Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / How To Stop AI From Making You Stupid - Sergei Guriev

Transcript

How To Stop AI From Making You Stupid - Sergei Guriev · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Unless, of course, AI kills us all before 10 years from now.
• 0:03
  The media makes sure that you have no time to think.
• 0:05
  We don't allow kids to buy alcohol.
• 0:07
  Why should we allow them to be addicted to this information?
• 0:12
  If you just get to the answer right away with an AI tool, you develop cognitive atrophy.
• 0:19
  is and is going to remain the scarce commodity, the most scarce commodity.
• 0:23
  Now, it is harder to find a salary job, but it's actually easier to build a one-person unicorn.
• 0:36
  Sergei, welcome to the Imagine If podcast with Dune.
• 0:39
  Dune, thank you very much for having me.
• 0:41
  It's a pleasure.
• 0:42
  It is such a pleasure to be here.
• 0:43
  I'm excited to be back on Davos On Air.
• 0:46
  And I'm going to start this a little bit differently because this isn't how I usually start a podcast.
• 0:51
  But earlier today, I had a brilliant guest that I was interviewing, Sara Minkara.
• 0:57
  And she does this thing to introduce herself differently.
• 1:00
  that puts constraints on what she says.
• 1:04
  So she doesn't say her name, she doesn't say her background, she doesn't say her educational background and she doesn't say what she does for a living.
• 1:13
  She introduces herself with interests, hobbies and who you are at the core.
• 1:18
  And so I've been asking everyone else to do that.
• 1:20
  Would you like to introduce yourself in that way?
• 1:23
  So I'm actually an academic, and in academia, your website, your CV tells so much about you.
• 1:30
  And if you erase my CV, a lot of years of hard work will go to waste.
• 1:36
  So I think I'm still being defined as an academic professor of economics.
• 1:41
  I also happen to be dean of London Business School.
• 1:44
  I'm very proud of leading one of these amazing institutions, which is especially important today, a global school which brings people from across the world to learn and work together.
• 1:52
  So for me, it's also a part of who I am.
• 1:55
  Of course, I'm also a father and a husband.
• 1:58
  I really like my family.
• 2:00
  And on the other hand, on the other hand, for your listeners, I think the most interesting part is me as a professor and an educational leader, I guess.
• 2:09
  Yes.
• 2:10
  Well, I wanted to start by kind of thinking about, you know, for someone like me who's not come from an economist background and who isn't, you know, someone who is in the world of academia like you are, we could spend this next 30 minutes going through some of the challenges that you're seeing or some of the insights and learnings that you're seeing from the students that are experiencing.
• 2:30
  at the London Business School and then kind of take it to the generation of leaders that we're with in the room right now.
• 2:37
  So can we start by talking about your current work and the current research that you're doing and what it's centered around?
• 2:44
  Right.
• 2:44
  I work on the role of information, disinformation, social media, how that changes economic, social, and political outcomes, how people trust or distrust the information which is coming from leaders.
• 2:57
  And what we observe is social media...
• 3:01
  have actually dramatically transformed the way we consume information, including political information.
• 3:07
  And therefore, that has had a huge impact on how people perceive performance of political and business leaders, how they become actually more negative and critical of the status quo with all the problems in the world.
• 3:19
  And problems are many.
• 3:20
  You have geopolitical disruption.
• 3:22
  You have climate and nature crisis.
• 3:24
  You have technological disruption.
• 3:25
  You have the rise of polarization.
• 3:28
  Yet the world is as rich as ever.
• 3:31
  Global poverty is as low as ever.
• 3:34
  And there are many things to praise in today's world.
• 3:38
  But people don't know about this because negative information is more likely to be disseminated on social media.
• 3:42
  And that completely changes the whole equilibrium.
• 3:46
  The other thing which, of course, matters on social media, people often reshare.
• 3:51
  People often react differently.
• 3:53
  within a fraction of a second.
• 3:55
  And that's the whole idea, the whole business model of keeping and maintaining attention of users that social media are built to do.
• 4:04
  And this knee-jerk reaction, what Daniel Kahneman would call fast thinking, system one, almost like pre-opening.
• 4:12
  analytical reaction of people to information on social media.
• 4:15
  This is what actually undermines logical, analytical, reasoning, pragmatic, rational behavior.
• 4:23
  And this is what we show in our papers.
• 4:24
  If you manage to turn on the slow thinking, deliberation, make people...
• 4:31
  rationalize what they see on social media, on media, around them, then people become more rational, for example, are much less likely to reshare false news.
• 4:41
  People are not stupid.
• 4:42
  It's just the business model of online media is such that the media makes sure that you have no time to think.
• 4:50
  But then, so in that case, and in the case that we know it's bad for us, like I, if I have spent time doom scrolling, I feel bad.
• 4:58
  Or for example, my algorithm is, is shows me awful things.
• 5:01
  So if I open up Facebook, I'll see something like terrible news and I can see that I'm in this algorithm loop and I can see that it's designed to shock me.
• 5:09
  And I can see that I want to click and get the dopamine for reading the bad thing.
• 5:14
  I know it, but then what do you actually do about it?
• 5:17
  And what's the, like, how do you almost like cultivate that slow thinking with everyone?
• 5:24
  So this is a piece of advice we give to younger people, right?
• 5:27
  Think about this.
• 5:28
  Control yourself.
• 5:30
  We do regulate tobacco.
• 5:31
  We do regulate alcohol.
• 5:33
  We fight against drugs, right?
• 5:36
  There are lots of addictive things which are bad for you.
• 5:39
  And, of course, social media business model is bad.
• 5:42
  created in the way to be addictive.
• 5:44
  And there is research showing addiction is a real issue.
• 5:47
  And the impact of these addictive devices and algorithms is actually negative.
• 5:54
  Impact on mental health is negative.
• 5:56
  And indeed, you should regulate yourself.
• 5:58
  So I'll give you a simple example.
• 6:00
  On Twitter now known as X, you have a choice.
• 6:03
  Turn on an algorithm pressing a button called For You.
• 6:07
  or turning it off, saying following, where you can only see people you follow.
• 6:12
  Moreover, in that particular button, there is also a choice recent and popular.
• 6:18
  If you choose recent, you actually only see posts by people you follow in reverse chronological order.
• 6:24
  I would not pretend that it's exciting because once you turn off the algorithm, you don't get dopamine.
• 6:30
  It's boring.
• 6:31
  You only read people you follow.
• 6:32
  Some of these people are amazing, but it's much less addictive and exciting than the algorithm.
• 6:38
  But there you control the information you consume.
• 6:41
  When you think about what you eat, food, diet...
• 6:46
  You try to control yourself to eat healthier food.
• 6:51
  Of course, occasionally you eat food, which is addictive, which is probably bad for you.
• 6:56
  Sometimes you drink alcohol, which is also not good for you.
• 6:59
  Same should be the case for information.
• 7:01
  But then this comes down to a government level, I guess, because government need to create those policies and create those kind of guardrails for us to stop, you know, being able to have 24 access and scrolling for as many hours a day as we want.
• 7:14
  So...
• 7:16
  How does the government become incentivized to actually create those policies?
• 7:20
  Or what is the pathway to creating that?
• 7:23
  Because I feel like in 100 years' time, we will have guardrails.
• 7:28
  And people will be like, I can't believe back in the day you were just able to be on your phone all day and be in who knows what algorithm all day.
• 7:36
  But how do we get from there to that?
• 7:38
  I think you already can see a lot of change.
• 7:41
  You see lawsuits in the United States and social media companies are losing those lawsuits, are actually settling some lawsuits in huge amounts, in huge amounts.
• 7:55
  So today already users are saying, I have suffered 15 years ago when I was a teenager or a school kid.
• 8:02
  from those algorithms.
• 8:04
  And you knew that.
• 8:05
  The whistleblowers actually are telling us that you knew that this impact could have been the case, this negative impact could have been the case.
• 8:12
  And many governments now ban social media in schools for kids, which is especially important because- In Australia we have done that.
• 8:20
  In Australia you were pioneers.
• 8:22
  Now the same is happening in many European countries, many US states, and many individual schools.
• 8:27
  And the reason is kids are not adults.
• 8:31
  We cannot rely on their judgment yet.
• 8:33
  And so that we don't allow kids to buy alcohol.
• 8:37
  Why should we allow them to be addicted to this information?
• 8:41
  So governments respond to voters.
• 8:44
  Voters ask for this action exactly because they see how negative the impact is on kids' mental health.
• 8:56
  When you think about kind of the students that are at the London Business School or even your own kids, what is their kind of relationship and thought process around social media?
• 9:06
  Are they already self-aware enough to think like, yes, this is bad?
• 9:09
  Are they also addicted?
• 9:11
  Are they rejecting the idea of social media and phones?
• 9:14
  Like what's their kind of like status on it?
• 9:17
  Right, so in London Business School, the youngest students are pre-experienced master's students, so students in their early 20s.
• 9:25
  And these students already understand the issues around social media.
• 9:30
  But the biggest challenge now is AI.
• 9:33
  So if you ask a question, I can give you an answer.
• 9:37
  But the whole idea of education is to make you practice reasoning, learning, judgment, critical thinking.
• 9:44
  And for that, if you just get to the answer right away with an AI tool, you develop cognitive atrophy.
• 9:51
  Instead of practicing thinking, reasoning, thinking.
• 9:54
  you're actually losing this capacity, losing your time in the university.
• 10:01
  And this is not great.
• 10:02
  And this is not great.
• 10:03
  And this is what we are fighting.
• 10:04
  We are trying to explain to students, you need to go step by step.
• 10:08
  First, you answer this question.
• 10:09
  Then you ask this next question.
• 10:11
  And the ability to ask right questions is actually what employers value.
• 10:16
  As a business school dean, I care about finding jobs for my students.
• 10:21
  My job is to find jobs for my students.
• 10:23
  And I talk to employers all the time.
• 10:25
  And employers don't like people who can just ask an AI tool for an answer.
• 10:32
  So employers value people who can ask right questions, challenge AI, challenge each other, orchestrate teams.
• 10:40
  So all the skills we can teach in the classroom, but students also need to know that getting to the answer right away is dangerous because you don't practice your cognitive muscle.
• 10:52
  But do they then think, well, AI is going to replace my job anyway, or are they more like...
• 10:58
  they are worried about it, and so they are like, okay, so we do need to develop critical thinking.
• 11:03
  So everybody's worried, and finally jobs is becoming more and more difficult.
• 11:09
  But in a top business school like LBS, students understand that we will work hard with them.
• 11:16
  Also, world-class faculty are people who produce new research, new ideas.
• 11:21
  So talking to these faculty generally,
• 11:23
  gives you a head start in the job market as well.
• 11:26
  And overall, our idea is to provide skills which are complementary to AI, ability to develop trust, ability to practice judgment, ability to argue, to collaborate, to criticize conventional wisdom.
• 11:45
  All of that is very much appreciated in the labor market.
• 11:50
  And the older the students are, the more experience they have, the better they understand it.
• 11:55
  And the most important challenge is the youngest students who've not yet been to the job market don't understand how valuable that is for the employers.
• 12:04
  Right.
• 12:05
  And is that kind of like the, you know, when we talk about social media and when we talk about AI replacing jobs, is that their top concern?
• 12:14
  Or are there other concerns that, you know, young students have at the moment in the world?
• 12:19
  Well, there are many concerns, of course.
• 12:21
  From the August.
• 12:22
  Climate and nature crisis is very real, and it's no longer an abstract scientific consensus.
• 12:27
  You can see the heat waves.
• 12:29
  London can go for weeks without rain, which is crazy.
• 12:35
  In France, people start harvesting grapes in August, which, of course, is even harder to imagine because French people usually don't work in August, right?
• 12:44
  So all of that is very visible,
• 12:49
  of course very worried about this and rightly so.
• 12:51
  Then you have wars.
• 12:53
  Then you have, for economic students, you have fiscal imbalances.
• 12:57
  The debt and the deficit in a normal or average Western country now is out of control.
• 13:04
  And young people understand that it's going to hit them.
• 13:08
  we are kind of boring from their future, both in carbon budget terms, but also in fiscal terms.
• 13:16
  They're worried about that as well.
• 13:18
  But AI is probably top of their mind.
• 13:20
  So they're all worried about AI destroying jobs.
• 13:23
  And so our job is to reassure them, saying we have some idea what to teach you so you'll be able to find a job.
• 13:30
  The other dimension of that is entrepreneurship.
• 13:33
  Now, it is harder to find a salaried job
• 13:36
  But it's actually easier to build a one-person unicorn.
• 13:41
  And in that sense, we are also trying to help them with that career trajectory.
• 13:46
  looking to the optimistic view and to the opportunity rather than the doom and gloom.
• 13:52
  Do you have to kind of also, I guess, like cultivate more of the optimistic view than keeping them stuck in the fear-based kind of mentality?
• 14:01
  Because throughout history, if we think about all the different stages of, you know, the world that we've been in, has there always been that kind of hopeless kind of feeling and that like uncertainty and overwhelm?
• 14:14
  I would say that social media created an unprecedented disconnect between the state of the world, which is, despite all the issues we discussed,
• 14:23
  The state of the world is not that bad.
• 14:25
  In terms of incomes per capita, GDP per capita, life expectancy, level of health, child mortality, global poverty, the world is in the best place ever.
• 14:36
  And then there is a disconnect between that and the perception in the society, which is very negative.
• 14:43
  If you ask people, if you read media, you see that people are very desperate.
• 14:48
  Now, I should say that business schools usually attract more optimistic people.
• 14:52
  Business schools attract students who want to do things to have an impact, to solve problems.
• 14:58
  Exactly.
• 14:59
  Not just to not just to mourn the state of the world.
• 15:04
  And in that sense, in that sense, yes, our students are a more optimistic bunch.
• 15:08
  And of course, entrepreneurs.
• 15:10
  overall are very optimistic because they believe that they can build something themselves.
• 15:15
  And that is different from other universities.
• 15:19
  When you think about your research and, you know, your research finding that people...
• 15:26
  become more anxious, obviously, when their jobs and money is at risk, and then they stop trusting the people in charge, i.e.
• 15:32
  government, like we've spoken about, which fuels the more extreme politics.
• 15:37
  So if AI is making a lot of people feel insecure, then what is the responsibility of leaders in this room to change that pre-that government level and pre-the government change?
• 15:48
  So interestingly, while we think that social media has increased polarization, and there is evidence of that, on AI, the jury is still out.
• 15:56
  The concern that you raised is there.
• 15:59
  It is very real that people are more worried about the job market, about inequality, about AI killing us all, and there are reasons to believe that.
• 16:08
  AI is undermining our cybersecurity, which may mean that financial systems are no longer safe.
• 16:15
  So there are many, many issues around AI that create anxiety.
• 16:19
  But overall, I would say that the jury is still out to what extent AI may be polarizing or depolarizing.
• 16:25
  Because, again, on AI you can find a lot of information which will be factual.
• 16:32
  And since you are asking questions, it's different from social media algorithm feeding you stuff.
• 16:40
  So there is more agency, interestingly, on AI, and that can create depolarization.
• 16:44
  But the jury is still out.
• 16:46
  AI moves so fast, and research is still lagging behind on that.
• 16:51
  But overall, if you're asking what leaders should do, leaders should do a better job.
• 16:56
  Leaders should do a better job for people, for average person in the street, and people should communicate about this.
• 17:04
  We should not forget that political leaders' job is not just to produce policies and implement policies, but also make sure that voters appreciate the impact of those policies.
• 17:15
  So communication skills is something that leaders should master today, because otherwise perception will be negative, as you said, and the equilibrium will turn upside down.
• 17:26
  And what about leaders outside of the political kind of like landscape, so business leaders in this room or leaders within companies and organizations and institutions?
• 17:34
  How can they make kind of that change when they're not necessarily in the political space?
• 17:41
  It's the same challenge.
• 17:42
  You make a mistake, everybody notices it right away.
• 17:46
  The problem goes viral and you get backlash right away.
• 17:52
  So this challenge is right there.
• 17:54
  And like in politics, you operate in an environment which is unprecedentedly uncertain.
• 17:59
  Economists know how to measure level of uncertainty.
• 18:01
  We live in a world which is more uncertain than ever.
• 18:06
  And the world is complex if you think about how much political leaders, but also corporate leaders need to know.
• 18:13
  You need to understand AI.
• 18:14
  You need to understand climate.
• 18:16
  You need to understand geopolitics.
• 18:18
  You need to understand different religions and cultures, right?
• 18:21
  You have to be very sensitive about lots of things.
• 18:24
  And the world changes really fast.
• 18:27
  So uncertainty, complexity, rapid change, that makes it a very hard combination for any leader.
• 18:33
  And I think what leaders need to do, leaders need to be very clear about
• 18:38
  what they change and what they keep the same.
• 18:41
  So leaders have to be agile, prepare to change, respond to shocks.
• 18:44
  At the same time, they have to define their DNA, what they are, what the organization stands for, what is the purpose of the organization is, what is the mission, right?
• 18:55
  All these questions eventually define what you are, help you understand and deliver on your strategy.
• 19:02
  And so you need to,
• 19:04
  tell yourself what is agility about and what is the guiding star is about and then communicate it clearly to your team.
• 19:13
  And your team, I guess, needs to take the exact same framework and apply it to themselves, understand their own purpose and their own values and what their north star is and what they're trying to achieve.
• 19:22
  authentically to self correct let me let me just to make a small amendment uh i run a global team and have i do have australians on the team australians don't allow me using the word north star north star guiding star guiding star okay because north star is kind of discriminating to people who were born in southern hemisphere
• 19:43
  Okay.
• 19:45
  I was not aware that we don't use the North Star as a reference, but now I know, and I will be looking that up later.
• 19:50
  Thank you for that.
• 19:52
  I want to talk more about trust because you said something earlier and it was around, you know, mistrusting what we see online and then what's happening with AI and this kind of thing.
• 20:01
  I saw a post on Facebook recently.
• 20:03
  And to give you context, during the day I was walking along the street, I saw with my own eyes, this, a car accident.
• 20:09
  There was two children on the ground.
• 20:10
  They were injured.
• 20:11
  The police and like the ambulance hadn't arrived yet, but I saw it.
• 20:15
  I go home.
• 20:15
  I look in my local Facebook group and there was like a post being like, you know, this accident has just happened.
• 20:21
  And I was just reading.
• 20:22
  I wanted to check that those kids were OK because they were quite young.
• 20:25
  And so I was reading in the comments.
• 20:27
  And of course, the first bit of the comments is like, oh, my God.
• 20:31
  I hope they're okay.
• 20:31
  Are they okay?
• 20:32
  What's happening?
• 20:32
  Blah, blah, blah.
• 20:33
  And then the sentiment shifted and people were like, this is fake.
• 20:37
  This accident didn't happen.
• 20:39
  But then there was a lot.
• 20:40
  It wasn't just like one or two.
• 20:41
  There was a lot of questions.
• 20:42
  And I was quite taken aback by that because I was like, whoa, I saw that accident.
• 20:45
  How insensitive to, you know, the family of this, these young children.
• 20:51
  And
• 20:53
  one of the brothers or relatives stepped in to be like, hey, it's actually my brother or my sister, and they've broken their collarbone, but they are fine and they're okay.
• 21:02
  But verifying that this is real.
• 21:04
  And it was funny because I was like, that's shocking to me that we're so distrustful already of this.
• 21:11
  And it's a real photo.
• 21:12
  It looks like a real photo.
• 21:13
  It doesn't look like AI.
• 21:15
  But then on the other side that, you know, we can't trust anything that we see online because we kind of know what is happening and we know that these photos of fake things are happening.
• 21:25
  And it was kind of like this weird, like both sides are just so strange to me.
• 21:30
  So how can you kind of fix that trust in the online space or is it just too far gone and we can't anymore?
• 21:35
  Yeah.
• 21:36
  No, you can.
• 21:37
  And coming back to what you just said, trust is and is going to remain the scarce commodity, the most scarce commodity.
• 21:45
  The capacity to run quantitative analysis is becoming automatable.
• 21:49
  A lot of what we do in economics research is now AI doable.
• 21:54
  But trust, human trust, trust of humans to each other is...
• 21:59
  Very important.
• 22:00
  And together with my colleague, Professor Gary Dushnitsky, we wrote a piece for what's called Poets and Quants, which is a top publication for business schools, talking exactly about this, that the value of MBA program is the time you spend on campus and learn how to build trust.
• 22:15
  And if you think about this, you write a report.
• 22:18
  You may use AI to write that report, but eventually you sign the report.
• 22:22
  I know you, and I know that your reputation is at stake.
• 22:26
  You're accountable for the quality of this report, whether you hired a human research assistant or an AI agent, but your reputation is on the line.
• 22:37
  And that is hugely important.
• 22:38
  And how we build trust?
• 22:40
  We build trust through multiple interactions.
• 22:43
  If we meet each other several times and I observe your work, your behavior, this is how I learn about what I can expect from you.
• 22:54
  And that is hugely important.
• 22:55
  And then when you go online and I see that this Facebook post comes from you,
• 23:01
  then I can trust that you're not making stuff up, right?
• 23:07
  Now, whether real photo doesn't look like AI, that already I think this ship has sailed.
• 23:12
  Yeah, this has changed.
• 23:14
  AI can produce real-looking photos for sure.
• 23:17
  Now for sure.
• 23:18
  But indeed, the ability of me connecting to you saying...
• 23:22
  you are to be trusted, and therefore whatever you post, I take as honest view, not just a manipulation attempt.
• 23:32
  So that is very important.
• 23:33
  But if not, if not, that creates a completely different equilibrium where you can only trust people you meet in person, which completely destroys the global world.
• 23:44
  Because in order to have a negotiation, I will have to travel to see you, right?
• 23:48
  In order to do something together, we have to be in the same room.
• 23:52
  And that is hugely disrupting to our global economy.
• 23:57
  But I also think if I just think about my own behavior online, you know, the news, the media, the way the media works, it's designed to shock us.
• 24:05
  It's designed to get us to click.
• 24:07
  It is a broken system.
• 24:08
  So it's created distrust.
• 24:10
  So then if you can't trust the news and if you can't trust media publishing things and if you can't trust then potentially – or you have to question or doubt your government or your leadership or, you know, if something's true that's being published, you know, online that you've seen –
• 24:26
  how does that then work?
• 24:27
  Because how are you able to trust, you know, that?
• 24:31
  Because I see what you're saying when we're talking about a relationship to a relationship and curating who you follow online that you do trust as a personal person.
• 24:39
  And, you know, I've seen like research studies that show, you know, you make a best friend with about 200 hours of time within your twenties, for example.
• 24:46
  And so within that realm, there's a lot of trust built within a best friendship.
• 24:52
  But then when we think about media and news and what we consume on TV and,
• 24:56
  you know, the government in that sense.
• 24:59
  How do you then build trust to that?
• 25:01
  Or is it, again, just curation of the publications that you follow?
• 25:05
  And watching the reputation, right?
• 25:07
  So those mainstream media build their reputations in decades, if not centuries of years, right?
• 25:15
  And so for them, reputation is a very important asset.
• 25:19
  And so I mentioned that as an academic, my reputation is built on several tens of papers that I've written during my career.
• 25:28
  These studies should be replicable.
• 25:30
  These studies should be impactful.
• 25:31
  Without that, I don't exist as a credible source of economic analysis.
• 25:39
  Same with media.
• 25:40
  Mainstream media are trusted exactly because they care about this reputation and they understand that if they start playing games with what they report, they will lose this main and only asset and they will lose trust of their readers.
• 25:54
  Mm-hmm.
• 25:55
  Right.
• 25:56
  It's a tricky one.
• 25:57
  It is a tricky one, though, because I do feel like even credible, trusted media, there is like an undercurrent of distrust in today's world, or I have felt that in the circles that I've been in.
• 26:11
  And so it's an interesting one to think how this moves forward in five years or 10 years' time when trust is eroding at scale.
• 26:21
  That would be a very difficult world to live in, for sure.
• 26:24
  Yeah.
• 26:25
  If you cannot trust information, it's very hard to imagine how you can function.
• 26:29
  If you only trust people in your closest circle, we are going back to tribal social structure.
• 26:36
  Yeah.
• 26:37
  So it's, I guess, about being still open and benefit of the doubt and still with curation.
• 26:43
  I'm conscious of the time.
• 26:44
  So I want to talk about leading, you know, when we don't have all the answers and how we have to be more open and kind of trusting and benefit of the doubt.
• 26:54
  What does a great leader look like to you today versus a great leader from 20 years ago?
• 27:00
  I think what you said is hugely important.
• 27:02
  As I said, leaders today operate in fast-changing, complex, and uncertain environment, and they necessarily make mistakes.
• 27:12
  If you want to avoid mistakes, you avoid any action.
• 27:15
  But this is not an option, because you need to act.
• 27:17
  You need to make decisions.
• 27:18
  Leaders are paid for making decisions.
• 27:21
  They cannot afford stasis.
• 27:23
  They cannot afford avoiding any risks.
• 27:26
  And so I think the right leadership skill is to explain to your colleagues, we are making this decision because of this, this, and this.
• 27:36
  These are the assumptions.
• 27:37
  It is possible that these assumptions are wrong and we are making a mistake.
• 27:41
  But this is an honest decision I'm making and I can explain to you
• 27:45
  the rationale behind this decision.
• 27:48
  And so honest analysis of the decision to be made under uncertainty.
• 27:54
  You don't have all the answers.
• 27:55
  You have to make assumptions.
• 27:56
  You have to make a leap of faith.
• 27:58
  But if you make an honest decision and you have communication to your colleagues why you are making this decision and what mistakes may look like, I think that's the only way forward.
• 28:10
  Yeah, so I guess showing a good example of that it's okay to be wrong.
• 28:14
  Correct.
• 28:15
  But how you act in the face of it being wrong is what matters and how you build that trust within your company.
• 28:21
  And I think it goes without saying that the leader, the chief executive, carries the ultimate responsibility for everything which happens in the organization.
• 28:31
  And strong leaders don't throw their colleagues under the bus.
• 28:34
  They understand that...
• 28:36
  If you make a decision, it's your decision.
• 28:39
  If somebody else in your organization made a mistake, eventually you also are accountable for delegating this decision to this person and for trusting this person with this decision.
• 28:51
  Right.
• 28:52
  And in that sense, the question of accountability stays there.
• 28:55
  Leadership is about accountability.
• 28:57
  People know that you are supposed to own all the successes, but also all the mistakes and failures.
• 29:04
  I want to end on the optimistic side of things.
• 29:07
  When you think about your students now and kind of the world that they're coming into in the next 10 or 20 or 50 years, what are you excited about?
• 29:16
  What do you imagine for the future?
• 29:18
  I'm really worried about the world.
• 29:19
  I'm really worried about the world.
• 29:20
  But on the other hand, AI, with all its deficiencies, will help us.
• 29:27
  automate all the routine work.
• 29:30
  And humans will only do work which is exciting and interesting for them.
• 29:35
  And of course, AI is already doing creative work.
• 29:38
  AI is doing tasks, is performing tasks that we thought only humans can do.
• 29:43
  But overall, I think delegating
• 29:45
  routine work to machines.
• 29:47
  Like we've already delegated a lot of tiresome physical work to the machines.
• 29:52
  I think this is good.
• 29:54
  And people living longer, people choosing what to do.
• 29:57
  And hopefully people having more resources to have happier lives.
• 30:02
  This is what is exciting.
• 30:04
  Unless, of course, AI kills us all before 10 years from now.
• 30:08
  You think that's going to happen?
• 30:11
  This is not impossible.
• 30:12
  We don't know how AI functions.
• 30:14
  We don't know how those algorithms make decisions.
• 30:17
  We can see that developers of AI models have no idea themselves.
• 30:22
  Yeah.
• 30:23
  I think we have to look.
• 30:24
  We have to...
• 30:25
  think that we've survived millions of years and we have to opt for the optimistic view and live a great life if it's just for the next 10 years.
• 30:34
  This is my job to be optimistic.
• 30:36
  Thank you so much for joining me today.
• 30:38
  Thank you, Doun.
• 30:39
  I appreciate it.
• 30:40
  Thank you.