Dr Lollie Mancey 0:00
I am concerned that we're being too slow in our reaction to this. I think we're being a little too guarded. And I think we need to lean in as a nation now and say, Let's build this future together. Go from passive to active. Let's actually understand what this is about, because otherwise we're coming up the rear all of the time and reacting to things.
Finola Howard 0:19
That's Dr Lolly Mansi, anthropologist, futurist in innovation and provocateur. I first came across her when she was interviewed on the Tommy Tiernan show. She had me mesmerized with her ability to engage on so many levels about what our potential future might look like. This episode is in keeping with my own deep dive into AI as a tool for growth, and she expanded how I thought about that. I'm curious how land with you. I'm Finola Howard, Business Growth strategist with a joyful heart, and your host of the your truth shared podcast, I believe that every business has a story to tell, because that's how the market decides whether to buy or not, and your story has to resonate with who you are and with the people you want to serve. And this podcast is about helping you reach the market in a way that feels right to you. So if you're an entrepreneur with a dream you want to make real, then this is the podcast for you, because great marketing is your truth shared like you. As an entrepreneur, I'm particularly interested in AI right now. I'm particularly interested because of the impact it has on our businesses and how we're shaping our businesses. It is a threat to some of us. It's an opportunity to others, and lots and lots of stuff in between. And I kind of wanted to flesh out some of these conversations with my wonderful guest here, who is the wonderful Dr Lolly Mansi, who calls herself anthropologist and futurist in innovation, amongst other things. But I do like this because it kind of underpins this idea that she talks about a lot, which is human Plus technology, so anthropologist plus futurist, and I thought that would give us a nice grounding for this conversation. So welcome, Dr lollyman, thank you for having me. I'd like you maybe. Let's start. One of the things that you say quite a lot is that we're in a time of transition and chaos, and that we are at this level of, like, huge change. And I'm really seeing change change change. Like, maybe three or four months ago, we were all kind of talking about and we had been talking for some time about AI, but it just seems like even in a couple of weeks, it's gone like this, this, this, that I'm now seeing something on Instagram where you can put in a prompt that is shared with everyone, that you can do this digital image of yourself in a pack, like a toy pack, and you can get this thing created where you you are, the toy you're reaching out to your left to put it, to Take the the glass sunglasses that are to your left, and you're putting them on and you're walking forward, and we do that with a little prompt, and it's like mind blowing. What we can do now?
Dr Lollie Mancey 3:11
Well, yes, however, we are also uploading our image to those that are collecting our data for all sorts of different things without even realizing it, because, Yay, we're all having a fun little play. But there's so much more to all of this, right? So when we you know the the, let's use the example of the Ghibli work recently, you know, of the, the incredible animator, Ghibli, you know, who is, you know, understandably sore that you can now upload your image and have it in the style of Ghibli, right? So in terms of this sort of the anime version of that, it all seems very harmless and really lovely, but there's a couple of things that pop out immediately. First of all, the actual artist who designed that style is not happy about this, about it being copyrighted. But also, where is this, or where is all of the data going in terms of what you're uploading? So here's my face, here's my image, here's my name, here's, you know, and so without being too dystopian, we've been doing this for a very long time, and we no longer own our own data. And in fact, I think we'll probably, and this doesn't go out with blame and shame or finger pointing, because I am also one of them. We'll probably look back at this time, and our children may turn around to us and say, You gave all of me away in my childhood pictures. And all of that data has now gone to big companies, and we continue to do this. So whilst this stuff all feels great, this playful stuff, and oh look, I'm a little action figure, and we're all sharing it and having a good old laugh at the same time. There's something, you know, else behind that that we need to be a little bit more aware of. Now, whether or not that stops us playing or not, you know, is another question, but, and it shouldn't, but we need to be aware of the fact that this is data harvesting as well as playfulness. It's just being done in a in a very playful way. It's kind
Finola Howard 4:59
of. Interesting because you made me go, oh, oh, what have I done?
Unknown Speaker 5:06
No finger pointing.
Finola Howard 5:08
I think it's worthy to say that for us to stop being giddy and stop to actually really think about it in the longer term. But it's interesting because I remember you saying at some point that people are terrified of it, but I think we've moved from being terrified now into giddy. Or am I wrong?
Dr Lollie Mancey 5:28
I think we don't really fully understand it, to be honest. And I think that we're exploring it, and I think that that exploration is good and positive, because we need to become AI literate in all senses of the word, but I think that it's quite magical at the moment. And there's this amazing study by Stanford University. It's like Berkeley University, and it's about the science of awe, and it's what's actually happening in your brain when you see something awe inspiring. Now, traditionally, that would have been, you know, kept for, you know, sort of, you know, giant landscapes or huge redwood trees, or, you know, the cliffs of mower and a beautiful day, you know, we're inspired by or, and what when we feel, or, or a beautiful rainbow, any of that lovely stuff, usually quite natural when we feel, or it's actually because we feel inconsequential to it, right? So it's like, I'm so tiny, and that's so amazing. And so what they started to do was they said to look at the science of what bits of your brain are highlighted, and then that's replicated now in VR. So the very first time you try VR on a VR headset and you sit, it feels very real, and you're like, Oh my God, what's highlighted in your brain? Is your awe inspired when you do VR over and over again? Not so much, right? So we're at that stage now with AI, where we go to magical it just made me an action figure. It squished me. Or, oh, it's, you know, it's great, and it feels very playful and exciting. But we actually have to dig a bit deeper to say, okay, when we're not, when we're no longer. So awe, inspired by it. What can we use it for? Where do we use it? Where don't we use it? And in, what are the some of the pitfalls? So we're heading into that area, but at the moment, we're on sort of the top of the top of the roller coaster, just about to go down, them down into the sort of the bit where we start to figure it out. A
Finola Howard 7:07
bit more you mentioned about redundancy. Also that when we feel inconsequential, we're in danger of feeling redundant. Tell us more about that.
Dr Lollie Mancey 7:14
I think that we have been on a very sort of utopian, dystopian, you know, polarity, for a while, which is a lot of people working with technology say, oh my god, it's amazing. And a lot of other people going, but, but, but, but dystopian. It'll take jobs. It'll change the world, etc, etc. Now we it's both, by the way, you know, and we are in a revolution at the moment that we haven't quite got to terms with so if we go back in terms of history, the agrarian revolution, into industrial revolution, into digital revolution, right? So we're using different digital platforms, the internet, different things, Excel, etc, etc. That all feels very doable now because we've been working with them for a long time. This is a cognitive revolution where we now no longer have the ability, potentially, to say we are the experts in the room. If we are experts, there is another body of expertise. And so that cognitive revolution where we decide to outsource certain jobs, tasks, pieces of ourself, even memory, for example, which is mainly technological. We don't know phone numbers, and we rely on technology to show us our memories and photographs and things like that, you know? And so when we outsource, that is a form of redundancy. So if we take memory, our memories are will shrink, no question, if we don't use them in the in the same way, and we will change neurologically. So we're already physically and neurologically adapting to the technology. So the redundancy might be part of us, but it certainly also looks like it'll be whole sections of society in terms of and it's not good enough just to say upskilling. We don't even know what that means. What do we upskill? Who do we upskill in? What? So this cognitive revolution is going to change the world of work and the world of education, and has started to but we're mostly not conscious of that. Yet, in five years time, we're going to be much more conscious of that. The
Finola Howard 9:12
question is, what do we do in the meantime? Like, there's a couple of things that come to me. One is, what are the things from an entrepreneurial perspective, or small business perspective in marketing terms, right? We started out, you know, because social media as a task for entrepreneurs is just a pain, because it's you either outsource it, and then when you outsource it, sometimes you think that the person you've outsourced it to doesn't truly reflect who you are, similar scenario but also things like we're just starting to learn now that we've got to teach AI much like we would teach someone, we're outsourcing it to, and if we teach them better, we bet get a better result. And one of the things in one of my programs recently, they used a prompt that I suggest. To them, which helps them build out their identity properly and feed it into chat GPT, so that they can get a really good output. And it comes back and they're realizing, oh my God, that's done it better than I could have done it. They the AI understands the customer better than I can. So where is my humanity? Now, if I don't understand, because you talk also a lot about human connection and our ability to read the room and our ability to connect and interface. But it seems to me, in some ways, with all of these prompts that are out, coming out all of the time, that actually, AI is better at reading the room than we are. Well,
Dr Lollie Mancey 10:36
it depends what your prompts are, and it depends what you've trained it on, you know, to be honest, but to you know, because there is no there is no one body of knowledge, like it's pulling on everything from the internet, but it's only bill it's only pulling on one type of idea, and that is so I'll give you an example. We have moral pluralism. Right? We can't agree across the world what is right and what is wrong. We don't have a global consensus on that. We have morality that steps in, in different religions, different things are okay and different, you know, cultural systems. So we are actually training AI on a global North sense of morality. But also we are not looking at indigenous thought systems, or as an anthropologist, all of that, the fact that, you know, there is one right and one wrong. So when you as an entrepreneur, you're kind of, you're thinking, you're not thinking about the nuances so much. You're literally trying to be all things. So now you can be an entrepreneur with AI, and you can have a marketing team in your AI, and you can have a content creating and so now it's one person, an AI, so and, you know, and it goes back to the same thing, how well do you know your customer to walk in their shoes? Well, a lot of entrepreneurs don't know their customer, their reality customers, owners, enough and their business will shift. They either they don't future proof at a time when they're solvent. They future proof at a time when they're thinking you know, which is all you know, always too late. So you can work with AI in a way that your capacity now should be to scale and understand your business and understand your customer, not all things to all people. So majority of entrepreneurs that I know, and I would see coming through UCD with sort of the entrepreneurial mindset we're thinking under the weight of the enormity of the things that we need to do. Most of us can't pay a wage to ourselves for the first couple of years. We certainly don't have a team. So when we're starting these businesses, is there a way of using AI to actually expedite our process? And the answer is yes, if you train it right? So become a really good prompt engineer. Set the memory setting on your GPT, if that's what you're using so it gets to know. You tell it who it is. You are an expert in marketing for this particular segment, etc, etc. The more you give it, the more it remembers, the more it knows you, the better it's going to be. So a little bit like having an intern and you train them to be great now you have an intern with the capacity of Einstein, so you know that's great. But at the same time, also, what is it that our role really is? So for majority of entrepreneurs, it's the bigger picture. It's the scaling. It's the idea of where to go next. It's that human to human relationship. We should be out meeting other people. We should be talking about our businesses, seeing where those collaborations go. Ai can't do that for us, but it can take the heavy lifting and the pain out of a lot of the entrepreneurial endeavor, you know. And to be honest, when we get to the point where it can actually represent me at meetings, then I know we've got to a point where I'm like, This is my my time better spent, because burnout is true and real. For most entrepreneurs, most of us take our eye off the ball because we're so busy in the trenches of just the day to day running of things that we can't keep growing it and seeing it our best value as entrepreneurs, we are ideas people. We've taken a piece of an idea, and we've turned it into alchemy, because an idea is not a business. We've We've literally created gold out of it, when we have proof of concept, when we have customer validation, when we have the, you know, the we've questioned our assumptions and we found our market segment. We now need to build that out. Our time is not best spent behind a computer, answering emails and doing all of the things we do on a daily basis. Our time is best spent relationally with other people in real life, building connections and collaborations and partnerships. It won't take that part from us. So to be honest, I think AI and the on the and the entrepreneur is almost a match made in heaven, if you understand your prompting properly. When I
Finola Howard 14:19
I get the sense of, I think it democratizes success, to be honest, because so many, there's so many, having worked with entrepreneurs for I'm over 25 years in business, I've seen the patterns of how they grow. I've seen the tears. I've witnessed them. I've handed the box of tissues over, and I think this is finally the solution to actually help you dream bigger, and it not be just a dream, but actually make it possible to be a reality and not get burnt out.
Dr Lollie Mancey 14:50
And don't forget, you know, your business isn't coming from Ai, your business could be validated through it to some extent. You know, you can get your you can ask it to build out a business model canvas for you. And. You know, and all of that, you've still got to check it and make sure it's right. Otherwise, if it doesn't know the answer, by the way, it'll make it up. It wants to please us, you know. So it will make up an answer if it hasn't got an answer. So you have to watch out for that. But you know, in terms of the the you know, the grounded ideas that you know, the the blue skies and the moon shots, it's not going to create the moonshots first, unless we give it permission to and help it. So, you know, in terms of, it joins dots between things that rational and makes sense, right? It's a good bad you know, there's no gray area for it. It's kind of like, this a good idea, this a bad idea. And if you ask it to do things that seem so I'll give you an example some of the one of the tasks I set my students when they first come into class in UCD to learn the entrepreneurial mindset is to create the worst soup. Let's create a soup that would be the worst delivery mechanism, the worst ingredients. It'll be the most terrible thing for the planet. That would be very difficult for AI, because it's not making sense in terms of it creating a proper business. But what it helps us do is it helps us as humans, relax that bit of our brain where we're just trying to succeed all of the time, to actually think differently. And by thinking differently with AI, we can do well. AI will play rationally into the rules. As humans, we don't. So when we don't play to the rules, there's plenty of examples of this in marketing, like liquid death, for example, water in an aluminum can. The recent, the recent advertising campaign by Oatley, which was to embrace its flaws and its issues, and it was fake Oatley, and then it went through seven iterations on a website. By the time you get to FEC Oatly, it says ring this number for customer service. It was a genius marketing plan that kind of like irreverence, is not going to come easily out of chatgpt, you know, because it doesn't, it doesn't work with any formula it could have pulled on in the past. So for humans to think differently, be wild, be bold, those moonshots, that's that's our space. But for something that's irrational.
Finola Howard 16:59
So if, if we have entrepreneurs who have been in the trenches for so long that their dreams have been crushed again and again and again, okay, because it's been difficult and they're burnt out and all the rest of it, and and they've had to play smaller. And actually remember society conditioning. They've probably been told to play small for most of their lives. That's a big shift to move into. I'm now free to be my genius self and then say, well, actually, do I have that? Am I actually able to be genius? However,
Dr Lollie Mancey 17:29
if that's a framing question, right? Because if you were, I don't want to bring up the States right now, but I will. But if you're in the States prior the Orange Man and the madness that's going on at the moment, so if you're in the states and you've had, you haven't had a failed business, nobody's going to trust you as an entrepreneur. If you're in Ireland, probably because of Catholic guilt and shame. You know, if you failed, you failed, right? Oh god, I had a failed business. All my students come in their 40s and 50s, and they're like, Oh God, I lost a business. Like, welcome to The Club. Now we can really get going, because you've built resilience. So you know that troughs of troughs of the peaks of enlightenment, troughs of disillusionment, you've proved them to yourself. They're the daily staple of an entrepreneur, right? So it's organized chaos to some extent for us. And so when we've seen that, we've bounced back from something, what did I learn from that experience? If you think about the whole Dragons Den model, like, kind of like, is it whether I agree with it or disagree with it? Sometimes it seems very explosive in the amount of equity they're looking for. What are you actually getting from that buy in? You're getting their experience in business, of businesses exactly like you say, folding, failing, succeeding, opportunities, timing, all of that that works into that zeitgeist, but you're also getting their Rolodex of connections. Most importantly, so each business that you have as an entrepreneur, you're building your connections and your network that is your absolute gold GPT can't do that for you. That doesn't have your connections. I can't speak to people the way you speak to people. We should be spending more time relationally connecting those ecosystems and building out those partnerships and speaking to other people, and let GPT take up the work or whatever platform that you, that you use. And so I think that the idea that sort of we're a little bit defeated by life again, if you have the entrepreneurial spark in you, you'll always have it inside of you to say either. But there might be just one more, you know, and I've heard serial entrepreneurialism discuss, discuss, almost like a sort of a mental disorder sometimes that we actually can't stop, but there's a compulsion in this. Just to see, is there just one more thing that I could do? You know? We other. We really want to affect change, and we are disruptive to a large extent. And I think that disruptive nature of what we want to do and what we want to create gets kind of lost in the day to day experience of how we of just how difficult it is to be an entrepreneur. You know you're working seven days a week. Your laptop goes with you on holiday. You know your your whole family live it if you're you know you've got people with you. So it's not it's different from a job. It's a full mindset. Do you
Finola Howard 20:05
think we can become more purposeful? Let me free frame this question. When you spoke about the world of work in one of your talks in Belfast recently, and you talked about organizations needing to become more purposeful because of Gen a coming along, but do you but that that has also been a trend over the last couple of years purposeful organizations. Yet when you talk when we actually get under the skin of a lot of these purposeful organizations, there's still burnout, there's still leadership issues, nothing really much has changed. Anyway, on the flip side, you'll see a lot of entrepreneurs becoming much more purposeful, because some of them have left those organizations because they wanted something better. And no, they're not working on the weekends, and they are like me swimming and not taking a client meeting until 11, like this there, I feel there is change in this space, and I'd love to see more people speaking about now, we're not all burning out because we've left it behind us, but maybe I'm naive.
Dr Lollie Mancey 21:09
I don't think so. And I think that it took Gen Z first and COVID to potentially as well, for us to really realize this. You know, that actually sitting on the M 50 until sort of seven o'clock at night is not normal, or, in fact, wanted, you know, arriving home when you're just saying good night to your kids is really not a way that any of us should be living, or should have been, you know. And so, you know, I kind of see I, you know, I might be a little bit optimistic, but I kind of see AI at the moment as a great reckoning with all of that, you know. Because why wouldn't we, and I'll come on to the negatives in a second, but in the positives, why wouldn't we take the heavy lifting out of our day? And the fact, you know, you have a bank holiday Monday, you've got Tuesdays like three days in a row, you know, it's just so heavy in terms of the content, why don't we take that bit out for ourselves and allow AI to take that bit for us, which we can do, and then we actually decide how we want to design our lives. And most of my students, I would say to them, you come in with a business idea, but actually, how many days a week do you want to work? How much money do you actually need? You know, what is your exit strategies? You want to sell this on? In fact, which you know, maybe don't call it the DR Lolly Mansi, you know, business maybe, you know, have a way of moving on from it. What is your what is your focus right now? And Gen Z, very clearly, are saying to us, I don't want to burn out. I don't want to drink as much as my parents. I want to spend more time socializing. We can see an awful lot of a movement away from dating apps in terms of their personal life, towards run clubs and in the experience of being together. And I actually think that that will dictate a lot about, you know, the companies in the way at the moment, companies are saying, come back into the office. We would prefer you to do that. And then they're going, Oh no, we can't get any people. We have to embrace remote working. We have to realize that's the that's the present. There are much more there's much more productivity on remote days, but there's social productivity on days in the office. But when days in the office are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of every week, which they are in Dublin, you can have a look at the gridlock on the M 50. Mondays and Fridays are free. So again, we've just gone back to that old way of being so but it's
Finola Howard 23:07
because we haven't imagined a new way of being like because
Dr Lollie Mancey 23:11
we equate that with with a with a with a drop in profit or productivity, which isn't the what the data shows us. So I wonder if it's not the micro managing, managerial headset mindset, you know, in terms of that of I need to see you, to see what you're doing. And so if we think about the way that we have since the Industrial Revolution, that we've organized our time, our lifespan, right? Maybe we're in school till we're in school till we're 16 or 18 or 20, maybe then we're in work, and then at 65 or 67 then we're in retirement. All that is now changing. So by 2050 we won't be retiring at 67 or 2030 actually, probably not. You know, we don't have the pension plan. We're going to be living longer, possibly up towards 100 years in the next 20 years, because AI is going to help us with so many of those diseases. We'll still have the lifestyle issues in terms of lifestyle lead disease, but we certainly get rid of an awful lot or solve a lot of the issues medically. And so on top of that, then you're going to be in and out of education throughout your life. So this idea of lifelong learning is actually true. You're going to need to upskill in different areas as the technology changes and as the need is however. And there's a big however to this, we are not all going to be working, and so there's no question that we are going to have, in my mind, a sort of a two tier system, and that will be through universal basic income, which is coming, I would say by 2035 to 40, that we will have a whole swathe of society that is purposeless and has no purpose to wake up in the morning and doesn't need to go to go to work, and I don't see investment in social enterprises and in the the equity piece that we're going to need in terms of what we're actually going to be doing and what our society will look like for those people on the medical side, doctors and nurses tell me that when we talk about this, that. Concerned about the rise in obesity and addiction and anxiety and depression, as am I. We can see this from many generations unemployed in different parts of the world, of what that looks like. And so if we are going to have sort of this two tier system, how are we going to help each other, and what will that look like? So the idea of a business hospice is something I said recently, and it got picked up. And I was saying, you know that the hospice business, hospice is not just about a taxi driver who will lose his business because of driverless cars. It's actually also areas within your organization that will become redundant. And the answer is not up skilling, that's an empty rhetoric. So what is the answer? And what I would love to see, at the moment I'm putting forward in a whole number of different ways, is that we collaborate on solving some of these issues that are coming down the line in a decade's time to actually say, what kind of a society do we want? Remember, we went into COVID and said we'd all be baking, you know, banana bread and have six packs, and we came out anxious, and most of us quasi alcoholics. It was depressing and awful, and we needed people, and we needed that connection, but also it was really great to have that time and that time with family. Let's design this future in a way that it works for us, rather than just taking what we're given, and I'm not seeing too much in that proactive space, and rather than going to work, I
Finola Howard 26:19
really take that because in so much of entrepreneurialism, and even about women and in work and women in entrepreneurialism and stuff, we talk a lot about having role models, and role models that are close, role models that are distance, so that we have something to as far up to but I also think that we need a role model for life, for how it could work if we weren't working, how it could what it could look like. We knew very clearly what the role model or the the design of industrial era thinking was, but we don't know what the design of the future looks like. So if we don't, if we can't see it, how can we even move towards it 100% so
Dr Lollie Mancey 26:57
then we went through this thing and the sort of 80s 90s, along with really about having it all, right? Like, and having it all actually meant burnout. So, you know, and I there is a lovely phrase, you can have it all, but it's not at the same time. Yeah, like, there's lovely data that shows us that actually, no matter how much your wage increases, anything up to six figures, that you're still doing the second and third shift as a woman. So you're still doing the care going, you know, caregiving. You're still, even if you have domestic help, you're still remembering birthdays and organizing parties and sending cards and doing family events and all of those things. So that's an extra weight on you. We've had the second shift. The third shift is on top of that now with the sandwich generation of elderly parents. So we get to that point, we also on top of that. You might add in menopause, just when things start to ease off a little bit. We've now got, you know, we've now got, sort of, you know, more things to contend with and to do. And so I think, to be honest, that we very much are, we took on a very masculine, patriarchal model of what we wanted. And I'm not sure that we've yet got to the point of saying, I would like a day that starts like you say, at 10. I would like a school day that doesn't finish halfway through the day. So I could actually work maybe three days a week, or maybe five, if that's what you want. But we still have a school system that's on the old religious idea that we were staying at home, you know, as breadwinners. I don't know any couples where they're not both working, because life's very expensive, so as a consequence, we haven't adapted towards that. If we look to countries like France, where your children go in at eight, at nine in the morning, and they come home at five, they're fed three phenomenal meals a day. They're actually not nuggets and chips, right? They're actually fed proper food. We look to the Swedish model, teenagers start at 10 or half 10 in the morning because they need more sleep in primary, they don't start until they're seven, you know, and so they don't have homework, so everything after that is to do with spending time with the family. So our education system doesn't fit for women or for the family. Good really,
Finola Howard 28:55
in Ireland, if we know this, and this is a wealthy country, and we know what it's like to be without money. We did it, and we remember it very, very clearly. Why are we not learning we're great with change. Irish people are really great with change. We adopt things very quickly. I
Dr Lollie Mancey 29:14
think it's our to be honest. I think we have a short term media reaction to everything, and I don't think we have much long term vision. You know, when we have a government that changes every four years, or doesn't, you know, like, kind of like, where is the, where is the long term discussion around 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, where is, where was the discussion? And we had, we had the separation of church and state. Don't have to be baptized to get into school, but why doesn't the school day finish longer? Why do we still have homework? Why do we still have a leaving cert? Why are teachers under so much pressure to get curriculum and have to be, you know, a jack of all trades and master of none at primary, you know, like, kind of, why do we still have that system that is absolutely putting teachers to the wall in terms of how exhausted they are and now they're still having to deal with, I mean. Mean, I was in a chat last week in the RDS, and it was like, Okay, great. We're bringing in more STEM subjects to the to the primary curriculum. You can just feel the weight on primary school teachers shoulders. Of them going, Oh, great. But now what we haven't even begun the conversation about AI literacy at primary and we should have,
Finola Howard 30:17
because they're also on top of that. They're dealing with a more anxious student population, yes, and
Dr Lollie Mancey 30:23
more and more people being aware of neurodiversity and multiculturalism and digital poverty and all of these things that we're having to contend with. And
Finola Howard 30:32
also kids who are not as social as they as they used to be, because they're they're so so used to being on a phone or on a PC or on a laptop, that their social skills have declined. So we
Dr Lollie Mancey 30:44
don't have an overall arching human flourishing policy in society, and it seems to be piecemeal, and it's not joined up, and the pressure points are always on those people like the primary teachers, who are literally under the strain, they're doing incredible work, but they couldn't possibly manage all of this. Now, one of the good things about AI, if we do adopt it at primary level, is that you can have personalized learning. It will help you with the neurodiversity issue. It will become a co pilot, not in the Microsoft way, but, you know, a teaching assistant for you. But we've got to lean in and do that in early stage, you know, and I think that the very first thing I would say, give me a magic wand, the first thing we do is we adopt something like the Finnish government did, which is they've got a beautiful course accessible to everybody in Europe called elements of AI. That's a National Literacy Program, and it's very accessible. It's free, it's on your phone, with a computer, your laptop, everyone should take that then let's have a conversation about what we want to build, but until we get the, you know, even the very basics of what AI is and the get away from the idea of it being utopian dystopian, it's a tool. It's a phenomenal tool when used right, and a very dangerous tool when used wrong. And at the moment, we haven't got the skills critical thinking, problem solving and a healthy mistrust of everything we see to and we need them embedded very early on. If we don't have that as adults, how can we impart that to our children? So I am, I am concerned that we're being too slow in our in our reaction to this. I think we're being a little too guarded, and I think we need to lean in as a nation now and say, Let's build this future together, but let's get go from passive to active. Let's actually understand what this is about. Because otherwise, when I don't like to use the term left behind, but other times, we're coming up the rear all of the time and reacting to things. I'd love to see us leading the way a little bit. We're small enough to be able to do it. Can I ask
Finola Howard 32:40
you a question, obviously, or on a podcast? It struck me the statement that you said about our government being having no long term vision. Why do you think that is, is there something historical that we're that we're always kind of in fight or flight, or why do you think that is? I don't think it's out
Dr Lollie Mancey 33:00
of any badness, but you would have heard this a year after year, decade after decade of the long term planning, the long term solutions. Where are they? You know, so do we have, do we have the right collaboration in place between the amazing academics in Irish research who can see far into the future with what they do, and then that consultation with industry, and then that consultation with the public, you know, do we have that dialog going? Because I don't feel that we do, and I feel that we try to do it. But even, you know, even in academia, we're siloed, you know, and so I would, I'm going to spend the next 10 years, you know, trying to really make much more of those connections, because I did a little thing for future called Future veil of RTE, a gorgeous show last year where we looked at Ireland, 2050 built it out and sort of said, this is possible. And the whole reaction to that was even in government buildings. But about six months later, and they said, Is this possible? We just, we've just shown you that it is. What do we need to do? So just heard we're about to do a second series. I'm so excited about that, and it's going to be okay. What steps do we need to take them? You know, let's tangibly go. If that's the if that's a future, do we want that future? Where is that discussion about the future we do want? And how do we retrofit? How do we go forward so far and retrofit, to take the steps into it? And I think it's that, it's that pragmatic way of saying, let's have a longer term vision. But also, you know, maybe some kind of citizens assembly where we all say how we feel, and it's okay to say fearful, and it's okay to say because the data that we had in the beautiful, you know, conversations we had in futureville with the people at the time, it was people in let alone. And I said, we know, what kind of a future do you want? And they said the same things. My great grandmother would have said, you know, which is I want a future where my children are safe, where they can afford housing, where they have a good education, where they have a job, where they can raise children if they want to, where we have security and we live in a nice community. We never really wanted. Anything else. So in terms of that, you know, in anthropologically, how do we then harness the technology to build that? And that's all possible, because that future of 2050 hasn't happened yet. It's unwritten. But what do we need to do to take the steps to it? So I do really fully, hand on heart, believe that what we have in Irish research and academia, and incredible expertise we have in Ireland and beyond, we can learn from all those other countries and collaborations. We can absolutely do this, but it requires a very joined up way of thinking, and we haven't got that, and for whatever reason, I'm not entirely
Finola Howard 35:33
sure, so it's basically the answer that you get offered us for entrepreneurs about collaborating more connecting more
Dr Lollie Mancey 35:41
amazing things all around the world, right? We can take a little bit of the things that we like, from Sweden, from Copenhagen, from Singapore, from is an amazing city called the Neom and the UAE, you know, they're building these sustainable villages. We can actually have a look at we we know what it is we need to do to be more prosperous as a society. I didn't mean financially. I mean for us, sort of, you know, our societal health, but we actually aren't taking steps. We tend to go either it's about profit and business or it's about society. Actually, there's a beautiful correlation between those two things. But if we're only funding with, you know, enterprise Ireland, or whatever it is, we're only funding the next and the next big unicorn. We're losing our way a little bit. We need to be funding Tech for Good and how we integrate that into people, into people's lives, and actually ask people, What is it that we could actually take some of the pain points out for you, and where does technology come in, and where don't we want it? Otherwise, we're setting ducks to the tech companies, and that's where
Finola Howard 36:41
we are right now, and we hand our power away, yeah, yeah. And has the government brought brought you guys in? Like, that's, have you been invited in,
Dr Lollie Mancey 36:53
not in a tangible way yet, but, uh, we'll make another program and we see what happens.
Finola Howard 36:59
What would you like with this idea in mind? What would you like people to do or people to walk away with from this conversation? What would you like to see happen? I
Dr Lollie Mancey 37:09
think a broader conversation across intergenerational conversation is needed around the kind of Ireland that we want. When do we ever sit and sort of design it? I remember someone saying to me recently in a talk I gave, he said, So do you think we'll go back to being the land of saints and scholars? And I said, Well, we can take from the past the parts that we loved and do love, and we can bring them into our future, but if we don't actively do it, then we're going to be dictated to on how that works. And we've we're not through any fault of our own, but we're very passive with technology. We've just accepted it in and this is just how it is, and we've got into really bad habits, and that's okay, but let's go a little bit more into the active mode of Why am I feeling that my brain needs this dopamine and I'm scrolling? Put in some, maybe put in some. You can put it. There's lots of free apps, like one called stay free that tells me how much I'm on my phone. Even I need that and I'm on, you know, I know all of this information, so it's not our fault, but we just need to go into a more active mode. We need to find out what's happening with the algorithms, and we also need to understand that basic AI literacy, and to be part of that, because there's going to be people that use, utilize it, that do very well, and there's going to be people that then are the recipients of that. And I would love to see more voices in terms of what that AI roll out looks like, and the kind of businesses that we create, because we're not going to just need businesses that create profit. We're going to need businesses and initiatives that create a better living condition and a better experience for us. And I don't see too much of that conversation going on at the moment. It's just all about the biggest, baddest, best and boldest in terms of profit. And I that is absolutely not the future that I want for society. I would like to say that if we do take use AI to take out some of the heavy lifting, what are we doing with that time? Are we putting it back into our phones, sitting on our sofas in the dark, you know, is that the best use of our time, or are we going back out there to solve some of society, society's issues? And if we are lucky enough to be able to have the privilege of being, you know, having our bills paid, and having some sort of financial security, then we should be judged on how we treat our most vulnerable, and we have an opportunity there. In terms of that your GDP is not the best judge of your success as a country. In my mind, it is literally how well we deal with those outliers. And we're going to have many, many more outliers, of people that are left out through AI that we need to start addressing, or otherwise, we're going to have a very strange Society of those integrated with AI and using it and those that aren't. And that's not a future that I'll go down with the ship. That's not a future that I that I want. Yeah,
Finola Howard 39:52
thank you so much. I think you've left us with not just stuff to think about which is valid, but actually the impetus to. Me be more active about it. So thank you so much
Unknown Speaker 40:03
for that. You're very welcome,
Finola Howard 40:06
and that's it for this episode, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Make sure to connect with Lolly on LinkedIn, and don't forget to click on the links in the show notes for the sources mentioned in this episode. And thank you for listening to your truth shared. If you enjoy this episode, please do rate and review in your favorite app at lovethepodcast.com/your. Truth shared and really help spread the word and it helps me to continue to invest in this podcast. You.
