Teaser: What We Learned From Anthropologist Mikkel B. Rasmussen About Why AI Gets People Wrong

0:00Welcome to Beyond the Prompt. This one is a little bit different. Today we brought in Migel Rasmussen. He's an applied anthropologist. He's a devisor to big companies like Lego. And then he's the founder of Human Activity Laboratory. And we were expecting a conversation about AI limitations. What we got instead was a masterclass on insight itself. Miguel's definition stopped us cold. All great insights come from the gap between how we think the world is and how it actually is. If you ever struggled to get AI to truly understand your customer or your business, this episode explains why and what to do about it.

0:35We also learned that his team is testing AI interviewers and that they outperform human researchers, not really what we expected for someone who spent 25 years studying people in their field. So whether you're building products, running a company, or just trying to get more out of AI, there's something here for you. Hope you enjoy it. Hi, I'm Mikko and I'm the founder of something called Human Activity Laboratory, where we work on understanding anthropology and AI and how humans deal with this whole new world of artificial intelligence. And I'm excited to talk about how AI can be used to understand people better and how anthropology and AI can become something that supports each other rather than be opposites.

1:24And how, when do you need a human being to understand another human being and when can a machine actually help you do that i find every time i meet michael to kind of like leave the conversation with a ton of new thoughts i i hope you enjoyed you know having a conversation with him thank you i mean it's so so rich i love talking to experts actually in between recording that conversation and right now recording our debrief henrik and i were just talking about the power of folks whose expertise lies outside of ai To me, it was incredibly, and I realized halfway through that conversation, Henrik, we should have been recording it because, you know, we're kind of learning and evolving live before our audience.

2:03But I think it's so gratifying to be learning from world-class experts like Mikkel. I can think of many others that we have as well, but it was really fun. I mean, to me, his whole definition of insight, I think, is so profound. profound, the gap between how we think the world is and how it actually is. The idea of surprises, the moment that you see it, the embodiedness of that moment. I thought the notion of pain as a prerequisite to solution and insight was really fabulous. So to me, there's something for everybody here, not just about AI, but definitely far beyond about human flourishing, human creativity, problem solving.

2:44And then of course I loved, he said at one point I wrote down, we don't even understand 1 % of what it means to be human, what it means to be a part of a family. I thought, wow, this is just, there's so much rich stuff there. Yeah. I think when we, I think a lot of the conversations ladies that we've had on this podcast is about all these things that we don't understand about humans and how AI is this magnifying class because we kind of have to tell a robot all these things that we take for granted right you know we you mentioned those things like the party's just getting started or the mood is kind of awful you know like this he seems to be a little bit under the weather whatever it is you know we we all know what that means and I think now we're trying to understand how we explain this to robots we have to understand it ourselves which is just fascinating so i i i you know just completely agree that there'll be funny easily in some of these podcasts to talk to experts that know something very specific and then ask them about ai and really start to kind of evolve our thinking about ai but not necessarily about just talking about ai but talking about kind of like the world in general through the lens of ai which i don't think i mean what's interesting what i see again and again and again is someone's The fact that they're an expert in some area, in some ways they're uniquely qualified to comment on AI, but other ways they're just as prone to misunderstandings and bias as much as the rest.

4:15And I think that it's generally true that humans want their expertise to be unique to them and want it to be irreplicable. And I'm always skeptical when I hear an expert say, but it can't do this really special thing that I do yet. And, you know, you heard me challenge him, I think, hopefully respectfully, but I hear this from so many experts in so many fields that, you know, can do all these other things, but this unique thing that I do, it can't do yet. And I really think that paradigm shift, you know, from assuming it can't do it to taking responsibility and saying, I haven't thought about training it, or I haven't sufficiently trained it.

4:54At the very least, it's a really powerful reframe to improve the performance of models. But the reality is AI will perform to your expectations. And if you have low expectations, it will perform poorly, not because it can't perform well, but because you don't want it to. And so to me, it's almost like a Rorschach or whatever, right? Interesting. It ends up being a fulfillment of what you see and what you expect. And I just think like one message that I find myself reiterating again and again and again is some version of expect more, raise your expectations, assume what if it could do it? And by the way, like if you think about in a world of disruption and startups, things like that, imagine for a moment, there's a team of hungry, scrappy entrepreneurs who are spending all of their energy, getting an AI to try to do that thing, right?

5:43Or trying to get an AI to do it. It's like the default isn't the status quo and the default isn't nothing changes. The default is everything is changing and you get to be a cause in the matter and contribute to it or get blindsided by it potentially. Yeah, I think. And meanwhile, I think the world of anthropology is probably pretty, is a conservative kind of group of folks, right? And probably like human based. And knowing Christian and Michael. I mean, anthropology without anthropologists is like, that's such a profound frame even on the. some of the projects they're working on like they're definitely i think very ambitious with what they can use ai for so i i think it's i think you're right though that you have to really be playful with what you want to use it for to kind of like start to see its limits uh but i'll see there's something too i also um i was fascinated by i was kind of like ready for him to poo poo all over synthetic data, I would imagine somebody spent his whole career looking at people.

6:45He was like, well, I have to look at people. And on the contrary, I was like, oh, yeah, I think there's a lot of maybe small problems to start with, but over time, bigger problems. I thought that was fascinating too. Well, and even his comment that actually AI interviewers are better than his own human anthropologists. I thought I was not expecting him to say that. I feel like we could have an entire follow-up conversation just on that topic. Maybe you should get his partner, Christian, to continue the conversation. Oh, that's a good idea. Can I make a request live on the air? I don't know how much overlap their expertise is, but if they're working together, I think this conversation just kind of stimulated so much more curiosity in me.

7:24I would love the chance to continue. No, I'd love to get Christian. I'm a big fanboy of his partner, so I'll go and do my appropriate baking. All right. Sounds good. Let me know if I need to take my reputation for a spin. Let's go. okay jeremy oddly i think with that we will end up and we will try to beg people to share this episode with somebody that they think might not really think about ai in like a classic term and wanted to kind of uh yeah maybe like into what are you doing you're doing i want to make sure you get the hashtag the code word the code word hashtag is is without anthropologists okay Okay, so that's a password.

8:06If you hear it all the way to the end, send us a note and we'll send you a gift. We'll send you one of our books, each. There you go. There you go. Each, wow. Can we not alternate for crying out loud? Okay, that's a good idea. We'll do it. We'll do it. Send us a note, we'll do it. And with that, bye-bye. Bye-bye.