What Makes Us Human? Kate O’Neill on the H Word, Verbal Slop, and the Meaning of Tech Humanism

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Long time viewers, listeners to the show know that one of the words I really strongly dislike or don't understand is the h word, humanism. It's a word that often gets thrown around by everyone, especially when, at least in my view, they don't know what they're talking about. And especially when it comes to tech, of course, in our age of AI, everyone now is a tech humanist of one kind or another. Certainly, we haven't found anyone to come on the show who's a tech antihumanist, at least willing to talk about it publicly. So I went to the source, and I found the original, the platonic version of the tech humanist, which is Kate O'Neill. She was one of the first 100 people employed by Netflix. So she's an old time tech person. She runs a podcast called, tech, the Tech Humanist podcast. She has a tech hue the Tech Humanist channel on YouTube. Of course, she has a book out called Tech Humanist, and she's joining us today. So, Kate, what exactly does it mean? I'm sure I'm not alone in being skeptical, but I've always been particularly impatient with that term because it's it goes without saying everyone's a humanist, aren't they?

00:01:52 Kate O'Neill: I suppose that's true. I think there's something implicitly valuable about humans or humanity, it doesn't mean we're exclusively valuable and that nothing else that's natural is valuable or that no other living being is natural is valuable. But I think in contrast to prioritizing business as a construct without prioritizing humanity or prioritizing technologies advance without prioritizing the impacts to humanity. So I think these are the things that are in tension when you think about tech humanism is that technology shapes human experiences. This, I think, we can all agree on. But it shapes human experiences at scale when it is doing so in service of business, which it almost always is. So there's always a business objective behind it that is accelerating its advance and its march into human experiences. So what I think the purpose of tech humanism is to find the business objectives that need to be met and align them with human outcomes that can still be rewarding and fulfilling for people and help the business leaders who are use making those decisions amplify instead of amplifying the business objectives, amplify the alignment between the business and the human outcomes. So we're using technology to make that alignment stronger as opposed to making the business simply more successful. That's not necessarily something that many business leaders are in the habit of thinking about. So this is Well, definitely, the kind

00:03:22 Andrew Keen: Of answer I would have got if I had fed it into, ChatGPT or Claude. Kate, I often ask, my guests who talk about this subject this question. Could you convince me that you're not a bot? You sound like one. You don't look like one, but you sound like one. The kind of stuff you talk about at scale. You're a business consultant. What are you saying that a bot couldn't say? What are you saying that Claude couldn't say?

00:03:51 Kate O'Neill: Well, for me, the thing that breaks it down is that human experience is really about meaning, and meaning is something that's unique to humanity. Like, we don't know of any other nonhuman animal that really constitutes meaning the way we do, that thinks about, you know, what matters about a given interaction. They do at an instinctual level, but they're not doing it in a way that has to do with trying to understand context and having emotional intelligence about what another being is experiencing and trying to triangulate all of that into something that actually creates context. That meaning and that we create that meaning through embodied sensory inputs and that it connects with language.

00:04:35 Andrew Keen: So you've you've thrown out the m word along with the h word, meaning. What does that mean?

00:04:41 Kate O'Neill: Meaning means a lot of different things, but it means what matters at every level that it what of what it means. Whether you're talking about semantic meaning or purpose or patterns or truth or significance and all the way out to the most cosmic existential, what's it all about, and why are we here, we can talk about meaning at a lot of different levels, but it's always about something that has significance, that has intentionality or purpose. And that meaning is something that is always about what matters in the way we process it. So to me, that is core to the human experience.

00:05:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you haven't been shy to talk about this. You gave a popular TEDx speech recently about not leaving meaning to machines. But seems as if we humans, for better or worse, are more and more dependent on machines for meaning. Recently, we had a Canadian author, Victoria Hetherington. She has a new book out called The Friend Machine on the Trail of AI Companionship, where she follows a group of people who were all looking to machines, to algorithms for their meaning. So seems like we're a little bereft of meaning these days, aren't we?

00:05:54 Kate O'Neill: Yeah. Well, I think it's very human nature to ascribe to our interlocutors to the things that we're doing interaction with the benefit of some kind of conscience, the benefit of some kind of inner life or inner self. And that is harming us right now because we are falling into that trap when we interact with large language models and other generative AI. We assume that there is a consciousness on the other side. And that is actually something that AI companies are taking advantage of right now to manipulate us.

00:06:30 Andrew Keen: Doesn't that reflect badly, not so much on the AIs, but on us? If we're that stupid that we think that machines have meaning, then we have a serious problem.

00:06:40 Kate O'Neill: You could say that. I think that it reflects pretty naturally on us. Like, we're we're actually, you know, sort of constituted to look for what is the inner life within the other person that we're interacting with. But it's not uncommon that we sort of give nicknames to inanimate objects or sort of assume that there is a personality of some sort in our toaster or in our car. You know? Like, those are not uncommon ways that we sort of interact with inanimate devices. So it is totally understandable that at this early stage for many people of interacting with what appears to be intelligent machines, that we would naturally sent sort of sense there being some sort of personality in the other side of that interaction.

00:07:26 Andrew Keen: You mentioned we're the only species with meaning. I think philosophers might disagree, or certainly some philosophers, when you see the meaning that humans derive, maybe not from algorithms, but certainly from their dogs and their cats. Are you sure that other species don't have meaning or can't experience meaning, Kate?

00:07:46 Kate O'Neill: No. No. That isn't I wouldn't say that they don't have meaning. I would say that they don't experience it or construct it the way we do. And the way we construct it very specifically has to do with the combination of sensory input and language, like how we encode meaningful experiences, like sensory experiences with language in our brains. That, as far as we know, is a uniquely human experience because other nonhuman animals don't have the context of language that we do or at least that we know of. Like, we may think dolphins or other like squid or other kinds of sophisticated animals have something that seems to be like language, but so far as any serious, researcher has been able to ascertain, it doesn't go as far. It doesn't kinda connect as deeply as our facility with language. So this is a pretty uniquely human construct, and I think that's a really important point for now because at the moment, it does actually separate us from the way that machines are processing information. Machines are processing information in a strictly predictive way, a strictly statistical way, and that is very, very different from understanding this larger sense of, you know, other humanity and how it relates on the civilizational scale to what other people are experiencing in the world.

00:09:10 Andrew Keen: You've warned us to be a little skeptical of big tech companies. You've talked about why AI firms profit when you think that the chatbot cares. The big AI companies claim they care. Sam Altman recently came out with an announcement, a few days ago that his plan at OpenAI is to build an AI platform that will benefit everyone. We're all gonna be rewarded. We've heard that one before from big tech companies. They haven't always come through. Are you suggesting that we should be skeptical of the tech companies that own these new AI platforms? And how does that square with your day job as a consultant, a business consultant?

00:09:56 Kate O'Neill: Oh, I think it squares fine. I think we do need to be skeptical. We need to be, guarded in what we digest of that message because there is a reason why Sam Altman and the other tech CEOs are able to take that message to the public, to congress, you know, to the lobbying, populace because they are they're able to use it to curry favor, to gain sort of a logistical, strategic forefront that allows them to say, we're gonna do some kind of regulatory capture. Like, regulate the space, but regulate it in a way that allows us to be the ones who are in front of it. And part of that is to create this kind of capture in the public imagination that any part of this, you know, race that's going on between the different AI companies over their the models that they're releasing every single day, literally every single day with incremental changes, they're trying to show that they have the most advanced version. And so to demonstrate that consciousness is part of what they can claim or that they sort of wave their hands and suggest that there is consciousness possible at the core of this model, that allows them to claim that they have some new advance that's a strategic innovation ahead of the other competitors. So I think it's incredibly important that we watch that with some skepticism. It doesn't mean that we can't use the tools and use them well. It doesn't mean that we have to, you know, sort of shun the all use of any kind of AI, generative AI in general. I think that there's there's a smart and healthy way to use them. But I don't think that accepting the ways that the tech CEOs would like us to use them as the default is necessarily that way. That techno utopias approach is not one that squares with tech humanism, and I'm definitely not shy to say that.

00:11:51 Andrew Keen: Aren't some of the tech companies, though, better than others? Recently, Anthropic and Dario Amodei aligned with the Vatican, as, Pope Leo the fourteenth, announced his in encyclical letter magnifica humanata humanatus. So he's up in the humanity thing

00:12:13 Kate O'Neill: That's right.

00:12:13 Andrew Keen: Business too, announcing, what to do about AI and humanity. Are some companies better than others? Do you trust, as a as the tech humanist, do you trust Dario Amodei, for example, at, Anthropic more than Sam Altman at, OpenAI or Elon Musk at XAI?

00:12:37 Kate O'Neill: I trust Pope Leo more than any of those guys. I think he did a really good job of building a tech humanist message into, in his encyclical. I think it was a very smooth and savvy marketing move for Dario to be there. I don't discount that he may want there to be those the alignment with Pope Leo's message. And Anthropic has certainly made some contrarian moves, you know, pulling away from the White House, in the past and from the Department of War, in recent months. There have been some contrarian moves that demonstrate that they want to be seen as an organization that sets its own precedent for what is right and correct and what is the way that they should be leading into the future. And that's good. There's definitely something to respect there. I don't think that it necessarily means that we uncritically accept every posture, every move as if it is a 100% consistent across the board with having the best interest of humanity in mind. I think we still have to think for ourselves and process what is the right way that we should be using AI, what is the right way we should be adopting this into our businesses and into our lives.

00:13:50 Andrew Keen: A few months ago, we had Geoffrey Hinton on the show. Of course, the godfather, supposedly godfather of AI, won the Nobel Prize for physics for his contribution to the development of generative AI. He warned when he came on the show, back in August of last year that we are in danger of creating alien beings that can take us over. You're not alone in that. A number of AI pioneers are warning us about this. I know you think that's really the wrong question in some ways. Not only is it a distraction, but a very unhealthy distraction. Why?

00:14:30 Kate O'Neill: Yeah. I think that there's a there's a subset of the population of the tech population that wants to talk about it as if it's a religious a quasi religious type of affiliation, and some that wanna talk about it as if it's an alien intelligence or an alien species. I think either of those is inherently taking us in the wrong direction for critical thinking. It's not allowing us to the religious posture is certainly not allowing us to have a critical view of what this technology constitutionally is and does predictably, what it's been trained on, what it what its, objective is to do on behalf of the tech companies that created it. And the alien species thing is really just another version, another flavor of the idea of nicknaming our toaster. Right? That's not that different from assuming that there's a consciousness on the other side of the interaction.

00:15:24 Andrew Keen: Who are your heroes in humanist terms as critical thinkers? Who are the models we should be looking at and thinking, that's that's a critical thinker. That's someone who has captured the humanist spirit apart from yourself, of course, as the self appointed tech humanist.

00:15:42 Kate O'Neill: I look around at folks like doctor Tressie McMillan Cottom. I think that folks like, her in the in sociology, folks who are doing

00:15:52 Andrew Keen: Work me. I haven't heard of her. What does she say and do?

00:15:55 Kate O'Neill: Doctor Tressie, is a MacArthur Fellow, and she is, someone she's at UNC in sociology. She's been doing more and more about the role of AI and how AI is being sort of adopted into society. And I think her view on this has been really strong. She's a columnist at the New York Times as well, so you can find plenty of her writing there. And she's been on Trevor Noah and a lot of other kind of late night talk show host, shows. So her message, I think, is a really strong one, and it centers humanity. But it does so in a way that's conscious of race, that's conscious of class, that's conscious of a lot of different social concepts.

00:16:40 Andrew Keen: I don't know how it works. It's it's not really I don't wanna make judgments. But isn't that just ideology? I mean, she or the way you're presenting her, she has a way of thinking maybe about race or culture or class. Why is that humanist?

00:16:56 Kate O'Neill: Well, it's a way of thinking, and any way of thinking is worth maybe

00:16:59 Andrew Keen: What is that more less humanist than a MAGA person?

00:17:05 Kate O'Neill: I would think so, actually, because a MAGA person's viewpoint isn't necessarily centering the human experience for the good of the human experience. It's for the good of the ideology. I think what Dr. Tressie's viewpoint is, and I don't mean to speak for her, but what where it seems to square with mine is we're thinking more about the collective of human experience, more about what's good for the majority of people that doesn't short sell some human experience for other human experience, that's looking to try to create the best futures for the most people instead of it being about, you know, how do I profit the most from this moment? How do I, you know, gather as much as I can for myself and restrict the rights of other people and use this to sort of trample down on other people? So those things are don't run to my mind, those don't run consistent with humanist values in a purely humanist sense. And in a tech humanist sense, they can't because technology is the thing that scales. And when you called me out on sort of, consultant language earlier, talking about at scale, the reason that it is a relevant term to use in this consideration is because you're talking about technology bringing to scale the decisions that are being made. When a company makes a decision about the roles that it wants its product to play or its service to play, and then it uses algorithmic optimization or AI to amplify that is at scale. That is saying we're not just having a one to one. You know, someone's not calling into our call center. This is handling through conversational AI. This is handling through, you know, algorithmic, reach through a platform that goes well beyond what a one to one human interaction ever could. That's really important for us to understand, and that's why it really matters that we think about the values we're encoding and the purpose that we're bringing to those decisions.

00:19:01 Andrew Keen: Well, Hinton argued, and I was particularly intrigued with this, that in his view, he wanted to feminize AI. He wanted to transform it into I'm not sure he quite put it in these terms, but it sounded like he was making the argument that, he wanted to make AI female. You seem to be suggesting also that AI has to be ideological one way or the other. You also seem to be saying that to be a humanist requires one to be a left liberal. I mean, what about conservatives? What about the pope? You talked about him. He's certainly not a left liberal. He believes in God. You're a enlightenment. I'm not sure there's anything very enlightened about the Catholic church. Of course, the enlightenment was designed to challenge, the primacy of the church. So it seems again, and it comes back to my initial criticism, that I always fear and feel that humanism is just a political term used to promote someone's agenda, for better or worse. Sometimes that agenda is one I might be sympathetic with, sometimes not. But it's just something you've picked off the wall to suit your purposes.

00:20:19 Kate O'Neill: Perhaps. And perhaps it sounds that way. I don't find that it's that difficult for, people of good faith, the people of goodwill to find common ground where this is concerned. I am then able to address, audiences of executives that for sure are not all left liberal. I have been able to address audiences of people who come from primarily what look like conservative and republican backgrounds, you know, people in various industries. And I think the common thread is we're concerned that there is a future for humanity, that people can thrive and flourish, that it isn't all about, you know, the suck of greed into, nonstop corporate optimization. That, I think, is where the humanist side skips over. It's not about tech business. Right? We're not a tech corporatists. We're tech heroes.

00:21:13 Andrew Keen: A business. I mean, you're even a ranked business consultant. So what are you doing? You're going into these big corporations. They're paying you large amounts of money to tell them what?

00:21:25 Kate O'Neill: To tell them that they need to prioritize the human experience and their decision making because they're using technology to make these decisions at scale. So when you have, you know, a Google or an IBM or, you know, a Deloitte or any of these companies, and they're using AI to decide how these how their customer experiences, user experiences, guest experiences, patient experience, student experience, whatever the role humans play on the other side of an interaction, they're using AI to optimize that, then they're looking for efficiencies. They're looking for profit. They're looking for ease and gain. And that's not wrong, but as long as that ease and gain isn't in contrast or isn't in contradiction and doesn't force the human experience into a painful posture on the other side. And that's what I'd really like for every leader to consider as they're making these decisions. Like, how can we make sure we're setting up our business to be very successful? That's fine. I don't have any problem with the business succeeding. I would like for businesses to succeed, but I want them to do so in concert with human flourishing, not at the expense of it.

00:22:32 Andrew Keen: Again, that goes without saying. I could have got that from Claude. So

00:22:35 Kate O'Neill: Think it does go without saying.

00:22:36 Andrew Keen: It does it doesn't. Because no business consultant's gonna go in and saying, well, what I'm advising you is in your interest, but it's against humanity's interest to recurposing.

00:22:45 Kate O'Neill: Plenty of consultants will talk only about profit and only about efficiency and how you can use AI to become a more effective shop and how you can, you know, cut jobs. They and they'll do it in coded language, but they won't be shy about making sure that profit and efficiency are at the center of their aims. That is not at the center of my aims. So I don't want to say that profit and efficiency are bad, but their ratios, they're not useful. You can have profit or efficiency come at the outcome of just about any, you know, denominate numerator and denominator. What we need to make sure is that we're including the right metrics in those equations.

00:23:25 Andrew Keen: In other words, they don't scale, to use your language. I know you've consulted with you know, you've mentioned some big companies, Google. So give me an example of what you tell Google. Google, of course, is a, what, a four or five, depending on the market price, but a 4 or $5,000,000,000,000 company, one of the two or three most valuable companies in the world, not just a platform, but a builder of AI. In fact, I relied on Google Gemini to come up with definitions of what a tech humanist is. They're also investing massively, many billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers. What are you telling executives at Google? And who are you consulting with there?

00:24:10 Kate O'Neill: Well, I don't think I'm at liberty to disclose the actual In general, I mean, tech

00:24:13 Andrew Keen: Tech people, business people.

00:24:15 Kate O'Neill: It's a mix. It'll be sometimes it'll be, executive teams. Sometimes it'll be a particular tech team, a particular department or function. And it ranges. I think some of the time, the concern is, you know, we're we've been using a lot of AI to do things like improve the effectiveness of our, customer support function. But we wanna make sure that we're, a, not displacing every single agent in the process without having some consideration for the upskilling and reskilling and where do they go, what happens in the organization. And one of the articles I published recently was about how we have the these, in the wrong order of operations. A lot of times, organizations are approaching reskilling and upscaling and not having done the role redesign and redefinition of an organization that it takes to create the vacancies and the opportunities that people can upscale and rescale into. So those are strategic conversations, operational conversations that really need to happen. The other thing is that there's an awful lot of, you know, guardedness about the sense that we're not following we're we're we're not clear on what the future of work really is. The future of work breaks down into at least seven different conversations. It's the future of jobs. It's the future of tasks, productivity, job roles, labor relations. And we've clouded all this together into a discussion about the future of work. So being able to unpack that and have very honest conversations about what that means, what it looks like, and still center the human flourishing at the end of that while thinking about what does the company need to be able to report to its board at the end of a quarter, to its investors at the end of a quarter. Those are very meaningful conversations to be able to navigate in ways that aren't shy from what the language of the company is while understanding what it's gonna play like outside of the organization.

00:26:14 Andrew Keen: Kate, a couple of days ago, we had a Stanford economist, Mordechai Kurtz, on the show who's written a book suggesting that the state, in at least in his view, particularly when it comes to AI, has a responsibility to retrain everyone who's thrown out of work with all this massive technological disruption, for better or worse. In your view, as a tech humanist and someone who consults with big corporations, where does the responsibility of big companies like Google end and the responsibility of the government begins?

00:26:52 Kate O'Neill: I think it's a it's an open conversation. It's one that I think is, a great provocation and one that I hope we can eventually have government administrations that are curious enough and humanistic enough to entertain, but I haven't seen a whole lot of them at the, at the state levels. Some states have been doing a really good job for a few years now. Nevada and Nebraska are two examples that created upskilling, or public private partnerships. So some of the larger companies that are in the state partnered with the state to create, resources that could be accessed by anyone inside of public libraries, for example. So they would know what jobs are available, and they would know what their skills map onto that's that's out there and available, or what skills they need to acquire in order to move from, where they are to the openings. There those are huge opportunities that are out there. It's not gonna be the same. I think in The US, we have, you know, the opportunity and the limitation of being very states oriented in the way we organize, so that's probably going to be a experiment from state to state. But also from city to city and region to region, I think we'll see some interesting experimentation in terms of, you know, can one entity, one city support a UBI experiment and be able to report back at small scale what that looks like and what it means for the local economy. And then we can maybe extrapolate from that to what it would mean at a larger scale, at a state scale, for example. So I think these are it's going to have to be an experiment in curiosity and willingness to kinda iterate and see where the line is from Google to federal government or to state government or to, you know, public private partnerships that may span different types of municipalities?

00:28:41 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure you really answered my question.

00:28:43 Kate O'Neill: I don't know that there's a one answer for it is what I guess I'm trying to say.

00:28:47 Andrew Keen: There is an answer. Either you think I mean, there are a lot of business thinkers, consultants, people who teach at top business schools who believe that given the dysfunctionality of American government, that real morality can come from within corporations. Some of your colleagues have written award winning books on that. Others argue that businesses are always self interested even if they learn the humanistic language that you're teaching them. Ultimately, they only really care about profit, and they dress it up in euphemisms. Is so is there a point where we can't trust these big corporations even if humanists like yourself have come in and taught them the language of humanism?

00:29:39 Kate O'Neill: I don't know that there's a point that we can or can't trust them. I think it I'll come back to the same thing I said about the AI discussion.

00:29:47 Andrew Keen: Thinking critically is always a good idea. Like, the we

00:29:47 Kate O'Neill: Don't wanna, discussion. Thinking critically is always a good idea. Like, the we don't wanna uncritically accept the rationale that a large company provides us just because it's large or just because it sounds rational. If there's something that feels off, then it's probably off. And we if we need to be accountable to or we need to hold accountable a large company for, you know, slashing 10,000 jobs, you know, Facebook cutting or Meta cutting 8,000 jobs over, a couple weeks ago, that's something that we should be talking about. And what are those jobs, and why are they cutting them? And it should be something that is part of the public discourse. I don't I don't think there's any reason why having good vocabulary about this necessarily means that they're not making, decisions that need to be held to account. It also doesn't mean that they're they're only speaking the language and not making credible choices. So I the choices themselves need to be examined, not the actions.

00:30:44 Andrew Keen: We had Eric Ries on the show recently. He has a new book out, Incorruptible, which cites some companies. Patagonia, of course, come to mind as moral companies. What are your models? Maybe you've consulted with them, maybe you haven't. Of companies that are doing, so to speak, the right thing in our profoundly disruptive age where so many, human concerns, jobs, interests are being undermined by big tech?

00:31:14 Kate O'Neill: No. I've written about Patagonia. I've written about, Unilever and a lot of the ones that

00:31:21 Andrew Keen: Paul Paulman. Yeah. They always the same ones come up.

00:31:24 Kate O'Neill: It is.

00:31:24 Andrew Keen: They're not very important to them.

00:31:26 Kate O'Neill: I agree. That there are always the same ones, and that's it is hard to reach beyond those. You know, you can look at, you know, Lego and some of these other ones that are fun to examine as case studies. But I think the real trick comes when you're looking at a company that doesn't so neatly fall into those beloved case studies and you're trying to figure out, you know, a company that's running a utility, for example. How does a utility show up in a way that supports the community that it lives within? And how does it make sure that it's doing the right things. And I've seen some examples of that. I don't necessarily wanna name specific names. But I think it's it's up to every company, every organization, every leader within those companies to figure out, you know, the accountability that it has and the moral sort of lines it wants to draw. And that's not necessarily going to be the same. And, again, this isn't an ideology. This is about finding that purpose that the organization can really stand behind and doing it with intention and with consistency in a way that isn't shying away from the output that it's that it's creating. But in order to do that, it has to be very clear about the impact that, at scale, that they're creating and the reality that's being created by those decisions.

00:32:45 Andrew Keen: But you can appreciate the frustration and anger some people have towards this corporate humanist speech and language and discourse. We did a show a year or two ago about Davos Man, and exhibit a in Davos Man was Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, who goes to Davos and talks in your language, the language of humanism, warns world leaders, and then comes back to San Francisco and wants to clear the streets of homeless people, or clearly, he's an enormously wealthy man. I mean, you might say, well, it's unfair to pick on Benioff, but he picks on himself by being so visible. So there is good reason for people outside business and outside tech to be so irritated with the kind of gratuitous humanism that some business leaders articulate while, on the other hand, pursuing their own self interest?

00:33:47 Kate O'Neill: I see what you're saying, and I don't think that's wrong. I think you can certainly understand why people would be frustrated. And I don't think there's any reason that should mean that people don't hold leaders to account. I'm just doing a role that I think is needed in the world, which is to try to help leaders understand in a better, more comprehensive way with more rigor, what the consequences of their decisions are and how that looks and how they can make those decisions in a way that actually upholds the objectives that they claim to have within the business in a way that also does not deteriorate the human condition on the other side of those outcomes. So And you said

00:34:27 Andrew Keen: Let me make so let me be clear here. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. You get called in. These big companies pay you significant amount of money to come in and, what, lecture them or remind them of the moral consequences of their action. Is that right?

00:34:44 Kate O'Neill: It can be a lecture. It's plenty of keynote speaking there.

00:34:48 Andrew Keen: Conversation or a speech.

00:34:49 Kate O'Neill: Or an advisory or a workshop or a consultant consultative session. And it is, often about helping them reframe or, you know, kind of reunderstand, reallocate their thinking about certain initiatives that they have and how can they, begin to reprioritize some of the way that they're they're putting different priorities in place. And some of this comes from being able to look across different industries and have a lot of examples to be able to synthesize from and be able to draw some examples to point to and say, you know, this is how another company I saw do it. Maybe that's an instructive lesson, and we can unpack that and examine whether there's something for them to take from there. And then if there's follow-up, there's follow-up. But I think there's there's very often, the provocation alone is something that can spark some new thought and some new direction for leaders.

00:35:41 Andrew Keen: Let's end, Kate, where we began with tech humanism. I'm not sure if you read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel from, I think, it was 2021, Klara and the Sun, which imagines a world very realistic not very far in the future. And this was written before generative AI or certainly, ChatGPT-3 revolutionized the world, where it's harder and harder to distinguish between machines and humans. It seems to me, for better or worse, I'm not necessarily celebrating it, but it's the reality that we are steaming into the world of Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, where it's gonna be increasingly hard to separate humans from machines, particularly in the language, your language of meaning, of what it means to be human and being cherished and loved and all the rest of it. Do you think that I mean, I'm not necessarily saying that you should celebrate that, but isn't that true? Isn't that where we're going, for better or worse, as a species?

00:36:48 Kate O'Neill: Possibly. And I don't necessarily celebrate that. I think that there's there's going to be, you know, generations upon generations of how we coexist with increasingly sophisticated machinery, and it's going to be incredibly hard for those of us in 2026 to understand what, people fifty years from now, a hundred years from now are going to understand about their coexistence with other machines. But I can say that in 2026 and for the near term, that presuming that the interactions that we have with machines are with conscious beings or that they're with alien intelligences or that they're quasi religious experiences. That's wrong. It's pure and simple wrong, and that's only allowing business leaders and tech leaders to co opt that natural human tendency for their own purposes. And so we need to develop that critical thinking. We need develop greater understanding of our own meaning making and our own humanity so that we stay in conscious control more of the time through more of those interactions and can be more critical of the interactions we have with technology and with business.

00:37:57 Andrew Keen: So let's cast our minds forward a hundred years, 2021, 2126 or 2121 when, a hundred years after Klara and the Sun was born, or was written. Born is another way of thinking about it. We're in an age, Kate, where it's impossible to distinguish between machines and humans, where maybe someone in 2021, '21 will listen to this or be listening. Maybe it will survive. What will you tell them? What would you tell them, these future beings who can't distinguish between humans and machines? What would you tell them about the value of humanity? Why should they care that they've left this world?

00:38:46 Kate O'Neill: I would say hello to those of you in the future, from those of us in the past, and that we hope that you appreciate that what we valued about ourselves was that we could understand each other on an in intellectual level, on an emotional level, on a sympathetic level, an empathetic level, and that we're able to come into our interactions with one another by holding space for what the other person feels and cares about. And that even if we don't necessarily agree, that we can have these kinds of interactions, these kinds of, conversations, and still create perhaps more meaning for the people who are listening even if they don't like that I keep using the word meaning all the time.

00:39:26 Andrew Keen: So it's

00:39:26 Kate O'Neill: A scale. It's a beautiful place. What's that?

00:39:29 Andrew Keen: Or scale.

00:39:30 Kate O'Neill: Or scale. Meaning or scale or humanity. But even if we can avoid those words, we would still be creating opportunity for more shared understanding by virtue of having this conversation. And I think that's a beautiful thing. And it's a beautiful thing whether we are distinctly human and distinctly machine or whether over the next hundred years, we increasingly become a blend of both.

00:39:51 Andrew Keen: Well, the more I talk to you, Kate, the more I wonder if I'm actually a machine. I think I probably am. Thank you so much, Kate O'Neill, the self described tech humanist, but there's certainly something humanistic about you for better or worse. Thank you so much. We'll get you back on the show. Lots more to talk about.

00:40:07 Kate O'Neill: Thank you, Andrew.