What will happen when we have more and more AI systems as our co-pilots? This week we revisit episode 8 from season 1 to see how our thoughts have changed in the last 6 months, and its incredible to hear how we had to look up Stable Diffision, and GPT3, versus today when these terms just roll off the tongue! (Our conversation on AI continues in the last episode of season 2 - episode 20: Working in Partnership with Generative AI) .
We will be back in 2 weeks with a new episode for Season 3 !
Instagram didn't just give people cameras. It showed them what good photography looks like. People see photos and they internalize the standard.
Hi, I'm Kahran. Hi, I'm Deve. And this week on Thinking on Thinking, we're taking you back to season one to episode eight where we first talked about AI and explored some of the ideas of how work might change with AI and what we thought the future would hold.
Of course, we continued that conversation in season two with the last episode of season two, episode ten. And we'll be back in two weeks with the start of season three. So the notion that Seth Godin talks about to Kahran second, I was like, wait, who was it?
Is that there and he uses mechanical Turk as an example, which is Amazon service that lets you break up work into really small segments, right? And then people can go out and do that work for your company or whatever project that's outsourcing the work. And the thing he's talking about is how some jobs are going in that way that would take,
like, maybe if you're doing a translation, you would need a highly skilled translator to be able to translate a document or using the example of Wikipedia, right? You needed all these researchers, I think Encyclopedia, for example, had 120 full time staff and it like is something like billions of dollars of band hours went into creating this Encyclopedia.
And then Wikipedia managed to carve the work into small chunks that then people could just do. So now you could just burst it out and, you know, millions of people could do small amounts of it. Similarly with mechanical Turk, right?
You can get something translated. You're paying by the minute or maybe by the word or something, right? But you're being able to do something that was previously only available to, I'm sorry, that type of work previously only went to people who were highly skilled. So I was thinking about it in other contexts.
Like if you thought about Uber and like taxi driving at the system level, then you have transport as a service was previously something that was kind of done by a regulated, a highly regulated environment, right? Like taxis are highly regulated. And that was because they were trying to make sure that people were safe, right?
I think, I mean, we're speculating a little bit here, right? But now we're able to deliver that with technology that allows for people to kind of be safe. And whatever solves the kind of like needs that were leading to that regulated environment. But similarly, you're able to kind of break up the problem of having a system wide transportation solution into small discrete chunks that then can be done by a lot of different people.
So with like an Uber sort of service, like people can, individual people can help solve the kind of transportation service at a city level. So as I was thinking about that, then I was just trying to think about like what are the other things? What are the other waves that or other industries that this wave will now come into?
So I have actually some ideas around that. Please. So like a couple of weeks back, maybe last month or so, I got the invite to Dalit too, which is the AI generating AI image. Yeah, I remember you telling me.
Like you tell it that you tell it that a man dressed as an avocado at a football game and it'll give you four images of exactly that. And you could tell it, oh, 50mm lens close up shot background, blah, blah, blah. And it'll like exactly make that thing. It's really quite incredible.
And now because of that, so of course, the art market was slightly under disruption because of NFTs for whatever they are for. It was already under consideration of, okay, where is the future of art and where's the future of visual stuff going? And now because of AI generated art and how interesting it is, like there is this almost
surrealist quality to almost all of it. Yeah. Right. If you see that or there is another software, I don't remember what it's called like that's also another one of wait, let me just check the name.
Well, I got served ads this morning for something called Jasper that apparently will write your marketing copy for you. I was getting ads on Instagram for it. Yeah. The GPT three is that which is called that right?
Like that, that has been yesterday I was talking to like, I had a call with somebody who is doing who is working with like a SMBs for their local SEOs, like and stuff. And they were talking about how a lot of companies like specially the marketing companies who do national or global level SEO now, they will use GPT three to generate content for website blogs.
Wow. And it's so interesting, right? Like you don't have to pay anyone. You can just use that like an AI to generate this thing. I had another friend who was like this couple, they were developing a software which could
do text to voice very, very well. Yeah. And so well that you could give it a script and you could give it the intonation and all of those things that you want and it would convert it. So you could have podcasts episode, even if you didn't want your own voice, like you
could choose the accent and you could choose the gender and the age and like, you know, all of these specifications and it's so interesting. Yeah. Stable diffusion is the other software that I was talking about. I was reading about it a couple of days ago.
And it's very interesting, like how all of these softwares are coming up, especially as it almost to me feels like there was a point of time in the last decade where everybody was like Google Maps sucks. And then it transitioned into Google Maps is the only way people transport around the city. Like they do not know how else to get around.
Right. Yeah. And like it's such a, it was such a natural transition. You don't even realize when you stopped like looking at actual physical maps. So like, I remember when I, when we had first moved to Delhi in like 2009 and my mom and
dad used to have like a physical map when they were roaming around in the city. Right. Like my mom would be telling my dad which road to take and which turn to take and all of that because she had an actual map of the location. Yeah.
And now you can't even imagine that. Like I don't know if there would be anyone who would have purchased a map of Bangalore in the last five years because a map of Bangalore exists on your phone. Yeah. And I think to me it's also interesting that now the next wave of that has started.
Like, like for example, my dad was driving his boat last week and my mom and I were talking about how when, when he started driving about like 10 years ago, we, there was always charts. Right. And the charts were a big thing of it because you have to understand the tides and you have to understand basically that you need to understand the tides and then how it might
affect, you know, where you could anchor and what the level of the water. It's just, it's all on the GPS. Like, like there's a, and it's a really nice system. It has two screens that you can look at two different parts. Like you can zoom in on one and have zoomed out on the other.
It's great. Right. And then similarly I was watching Apple's product announcement yesterday and, and I noticed that with their new Apple watch, they're really going after some of the more extreme use cases.
So the new Apple watch can be a dive computer and they partnered with this diving company to build a dive computer app. And it's just, it's interesting to me now how we're starting to see these kind of mainstream technologies really go after the really, really specific use cases that used to be tackled by really only specialized equipment.
And now it's like, Oh, well, why not? Right. Like you can just, if you can do it, like why not be able to go after and show that this, this tool can also be used for this market. It's really interesting.
I was telling Goro because I'm like, yeah, I don't like that I have a dive computer. Right. Like I use it twice a year. A dive computer is just a fancy name. You know, it's a dive watch, right?
Like they just call them dive computers or something. And the main thing it does is like when you're scuba diving, it tells you what depth you went to and then based on what depth, how long you need to spend at lower depths to help reduce the nitrogen in your, in your system before you come up. The danger is that you, if you come up to the nitrogen, right.
And it's like, well, it's again, it was something that like when I learned to scuba dive in like 2000, I learned how to do it on paper and how you would calculate like, oh yes, if I go to this level, I need to wait at this level for five minutes before I come to the surface. And then, you know, then you get to the point where you use a dive computer, but now it's
like, well, I can just have my Apple watch. Why should I spend $250 on this kind of specialized piece of equipment? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that's, to me, it feels like it's a similar technology wave or it's part of the same technology wave.
Yeah. But it's a, it's a definitely, it's a different side of it than the kind of like labor replacement side. Yeah. But like it, to me, it's almost like, I think the place where I was coming from was
more, if we look at this GPS or the dive computer use case that you're talking about, right? Like in front of our eyes, like we are living through a revolution almost like world is changing and we can't, I can't really pinpoint the day when I like, you know, switched to Google Maps as my source of truth about traveling in a city.
But that is the case right now. And when I look at GPT three or when I look at AI generated art, that's what I feel. I just feel like, oh, you won't need somebody to generate actual artworks for you, because this is how you can instantly generate artworks. Like you don't need an illustrator.
And if this is where they are today, where they would be in five years, we know that like AI grows exponentially. Yeah. No, I was hanging out with some of my, my, my dad's friends who work at Microsoft last week and it was just really interesting.
So you know, there's a tool called co-pilot. Have you come across this and it writes code for you when you're it's basically a pair programmer that's an AI. Yes, yes, yes. My sister was telling me about this and she was like, it is insanely amazing.
At least I haven't seen it myself, but it's both like it will do syntax for you. If it's a new programming language, but you can also comment like, I need a function for this and it will go. Yeah. Right.
Yes. Yeah. So that yeah, my sister was telling me about how like, I think in a unity program that she wrote, she used it and it was very interesting. She just like, she told it to do something and it just wrote a piece of code
that did exactly that thing. And it's insane how awesome that is. So apparently on GitHub projects where co-pilot is being used, it's writing 40% of the code on average. This is how you're hearing last week.
Yeah. And then my dad's friend was also talking about how you could, because his daughter's very into manga and she was like, you know, I really want to write one someday, but I don't think I could do the drawing. And it's like, well, this is a different world, right?
Like now if you can write it, like something could generate the art for you, which is just an interesting, they're interesting use cases. It kind of expands, it reduces the kind of technical barrier to do something, which I think is interesting. I think we'll see more waves of like innovation, maybe you know, kinds of art or
people who feel enabled to be artists because they don't have the kind of barriers. Also, like there's so much interesting stuff within this to talk about, because like one good thing about all of the cultural implications of come on, somebody would say commoditizing it, but making it more accessible is also a fair way of saying it. Right?
Like, I mean, did Instagram commoditize photography? Sure. But like, actually good photographers didn't become like professional photographers didn't become worse because of Instagram. I would say that the like the average person became a better photographer because they
started taking so many photos and they started improving. Yeah. Like people 20 years ago probably wouldn't be so good at photography. I definitely think, I mean, I wouldn't say it's so much, well, I'd be interested in your thoughts, but I wouldn't say it's so much the output, which I guess is what I
would call Instagram and more the evolution in the input tools, right? Just the cameras have gotten better and the software to support the cameras has gotten better. So now like people, you don't have to understand Boca to be able to take like a cool, you know, I think what is the term depth effect, right?
All right. And there's all these people who never would have like my brother-in-law like takes amazing photos with his iPhone. And he just would have never put in the time to kind of like, like learn about photography in that way.
But now he doesn't have to, right? He just knows how to do a few of the things on his phone and he can focus more on like framing and he and I think absolutely, right? You, he's become much better at framing because of, I guess you're right, Instagram, right?
Because you start to see so much of photos in a certain style. That's kind of interesting. I wonder if that also pushes styles towards a certain kind of like place. So this is, I promise this is related. So do you know how like when they do studies of how kids learn, the more a
kid's parents speaks to them, like the more words a kid's parents speaks to them, the more faster the child learns the language and the better the child gets at the language. Interesting. I know, did you know this?
A little bit of like the related, so my, one of my best friends teaches kindergarten and so one of the predictors for her for success is how many, how many words children know coming into kindergarten. Right. And so like one of the big things she does is try to get them, you know, to
first grade, like just having expanded there because those are, those are the good predictors for her future success. Which I think is similar to what you're like, a similar body of research to what you're talking about. It is similar, but not exactly.
So this is more, I think this was done more for like the class differences between different people, but basically generally you'll find that like people who are economically at a lower level, they generally would have single parent. That parent is probably working three jobs, probably not talking so much to the child.
So the child starts off on a back foot almost because the parent has not spoken so much to it. On the other hand, when a child has a lot of people speaking to them, they just pick up the language so much faster. Interesting.
And cause I guess you also have more variation. You get to see more people speaking the same words in different ways. Yeah. Because like ultimately it is a neural network trying to learn and make sense of things.
Right. So similar to that, I think that like that is how all human brain learn, right? Like everything that a human being is trying to learn, they learn it in that particular way, which means that if you are shown a lot of quote unquote, good images and you're given easy access to tools to take those images and you can
see what you are taking and compare it to the stuff. It becomes a lot easier. And that's why I said Instagram made it a lot easier. It's not just the cameras. It's not just the fact that iPhone had like, you know, really good camera.
And like nowadays the phones have amazing cameras. It's also that people see photos and they know, okay, this is what good photography looks like. Yeah. That's interesting.
Cause if I think about like the Facebook era of like the late 2000s, it was a lot more crazy photos, right? Like people would like, you know, it'd be like they'd be like doing crazy pictures or like they would be like throwing like, you know, it wasn't as much just beautiful photos.
And I think part of that is no, like Instagram knows what I like. So I get to see a lot more beautiful photos. Um, but I do think you're also what you're saying is true, right? Cause it gave people a more of a place for feedback, for seeing similar photos, for seeing like this is the way that you could have taken it.
And then you start to, yeah, you just start to learn and think. You start to have a vocabulary for what this thing could be. Yeah. Should be. When we started this conversation, I was kind of wondering about like, you know,
is it semi-skilled work that's going to be replaced by, by this kind of like wave of automation? And now like this, as we've been talking, it's like, it feels more like it's almost like there's potential for new kinds of art or at least like reducing technical burden to, to art.
I don't know. Do. So I, I think that the metaphor that comes closest to my mind is maybe like 40 years ago, if you wanted to play music, you had to actually learn how to play an instrument.
If you couldn't play a guitar, you could not make music. You could not play music. But if you today own an iPad or an iPhone, you have GarageBand. If you own a computer, you can find some free software that'll let you quote unquote make music.
There's no equivalent though in music yet, right? Of these kind of AI generation softwares that we've been talking about that exist for imagery and. Sort of, I don't know how much I think in. So there is this thing called MetaSounds that Unreal has released with their
newest version. I don't know if it is procedural generation or if it is AI generation. I'm not sure which one it is. What is the difference? But music is also happening.
What's the difference between this? It's so AI. Go ahead. AI is like, you just give generally AI generation is like you just give it a bunch of keywords and it'll make something procedural is you'll tell it
the rules that it has to follow. I see. I see. So one would be like make something like Beethoven, but rap. Right.
And then it would figure something out. And then the other would be like, I need something in this certain key, like with this, like, I don't know, cadence. Okay. I see.
Yeah. Or even like more detail where like, okay, this is what the drum beat should be like, it should have this many instruments and stuff like that. I'm sure that like people are doing it for music as well. There is no reason why you couldn't do it.
Because there's so much data in the public domain. I was thinking, right? Like there's so many songs that are out there. Interesting. And also like there is just so much possibility as well.
Yeah. Right. So one of the interesting debates that has been happening has been what makes AI art special separate from regular art. Right.
Like if I draw something versus I asked the AI to make something, what's the difference? Um, like recently one of my friends, uh, she decided to publish a book of poetry and she just went on, uh, Dalai because she had an invite and she chose a cover from there, like she, you know, gave it a bunch of keywords and she decided to
pick a cover from there instead of asking someone to make it. Right. Um, so I've just been thinking about like, how do you distinguish if somebody else had like drawn it for her? Well, what's the line?
I'm right. I'm right in remembering, right? That most of the, the historical artists, they worked with people. They did. Right.
So it's not like, yeah, yeah, like they always had someone who actually was executing the painting for them or even like, I know there's a very famous glass maker, um, out of Seattle, uh, named Chihuly Dale Chihuly. And like I met some people who work in his studio and they're like, I mean, he's older.
He's like, I think he's blind and wonder both eyes. Right. It's like, he's can't be doing that much glasswork anymore. And so a lot of the stuff that's coming out of his studio is, is being made by his, his, um, assistants.
But you know, everyone still calls it Chihuly art. Like, um, yeah, it's like Sistine Chapel was not actually hand-painted by Michelangelo. Yeah. So I don't know.
To me, that feels like it's just a set of tools, you know, it's not necessarily, um, I'm sure there was like in other eras where people are like, no, I don't know what came first. If it was like oil, and it probably was like, like oil acrylic and then tempura, right?
We kind of like, and I'm sure that there were similar sort of reactions where people were like, oh, how could you paint with tempura? Only real painting is oil painting. Yeah. I would imagine.
So I would also think that like this might not be true, but this has been my observation that the appetite for entertainment has increased over the last few years. Like there are a lot more careers for entertainers. I think it's a reaction to what we were actually talking about a few weeks ago,
but that there's not a good, that's getting into a flow state in your relaxation time is, is, um, takes work. And we are, as a society, we've created so many things that don't, don't easily let you go into a flow state during a relaxation time, or let me, let me say that a little differently.
We've, there's lots of, um, things that you, that are slightly satisfying. And then you don't end up going into find things that are more deeply satisfying because you're being slightly satisfied enough. Um, interesting. Right.
So I wonder if that's creating more of this deeper demand where it's like people feel like this unfulfilled and now you're willing to go and spend things on, because you're not being, I'm not satisfied by spending, you know, 25 minutes on Instagram every day. So, but I still have that need of like, I wanted something to entertain me.
I wanted to see stuff that is visually exciting. And now I'm like going out and like filling it with something else. Like you keep eating like a mousse, bougies or little appetizers. And then you're like, damn it, at some point I need to be that's a very interesting way to put it.
I was thinking that like, it's just overall our demand, demand from our time has increased so much that we often are doing more than one thing. Like, you know, I'm driving, but I'm also like listening to audiobooks or I'm listening to podcasts or I'm like, you know, doing my chores and then I'm doing listening to podcasts or I would often be drawing and watching a YouTube
video on the side or something like that. Right. Like my attention is divided. So which means that even if I'm doing, let's say eight hours of work, I am simultaneously also overlapping five hours of entertainment with that same time.
That's interesting. Because I wonder about, so if you compared to a much earlier time, right? Like if you know, we were in a time where like you were still looking for securing your like shelter or something, right? Then it would be much more encompassing to be like, oh, you know, I need to figure
out where I'm going to sleep tonight. Right. Like, you know, there's not as much time for, or there's not as much brain space for non-essential activities. Or maybe there is like, I don't, I don't, I mean, that's a separate point.
I don't know how I feel about assigning intent. That's very fair. Do how like foraging societies live. Yeah. That's very fair.
Fine. So maybe this was a bad example to go down. But the point I was, I was trying to get out with the example was that I wonder about how much it's that, that you're being able to use the, um, like the system one versus system two part of your brain, right?
So you're being able to kind of do it almost on autopilot these things. Cause if you've, you've done them before you've done, you've watched YouTube before, right? Like it's not going to be so startling to you. For example, like normally when I'm talking to you, when we, you know, when we
have our calls and stuff, I might do something else at the same time, right? Where like, just cause I'll have a head of thought or I'll have seen something. And so I'm like, yes, I'm sourced talking, but I'll be doing something at the same time. But when I'm recording a podcast with you, it's not something super familiar
with me. So it requires a lot more of my intention at like, you know, am I speaking at it? Like staying close to the microphone. Am I seeking at a reasonably level volume? And so like more of those kind of like, there's more processes involved in, in
doing something new. Cause it's novel. Whereas I think a lot of the things are not novel anymore, right? Cause we effectively do the same 25 things, you know, over the course of a week. Interesting.
This is also making me think that like as some of these jobs get democratized, not necessarily replaced because I don't know if the demand is outpacing the supply or not. Like it could very well, like Instagrammer wasn't a job 10 years ago. YouTubers wasn't a job 10.
YouTuber wasn't a job 10 years ago, which like celebrity wasn't a job 10 years ago. Like, well, but I think all of those were jobs. Just the path to becoming successful in that career was not something so democratized, right? It wasn't Instagram or.
No, but, no, but like people still do make shows. I think that more movies and more shows come out even on a Hollywood level these days. Like that market has also increased, but all of the tech entertainment is completely a brand new market.
I think it's not like conventional TV has gone away. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the, the like ratings for TV shows, you know, nobody watches the way they used to, right? Like I think Grey's Anatomy, it's second season or something.
I remember looking this up. It was, I think 30 million people watched like the prime time. And that was a time when the United States population was like 350 million, right? It was like 10% of the country was watching. And now it's like 2 million is like a prime time, like success.
That is a very interesting point. There's just more options, you know? Hmm. Okay. I'll take your point.
That is fair. I was just thinking more from the perspective of there are more shows being made. There are more movies being released and there are all of these other people and everybody is spending much more time on entertainment than they used to before. Yeah.
So maybe the supply, like despite the fact or maybe because of the fact that it's more democratized, there is more supply. There is more supply and there is more demand. Interesting. I'm also wondering a little bit like, I'll draw a few plain generalizations about
history here, but I think like the printing press probably, or the printing press obviously made distribution of longer form things easier, right? And I imagine things like auto correct and like all these little tools, editing tools just made it easier for you to write longer form things. You didn't have to focus as much on the individual words, individual sentences.
So I wonder if these kind of supporting technologies we were talking about for generating, you know, copy or for generating images will start to see more composite creations or just like, like elaborate creations. And I wonder if that will start, if we'll start to see that into the entertainment side as well.
Cause I don't think we'll get to a point that will be AI generated TV shows really fast, right? But we might have more AI generated pieces of them. And I wonder if that might be an interesting, I don't know. I wonder if there will be new genres that will start to, to pop up as we start
to see more of that. Like today, I think, I mean, I'm also, go ahead. Sorry. Okay. Well, okay.
Well, I just like today, I think there's this profusion of reality TV, right? In different forms. There's reality TV for baking and reality TV for, you know, obviously for dating and like, you know, a hundred other different forms. I wonder if we'll start to, and why is that?
I mean, it's, it's cheap. It's unscripted. You get to people like to see people like them. Like it has all these ways that it resonates with people. But I wonder if we might start to see that kind of art form, particularly being like
elevated in a certain way, because it's able to, um, you're able to offload some of the, the burden of the entertainment to the technology and not being fully carried by the people themselves. Oh, that's a very interesting thought. Huh.
I wonder if that's a million dollars idea. Yeah. And generated reality show. AI supported or something. Yeah.
No, that sounds like such an incredible idea. We should totally sell it to Netflix. We should be like, we originally came up with this thing and he should totally do this. Don't you have some, some contacts with Netflix and yeah, maybe we can make it happen. It would be really entertaining though.
Yeah. I am, I'm also pretty interested by this music one. I'm like curious why more people are not out there because I feel like you also have good, uh, because there's rankings, right? There's billboard rankings and there's like purchase data and there's, you know,
listen data, you would be able to actually get feedback into the model, which doesn't always exist, but you wouldn't, but you couldn't be able to use most of the music that is out there, right? Like popular music and all you wouldn't be able to use for training your model. Why not?
Doesn't it all leave copyright after like 50 years or 99 years? It's like one of the, yeah, but like there was no music at that time. I mean, there was like there was no recording. There was no recording. It's 2023.
There was music in the 1970s. No, a hundred years, right? 1923 would have to look. I really, I'm not sure if it's a hundred years. It might be it.
It is really a hundred years. Okay. Okay. It is. Okay.
Fine. Well, the 20s still had music, but yeah, that was a big band and I don't know what was happening in all parts of the world. Yeah. Like most of the times like they had music, but there weren't recordings which
lasted till now. First of all, and second, like even if you have open source music, there are a lot of places where they do have open source music. Like I think the volume that these models need is insane, which is also super interesting.
So I was watching this video about this person who tried to train an AI model to recognize faces and to recognize K-pop idols specifically. And the interesting thing is that most of these models are based off of white people faces. Got it.
And so even despite her trying to train it, the model just would not recognize the people like it just kept calling everyone the same person. Wow. That is so interesting. So like as we go into, you know, cheaply generated text or we go into
dali generated artworks, what kind of stuff like whose jobs get replaced and whose culture gets replaced? Yeah. Cause like I know the dali one I was reading about how if you type like a beautiful woman, it tends to show an unclothed woman because that's how Western
media portrays women on the internet. Oh, wow. Is that crazy? Oh, wow. And it's like, you don't want to train on the internet, but you do have to train
on the internet because the internet is the best data source to train from, but then the internet is very biased in certain ways. Yeah. It's crazy. Wow.
That is insane. So I think because of stuff like that is showing up so early on, I feel like that will push us to be at least from like, like wiping out kind of like creating a general internet culture. I feel like that is less likely to happen because people are already starting to
see this issues with the training sets. I don't know. Speculating. Very true. And I mean, I would assume that most of my friends who are from like Southeast
Asian or South Asian countries, there is, they used to be like, especially when you were younger, there used to be this glorification of American pop culture. Yeah. Like American music is the best and American movies are the best and American shows are the best.
But like if I see just the general internet culture these days, it's not so much like Western like glorification of the West. There is some elements of West which are there, but like there are other elements where because of the abundance of content online and because of the abundance of just access, people are able to just say, no, I want my voice and I want representation
like it, it's just interesting to, I don't know how we arrived here. But like the way you said it, it just made me think about all of that. Yeah. I mean, I think I sent you a voice note a few a week or so ago, but I had this kind of interesting notion.
I wonder if like, cause we generate so much content in our lives, right? Like I'll probably have taken, I think 30,000 photos at this point in my life. So probably by the time I die, it will be, I don't know, 200,000 photos, right? And I was just thinking about like, I wonder if there could be like a nonprofit or something that people could donate their digital content to that could be trying
to create less biased training sets. Cause I think part of what you're saying is true, right? Like people eat the stuff, isn't copyright certain stuff is in the public domain and there are biases that exist because of that. But like I have a very close friend, um, Shreita, who, who we started a couple
of companies together and she and I have talked a lot about how she, she grew up in this part of Bangalore called Malaysia room and Malaysia room has all these old stories that are just mostly captured in people, right? People know the stories of those areas, but there are photos. There are places whatnot, but there's no real, like she was like, I would love to
like create a place that could be a repository for these stories or repository for this content and data. I think that even just kind of create the places that could be like, like repositories, even if we don't know what to curate from them yet, I'm very confident our abilities to curate are going to get, keep getting better and
better with these technologies. But I feel like we're starting, we don't necessarily, we haven't, we haven't put enough focus and saying, what is the source data going to be? What's the trading data going to be? And you know, how can we, there's certain places where I think like people
still have to add value. Um, and I think like stuff like Malaysia, like some, like this example of Malaysia of creating stories around local areas. Um, it's hard today because that kind of data that it's getting lost in, I think the like, there's so much content out there.
What content actually relates to this specific place? Can we, can we create something that is from this kind of place or style? Interesting. This is also making me think of like, as you were talking about curation, right? Especially of the stories and local stuff.
It's like, it's almost like art direction and curation and bringing taste into the picture becomes the role of the human element and the technology like does the rest of the work almost? That's really what am I trying to convey and why am I trying to convey it? Are the questions that the human needs to answer?
And then the generation ends up being on the shoulders of the AI. Interesting. That kind of reminds me about how, um, you know, you and I were talking to, to, um, uh, one of my friends who's a conservator a couple of weeks ago. Yeah.
And, uh, it was interesting to hear about how, how exhibits happen in museums. But it does seem like it's basically like there's one curator or someone who kind of has a, has a very controlling ability and they have a vision for it. And there's a lot of people who execute their vision, right? There's a lot of people like who's job is to run around and, you know,
create, make this floor into that. Um, yeah. So it's not that different today, right? Like, like, you know, maybe the AI would replace all of those, like, you know, 10 people whose job it is to take that curator's vision and, and, uh, executed
in reality. It's also interesting to like, as you said that I was also thinking, it's interesting to think about when humans say, Oh, the jobs are going to go to the robots. But like, is that the kind of job that you want to be doing?
Correct. Uh, so my brother's sister and I, we were talking about, um, some of these stuff recently, like AI generated art, AI generated code. And because we are artists or developers, where does that leave us in some ways?
Right? Like people around us are having those conversations and it's like, if somebody could replace a part of my job, please replace it because if it's replaceable, then it's okay. It's just replace it.
I would rather do the stuff that is irreplaceable, but I don't know if that's coming from like a position of extreme privilege in some sense or not. I think a lot of things get standardized over time. Right. And as they get standardized, I don't know whether to say it's like the fun
goes out of it or the art goes out of it, but, but like, for example, like, there was a time, um, that I kind of enjoyed writing Facebook ads, right? And it was about, uh, I guess maybe like seven, eight years ago. And it was just like, it was fun, right? Cause you could kind of like think about it.
There was like, there was a lot more of just like, I don't know, I would say kind of like art to it, right? But now, now it's like what you should do is you should be just like creating like, so you have a certain set of images. You have a certain set of copy and you create all the iterations of them, right?
See which ones work. And then you, and then once you know, like, what is the kind of direction for the imagery, then you try another set of five images with the copy, right? And you keep just winning and suddenly iterating in a way that's right for your audience.
Um, that's just not as fun. It's a different kind of skill set. It's a different, it's much more of like, like I have a good friend who I play games with and we play this game called Stellaris and he loves to call it, uh, that it's a spreadsheet game, right?
What is it doing? It's a fancy UI for spreadsheets. You're just moving stuff around in spreadsheets. So I think jobs that are spreadsheet jobs, right? Just not that fun at some point.
Um, and nothing wrong with accountants. Yeah. It's also very interesting to think about like, as people move into this direction, as the culture moves into that direction, how do people perceive their job?
Right? Like, do we want to be doing repetitive stuff? Do we want to be like developing skills such as repetitive stuff? I think I've met some people during my, so far in my career, especially when I was running the company in India, that they kind of wanted you to tell them
what to do, you know? And I think maybe it was like that they didn't have the mind space available for work right then, you know, maybe they had a lot of things going on in their personal life. Maybe they were trying to do something else with their life and this job was
kind of just like a way to make men's meat. Um, but it was, it's an interesting thing because I, I interpreted that the way I kind of internalized that was I was like, Hey, okay, Kahran, you have the ability to kind of create opportunity for people that will give them a sense of purpose. Like what higher calling can there be to that?
All right, then that, right? Like that you're being able to kind of create something that will tell people what to do, who want to, right? Who will tell people what to do in a way that is, you know, at least to the best of your abilities, like useful for them, for society, for whatever, right?
It's helping the greater good. Um, I don't know. So I'm kind of curious of your thoughts, like if you feel like there'll be, and I think as we kind of started talking about something Seth Godin talks about in his book, Lynchpence, he's like saying you can either be a person that people
are telling you what to do, or you can be a person who's just be a genius at something. He loves to use that word kind of genius a lot. Yeah. I don't know.
It's kind of, yeah, like you're saying, it's an interesting place. I think it's an interesting place even as you, as we kind of think about as entrepreneurs and as we're starting a company, like what will success look like and what does, um, whether the kind of interim successes and should we, I think about creating that kind of work or looking at places where we've created
repetitive work and say, Hey, you know, is that a success for our business? Or is that, is that not a success because we're creating jobs that are not good jobs or jobs that we think of as not being good jobs? Oh, I just had this thought. So industrialization made repetitive work happen.
Correct. Yeah. Right. Like because industries needed repetitive work. Yeah.
And it's almost like, I don't know how right this is because like my brain just connected those dots right now. And it's almost like now in the world of extreme personalization, we don't want repetitiveness. So we are almost fighting against that.
I guess like there's like a tidal wave coming from one side and crashing into what existed long before. Yeah, you're exactly right. And it's like people like from childhood people expect to do a certain kind of work and that's why they are like, you know, sent to school and everybody's
given the same education because they want to be doing the same work. But like most of my friends who graduated from college are not doing the kind of jobs that they thought that they would be doing when they graduated 10 years ago. Like many of these jobs didn't exist.
Most like many of them have constructed their own jobs. What I am doing did not exist in the way that I am doing it 10 years ago. Definitely not in India. What my brother is doing definitely didn't exist. My sister is making something on VR.
VR was not a thing. Like it's so interesting. Yeah. It's yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think an interesting point that maybe we can talk about in the future
week is how the education system is. I think part of the reason why so many people have failed so many startups are failing in going after ed tech and changing the education space. My dad is very deep into education space and he's very fond of saying that if you put a teacher from 150 years ago into a classroom of today, they would have
literally no problem. What if you put a doctor from 150 years ago or any other kind of right? They would have no idea what they're doing. But a teacher it's like it's still maybe it's a blackboard. It's a whiteboard instead of a blackboard.
Right. But like and I think it's because of what you were just saying. It's because the system there's society is looking to reward people for individuality and for kind of like shining in their bright person person hood or whatever.
And our schooling is not about that. Our schooling is about trying to make people standardized. I think part of why there's such a discrepancy and why we're struggling so much in trying to solve this problem is because it's not actually solving education the way it's needed.
It's like solving like preparation for life, but education is not really doing that right now. It's like doing things that are orthogonal, but kind of related. Very true. We can talk about the future week.
We should definitely talk about this next week. This is such an interesting. I feel like this is the first time when we have arrived at another concrete topic from our topic. I love it.
I love it too. Awesome. This is a good talk. Then we should continue. Yeah, this was awesome.
Okay. We should talk about it next week. We'll talk about it next week. Okay. Bye.
Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. Our theme music is by Steve Gomes. If you found any of the topics we talked about interesting this week, we'd invite you to get in touch with us.
We'd love to invite you on the podcast or just have a conversation about how these topics applied in your business and in the decisions and problems that you're struggling with. You can get in touch with us on our website, joya.studio, or by reaching out to Divya or me, Kyon, directly.