Business Innovators Radio - Episode 260-Tim Miner on the AI Revolution and the Opportunities It Presents with Lois Sonstegard,PHD

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Building My Legacy Podcast. This podcast is designed for leaders and entrepreneurs who want to leave a legacy and will provide strategies that focus upon key elements for legacy creation, determining your desired impact and its benefit, increasing your legacy's reach by engaging key stakeholders, planning, prioritizing, and executing. Here's your host, Dr. Lois Sonsdegard. Welcome, everybody, to today's Building My Legacy podcast.

Starting point is 00:00:31 I have with me today, Tim Miner. Tim is the CEO of Buy the People Technologies. It is a company that works with IT and AI. And in today's world, isn't that amazingly important? He came into that field of expertise, working with Salesforce, and then with InfoSystems. And as he's been working in those areas with his company, he's found more and more pushed into this whole area of AI and what's its role?

Starting point is 00:01:07 How do we want to structure things? And so, Tim, before we get too into all of what you're doing, tell us your story and how you got into this field in the first place and what keeps you in it? Where's your passion in all of this? Oh, good question, good question. I think most of my passion is in the fact, and this is what kind of drove me early on in my career and continues to drive me now. I was always very much fascinated by the change of technology and how the use of technology can make individual humans, teams of humans, and entire corporations more effective, more competitive in the marketplace and the use of the way they use and actually adapt technology. So digital transformation was the big word we talked about for so many years there.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And that kind of got me started a long time. I've been consulting in IT enterprise solutions for well over 20 years. I usually say 20 years, but I've been saying 20 years for quite some time now, so it's maybe a little longer. But I've seen quite a big transition. And since when I joined Salesforce in 2014, that was the one where I saw the largest transition for many companies and not just how they take care of their information, but actually how they take care of their personal relationships with the client. Then in 2018, I left and went with a company called tact.a.I, an artificial intelligence company, which actually helped build a little bit more of this concept of

Starting point is 00:02:44 taking the human part and making it more human than the interface with the computers. So in other taking what the human actually means by taking their natural language and processing that to then be able to become an input into a computer. And then finally, with the Chad GPT introduction last year, that's the number one thing that seems like we're doing at all times right now, trying to figure out how to best use it for companies that want to gain a competitive advantage. So it's interesting you talk about that because in today's world right now, we're having so much discussion about AI, right?

Starting point is 00:03:24 And is it safe? Isn't it safe? What will it do to the discourse? And so if you would just weigh in on that little bit from what you see, Elon Musk has his opinion. We've seen Google and we've seen Apple. We've seen a number of people now begin to respond to the issue of AI. And so there's a lot of questions that are being asked. So talk a little bit about that,

Starting point is 00:03:55 if you would. Well, as opposed to just a technological change, right? This is not just a new way of programming and a new type of software, like cloud computing or something like. This is a real fundamental change the way we as humans interact with computers and therefore what computers can actually do for us. So Wall Street Journal early on quoted the fact that the AI revolution, they said, was going to be bigger than the industrial, the agricultural, and the internet revolution combined and 10 times faster. So that means if you're in a group of 100 people that you're seeing walking down the street and we in New York see 100 people walking down the street quite a bit, 25% of those people will lose their job in six months is what that

Starting point is 00:04:43 means, just statistically by the numbers. It also means that 25% of those people you just saw will become millionaires. So there's going to be a radical change throughout society that AI is going to invoke and push to go forward. There's a really great article that came out of the New York Times just a couple of days ago. That's why I mentioned it. And that's where the big overhead was, so what are the dangers? What are we worried about with this whole AI revolution? And they put it into the three great classifications. The first is what they call a short-term risk, and it's basically about disinformation. The fact is, these AI engines tend to give disinformation. Just to go through those risks real quick, and I'll talk about each later on. The second one is mid-term,

Starting point is 00:05:30 medium-term risk is job loss, and then the last long-term risk was loss of control, right? We as humans losing control. With the first one, the short-term risk, disinformation, I come. completely a greedy, and I've been helping people now for a couple of months, right, with lessons and webinars on how to use chat GPT to become more personally efficient and effective. And the first thing I always say is chat GPT can be wrong. We have never believed everything that came into Google, but our first reaction sometimes when there is a technological bump is to automatically give it more credibility than it is. ChatGPT is just going to give us information that it is learned out of the vast amount of information that is on the internet.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Now, which one of us is going to say everything that's on the internet is correct? Nobody would say that, right? So if you take somebody who goes and sifts through everything that's on an internet, a certain topic, some things will be wrong. So what we should always do as users of products like chat, DVD is first, always check, always read it, always make sure we're not going to take this, this Ajax or whatever. because it said that's what's going to heal my things because the doctor said it differently.

Starting point is 00:06:45 We're not going to believe anything until we look at it. We're going to use it as something that will create text for us, but we have to read through the text to verify that it's correct. That's the first thing. It's a clear answer. It can be wrong and always expect it in certain cases to be wrong. Okay. Can I just pause that from a little, ask you a question?

Starting point is 00:07:06 So disinformation, you're right. We should check. But where do we check anymore? Do we have sources that are truthful anymore? It's a very good question, fantastic question. But even before ChatGPT, we would have asked that of Google as well, right? So as we research the Internet and find out things that we think are right, are they right? The best way to find out is something correct, whether it's factually correct,

Starting point is 00:07:35 is to go back and look for alternative sources, look for the, reasons why people told me what they said they said, right? All those kinds of things need to be looked in the background to figure out with something right. Just because we have a tool now that creates this beautiful text and gives me this, you know, five paragraph essay on this topic doesn't mean that it's not going to the same source I would have gone to to write this out of Google and therefore could be factually as wrong as I just was. So the reality is we always have to check what we have. I think it's a great tool to help. us in our convenience. It can pre-write text for us, which is a great idea, but we can't accept it

Starting point is 00:08:15 for what it is and say it's never going to make a mistake. We should never do that. Now, the difference between Chatubit 3.5 right now and Chatubt 4.0 means that this hallucination, this ability to actually think it's got a certain fact right, even though it's clearly a wrong fact, is dwindling. It's going down a little bit, but it's never going to be zero. And so because it's never going to be We should never put it to the point of ever saying, okay, whatever chat subpoety tells me, that's what I got to do because they just said that. So we always need to check it factually right. That doesn't mean it's useless.

Starting point is 00:08:52 It just means this is not the source of the truth. It's a source of help. It's an aid for helping me identify subjects. It's a help for going through many different websites and getting, sifting that information out. But I'm never going to say, okay, write me a piece of text and say, this is the absolute truth just because Chad CPD said that. Got it. So that's the part about the disinformation.

Starting point is 00:09:14 Medium term risk on the job loss is a medium term risk, right? If we believe that this AI revolution is going to do a lot of things under society, there will be certain people and certain information level jobs that would just not be needed to be done anymore. That will be hardships. There will be terrible things that will happen to people. They will lose their job. Just like the gas lighters lost their job in New York when electricity came in, the people

Starting point is 00:09:37 that took care of all the horses as you drove put your horse in when the buggy came in the automated buggy came in all these transformations of technology automatically put people in a certain position where they had their livelihoods affected and this will affect certain livelihoods i i am i'm not one of to be apologetic about it i don't want to say it's nothing because for those who does defect it's a big deal and i really am sympathetic for them this is one reason why i teach my class anyone who is unemployed can take it for free because I want people to be prepared for this revolution. And then we'll just touch on the long-term risk, the loss of control thing. A lot of the people that are speaking about the loss of control, the fact that one of these days

Starting point is 00:10:19 AIs will take over and eliminate humanity are the same people that want us to, you know, get off of Facebook, get off of Twitter, get off of TikTok and everything else. And don't get me wrong, they have a modicum of truth to that. but those who really truly understand the technology know that no matter what we do with computers, right? Here in New York, we have subways leaving every two minutes out of a station, every two minutes, every 30 seconds probably out of a station here in New York. They have computer systems built in them that are so sophisticated that they can overtake the, they're just so much smarter than the humans that are driving them. But we would never let a subway leave the station without someone driving that train. The computer systems that are on at Boeing 747 are so sophisticated.

Starting point is 00:11:08 They land the plane by themselves. They can take off the plane by themselves, but we would never let a plane take off without a human on board. We humans always build systems with human control. So what makes us think just because an AI is smart and can give me an automated essay on Abraham, Lincoln, suddenly we're going to, the president's going to say, oh, okay, you're smart enough. Here's the launch codes to the nuclear weapons. I don't need to be involved there. It will never happen.

Starting point is 00:11:36 We will never give technology the ability to have control. And this whole thinking that this, even these systems are learning. These are learning systems, right? They learn and learn and learn. They learn out of their mistakes. They learn out of other information that's out there on the internet. They're continuously learning because that's kind of what they're built for. But the reality is we will always give the final aspect because we will never give any system the ability to control things.

Starting point is 00:12:03 And that's why I think this is a little bit far-fetched. Even most of the big guys say this is far-fetched, right? They say, you know, taking control over is great for Terminator movies, but it's not really great for reality. So I personally don't think this is going to be something that we have to worry about. I know there's many people who disagree with me. This is, of course, fodder for, as you can imagine, all kinds of conspiracy theories. You know, and just let me just tell you.

Starting point is 00:12:30 One last little anecdote, because it's a lot of fun. people want to see whether text that is generated out of chat GPT can be detected as text generated out of chat GPT. This is for schooling, so people in schools can see, ah, this text. And it is pretty good. It's like 95% on detecting chat GPT text as chat GPT text. The problem is it also detects non-chatGPD text in many, many cases or not. It's about 80% accurate, which is already too far.

Starting point is 00:13:01 actually they took the Declaration of Independence, put it into ChatGPT into these tests, and sure enough that test came back and said, yep, this text was generated by ChatGBT GBT, which again, fought for great conspiracy theories and great movies, right, but it's nothing to do with reality. Chad Chiefs clearly wrong in this case. This was not a text generated by a ChatGPT. We know that. So these kinds of things, I think, are out there, and there's a lot of movie and critique

Starting point is 00:13:30 and thinking about what's going to happen in the world, I just don't think it's a reality. I don't think it's going to happen. Got it. I want to come back to the whole part of people losing jobs. There's a lot of fear about that right now. You know, you just look at what's happening in IT. Elon Musk, alone with Twitter,

Starting point is 00:13:53 he was able to run his company with 20% of the staff. Facebook is cutting. Amazon. has cut, lift has got, and the list goes on and not. So many people have been cutting positions. We had last year, what was that, 140,000, 190,000. It was a huge group of people that were let go. And we were at about 43 by the end of 43,000 by the end of February. So ahead of pace from last year. Already, that whole piece of unemployment has begun. I'm not sure it's because of AI. I think it's been because of trying to meet profit goals, rather than meet growth, right?

Starting point is 00:14:36 But let's talk a little bit about what is the impact on labor? What could be the impact on communities with unemployment? And what is that going to mean in terms of how we're going to live together? Great questions. Great questions. Just statistics that came out of just in the Wall Street Journal on the weekend was the fact that we have the Labor Department statistics as we have currently right now 9.6 million open, unfulfilled jobs. And we have approximately 5.8 million unemployed people. So were we to turn around and find a job for every one of those people, we're still missing four million people to do the jobs in the United States. As Elon Musk, as we quote him all the time, has said very often, he says, we are suffering from underemployment and we will have a lack of people,

Starting point is 00:15:35 right? If we don't bring in automation into our processes, we will pretty soon not be able to grow to the GDP we hope to grow to one of these days because we just don't have enough people. We're not making enough people in the world right now. And this goes against, flies against the light of those people think we're over. We don't have enough jobs. We don't, we have too many people. It's just not the case, right? Even the United Nations statistics will tell you by 2060, right, that's when the population will start drastically reducing because of the amount of economic development all across the world. So we're in a current position right now with that's the case. Now, I agree, right, even though there's

Starting point is 00:16:15 going to be a job for everybody. Not everybody wants to flip burgers, right? And if you're obviously an executive in a company earning a lot of money, flipping burgers does not like a good alternative. But the reality is there's going to be this transition, this revolution of jobs. Certain jobs will become very popular. Certain jobs we thought were popular in the past will not be as popular. Good example is programming, right? Programmers were once looked at as, now that's us, job for the future. You'll never lose employment if you're a programmer. Right now, chat GPTD can write programs much easier, much cleaner, with better documentation all the way through it than a human can do right now. So is that going to be an effect? That's going to be a fact. I don't want in any way downplay someone

Starting point is 00:17:03 losing a job because I think I've lost a job myself many times as we all have you get to a certain age, but I got to tell you, it is a heartbreaking thing. It is something that you need to address. Now, is there a way to address it? I think there is. If it's technology that is going to be something, my answer is let's embrace that technology. If you once were a steel worker, learn how to use a computer now because steel manufacturing is off to Japan. That's what happened in the 70s as I was growing up. The same thing is happening here. It seems like a lot of this text creation, if you were the guy that just sits there and writes text for emails or ad copy going out, that might be a tough one. Learn how to either a whole lot more ad copy by using chat, CBT, or find other employment, right? Find something else out there. But embrace the technology. See what it can do for you. See how it can make you more effective and more efficient and therefore broaden your

Starting point is 00:18:01 capability to do your job 10 times better than you ever thought that you could. That's the attitude people ought to have. Whereas those who sit back and say, well, I'm losing the job. It's terrible. The government needs to stop this mess so that I don't lose my job. That's just not going to happen. So I try to get people and I try to motivate them, learn about it. I mean, it's free.

Starting point is 00:18:22 Chat CPT is free. So go learn about it right now. It's not like you need a big computer. You just need something that's connected to the internet, which you can do in Starbucks for free. They don't even have to buy a cup of coffee. And off you go, you've got Chat GPT that you can start using. So I motivate and I try to get everybody get out and start using this, start doing this, start telling people that I found these great things that ChatGVD was.

Starting point is 00:18:45 able to teach me that I didn't know before, right? Start learning these things. Embrace this capability that you have to learn all these different things in the world and skills and information that you didn't have privy to do before just through chat GPT and start using it. That's my experience in what I tell people. So Tim, tell me, what are some of the things that you learned from chat GPT when you started? What were you trying to learn other than having textual? written questions answered, but what was your real learning? So if you're, if, and the reason I'm asking that is if you've lost your job, you've got you're in the unskilled labor category you're wanting to learn, how do you use chat GPT for that?

Starting point is 00:19:31 What do you, what can it teach you? Okay. One of the greatest things, again, back to programming here. I just said that programmers don't have a good job, but programming will still be needed, writing things like Python script or writing programs, right, is a great way that Chat ChaptopT can teach you how to do that. And here's a little bit more than just teaching you, just teaching a certain thing.

Starting point is 00:19:54 ChatGPT can also come to you and ask for your learning speed and give you back around explanation. So you can say, okay, what is quantum mechanics? And it'll give you quantum mechanics. And then you can ask it, give me the five steps you win, through to figure out your definition of quantum mechanics. What did you learn? And then you see those five different steps that it went through and said, step number three, I don't understand. What does that mean? So as you can see, you can get the learning capability into a completely interactive function.

Starting point is 00:20:28 So you can take things like accounting. You can take things like, you know, every other kind of white-skilled, white-collar job that we can think about doing business management. Take some of those aspects of what you want to learn, ask Chat Chachibee to teach you, how to negotiate better for my next job, things like that. And it will give you the steps that you can go through and the things that you need to know in order to know the skill that you need. So I think there's a lot of this, we tend to think Chat Chachyptee is just a function, just somebody go do something with me. But what it actually is is a great interactive tool. When we believe that Chat ChubD really knows everything, then we have.

Starting point is 00:21:10 have the ability of having a dialogue with it. So I don't know this. Teach me more of how to do this. What's the aspect I don't need to know? I don't know. And how do I learn that? You got to think about, you know, differential equations was a tough one for me to learn as an engineer. And it's a tough thing to learn. But when you think about it, you had 20 students that you're trying to teach differential equations to, and you can tell the students, okay, everybody gets to ask chat GPT, what are the five steps to know? And if you don't understand step number two, ask it to go back and explain it to you again until you finally get it. It's like a private tutor for anything you would want to learn. So now the big question comes in, what do I want,

Starting point is 00:21:53 what are my passion about, what are the things I feel are good that can be used in a job search going forward? Sorry. So you're saying Chad GPT could be YouTube and steroids. Hmm. Well, quite a bit even more. You know, the problem is with YouTube is you have some guy who's going to sit there and explain something for 30 minutes. You might have known most of what that person is telling you for the first 10 minutes. So you kind of fall asleep and then, oh gosh, when is it finally going to get some good stuff? And then coming in step, you know, 11, minute 11, a minute and 12, you heard some stuff. You got to go back and listen to again, go back and listen to again. You have no way of talking to the author of that YouTube video and say, I really didn't understand what you did there. How did you come to that conclusion? But you can do that with chat GPT. Very, very, a great way to learn. It is a great way, isn't it? I hadn't thought about using chat GPT that way. So tell me, what do you think is going to happen to jobs? What jobs are going to survive? What jobs are going to be gone? And where do people need to look? There's a certain number of jobs that are specifically around research and text creation, right, that I think are going

Starting point is 00:23:04 to be in immediate trouble right now. Look at, for instance, a law clerk, right? The lawyer has to argue some case in court, and he's asking, give me these 30 cases of where this same thing was argued before. It could take a law clerk a week to come up with that research. It comes with chat to me five minutes, and then it spits it right out right there. That's a big differentiating factor that I think many people are going to start using in a competitive sense. So those are the ones where I think the first question will come, you know, do we need to? So text creation and research. Those are the two.

Starting point is 00:23:40 Now, if I was in a text creation of research job, the first thing I would do is immediately start getting into chat chutee and figuring out how it works so that I, when asked any of these questions, would also be able to answer within five minutes. And not only an answer within five minutes, I'm going to understand much better what that lawyer really wants, rather than having that lawyer who doesn't have the patience, maybe to sit down and go back and forth and interact with Chat Chachibati back and forth, really not get the answer right away. So even though it is a large language model, Chat ChachybD can be very frustrating and confusing to work with, right? But if I can get

Starting point is 00:24:17 past that point to the point where it really becomes my servant, right? My administrative assistant that knows AI knows everything. If I can get it to that point, then I'm going to be a much better law clerk than ever before. So I think there's going to be some competitive natures where some of those jobs right away. The next level jobs are things like people that are doing marketing information, creating marketing information, doing marketing research. A lot of that stuff can be just accelerated and authentically brought out through chat QPD. So those are the big ones I see immediately transitioning on. And again, there's going to be people who understand the matter who have a complete grasp of chat GPT. They're going to accelerate. They're going to be the ones people

Starting point is 00:24:58 want to keep. Those that didn't get into it, they just thought, well, this is going to stay the way it is for the rest of my life. They will be surprised. What jobs do you think are going to be eliminated? I don't, again, back to our underemployment situation, I can see jobs being eliminated themselves, right? I can see companies rather than saying, listen, I've got 40 people in my company, the bottom 10 that I have there, I could probably get rid of with chat GPT, but let me get them to use chat GPT. to use those 10% more effective so I can actually do more in a 40-person company. There's that. That's the one I would love to see more of. And then there's the other side of people with, you know, we can chat to be we don't need these 10 people and just eliminate them right away. But again, if all you do is sit there and create text, if you administrate, if you, I mean, automation itself is getting rid of a lot of administrators, right? We we now have fewer and fewer secretaries because, you know, bosses are typing.

Starting point is 00:26:02 their own memos on the computers themselves, right? So this kind of job kind of went away anyway, and it's just going to further get to the point. Most corporations are just going to try to get leaner and leaner to make sure they're not doing it. I hope that they try to become more effective through chat GPT. You know, you said something that I think is huge. And that as you said, actually, if you really use AI, chat GPT, AI in general, effectively, and you learn from it, you maybe are taking your company to finding more opportunities, expanding it. So actually, it grows. We tend to look at this from a shrinking standpoint, not from an expansion standpoint.

Starting point is 00:26:46 That thought difference is everything in terms of how you approach it. I completely agree. And again, it's a little bit of the optimism who sees, you know, an opportunity in things, rather than a risk in things, I see there's much, much more opportunity in what we can become as humans. What we need is more people to start dreaming. What if I have an assistant, I'm not going to pay for an assistant, but I have an assistant in Chat, GPD, who has read every article on my industry and everything I've done, everything, and it memorized them all. What would that do to me to have that person on my team?

Starting point is 00:27:24 Would we be able to work more effective as a team? You bet we would. We'd be able to do things we haven't been able to think. about doing before because we're so overworked. If people can start thinking of it that way, those people are going to start going ahead and becoming more competitive in the marketplace. You know, it is so interesting because the difference is now I'm embracing it. It's coming along. How do you develop a relationship through this? Because I think that's the other big fear, is it's going to replace relationships. So you're all about people, all about building relationships.

Starting point is 00:27:59 How have you taken these technologies and allowed people to develop those relationships even further? I think if we, if there's three areas, right? If we can become more efficient so that all the administrative work I usually do, I can now take that as extra time so I can start building more relationships, right? Relationships with my family, relationships with my clients. I can actually spend that time that I'm gaining through this efficiency by actually, you build a relationship, by the way, by communicating with people. That's what builds relationships.

Starting point is 00:28:38 I think you'll agree with me on that, right? The next thing is, I think the next step is it allows you personally to become more strategic, right? Now you can go back and say, okay, I've got this meeting with this client. Chatchip, I want you to play the persona of this client, and I want to run some things by you. What is going to be your first reaction out of that? Is this going to be 100% right? Absolutely not, but it's going to be close. And it's be close enough to make you better.

Starting point is 00:29:05 So now the next time you go and talk to that client, you're going to be a little bit more strategic. You're going to have some strategic ideas of not only they should buy this product, but this is what it's going to do better for them having that product, right? Because you've already worked this out with chat. The next thing is becoming more creative. We're all being asked. Give me some more creative thoughts, right? How many times as a sales guy, I wanted to commit.

Starting point is 00:29:28 communicate with the purchasing person. I wanted to tell them, hey, what's up with my offer? I just sent you the offer a week ago. Is it going to go through or not? Right? Well, what if I just gave them some, here's some latest 10 tips on how to work with Excel? I can ask chat GPT for those. I can send those over right there. I just thought about you. I know you do a lot with Excel. That person's going to think, you know, every time Tim communicates with me, he's not just asking about his last offer. He's giving me some value. So let chat, GPT be the person that gives you value that you can show in your communication with other people. That builds relationships.

Starting point is 00:30:02 Relationships are built in communication with people, but they're intended because you build value into that communication. How can I do that more? Again, if you got that AI assistant sitting right next to you, is amazing things that AI assistant can do for you to get you to the next level, building value in your communication.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Wow. You know, but this is a fascinating conversation. I'm just looking at the time, It is just flying by. I could talk about it for hours. Right. We could talk about it for hours. And I think we may need to come back and pick up some of these pieces again.

Starting point is 00:30:37 Because think of it. Every day, there's something new. There's a new issue. There's a new question. There's a new problem. There's a new something relative to AI and unemployment. So what have we missed? What have we left out that is important for the audience to know?

Starting point is 00:30:55 I think what we've touched on a lot, but what we've really missed is, again, that that positive side, I want your audience to dream, to think what could I become? What could not only I become, but what could my team become and what could my organization become if we embrace this capability and really became the better than what we were? I think AI, and forgive me for being too religious about this could make us better humans. I think we could learn to tolerate another better. We could learn to bring the barriers of culture down if I can get a larger amount of understanding myself. And AI can do that. If we learn to talk to it right, we learn how to use it right, it can bring us to that point. And will that be better for all of us? I think it will. Oh, on that note, we can use it to dream

Starting point is 00:31:51 and to make us better. I love that. What a great note to end on. Tim, thank you so much for being with us today. Very welcome. For those of you who are listening to Building My Legacy Podcast, we will have information about Tim Minor in our show notes. So you will have a way in which to contact him. I encourage you to do that. We are all better by using the resources there are.

Starting point is 00:32:17 And it never is a problem for me when people reach out to the guests on our show, we have them on the show for you, for you to use, for you to expand your network and for you to be able to do more. So again, on that note, Tim, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. And those of you listening to Building My Legacy Podcast, thank you for being with us. And remember to visit our website as well at www.biltomorrow with the number two.com. Thanks very much. You've been listening to Building My Legacy Podcast with Dr. Lois Sonsdegarde. To book your appointment with Dr. Sonsdegard, visit www.bidvigar.com.

Business Innovators Radio - Episode 260-Tim Miner on the AI Revolution and the Opportunities It Presents with Lois Sonstegard,PHD

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