SXSW Keynote: Humanize AI before it dehumanizes us, with Dr. Rana el Kaliouby

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2:18Last month, the team and I were in Austin for South by Southwest, where I joined Bob Safian, host of the Rapid Response podcast, for a keynote conversation on a topic I care deeply about. why the future of AI must be human-centric. It was a packed room and a really energizing conversation. In this keynote, I share why human-centric AI really matters. I push back on some of the biggest misconceptions about AI today, and I talk about the gender gap in AI. Let's be honest. AI is a boys' club, and that needs to change. This week, we want to share this keynote conversation with you. We think you'll really enjoy it.

2:57Let us know your thoughts.

3:27how to keep AI human-centric, not only as a safeguard, but also to help us thrive socially, economically, and emotionally. We also play a game, parsing fact from fiction on some of the buzziest AI myths, and we debate the merits and pitfalls of everything from AI therapy to meta-glasses to which AI founders are opportunistic versus truly visionary. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

4:01Put your hands together for AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, podcast host, and my good friend, Dr. Rana El-Khalyubi. Isn't this fun? It's so fun. All right. So we're going to talk today about controversies and opportunities in this moment of change, right? What's real, maybe what's not quite as real, what's myth, and how to stay human-centric in all of that. I want to start with you, Rana, with your background, because your journey to this world of AI wasn't exactly predestined. I think the first picture we have here is of you as a kid with your family. Hold on. Rana, you grew up in Egypt and Kuwait.

4:52Yeah, you're like, oh, look at me. That's Rana right in the middle there. Your father was quite strict and traditional, right? Your mother, though, was one of the first female computer scientists in the Middle East. It sounds like it was a dynamic household. Out of that, how did you find yourself studying machine learning? Yeah, I would say we grew up in a very tech-forward household. So my parents, my dad, as you said, is pretty strict. but he taught COBOL programming in the 1970s. It's an obsolete programming language. Oh, some people recognize it. And my mom was one of the very first female programmers to sign up to take this class in Cairo, Egypt in the 70s.

5:36So that's how they met. Then we moved to Kuwait. And my earliest memories of my childhood with my two younger sisters was sitting around an Atari video console, video gaming console, I guess. Any Atari space invaders? Anybody? And for me, technology brought our family together. And so I think that's been a common thread throughout my career. Like, how can we build technology that brings people together versus isolate us or pull us apart? Your studies took you from Egypt to London to then MIT, where you co-founded your company Affectiva. And this is a journey that you capture in your book, Girl Decoded.

6:21I think we have a cover of the book. From the start, you were focused on the emotional context of AI, on being human-centric. Affectiva used machine learning, I hope I described this the right way, to read people's emotional states and sort of analyze nonverbal cues and things like that. Sort of focusing on EQ as much as IQ. And I'm curious, given that background, when you look at what's happening in the AI world today, how prevalent is that emphasis? Do the major players take EQ as seriously as they should? The answer is no. But let me kind of unpack that. We've made a ton of progress in AI on the IQ front, on the cognitive abilities and the cognitive intelligence of machines.

7:14But to get to true artificial, like general intelligence, AGI, we absolutely need these technologies to have both emotional and social intelligence. And this is where I believe that the industry as a whole is really lagging. And it's the next frontier to figure out this EQ. We need to marry the IQ and the EQ of machines. And it's, you know, if we look at human intelligence, of course your IQ matters, but your EQ matters arguably even more. Like people who have higher emotional intelligences are better leaders, they're better managers, they're better partners, they're better friends. And I believe the same to be true for technology.

7:49And also, if you kind of consider how humans communicate, only 7 % of how we communicate is the actual choice of words we use. 93 % is nonverbal. It's facial expressions, vocal intonations, gestures, body posture. And all of that technology is completely oblivious to, right? Like if you think about AI today, it's mostly focused on what you're saying, not how you're saying it and what's the context around it. So I believe this is going to be the next frontier of AI. AI ought to communicate with us the same way we communicate with each other through conversation, perception, empathy. But I also believe strongly that we only build what we measure for.

8:33And all of the benchmarks in AI today, they're very IQ focused. So I guess my call to action to the audience here and, you know, whoever's tuning in and listening to this, we need benchmarks around the EQ of AI. And when you talk to your colleagues who are who are at some of these places, the hyperscalers and whatnot, and you raise this issue, are they like, yeah, that's yes, I agree. Or are they like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, I don't really buy it. I think there's recognition that this is important, but I think it's also a function of who's designing these technologies. I mean, I'll give one example.

9:10If you look at all the leading humanoid robotics companies, the robots are pretty impressive. They can unload your dishwasher and fold your laundry and, I don't know, organize your living room. But I wouldn't want any of these robots in my home. They're big and scary, and they don't really know how to interact with humans. So the teams building these things are really kind of really obsessed about the functionality, and they're not really thinking about, okay, when this thing goes out into the real world, how's it going to live with us? How does it impact our lives, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the next visual I have has a little bit about your life.

9:47It's a picture of your mom with two kids. Here you are with your two kids. and you were telling me that each of their approaches to AI are very different, that your son is kind of super enthusiastic and he's using all the new tools and he's doing everything and your daughter is a little bit like, sort of the opposite direction, like IRL, I want to unplug a little bit. It almost sounds like your family dining table is like a microcosm of the discussions we're having in society at large. It really is. this picture is from a number of years ago so they're a bit older now my son is 17 he's very AI forward he's actually my teacher in many ways like even though I spend my every day in the AI space he's always surfacing like new tools his latest project is using AI workflows to translate the diaries of Egyptian workmen from the 1930s who worked at the Giza pyramids and they wrote these diaries like handwritten in Arabic with a lot of like images and whatnot.

10:53And he's using AI to translate them. And he's actually running into obstacles because he's pushing what the AI can do, which is really awesome and cool. I love that he's using it to advance knowledge and, you know, like combine history and archival research and AI. So that's Adam. My daughter, Jenna, She is a food anthropologist. She just graduated in the spring from Harvard, and she does not use AI at all. And the project she's working on is bringing, she calls it a cultural salon slash cafe. So they bring young people, you don't have to be young. They bring people to this space, and they host book talks and poetry readings and embossing workshops and whatnot.

11:38Sounds old-fashioned. But they're packed every night, And it basically tells you people are really longing for this in real life human connection. And so. Yeah, there's a reason we're all gathered here in this room. Exactly. We're not doing this over Zoom, right? Yeah. And so I think both realities are true. We need to both at the same time lean into AI. I really believe I keep pushing her to like at least try chat GPT or something. And then at the same time, I think we should really nurture our human connection as well. I mean, I was curious, you know, you exited Affectiva in 2021, right? You're an investor now, as I mentioned, at Blue Tulip.

12:22But you're also the host of this podcast of Pioneers of AI. Like, are these tools between the investing and the podcast that you're using to try to shape where AI goes from here? Like, what is your goal in that? Yeah. So Affectiva was my baby. was like literally my third child it was like really it was a big part of of what I did and my identity and so when I sold it in 2021 I spent a lot of time thinking about you know what what do I want to do next and I kept coming back to this idea slash question that we absolutely need to build a future of AI that is human-centric that prioritizes how these technologies are going to affect our everyday lives and our relationships.

13:11And I mean, I believe that AI has massive economic opportunity. It really does. And at the same time, it has this opportunity to unlock human potential. So my point of view is that AI should not replace our abilities. It should really amplify and augment what we can do. And ideally, we can harness AI and use it to solve really meaningful problems, you know, facing society today. So that's kind of my thesis around that. And then I was like, okay, how do I shape that? How do I become a real player in that space, given my background too? And I landed on three things. So one is investing. So kind of backing founders who are building these generational category-defining human-centric AI companies.

13:57Two is storytelling, amplifying the voices of AI that maybe you may not have heard from. There's a very small set of companies that dominate the AI headlines, in my opinion. But there's a lot of innovators and thinkers and creators in the AI space. And I want to make sure that we are a platform to tell their stories and be a door opener, too. And the third one is a convener, which is why I like to do these things. I love bringing people together with disparate backgrounds and perspectives and just seeing what magic unfolds. You use this phrase about sort of humanizing technology before it dehumanizes us.

14:36And in the dialogue today about AI, I always wonder about sort of for the practitioners, and you were one of the seminal ones, Like how much responsibility you feel like you have for what the future of this technology ends up being and how much that how deep is that conversation in that community as opposed to sort of giving lip service to it. But I just got to get ahead of the, you know, the company next to me. I feel a very strong responsibility. And I would actually argue we all in this room have a responsibility as well, because we get to vote with our feet which AI tools we're using every day, right?

15:17Who's getting the$20 a month subscription from all of us? And I think asking questions around, does this company care about the ethics of the technology? How is it being built? Are they thinking about bias, both data and algorithmic bias? Are they thinking about trust and security and privacy? Are they thinking about the use cases of this technology? Where should it be deployed and where should it really not be deployed? I think these are big questions that we all should be asking of the tools we're using. And with, you know, as an investor, there's a set of questions. We have like a rubric that we ask founders.

15:55And if the founders have not at all thought about it, if they're not open, then we're not investing in them. Yeah. I thought maybe we'd do something very human and we'd play a game, if that's okay with you. All right. So, because there's so much noise surrounding AI right now and so many myths. It's sort of hard to know what to pay attention to. I think we all feel that. So this game is called Fact or Fiction. And I'm going to share a few video clips, some of which that come from Pioneers of AI, the podcast. and each of them lead to a myth around surrounding AI today. And I'll be eager for your take about sort of whether it's mostly fact, mostly fiction, or somewhere in between.

16:42Are you ready? Let's do it. So let's play the first clip. Are we in an AI bubble? Of course. We're certainly seeing lots of evidence of bubble-like behavior. The excitement that the hyperscalers had kind of got away from them a little bit, and it's starting to face reality. It has the world wondering if we're about to see a big pop of the AI bubble. AI bubble. AI bubble. Whenever this bubble pops, there's going to be tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that will literally be incinerated. So we're on, of course, the first myth. We're in an AI bubble. Is this fact or fiction? I think actually it's mostly fiction.

17:27So I believe there are signs, there are like, you know, signs of potentially a bubble. For example, there are a lot of companies raising, you know, the frothy valuation problem. There are a lot of companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars at billion dollar valuations, but they're pre-product, they're pre-revenue. That's kind of a, you know, that's a red flag. And there are also kind of concerns around the circular money machine, right? You look at these handful of companies, they're all investing in each other. They're all buying chips from each other. Right, NVIDIA gives money to OpenAI.

18:05OpenAI uses that money to buy chips from NVIDIA. Exactly. You kind of wonder, what is the net new value creation here? But the world I'm in every day, the ecosystem of founders building real products that are going to be transforming real industries and companies that are really trying to figure out how to bring AI to be more productive, this is real. And it's very early days. So that's where I focus my energy. And I think we're in the very early days of like massive, massive economic opportunity. And so, I mean, a lot of those clips we saw were from investors. Maybe the investment marketplace, there might be some bubble in, which might be cautionary for all of us because we all have money in these companies now, right?

18:50But in the long run, you think the technology itself we maybe are even undervaluing? I think so, yeah. The technology itself, it's very early days, and the use, the applications of the technology is very early days. We spend a lot of our time, our thesis is basically AI is transforming like every industry in vertical, but we focus on three in particular. One is how AI is driving this health span revolution. So think sensors, data, AI, and how that can advance healthcare in every aspect of it. The other is future of work. So how can we employ and deploy AI, whether it's physical AI or AI coworkers and agentic AI to transform businesses and especially antiquated industries.

19:36Like some often they're very like boring and unsexy, but like lots of opportunity there. And the last is sustainable living. How can we use AI to apply that to planet health, whether it's food innovation, you know, rethinking manufacturing, climate, energy. All right. Yeah. All right. So are you ready for another myth? Okay. All right. This next video is from the Pioneers of AI show. So let's see the next one. Somewhere in the early 2040s, we will get a billion bipedal robots. They will do more work than all of humanity does today. Now, people are terrified that these jobs get displaced, and they should be.

20:26Okay, such a happy thought from Vinod Khosla there, legendary tech investor. So the myth here is that, like, the robots are taking over, right? So how real is that? I kind of, I mean, Vinod is legendary, right? And he's obviously been super successful. I think he was one of the first investors in open AI, actually. But I kind of disagree with his point of view a little bit. I don't think robots are taking over in the sci-fi movie Terminator kind of way. I do think robots are going to take over a lot of jobs, often repetitive, mundane, even dangerous jobs. We're looking at a company that's building humanoid robots for ship welding.

21:14Ship welding. Yes. And it's a very dangerous job, as it turns out. And there's not enough humans who even want to do it. That's a perfect job for a robot to take on. So I think there's going to be a lot of that. But again, if you take a human-centric angle to that, we want the robots to take over the tasks that we as humans probably don't want to do. And yes, that will mean we'll have to think about what do we want to do and what does that look like. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we should be threatened by these robots. I don't think so. All right. Well, that's reassuring. All right. Let's try the next myth.

21:59This is another Pioneers of AI video. Let's play that. People don't realize that IP gets more valuable in an AI world because if a model, a foundational model is not trained on that IP, it's behind. And trying to make decisions about whether or not you publish the work you do because you want the accolades, that's the exact wrong way to do things now. Maybe you don't want to patent it because the minute you publish it, every model is training on it. All right. So our good friend, Mark Cuban. So basically, the myth is that AI is bad for creators. Right. Mark is kind of arguing that it's not. It's good for creators.

22:44Where where are you on this? I I don't think a A.I. is inherently bad for creators. I think A.I. is reshaping the creator economy. You know, when I put my kind of positive hat on A.I. is also democratizing access to creation. right i i have like zero graphic skills i can create videos and content and i think it lowers the barrier to content but that also i think at the same time means that you know there's going to be a premium on human originality and human perspective and um lived experiences and how do you encapsulate all of that because ai is not going to that's not going to be a differentiating factor.

23:32So, I mean, it's, it's, it's almost like sort of the, the definition of progress in some ways, right? The floor goes up. Right. But that doesn't mean the ceiling doesn't go up also, which is, which is where I guess the best creators will end up. Yeah. I love that. I love that. All right. We have two more myths. Let's play the, play the next, the next video also from pioneers of AI. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI, which is an incredible opportunity to realize that we are not defined by our IQ. Let AI be more intelligent than humans and let humans be wiser than AI. I love Ariana. She's just so cool.

24:18So the myth here, and Ariana Huffington is talking about it there, right? AI is on course to outsmart humanity, which she thinks is a good thing. It's okay. Yeah. I agree with Ariana. Her point of view is basically, yeah, let AI, let AI be smarter than us, but let us kind of, she uses this term, like AI can be the GPS of our soul. Like how can we use the GPS of our soul? Yes. Wow. Yeah. Basically we are in this moment of time where we can use AI to double down on what makes us uniquely human and tap into our intuition and this kind of wisdom and intelligence that AI doesn't have. And I really like that.

25:06So, you know, so my book's called Girl Decoded, and it was very much about how to bring emotional intelligence into machines. And I learned a lot from that whole journey about my own emotions. But I keep wondering, like, my next book should be called Girl Embodied. And it should be about, like, our intuitive intelligence, like our body intelligence. You know, when you get goosebumps, That's a signal when you have this gut feeling like we're so disconnected from that type of intelligence, but it's a true intelligence. And I think our opportunity as humans in this age of AI is to really double down on that.

25:40Because in the tech world, because we can measure other things, you were alluding to this before about IQ, because we can measure this, this becomes the definition of intelligence. when as you sort of look at it, you're like, well, maybe not really. Right. There is a different form of intelligence that technology has no access to right now that we've lost access to as well because, you know, we're always rushed. We're in this world where we're like blue to our screens. I don't think we're in touch. I'll speak for myself. I don't think I'm always in touch with like that kind of intuitive intelligence.

26:17It's not easy for me to access it unless I spend a lot of time meditating. So anyway, I'm on a journey to tap into that intelligence. I think it's really important. But it sounds a little bit like for all of us in some ways, as AI takes on more of the intelligence that maybe culturally we have emphasized, that we all should be working a little harder to sort of tap that other piece of intelligence. The inner kind of wisdom, yeah. All right. One more myth. This is a constellation of random headlines chosen recently from TechCrunch of new AI startups. And there is something in common about all of these folks.

26:58They're all men. Yeah. I mean, you and I were having a conversation at one point, and you kept pulling these up, and you were kind of, you know, animated. And I guess so the myth here is, you know, is AI a boys club? And, like, is it? Is that a fact? Is that a fiction? That one is not a myth. That one is, like, there's no, like, mostly about it, yes. I think AI today is a boys club. And I think diversity is not a very popular conversation topic these days. But I think it's so important because AI is creating incredible economic opportunity. And if women are left out because they're not founding these companies, because they're not getting the funding, we're going to look back five years from now or a decade from now.

27:52And it's going to be we're going to have widened the economic gap. like crazy. So this is something that really concerns me. It's why, again, I, you know, three out of my four investments out of Blue Tulip Ventures are women CEOs. I don't just invest in women, but I really try to seek these women founders and support them, if not by a check, but in other ways as well. Because they're not getting the opportunity that they should and that they need to. Oh, thank you. Yeah.

28:26Rana is so logical in how she describes the impacts of AI across all kinds of areas, even ones that are emotional. So what kind of role does being human-centric play in AI safety? And what human skills should we prioritize in an AI world? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.