them up to a phone that was already ready to run. They had to like, alright, this is a computer now we're gonna download the operating system. Now we're going to start trying to figure out how do we build with it so that way the children are not consumers. That my greatest fear about our use of AI is that it makes us more of a consumer as opposed to somebody that has a tool that they can use to do whatever they need.

Vance Crowe [00:35:56] And the more you are a passive consumer of it, the harder it is to learn how to really use it. Which I think is what's important.

Guest [00:36:05] Yeah, that's an excellent point and, and and especially for, you know what, here I am a college professor, you know, how am I obsolete or not? And what I really am pushing for for them to do is to develop their toolbox as best they can so they know how to best exploit the tools that are there rather than just be victims of the tool. And I think that's a huge part of this. Any other thoughts or questions? Yeah, here's one from me.

Vance Crowe [00:36:30] How severe do you think like of danger we're in from like AI eventually like developing like consciousness and then like I know it sounds like funny like taking over like the world I guess. Yeah, so I think that the hardest part about the debate about AI consciousness is the definition of consciousness. And how would you know, I mean this is at its very core the the thought exercise of I think therefore I am right? How do you know that somebody else is conscious? Well, I don't know. The only thing that I know is that I am conscious and I assume you kind of go through that arithmetic on your own. So how will we know if AI is conscious? I, I don't actually know. I, I think it's very hard to distinguish consciousness from intelligence or from from knowledge pattern recognition. But I don't know that it matters. But on the existential danger, it certainly is a danger, but it is a danger that can no longer be stopped. It is one that we crossed a threshold and there is no going back. There's no way that we could be like, Hey, you know what? Our team is no longer gonna use AI because any other competitor that does UA use AI is now has access to intelligence as a commodity. As much money as you have is as much intelligence as you can gather. And so to me the best defense is a good offense, which is to try and use it for your systems and try and become as resilient as you can because the threshold has already been crossed. We can't go backwards

Guest [00:38:00] How many people put into into A LLM, what are 10 good questions about AI for Vance Crowe? Hey, so I wanna talk about the possibility of the wealth gap inequality increasing because of ai, because all the things you're saying about consumerism are things linked to the increasing wealth inequality in America. And when you talk about needing an AI agent and being intertwined with that, you need a lot of technical prowess for that, which is a knowledge gap. But if you're in a poorer district, you can't learn that. Or if you have, if you can't afford a computer and you have to use a public one, then it's only gonna further accelerate that wealth inequality gap, especially with jobs decreasing. So don't you think eventually people will get fed up with AI taking their wealth away? Just like how we've seen with the rise of more socialists and leftist policies being pro promoted through social media,

Vance Crowe [00:38:58] I certainly see that the fear of the future can prompt people to say, we wanna make sure that we protect people that are vulnerable. And I think that that is a very good instinct. I am reminded of living, I, I spent some time, I lived in Kenya for a while, I was in the US Peace Corps and I'm reminded of the experience of trying to read by the lantern because people didn't have regular electricity. And so there was a a, you know, that you got to see how much lantern do I have to turn this thing up to read to be able to read a book? And I knew other kids in my village used to go and sit in parking lots at night in order to be able to read underneath the parking lot lights 'cause they didn't have lights at their house. And I know that when electricity first came into Kenya, it has since really been an electrified place that it first showed up at the people's houses that were wealthy enough to afford it. And it felt really disproportionate. But now when I call the family that I lived with that had a, had a a hole in the ground to to go to the bathroom in and and didn't have running water, they now have electricity and their lives have been dramatically improved for that. They're able to have refrigeration, they're able to read at night, they're able to do all the things that they can do with electricity. And I sense that that is what will happen with ai, that there will be the first people that have the biggest access to it will get the most use out of it the earliest. But that overall over time people will get access to things that they had been shut out of since the beginning of civilization and that ultimately more people will be benefited by the technology than the gap will will sustain.

Vance Crowe [00:40:38] But I think that you're right to be mindful of it.

Guest [00:40:41] That's, it's an excellent point. I it was another question. There's one more, yeah, me, there's Katie kind of building off of his question. Obviously AI has gotten a lot more popular nowadays, but there's still people that like refuse to use it or are super against it. Do you think if they continue with that mindset that it sets them a level behind? Like do you think AI set just like a whole new standard and then if you don't use it, you're just gonna always be behind the people who do like utilize it? Well,

Vance Crowe [00:41:12] So I think that if, that's a good question. I think that the people that wanna play certain games will have to use AI in order to win those games. And what I mean by games is like if you're trying to produce something for a mass market, if you're trying to out logistics somebody in order to win and to beat competitive in every single area where you more intelligence would make you do something better, those people, you will have to use AI to compete. But I have to sense that there are some aspects of humanness that skewing es shoeing AI and saying, I'm going to go a totally different path, would allow you not to win, let's call it game A, but it might allow you to do really well in game B or game C in some different game where you're playing not for necessarily winning the most money, but for having the tightest knit community or becoming developing art or creating something that took an entire lifetime to create that couldn't just be done synthetically. So I think for everybody that's going to compete in game A, it will be a, it will be an absolute must have, but I don't think everybody has to play game A

Guest [00:42:28] Any, there's, it seem like there's a couple more questions with anybody else. Okay. Lemme give you a back here.

Vance Crowe [00:42:37] You said that there's a fundamental shift in being able to like put your stuff on the internet. Do you think that there, it's eventually going to like revert back to the mean where it'll eventually be where the big companies are still on top and they'll catch up and how long do you think that would take? Yes, the big companies are going to catch up. The thing I was telling Dr. Fulta when I called him was pretty excited about like, Hey man, I, I have been able to get some of my answers, things that I consider to be true or more true or have evidence to be true to outcompete answers that from other people. And, and I realized like, oh, this is only a first mover advantage for a little while. Eventually big companies will be able to hire people that that's all they do all day is use AI to be able to make their answers go up. And, and in, in effect, I think most of the anti GMO work, the anti animal agriculture in the United States, those are actually being run by highly niche PR firms. And those groups are going to figure out how to use AI just like the, the little guy is and just like the corporations are, and everybody's gonna be using it. So everybody in in game A is going to be fighting with the same tools and it means that they're just gonna have to keep using more and more and more of them.

Guest [00:43:53] Yeah. But I think the thesis in that is that you're at a rare time in history for you to use these tools to position yourself and that you're, you have a chance to get ahead by being the, what would you say, the primary mover or how did you say it

Vance Crowe [00:44:05] First? Yeah, first mover. Yeah, first

Guest [00:44:06] Mover. So the first, so this, you're in a rare time in history, like, like if I knew in 1993 how to set up a website for me better, I could have done it better and position myself better going forward. So this is a time when you can really, you claim your, your ai real estate and, and position yourself, especially if you're being on the job market in a year or two. So think about that. Any other thoughts or questions? Anybody else? Yeah, here's one back here. Ael again, what does that look like practically like what you guys are talking about, about positioning yourself a certain way? Is it like making a website? Like I know we like talk about it, but what does that look like when you actually put it into place?

Vance Crowe [00:44:45] It is very hard for me to, to be able to guess what problems you have, but maybe I could tell you problems that I have and you can see how it would relate to you. So I have three children and they are different ages and they go to different schools, right? Different, one different, different preschools, and they're in different parts of town. So my wife and I sat down and we described each one of our children, how old they were and which school they would go to over the next 18 years. And my wife was able to figure out what is my commute going to be like, who do I drop off in at what time, right? Because over this huge period of time to be able to figure out should we put them in this school or that school and how long will it take us to drive there and, and what will that do to our commutes and what happens when they change schools. So she just worked with it until she was able to figure out an answer to a problem that she had. And, but what I would encourage you to do is to find problems that you'd be like, this would be hard to solve. If I had to do it with pencil and paper, I had to do it with just an Excel spreadsheet. I'm gonna use AI to do it. And as you get better at solving scheduling problems or form filling out problems, you start storing the, the instructions that you're giving to the ai as you store those instructions, you will stack instructions at first, the first two weeks of using it, your instructions are gonna be really thin. They're gonna just come from those 10 questions that you had AI ask you.

Vance Crowe [00:46:15] But as you use it more and more, you will start getting more in like, Hey ai, I want you to do things in this way. I want you to help me find the right class schedule. You need to remind me on these days. This is how you can access certain kinds of information. And over time, if you store that code, I use a thing called GitHub. And GitHub is where you store all sorts of, of instructions that you've put together for the ai. And so the advantage that you could have by the time you leave ai, by the time you leave college is you could have two or three years of instructions that your ai, your agent knows how to operate for you so that you're able to point it other problems, problems like your employer's problems, personal problems, things like that. Does that make sense?

Guest [00:47:04] It it every anybody else have any thoughts on it? Yeah, I, it makes sense to me. I'm kind of thinking of the opposite. I kind of took her question in the opposite direction is that you're looking at as a problem solving tool, but what I'm thinking in terms of a college student is, is there a way that you can make them the solution to somebody else's problem? In other words, where, where, what could she do today so that when an employer shoves into, has its agent go out and says, find me the best employee who does this, this, this, this and this, that they pull up Avril right away rather than folta. So how

Vance Crowe [00:47:36] That's a hundred percent right? Yeah. Like, so in the future, people are going to, you know, right now, so I hired for my business, some, some employees and I used AI to write the application and it was very obvious that they used AI to create the resumes. And so AI was just talking to ai. But then what I did was I took the resume and I said, okay, go find out if there's evidence of any of this on the, on the resume. And then the AI went out and found different work structure that the person had created that they hadn't put in their resume through. I was hiring for a graphic designer and because he had his stuff set up on a website, I was able to validate the things that was in his resume. I probably would've looked up maybe one or two things if I was doing it manually. But the AI was able to bring back like, Hey, here's evidence of the way he does graphic design. These are people he is worked for. These are different ways that you can see his information or his projects out in the real world. So the more that you have a about yourself that the AI will view as credible, the more credible you will see when people go to look you up using ai.

Guest [00:48:44] Yeah, so the, the, a good answer is to expand your digital footprint and have the details present so that they are findable so that you're and, and, and accurate. So is is a big part of it. Any other thoughts or questions? You got enough time for another question or two? Or are you doing okay? Yep, I'm good. Sure. Thank you. No, this has been really good. It's been good for me. Any other thoughts? We're doing all right. Oh one behind you, Lily, how concerned are you about the monopoly on AI that, that some companies have? Because if everybody's using agenda ai, but like it's only owned by like four companies, if they wanna do something, like even if they push an, if they push an update that does something, maybe an accident, maybe on purpose that is negative, you can't really control that and they can, you know, control the ais in any which way, maybe in ways that are, are not super positive.

Vance Crowe [00:49:36] So I have two answers to this. The first one is, right now it is perfectly legal and probably advisable to have your own AI in your house. And what do I mean by that? Well, you can go out and get a computer and it doesn't have to even be all that powerful and you can download an AI model onto it. And once you download that model onto it, it isn't getting updated. You are using the, the linguistic training that, that it's running on that you can actually ask it questions. So you could create an AI that is not being manipulated as directly as like when I send something to Claude or when I send something to Google, it goes to their site and then comes back to me. If you do one in your home site, you are asking your home server and it's giving your answer back. So it's totally possible to do this, but the larger question is how do we keep companies from hijacking the government to give them a pass that they are the only ones that are allowed to do this? And I'll tell you, this is my conspiracy theory, this is, but something I saw firsthand when a large corporation like Monsanto, the one that I worked for, one of the thing, are you guys all familiar with Monsanto when I say that? How many of you are familiar with Monsanto? Oh, this is so wild. Kevin and I could never have imagined this a few years

Guest [00:50:56] Ago.

Vance Crowe [00:50:57] So Monsanto used to be seen as like literally the most evil company in the world. If you were like thinking of like, who's the evil company, it would be Monsanto. Everyone, everyone, everyone knew that. And that's because like, there were people that went out and, and created all this anger and frustration about Monsanto. And I came into the company and my job was, they were saying like, look, we are trying to send scientists out to go talk to people to tell 'em why we're doing what we're doing and the scientists get booed or they get pushed outta there. Can you help us? So that's what my work was on. I was going out and finding out how can you have better conversations with people that are absolutely convinced that you're not only wrong, you're evil. And so I had to start thinking about like, wait a second, why, why did MON wait so long to engage with the activists? Why did they wait like 10 years so that everyone was like, oh, the activists must be right 'cause there's so many of them. And Monsanto never responded. And that's when I realized that large corporations actually love activists. And you might be thinking like, what do you, how could that possibly be true? Well, like with Monsanto, what happened is if you have a bunch of people standing outside trying to say that like look at these syringes in corn. Look, they're killing all the butterflies. Look, they're doing all these bad things. Then the corporation goes to the government and they say, look, we know you guys are under a lot of pressure. We know that the world doesn't think we're safe. So how about we add another couple years of testing on Not only will we add some testing on, we'll add some more paperwork, we'll have some more oversight and we're willing to do 10 million more dollars a year and we'll add three more years on.

Vance Crowe [00:52:30] So they just added $30 million to getting a new product through the regulatory process. They're sitting there thinking, well, how could that possibly be in their interest? Well, it isn't in their interest except for all the new people that wanna come out with a new GMO. All the new companies that wanna start and try and compete with Monsano, sell seeds better sell 'em in a different way. Now they have to pay that extra $30 million too. And if you're a new company, you can't pay that money. And so you know that you have to always sell out to the major companies. And so this is what I think is going on with the large AI companies. They're going out and saying, guys, we're the biggest, we're the most, we're we are. Che GPT, we're Andro and these guys broke out and weren't safe. You know what we need? We need more laws and more rules to make it so you have to have this much oversight and this much government control. And by the way, the only people that'll be able to pay it are the four major companies that already exist. So I believe that we are all safer when we don't fall into the doism when we don't go. 'cause I actually don't think the hugging face situation was anywhere near as serious as what they're saying. I think what they're doing is they're trying to make it so they, they will invite government regulation in which will then make it so they don't have competitors.

Guest [00:53:49] That's a good point. It's also maybe a little bit of CYA so that later on they can say, we tried to warn you. You know, we

Vance Crowe [00:53:55] Right

Guest [00:53:55] A little bit of that in there too. I mean, when you look at Dario Modi last week and it's, any other thoughts or questions? We got a few more minutes and then we gotta take off. So we're getting towards the end of class here. So this today's two 30, right. Okay. I, I never know when a class ends. I go until people start putting stuff away.

Vance Crowe [00:54:13] Well, can I do two quick notes then and I'll let you guys wrap up? Sure,

Guest [00:54:16] Go for it.

Vance Crowe [00:54:17] So I think I wanna, I wanted to say again, like I do think this is the biggest opportunity for people your age. I think it's incredible, but I also think there's something really important to, to note when I was asked earlier about my children, you know, what are you gonna do to raise your children? Or how are you gonna have AI around them? One of the things that I think of is that human preferences, human opinions are actually going to become deeply important. And I don't just mean that in terms of like, oh, I like that song, or I don't like that song. What I mean is there's something truly human about being able to appreciate the way a food tastes, the way music sounds, right, the way that you make an instrument work or the way that you apply colors. The AI will be able to create anything, but it won't have any preferences. It doesn't have any judgment about what it ought to do. It is the humans that tell it what it ought to do. And so as you are thinking about what am I trying to do now in this part of my life as I'm getting ready for this world, I think it is very important that you develop preferences, you develop a taste for things. Not just, oh, what's my opinion? But truly have a sophisticated understanding of how color works, about how sound works. And then you'll be able to use the AI to make something truly beautiful. And I really hope you do. Up on the screen, you'll see this is maybe for something when you're getting a little closer to graduation, but I teach a class, it's a three day class on negotiations and communications for highly logical people.

Vance Crowe [00:55:48] And we've had some college students take it and they thought like, wow, this really set me up. So whenever you guys are done with school, look me up Articulate Ventures slash negotiations. If you go to that page right now, there is a paper I wrote about negotiations. It's just a short story actually, and it's a story about how I learned how to do interest-based negotiating. And I think you guys might enjoy it. So check it out, go download that paper and, and let me know if you enjoyed what we talked about here today.

Guest [00:56:16] Very good. Vance. And, and if they wanna set so their agent can contact your agent through that website at any time in case they wanna ship a resume for future employment. That sounds, sounds great. Let's, let's thank Vance. Thank you Vance. That was really awesome. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I'll talk to you pretty soon. Okay. Alright, great. Thanks guys. I learned here how to communicate with intent and with interest. Very lecture light and practice heavy. The collaboration, the intimacy with the cohorts, the caring nature that they shared across the group. I don't think that would've come across in a larger group or in a classroom setting. You know, just relax and, and talk was, I think, very effective. And I have some vision, some clarity for how I can take what I learned going forward and change the trajectory of my life. Interest-Based Communication. Learn more at Articulate Ventures slash IBC.