The Tech Humanist Show: Episode 2 – Dr. Rumman Chowdhury

About this episode’s guest:

Rumman Chowdhuryโ€™s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. She is currently the Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence, where she works with C-suite clients to create cutting-edge technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI.

She tweets as @ruchowdh.

This episode streamed live on Thursday, July 23, 2020. Here’s an archive of the show (in two parts, due to a connection interruption) on YouTube:

Episode highlights:

(Part 1)

3:17 how Rumman’s background in political science shapes her thinking in AI
3:28 “quantitative social science is math with context”
3:58 “often when we talk about technologies like artificial intelligenceโ€ฆ we’ve started to talk about the technology as if it supersedes the human”
4:11 Rumman mentions her article “The pitfalls of a โ€˜retrofit humanโ€™ in AI systems”: https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/11/the-pitfalls-of-a-retrofit-human-in-ai-systems/
4:56 What is the core human concept that shapes your work?
5:25 “I recognize and want a world in which people make decisions that I disagree with, but they are making those decisions fully informed and fully capable.”
5:49 A DOG ALMOST APPEARS!
7:18 transparency and explainability in Responsible AI
8:17 on the cake trend: “reality is already turned upside on its head โ€” I want to be able to trust that the shoe is a shoe and not really a cake” ๐Ÿ™‚
9:04 on the critiques of Responsible AI, “cancel culture,” and anthropomorphizing machines
11:11 Responsible AI is not about having politically correct answers; her role leading Responsible AI is part of core business functions
12:00 Responsible AI is about serving the customers, the people; credit lending discrimination example
12:40 need for discussion that’s bigger than profitability and efficiency; humanity and human flourishing
13:27 “human flourishing โ€” creating something with positive impact โ€” is not at odds with good business”
15:21 “I think sometimes people can get overly focused on value as revenue generation; value comes from many, many different things”
17:05 a political science view on human agency relative to machine outcomes
19:22 AI governance
20:34 “constructive dissent”
21:13 the “human in the loop” problem
25:14 algorithmic bias
29:20 “building products with the future in mind”
29:44 are there applications of AI that fill you with hope for the good they could potentially do?

(Part 2)

0:45 how can we promote humanity and human flourishing with AI and emerging technologies?
1:16 what can businesses do to enable Responsible AI
1:22 “I have a paper outโ€ฆ where we interview people who work in Responsible AI and Ethical AIโ€ฆ on what companies can do” (see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.12358)
6:22 what can the average human being do
8:40 where can people find you?
on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ruchowdh
on the web: http://www.rummanchowdhury.com/

About the show:

The Tech Humanist Show is a multi-media-format program exploring how data and technology shape the human experience. Hosted by Kate Oโ€™Neill.

Subscribe to The Tech Humanist Show hosted by Kate O’Neill channel on YouTube for updates.

Full transcript:

(Video 1)

00:17
there we go uh hopefully you’re seeing both of us
00:19
now hi there it’s great to have you on Rumman yeah
00:24
thank you for having me on I am so happy to be talking
00:27
to you in the person-ish pandemic person
00:29
in person-ish that’s probably the best uh best term to describe conditions right
00:36
it’s uh it’s been a strange time I’m sure for you as well
00:40
yeah absolutely um although i must say it is nice to not continually
00:45
be on the road yeah yeah you know usually i’m away from home like 60 to 70
00:49
percent of the time so you know it’s nice to be not jet
00:53
lagged and in one location i do miss the travel myself so i have
00:57
also a pretty aggressive travel schedule for my work and uh it’s
01:02
it’s a little bit of a bummer not to have you know kind of a new country to
01:06
check out every couple of weeks that is very true
01:09
that is very true and by the way i will add that we’ll
01:12
probably get some sort of accompaniment from
01:14
my cat and/or my dog my dog is sitting right right down here and the cat’s kind
01:18
of behind the computer right now so i love that so my cat is in hiding
01:23
somewhere and she’s done really well so far at not
01:26
making an appearance in this show but I feel like one of these days she’s
01:29
going to demand her cameo so and my pets are attention hog so the
01:35
cat makes it a point to be vocal I I’ve just joined this um
01:39
this like Oxford commission we’re actually going to be announcing it
01:42
pretty soon and we’ve decided that she is our
01:44
unofficial mascot because she’s very vocal during all of our commission
01:48
at all so that’s perfect so what’s what’s really
01:51
cool about getting a chance for us to finally
01:54
sit down and talk is that you know as you mentioned you’re traveling a lot and
01:58
i’m traveling a lot and i know that we have been following
02:00
each other on Twitter for a while and it seems like
02:03
our our paths came crossing we’ll be like
02:06
in the same city uh either on the same day
02:09
or like yeah ships passing in the night and we just haven’t had a chance
02:13
to uh overlap enough to sit down so this is it this is our first chance to do
02:17
that and that’s really exciting um to me it’s
02:20
exciting because uh from the moment I I first kind of interacted with your
02:25
profiling and with you online I got the sense that first of all I love
02:30
how you put come across online but that your area of focus is so um
02:35
it’s so relatable to me you know this this intersection of course of AI and
02:38
humanity is very parallel to mine in tech and humanity
02:41
but also I noticed um that you have degrees in political science
02:46
and so I thought it’s your your phd’s in political science
02:50
even isn’t it yeah yeah so i to me that is incredibly intriguing because it’s
02:56
sort of I can relate to the idea not that you
02:58
know I have a background in political science mine is in languages but just
03:01
this idea that that that education and that framework
03:05
probably shapes you know your thinking and your mindset
03:08
about things right and the idea of systems and and the public
03:13
good and that sort of thing how does that how does that shape your work and
03:16
your thinking yeah um so the thing that really drew me
03:19
to political science so this was actually even
03:21
as an undergrad at MIT was the idea of essentially like distilled two it’s
03:26
basic it’s like quantitative social sciences math with context
03:30
and i really like massive context right or maybe another way to put it
03:34
would be uh i think it’s really fascinating to understand
03:38
at a high level uh patterns of human behavior using data
03:42
but the way I framed all of those sentences
03:46
well especially the second one you know centralizes the human it centralizes
03:50
society and what i find intriguing frustrating depending on what
03:55
you know my mood at the moment is that often when
03:58
we talk about technology like artificial intelligence
04:01
with technologies in general but especially with AI we’ve started to
04:04
kind of talk about the like the technology as if
04:08
it supersedes the human and this whole article i wrote called the
04:12
retrofit human where i raised that concern like why is
04:16
it we build technology and assume the human being fits in afterwards and we
04:19
really should be doing it the other way we need to be designing our tools
04:23
because these things are tools need to be designing our tools to help
04:26
us we shouldn’t be we like you know recreating how we
04:30
naturally are or what to be to fit someone’s notion of how society
04:34
ought to be so in your mind what is that kind of
04:38
core human concept because to me i i also mentioned um you know that that a
04:43
lot of the ideas felt parallel in our work and one of the things that
04:46
that i find i keep coming back to in my work
04:49
at the core of human experience feels like meaning and the
04:52
making meaning and the quest for meaning and so that’s one
04:56
theme that just over and over again i keep finding myself
04:59
returning to is there a similar concept for you that you find yourself returning
05:03
to in your work yeah and i think like it’s
05:06
very parallel unsurprisingly i would say it’s either
05:09
something like human self-determination or human agency
05:12
but ultimately it’s just the right to make an informed decision
05:16
the ability to uh you know have all the information for
05:20
yourself and make that choice and and i very carefully say that because i
05:24
recognize and want a world in which people make decisions that i disagree
05:28
with but you know but they are making those
05:30
decisions fully informed fully capable so to your point on
05:34
on meaning whether it’s you know being able to derive good
05:37
meaning from the systems we’ve created to make the decisions
05:40
or understanding what our meaning is or what our purpose is as
05:45
a human being and not having that be shaped or guided by
05:48
other forces unknowingly that’s my dog yeah is the dog gonna make a cameo is
05:55
that i mean i’m sure he wants to come here do
05:58
you want to say hi to everybody yeah he’s not tech canaanist show
06:03
that’s fantastic at the door so i apologize for the flying at the
06:08
door oh no the the pawing at the door just makes me
06:12
feel sad kind of get a little cameo actually the
06:15
thing is if i like open the door he’ll go out and he’ll father
06:18
come back
06:21
well i love how you put it and i think i think
06:25
you know the agency and the self-determination is is a really
06:29
solid piece of of what always kind of comes back to me too i’ve lately started
06:33
thinking about you know how we talk in in
06:36
literature and culture about the human condition
06:39
and exactly yeah and i feel like that when you break down what the elements
06:43
you know what we’re typically talking about when we talk about the human
06:45
condition it does seem like you know agency and you know sort of
06:49
control over your own destiny at some level
06:52
is is part of that right absolutely absolutely um and i think what’s really
06:57
great about it is you know it’s it’s not normative or judgmental like i
07:01
said i’m not trying to enforce my values on someone else my point is
07:05
that we should all make informed decisions yeah and we have transparency
07:10
into the systems that are maybe shaping us or
07:13
guiding us or giving us opening doors or closing others
07:17
so when it comes to ai then it seems like
07:20
the where that carries over is into the idea of
07:24
you know transparency or explainability and
07:27
is that what generally when you talk about responsible ai
07:30
as the scope of the work that you do is it generally focused on those
07:34
attributes or are there other attributes that are even maybe more
07:38
pertinent to that consideration yeah i mean so
07:42
certainly responsible ai covers those fields i think those schools are
07:45
incredibly important i think that you know of course any
07:48
conversation about responsibility would be remiss not to talk about
07:51
uh fairness and accountability um particularly when we think about
07:55
biases and biases and the technology that’s being built
07:58
and i know this has been kind of a contentious topic lately especially on
08:02
twitter that what isn’t different just topic on twitter right uh violence
08:06
is talking about worms has become a topic of contention if
08:10
you’ve seen don’t bring up cake that’s all we just
08:13
don’t need to talk about cake right now that’s a lot i mean look
08:16
like reality is already turned upside in its head i want to be able to trust that
08:19
that the shoe is a shoe and not really a cake
08:23
but you know what what i’m sad to see often
08:27
is that so much of the work on responsible ai
08:30
you know gets divided into camps of like this you know politically correct
08:33
culture and non-political or like whatever
08:35
whatever the opposite of politically right right um but that’s
08:39
not not what it is it’s not like normative judgment
08:43
passing uh at least not for me um you know if for me it is you know just
08:50
making sure that we are aware and have some control or agency and some
08:54
right to uh understand and have impact on the
08:57
systems that are you know shaping uh like the actions we’re able
09:02
to take in our lives yeah and i think you you bring up a
09:04
really good point because it does seem like
09:06
that issue of um sort of the critique of responsible ai or the the mechanisms of
09:13
responsible ai um that talks about political
09:17
correctness and you know we’re having such a moment
09:19
where people are uh you know hitting at this bogeyman of
09:24
cancel culture and and political correctness so so this uh
09:28
tweet from paul graham uh in the last couple days
09:32
that he says you know people get mad when ai’s do or say
09:35
politically incorrect things what if it’s hard to prevent them from
09:37
drawing such conclusions and the easiest way to fix this is to teach them to hide
09:41
what they think that seems a scary skill to
09:43
start teaching ais i imagine you have a response
09:47
for that i mean just like before i even get into what i think like
09:52
sort of let’s unpack all of the assumptions behind that statement
09:55
there’s just a lot of anthropomorphizing happening
09:58
like what is this like teaching the ai to hide like
10:02
these are not like these are technical systems right they are making
10:05
yes it is a predictive model it is quote making decisions but not from the sense
10:08
that human beings make decisions like teaching you don’t
10:12
really teach an algorithm to quote lie you can do
10:16
particular things to it to make it come up with some answers and
10:19
not come up with certain answers but if you are
10:21
hiding output or hiding outcomes that’s a human decision
10:25
from the design perspective so like let’s talk about the people who are
10:28
creating ultimately that’s the weird thing about
10:30
that statement this is weird and morphizing happening i just i simply
10:34
cannot understand like you know and this is not like sort of
10:37
the responsibility of community saying this
10:39
we have plenty of people you know who are some of the
10:43
the trailblazers in the field of artificial intelligence saying like we
10:46
are nowhere near the singularity we are not near
10:48
any sort of ai system and you know we will define it as like narrow ai if
10:52
you’re in the world of narrow ai so let’s
10:54
let’s let’s let’s box this into what it is today like we are nowhere near
10:58
creating this system that’s called lying or quote making decisions we’re in a
11:02
world of narrow ai we apply things to very narrow use cases so that’s
11:06
that’s one that’s hiding things it’s very odd to me
11:09
um and like it’s not about having politically correct
11:13
answers to be like i i work for accenture
11:17
um accenture is you know obviously that they were poor thinking and hiring
11:20
somebody to be responsible ai i don’t sit in corporate social
11:24
responsibility i don’t sit in corporate citizenship those are amazing parts of
11:28
extension parts of every company but i sit in core business functions if
11:31
accenture a half million person company thought that
11:36
responsible ai was creating politically correct answers
11:41
i don’t know if i you know i mean i’m not a ceo but like
11:45
that’d be a strange place to put somebody yeah that’s a really
11:47
interesting point right like i’m part of core business
11:50
functions my job is to create solutions with value
11:53
if you’re creating a product that doesn’t serve a portion of your
11:56
population you have not created a good product
11:59
so for example if you are making a credit lending model
12:02
that is discriminatory towards women because of the history of credit
12:06
discrimination against women this is not about put not about
12:09
politically correct culture do you just want to not give people money who would
12:13
pay you back like i don’t understand like do you not want to make revenue off
12:17
your product because you are you have literally an underserved market
12:21
so you are telling me that you don’t want to address an underserved market
12:24
like and and in some sense like in a business
12:27
sense that is what some of this work is about
12:31
it is about making good products that serve your
12:34
that serve your clients that serve your customers yeah yeah 100
12:38
and i just want to interject there i feel like i’ve seen interviews with you
12:42
where you talk about the need for there to be discussion
12:45
that’s bigger than profitability and efficiency
12:48
when it comes to you know business uses of technology we need to understand you
12:51
know what is um you know what’s about
12:54
humanity and her human flourishing so it’s really
12:57
important that those attributes be part of that discussion
13:00
too but you’re right at this core level of course business is going to be
13:05
investing you know primarily into technology that’s going capacity
13:09
and scale to their opportunities you know i think i
13:12
think that’s a savvy observation and you’re right like why
13:15
would there be a function for responsible ai
13:18
in the core business if it weren’t uh likely to produce
13:23
you know desirable outcomes for the business right exactly and also i’d say
13:27
like human flourishing you know creating
13:30
something with positive impact is not at odds with good business and
13:34
and frankly you know some this is what some of the
13:37
biggest ceo the ceos and the biggest companies in the world
13:40
recognize that you know some of what you build especially if you’re a b2c company
13:44
is about brand it’s about how people feel
13:48
when they interact with your technology or your product or
13:51
you know if you’re making like soda or a fast food chain
13:54
uh or clothing like you are trying to spark an emotion
13:58
uh frankly right people by like especially in the us we have no lack of
14:02
choices a lot of our goods are actually perfectly uh substitutable
14:07
why why do you buy coke versus pepsi why do you go to mcdonald’s versus burger
14:11
king i’m just like naming things right right like some of this is an emotional
14:15
decision um and so it’s again not necessarily
14:19
some sort of weird like lefty pc culture to say you know we want
14:23
to make things that make people feel good that are aligned with like
14:26
society’s values um and you know we’re getting some
14:29
pretty clear indicators of what a lot a lot of people feel today uh you
14:34
know branding is is definitely important for
14:38
companies yeah yeah that’s a really good point too
14:40
i think that that comes up a lot in my own work that that the uh you know
14:44
i talk about meaningful experiences and people are
14:47
always like well how do you measure meaningful experiences it’s like well
14:49
you know actually if you’re creating meaningful
14:52
experiences then you should have a whole host
14:54
of holistic measures that tell you that you’re on the right path
14:58
and everything you just talked about is all you know part of a model that
15:01
actually tells you you know you’re moving in the
15:03
right direction people can remember your brand people have delightful experiences
15:07
they’ll recommend you they’ll you know your cost
15:09
of acquisition and retention is going to be lower
15:12
because people have good experiences with your brand
15:15
all of those things right it’s also this notion of value
15:19
right i think sometimes people can get overly narrowly focused on value as
15:23
revenue generation value comes from many many different
15:26
things and to be perfectly frank you know people often choose less quote
15:31
efficient outcomes or you know less economically sound
15:34
outcomes because of how it makes them feel right uh you know and and i suppose
15:39
maybe a frivolous example but an extreme example of it would be
15:42
why people buy luxury brands you know like why would i buy a canvas bag
15:46
from like louis vuitton versus target canvas is basically canvas right like
15:51
louis vuitton doesn’t make better canvas but like they recognize
15:54
that how it makes you feel and the experience or to give a techie example
15:58
apple spends so much money on design they spend like
16:01
like there are entire articles on how every apple product
16:05
opening it is designed to feel like you’re opening a present like you’re
16:08
getting something special right that was purely intentional and if we’re
16:12
going to try to make this case that tech is about efficiency and value then you
16:16
know go talk to apple because they don’t seem
16:18
to believe that right they fully understand the
16:21
experience of an individual in interacting with technology like a phone
16:24
or a computer is also an emotional experience yeah
16:29
yeah so so in terms of of ai and and what the experiences we’re
16:35
going to be we are increasingly creating with
16:38
algorithms algorithmically optimized systems you know how can
16:43
people think about more meaningful and more human
16:47
flourishing kind of systems when it comes to those types of
16:51
interactions what what do you recommend there for people
16:54
yeah and here’s where i think it’s really interesting like as a political
16:57
scientist and the social sciences because i draw a lot from my background
17:00
when i think about these things you mentioned the concept of systems earlier
17:03
and this is absolutely true like these technologies don’t live in a bubble they
17:06
exist as part of an existing infrastructure of systems that impact us
17:10
so if we’re talking about for example a recommendation system
17:14
to decide if um you know to help judges decide if certain
17:18
prisoners should you know get bail or not
17:21
fail um what’s really interesting is not just how this impacts the prisoner
17:25
but also the role of the judge in sort of the structure of the judicial system
17:30
and whether or not they feel they can they need to be subject to the output of
17:34
this model or whether they have the agency to say i disagree with this
17:38
and i don’t and that impacts you know how this outcome plays
17:41
out for the individual who’s on trial right
17:44
so a judge is somebody who is a position of high social standing
17:48
you know they’re considered to be highly educated if there’s an algorithm and
17:51
it’s telling them something that they think is wrong
17:54
they may be in a better position to say i disagree i’m not going to do this
17:57
versus somebody who is let’s say um you know an employee
18:01
like a warehouse employee at like at amazon
18:04
or you know somebody who works in retail at a store where your job is not
18:08
necessarily considered to be high prestige
18:10
and you may feel like your job is replaceable or worse
18:14
you may get in trouble if you’re not agreeing with the output of this model
18:17
so like thinking about the system that surrounds these models it could
18:21
actually be kind of an identical structured model but because of the
18:25
individual’s place in society they can or cannot take action on it so
18:28
i think these things are really important
18:30
really important to think of yeah that’s a really important point i find
18:34
in talking with companies too about employee experience and about thinking
18:39
about how culture is going to be developed around digital
18:42
transformation and how they’re going to incorporate more and more automation
18:45
into their businesses so much i find of that discussion needs
18:49
to be about you know the increasing importance
18:53
of good judgment from humans you know like
18:56
people being able to make good judgment calls and being able to
18:59
say like this is asking me to do the wrong thing
19:02
and the machine doesn’t necessarily know that as you already said like there’s
19:05
not kind of hidden motives within the machine there there are
19:09
hidden motives within code because coders put them there but you know that
19:14
it’s not like um like humans shouldn’t be able to
19:17
question the output of these things so that’s a brilliant point
19:21
yeah and like two two points to that one is when i
19:24
talk to companies about governance um and ai governments has actually become
19:29
like one of the bigger things to think about rather than
19:31
just purely focusing on like monologue or modern explainability
19:35
so like a few thoughts on governance so again kind of drawing from my
19:38
backgrounds of political scientists i find it very interesting that all of
19:42
us even those in the responsibility community
19:44
are approaching this notion of governance from a non-democratic
19:46
perspective like what what every organization is
19:49
doing uh when we create systems of governance is put
19:52
the smartest people together and figure out what governance means for everybody
19:56
and it’s quite interesting because we all claim to adhere to very democratic
19:59
principles but very few organizations have actually
20:02
created a truly democratic process for government so that’s one
20:05
right uh the second very few organizations have created really flat
20:08
organizations too and even though they claim the two have done
20:11
so so yeah that’s a very good point yeah um and then the second is like so
20:17
i i we created um like this this handbook for companies called the
20:21
government’s guidebook it’s a publicly available document
20:24
i can share it with you if you have like show notes and yeah
20:27
put it in there uh one thing one thing that we call for is the notion of
20:31
constructive descent so how do you actually enable safe
20:35
channels of descent within your organization
20:37
how can people feel comfortable saying you know this is not working or this is
20:41
being done unethically or i disagree with what’s happening here
20:44
and not just in the way that they’re protected but also
20:46
in a way that they feel like their voices are being heard
20:50
i think one of the issues with you know with uh
20:53
people being at odds with the organizations that they’re with is not
20:56
just that they disagree with what they’re doing but they everybody has the
21:00
same story when i tried to go to management i was
21:02
shut down nobody listened to me it wasn’t meaningfully addressed and i
21:06
think that that’s a that’s a component of this
21:08
um that’s really important which kind of also ties into the third point that
21:12
we haven’t really solved this human in the loop problem everyone
21:16
loves to use that phrase but i you know it’s
21:19
really hard to think of difference a good situation
21:22
in in which we really resolved meaningful interaction between
21:27
you know a an advanced predictive technology and a human being
21:32
say more about that because i’m not sure that many of our listeners will be
21:35
uh as familiar with with that concept yeah so folks always talk about human in
21:40
the loop within an ai system so you know the the narrative would be okay
21:44
well we’re worried about runaway ai or ai that makes biased
21:48
decisions and then the answer seems to be we’ll
21:50
put a human at the end of it and then the human will kind of
21:53
judge the output and then the human has agency they can say yes or no and then
21:57
that’s that right but there’s so many problems with
22:00
this when you unpack that that story like it seems to
22:03
work on face but then we’ve already talked about a few issues so number one
22:06
like who is this person in this structure of you know the
22:10
hierarchy of humanity within their organization within society
22:13
and can they actually agree or disagree with the output
22:17
of the model are they in a position where they would be punished if they did
22:20
are they incentivized to do so and not do so et cetera and then the second
22:24
question is this person on the end can they even
22:27
understand whether or not that decision was a good one or a bad one because that
22:31
person may not and actually often is not a technical person
22:34
they’re not a data scientist so how are they to understand whether or
22:38
not this output makes sense or not um and just a really good example um and
22:43
a few months ago there was a whole apple card debacle um
22:47
when apple launched the credit card and we had the husband and wife and the
22:51
husband got approved and the wife did not even though i think she had a higher
22:54
credit score and made more money but here’s the part that i think to me
22:57
was the most meaningful around what we’re talking about so they
23:01
call you know apple or whoever and they ask
23:05
you know and again back to this notion of constructive
23:07
descent and human in the loop they asked like hey
23:09
you know my wife didn’t get approved for the card and we’re kind of wondering why
23:13
because you know like that’s weird and the answer was well the algorithm said
23:19
so and so that’s that’s that right and genuinely that is
23:23
not a good answer to give but to the person on the end
23:26
who’s a customer service rep right the question here then becomes
23:29
how do we enable a customer service representative to understand whether or
23:32
not this model output was problematic yeah like these are the people who
23:37
should understand it’s not me as a data scientist or
23:39
you know you as a technologist it’s actually the people who will be on the
23:42
receiving end who will be and who end up actually
23:45
being the front line with the human beings who are being impacted
23:48
so like that’s that’s the human in the loop that i think needs to be resolved
23:51
yeah and i think in in in a number of models business models
23:56
you know the the um the proposed answer tends to be
23:59
we’ll use a rating system to evaluate how reliable this person’s judgment or
24:05
outcome or whatever it is and of course then you end up with sort
24:07
of algorithms all the way down it’s like you know yeah yeah i mean and also in
24:13
this example like you know this is the this customer
24:16
service rep didn’t even get any visibility so they
24:19
they couldn’t they actually didn’t really know how to answer this person’s
24:22
question um and then even thinking through at a
24:25
higher level whether or not that model was biased like
24:27
i will say i haven’t followed the story all the way through but at first glance
24:32
i think captain also had a good article about this is
24:35
it’s not whether or not there are these one one-off cases in which things go
24:39
wrong because fundamentally all of these
24:41
systems are probabilistic not deterministic meaning like there is an
24:44
error rate and there things will go wrong
24:46
but that is just that is just a true truism that’s not even debatable
24:50
but what the problem would be is if this is systemic
24:53
it’s not just that this this one woman with
24:56
good you know who makes a good salary and has a high credit rating got denied
25:00
it would be if and obviously that should be fixed but
25:03
the system is a problem if we are seeing this across the board
25:06
across a number of women you know as compared to like a data
25:10
scientist have to do an analysis of this system to see if it’s a problem
25:14
and certainly i mean it’s easy to come up with examples
25:17
from across different parts of society and parts of technology where
25:22
you know this algorithmic algorithmic bias reflects
25:25
systemic bias and that we have those problems and
25:29
i think the the discourse on that is is raising but it seems like
25:33
we probably also need you know beyond discourse we need
25:37
other solutions where are you on regulations from for much of this like
25:40
where are you feeling like we stand on you know the maturity of that discussion
25:44
and where we need to be with with that yeah um it’s been really interesting to
25:49
see what different regulatories are regulatory bodies are coming up with all
25:52
around the world um so most likely europe will be ahead of
25:57
the pack on this um the european commission’s uh
26:01
the hleg has come up with a white paper that came out in april i think there’s a
26:05
follow-up to it that’s scheduled for december but who knows in
26:08
endemic times if they’re going to get everything done by then
26:11
which would be understandable if they didn’t the uk information commissioner’s
26:15
office also has a really great paper on risk-based approaches
26:18
to understanding ai systems singapore has launched this project called project
26:23
veritas which is getting financial services
26:25
financial service agencies together with their financial regulatory bodies
26:29
or thinking about it in the u.s we’ve had
26:31
uh the ftc federal reserve there’s been a lot of noise and there are also bills
26:35
on the table and what we’ve seen interestingly is
26:37
there’s been this bottom-up movement in the u.s so for example banning facial
26:41
recognition is such a great example you see it’s we saw it starting in
26:45
cities right before we see we saw anything
26:47
happening at the federal level there are algorithmic accountability
26:50
bills in like in multiple different cities and states and
26:54
again before we see it hitting at the federal level
26:56
so i think the us is going to be really interesting just again as a political
27:00
scientist yeah focused on american politics this
27:03
is why american politics is fascinating because of the way we’ve divided federal
27:06
and state powers and how that push pull like ends up being like sometimes a
27:10
contentious debate but ultimately like back to like my
27:14
first point it’s good to have people with different opinions
27:16
talking right that’s kind of what ends up being
27:20
and it also seems like it gives you know in theory at least it gives an
27:24
interesting model for being able to test different
27:26
approaches in different markets and see you know what are the consequences of
27:30
doing it this way versus that way uh and and then what’s going to happen
27:33
with that at scale but of course yeah of course that’s uh
27:38
it it supposes that that um that we can
27:40
actually anticipate that scale uh with just what happens at that city
27:44
level and often often that’s uh that’s going to be very different when
27:48
it’s applied federally right exactly yeah those are that’s such an
27:52
interesting area for you given your political science background
27:55
so do you find that you’re drawn more and more
27:57
into those not only governance discussions within
28:01
uh corporations but the governance at an actual
28:05
sort of political uh government level are you uh participating more and more
28:08
in those kinds of uh discussions yes absolutely um and i kind
28:13
of have been from why i wouldn’t say day well no almost from day one um and i
28:19
i don’t know whether it’s because it’s just my inclination to do so whether
28:22
it’s kind of a natural part of this job um because it does kind of combine both
28:27
i can’t just think about the technology i would be remiss not to think about
28:31
what sort of policy and regulation would be
28:33
would be coming down the road uh in part because you know
28:36
i want all these public servants to make informed decisions
28:40
um and you know it is difficult to wrap your head around the technology
28:44
when you’ve you know your experience has been something totally different and
28:47
it’s very difficult to get good information
28:50
um you know from from these different bodies and like all these
28:53
groups have you know people may have you know different uh incentives and
28:57
different reasons for sharing certain kinds of information not sharing
29:00
others but also i think you know when it comes down to
29:03
businesses everyone just wants to know what the regulatory
29:07
landscape will be and it’s useful to have that
29:10
information i mean not that i have any sort of insider information but just
29:13
to be aware of what’s happening so that businesses can make
29:17
good decisions um you know so they’re they’re kind of
29:20
building products with the future in mind yeah and
29:24
you know so sort of speaking of building products with the future in mind i
29:28
i guess i’m i’m curious about your own disposition and views like are there
29:32
particular applications of ai or just emerging
29:35
technologies in general that you get really really excited about that sort of
29:39
maybe even fill you with hope for what they
29:42
they’re for the good they could potentially do gosh
29:45
um i feel like lately like everything is very doom and gloomy
29:49
it is 20 20 so it’s like the world is on fire
29:52
um what what a great question honestly this is a very good question to ask
29:56
um i i what i think is amazing about this technology at the
30:02
meta level and what interested me in it uh in in technology is just how much
30:06
amazing potential it has for us to question our institutional
30:10
paradigms and and us to question why things are structured
30:13
the way they are and i think the the thing if i were to pick one
30:17
thing that got me the most interested in this technology
30:19
is actually the potential for it for edtech which is
30:23
funny because edtech has now become one of the biggest topics of conversation
30:27
and talking about all the negative of the surveillance
30:29
state right but you think about it like what’s the what it should be what
30:34
something like edtech should be is a complete reimagining of education
30:37
because number one like educational systems do not
30:40
actually help uh do not actually help people get jobs
30:44
they don’t help people do well at their jobs like everyone always jokes about
30:48
the number one skill you need to learn in colleges excel
30:50
because and that’s the one thing they don’t teach you right so it’s there is
30:53
this disconnect between the quote the real world the jobs we get
30:57
and then education educational systems how they should we
31:00
know there’s inequality we know that people in the us end up
31:03
with massive student loans you know there’s just so so much that
31:06
can be resolved with this technology whether it’s remote learning
31:09
or customized learning or you know like whatever it is and early on in the days
31:16
of when i started my job at accenture
31:18
before then people were talking about lifelong learning
31:21
and how you know the sort of new worlds of technology and ai
31:25
really means that we have to embrace you know learning and really think about how
31:29
we’re going to spend the rest of our lives educating us all of this
31:32
what what amazing aspirations yeah um right and i sincerely hope that what
31:38
we don’t do is just try to like stick technology
31:41
into the existing broken infrastructure that is our traditional education system
31:46
because that that would be a disservice not just to us as
31:50
humanity but also to the technology and the potential of technology so
31:54
but is it is it also true or not that once you use technology to sort of
32:02
accelerate or amplify a given system that where it breaks
32:06
might be what’s instructive about where those institutions are
32:10
already failing us like we won’t know those failings until we
32:14
try to amplify them at some level right i mean i understand
32:16
that there are real harms that are being caused
32:19
by doing that and the impacts are real but i’m i’m also wondering if
32:23
uh if it’s not um if we won’t get to the the level of
32:29
discussion about the failings of those systems until they’re actually being
32:32
amplified do you think there’s a way that we can
32:35
we can do that uh effectively um i mean i think
32:39
specifically using the education example there are so many people that have
32:43
already looked at the inefficiency of these systems and what does work and
32:45
what doesn’t work and you know what and if we really think
32:49
about this again by going back this notion of human self-determination
32:52
or you know whether it’s meaning or whatever we’re talking about like what
32:56
is the purpose of this system and you know
32:59
frankly can we just objectively take a step back
33:01
and in a sense almost emotionlessly ask is it serving the purpose it is intended
33:07
to serve right like you know like what is the meaning of our
33:10
educational system why is it doing this i think there are plenty of people who
33:14
have been pointing out the systemic clause
33:17
and i think usually the pushback is that oh it’s easy to criticize the system
33:21
like but but who’s going to be the one to solve the problem and really the
33:24
smart thing to then say is well now we have technologies and
33:28
systems that theoretically could be designed
33:30
to solve these problems instead of being designed to simply
33:34
reinforce the power imbalance and the structural inequalities
33:37
and we’re gonna ignore what these people say because it’s too messy
33:41
to deal with that and much easier to just perpetuate amplify and
33:45
now like cement uh all of these inequalities rather than do like the
33:50
extra amount of work it would take to like fix things yes no and that
33:53
that’s a brilliant way to address that that
33:56
mindset or that problem where do you think the the solutions best originate
34:01
are you finding in your experience do you find the
34:04
solutions origin originate with academics or
34:09
with private corporations or is it kind of a mix in
34:13
in what you’ve seen in terms of being able to identify the the sort of
34:16
structural flaws of institutions and what’s going to happen
34:19
when they’re brought to scale with technology um
34:22
i think it’s a bit of both um you know i i love
34:25
all of my academic friends because they you know they do such an
34:28
an insightful job of understanding systems and you know and again like
34:32
they’re sometimes able to look at it more objectively
34:35
because they’re not inside it um but then there is the aspect of
34:39
there’s the application component of it and that’s you know
34:42
what industry does so i’ll give you a great example
34:45
um so about what two years ago at this point a little over two years ago
34:49
um accenture came up with a fairness tool so we were the first to create
34:52
a enterprise level bias mitigation tool um
34:56
and the way we did it was we started off with academic research papers on you
35:00
know this is things like counter factual
35:02
fairness bias mitigation blah blah blah you can find all of these papers
35:06
but what was important to us is whether this works outside of a laboratory
35:10
setting i think we started off with like 30 some
35:12
odd papers and we only ended up with actually three
35:16
three of them that worked if we thought about does this scale
35:19
you know is this generalizable across multiple different settings
35:23
and is this possible within the way a data scientist does works that was
35:27
basically our criteria um so i think everybody has their role
35:31
to play it’s there’s some there’s definitely value in
35:34
pursuing research and even research that seems crazy and
35:37
weird but then there is certainly value to trying to
35:40
ground that research in something pragmatic and applicable like it’s it is
35:45
wonderful to live in a world of like all of these possibilities but then at
35:49
some point if you want to make this reality you have to ask yourself
35:52
will people use it how can i make it so that somebody will use it
35:55
and is this actually as beneficial as people are claiming it can be
36:00
and and does it matter do you think in the
36:03
the the context in which the technology starts you know we were talking a little
36:08
bit before we got on about this current story about that broke i
36:12
think today about facebook using a simulation uh
36:16
with ai to to simulate bots and other kind of bad user behavior so that they
36:22
knew better how to moderate against it um which i think you know i think you
36:27
had said at one level of abstraction seems like a
36:30
really good idea from like a data science model right
36:33
but from another level of looking at it you can easily see how
36:36
this may not be ideal to train to to begin to develop that sort of
36:41
training so so is there does it matter where the the kind of
36:46
origins of of a technology are or or do we do we always need to be
36:50
working toward you know these good outcomes and the
36:52
best of humanity sort of outcomes yeah um so two parts to it one i think
36:57
all of my sts and hci friends and i agree with
37:00
them would say uh the origin of technology absolutely
37:04
does matter like this is why so many people study the
37:06
history of technology you know things that are built for uh
37:10
military use even if it is moved into the commercial
37:13
space which is by the way a lot of technology
37:15
it will still hold with it the vestiges of let’s say surveillance or monitoring
37:20
because it is ultimately built assuming the world is a particular way in other
37:24
words there are good people and bad people there’s me then there are the
37:27
others right there’s me then there’s there’s people
37:29
i’m protecting the people i’m fighting because that’s just how the military is
37:32
structured right so so then it’s just fundamentally how your view of the world
37:38
will impact the technology that you build and i think that’s really
37:41
really important and and maybe even to abstract it even more and going back to
37:45
like all this conversation about political correctness culture and you
37:48
know designing an a that quote hides itself
37:50
i think what paul may be missing and some of you may be missing is that
37:54
um often you create technology with them often you do you create your ai run
37:58
optimization function like there’s a goal
38:00
to this and this has kind of been some of the critiques of the way
38:04
um like you know some of these research firms have been trying to arrive at uh
38:10
sentient ai is by having them play these games and they have them play combative
38:15
games right rather than have them play
38:17
collaborative right and again your objective function matters if my
38:20
objective function is to win a game where i have to kill
38:24
everybody to win or it’s a zero-sum world in which
38:27
i have to have the most amount of points to win
38:29
right um then that sets up a very different
38:32
system than one in which i’m training it to play a game
38:36
where we have to be collaborative and collectively succeed
38:39
like two totally different worlds but it’s all a function of your
38:42
of your objective function so going back to this facebook example
38:46
i think it is actually really cool to kind of basically like
38:49
simulating red teaming which is kind of awesome because rather than kind of
38:52
wait for bad things to happen they’re saying we’re going to have to
38:55
proactively model the world but the problem with it could be is that
38:59
you have to it’s not necessarily future adaptable
39:02
and if a new thing starts to happen that obviously cannot
39:06
be modeled within the existing system that you built
39:10
because your existing system is only based on the past and i think a really
39:13
good pragmatic example might literally be
39:15
something like gamergate right and a lot of folks and a lot
39:18
especially the women who are impacted by gamergate will say
39:21
you know we were yelling and screaming about how gamergate was really like the
39:25
canary in the coal mine about like this whole in cell culture
39:29
this whole like underground culture of like just you
39:32
know like a lot of the a lot of the issues that we talk about today
39:36
um people getting harassed and doxxed and you know
39:39
all of this was the player in the coal mine was gamergate
39:43
and people ignored it but then you think about if you’re trying to build a
39:46
predictable predictive system gamergate prior to gamergate would not
39:50
fit into your paradigm of the world because that had never really happened
39:53
like that before right so it’s a good idea if the world is going
39:57
to stay static if the world’s going to change
39:59
you actually need to have some balance to it that
40:03
understands how the world’s changing yeah and i think by the same token
40:07
it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about you know there’s
40:10
there’s a body of work already that has identified problems
40:13
like there’s the um the scholars that have already
40:16
identified problems with edtech and sort of the
40:19
systems of institutional education you know
40:22
that that knowledge already exists the the the scholarship already exists
40:26
so that it’s parallel here it feels like there’s been plenty of
40:29
um light being shown on some of the areas that need the most
40:35
work in terms of content moderation in terms of
40:38
uh making sure that you know uh bad actors are are banned and that can’t get
40:43
through on on all the social platforms but it
40:46
seems that twitter facebook you know and so on
40:50
don’t necessarily adopt those those recommendations and
40:54
instead it’s like facebook wants to play a game with itself
40:57
in order to come up with uh this this war game as you as you
41:01
so aptly described to be able to identify
41:04
what it probably could identify just by taking the recommendations of experts
41:08
who have been saying this kind of thing right
41:12
um yeah i mean like i said i think there is certainly value
41:15
in like from a data science perspective and trying to do what they’re doing at
41:19
scale like one of the issues of like any sort of moderation or
41:22
tracking is just the sheer volume right there’s just like i can’t even
41:26
create a number to imagine how many harassing situations or flagged
41:31
posts there must be on all of the social media so how do they like
41:35
parse through and it’s it’s it’s actually like again from a like a data
41:38
science perspective kind of a similar problem to thinking
41:41
about things like credit fraud which is at a massive massive scale so
41:45
the cool slash interesting i think the cool
41:48
part of the problem of addressing things like credit fraud is like yes there are
41:51
people trying to defraud your system but also there are people
41:54
who just like happened to go on a vacation in germany and like didn’t call
41:58
the credit card company and how do you do it in a way that
42:00
you’re not going to lose a customer because you’re annoying them with phone
42:04
calls or you’re freezing their credit right so it’s like
42:06
it’s not just like shut down everything that looks bad and it’s


(Video 2)

00:00
and then we’ll just go ahead and sort of
00:02
close out with some broader themes
00:04
uh put put a little uh bow on the
00:07
discussion
00:08
um it’s such a bummer that we we lost
00:10
signal and lost connectivity while we
00:12
were talking
00:12
before because i think we really you
00:14
really were going through some some
00:15
interesting
00:16
uh thought there but i guess look maybe
00:19
let’s just go back to
00:20
you know the the discussion about
00:22
humanity and human flourishing like what
00:24
do we
00:25
what do you think uh what do you think
00:27
we can do
00:28
in culture and in technology to
00:32
stand a better chance of of bringing
00:33
about the best futures with
00:35
ai and algorithmic systems rather than
00:38
the worst futures
00:39
uh and and how do we how do we promote
00:42
humanity and human flourishing
00:43
in your view um wow yeah that’s
00:47
not it not a special question yeah so
00:48
it’s like it’s a little it’s a little
00:50
we’ll
00:51
we’ll figure it out in the last week i
00:53
mean you and i work around the concept
00:55
of humanity so we
00:56
have to think in big terms no absolutely
00:59
absolutely
01:00
um i mean there’s a few things just kind
01:02
of the immediate steps and then there’s
01:04
kind of the
01:04
the longer term like how do we view
01:06
things and and i guess like as a social
01:08
scientist i can’t help but think of it
01:09
as like
01:10
you know like atomized systems that
01:12
exist so one
01:13
i would say is first like what can
01:16
businesses
01:16
do to enable responsibility and that’s
01:19
pretty much the crux of
01:20
my job um so i have a paper out
01:23
with my research scientist donna rakova
01:27
as well as jinyoung yang from
01:28
partnership on ai and henrietta kramer
01:30
from spotify labs
01:31
where we um actually interviewed people
01:34
who work in
01:34
applied responsible ai or ethical ai um
01:37
so not in research people who are
01:38
working on business functions and we
01:40
actually got their
01:41
thoughts on what companies can do what
01:43
actions they can take
01:44
um you know what’s the president so
01:46
really it was couched it was
01:48
guided around like what’s the present
01:49
state what’s the prevalent state and
01:51
what’s your ideal future state and from
01:53
that we sort of drew out multiple levers
01:55
that companies
01:56
can use to enable so one it’s there’s
01:59
this balance of like external pressure
02:01
and internal pressure and that’s
02:02
something that’s actually worked in
02:04
um you know to to really drive change
02:07
and organizational change
02:09
i shouldn’t have the literature respond
02:12
is on the literature on organizational
02:14
change dynamics so what makes companies
02:16
culture shift right so there’s this
02:19
external pressure and external
02:20
validation and then there’s
02:21
the internal infrastructure um so one
02:24
it’s
02:24
an important to especially responsible
02:26
use of ai and technology
02:28
one is um having aligned success metrics
02:31
and like and that’s multiple things so
02:32
one
02:33
having metrics for things or ways of and
02:35
i say metrics very loosely i don’t just
02:37
need
02:37
like measurable quantifiable things and
02:40
you know qualitative metrics are just as
02:42
valuable
02:43
as quantitative metrics right i think
02:45
that’s a really important clarification
02:47
because people really do get hung up on
02:48
but i can’t
02:49
measure that specific thing and i can’t
02:51
see it on a dashboard and
02:52
yeah yeah exactly yeah or worse they
02:55
find some sort of like
02:56
you know insufficient metric and then
02:59
because human nature like we optimize
03:01
for numbers right
03:02
uh and that’s actually a pretty bad
03:03
thing too the analog i always give by
03:05
the way is like
03:06
when people are trying to be fit or lose
03:07
weight or be healthy there’s so many
03:09
quote metrics there’s like bmi there’s
03:11
weight there’s number of says all these
03:13
and
03:13
it doesn’t actually none of them are
03:14
actually good ultimately what matters is
03:16
like holistically how you feel
03:18
right and like that is a qualitative
03:19
metric that is very very valid right
03:21
and frankly more valid than how much you
03:23
weigh like a number on a scale
03:24
anyway so uh so when i say aligned
03:27
metrics for success
03:28
uh this is not just for products but
03:31
also for individuals like is it like
03:33
is it beneficial to my career at this
03:36
company
03:37
if i’m doing things like helping the
03:38
company create responsible
03:40
ai or is it going to look bad next year
03:43
in my performance review because i’ve
03:45
had x number of quote
03:46
failed projects right yeah and
03:48
interestingly like
03:49
there is a tech analog for this so you
03:52
know the lean startup eric reese’s book
03:54
is like the like
03:55
you know one of the core books of
03:57
anybody who’s starting a company
03:59
and in it he talks about um sort of like
04:01
innovation
04:02
metrics versus your traditional metrics
04:04
and this is quite similar like what
04:05
we’re talking about here really is truly
04:07
innovative
04:08
and this is part of innovation like we
04:10
are creating these technological systems
04:12
that are meant to actually improve
04:14
humanity in a very fundamental way so
04:17
like we actually do need to assess
04:18
people who work in these fields and
04:20
companies by quote innovation metrics
04:22
and not just these quarter reporter
04:24
and quote improvement metrics so there’s
04:26
that um another
04:28
is just this concept of tone from the
04:29
top and having you know your
04:31
leadership really say like this is
04:33
important to us as a company to support
04:35
us as an organization
04:36
i will honestly say that’s been a really
04:38
critical part of being for me to be
04:40
successful at accenture like you know by
04:43
my boss and our leadership has decided
04:45
that responsible ai sits in core
04:47
business functions
04:48
we have five core capabilities
04:49
responsible ai is one of them
04:51
that means something like that that
04:53
tells the entire organization
04:55
that you know they haven’t just hired me
04:57
to like talk on a stage and say nice
04:58
things
04:59
hired me to do real work and and that’s
05:01
very important and it helps me quite a
05:03
bit
05:04
um you know and some of it really is
05:07
just about creating
05:08
transparency around systems and
05:10
accountable systems so who’s responsible
05:12
for what
05:13
and to be fair if we’re trying to get
05:14
people to be on board with responsible
05:17
ai
05:17
we need to be very clear on what you can
05:19
and can’t do and what you will and will
05:21
not be responsible for so if
05:23
for example a lawyer is being told hey
05:25
you need to make sure these systems
05:27
don’t break the law
05:28
they’re like okay well i know what the
05:29
law is but i have no idea how these
05:31
systems work so maybe i don’t want to do
05:34
that because i don’t want to be left
05:35
holding the bag
05:36
if something bad happens right so
05:38
instead you have to very clearly define
05:40
as a lawyer it’s your job to enumerate
05:42
clearly to a data scientist
05:44
you know what the different aspects of
05:45
the laws are that make that may
05:47
come into play with this model and the
05:49
data scientist is responsible
05:50
for sharing with you the empirical
05:52
evidence like clearly defining those
05:54
responsibilities really help
05:56
um so that’s kind of one from the
05:57
organizational perspective and i guess
05:59
that’s maybe like
06:00
really specific but at this point i
06:02
think in responsible ai i love being
06:04
really specific because we have
06:06
everybody’s been talking into these high
06:08
level imperatives it was important to
06:09
have those imperatives yeah but i think
06:11
a lot of this pushback is coming from
06:13
you know certain people feeling like
06:15
we’re all kind of fluffy concepts and
06:17
not
06:17
real actions and we are absolutely real
06:19
actions um so that’s kind of the
06:21
corporate perspective i think you know
06:22
for the average human being
06:24
there’s a lot about education
06:26
understanding and sometimes it’s as
06:28
basic as understanding that there’s no
06:29
such thing as a free lunch
06:30
if there’s a technology that you’re
06:32
using an app you’re using on your
06:34
phone it is not actually free you’re
06:36
paying for it in data
06:37
you know you’re paying for it in some
06:38
way just like trust me you are
06:40
right whether it’s because you’re being
06:42
targeted media whether it’s because your
06:43
data is being taken and sold
06:45
like just understand there’s no such
06:46
thing as a free lunch right um
06:48
and like thinking about like what this
06:50
means and being mindful of the tech you
06:52
choose i think that these are the
06:53
actions that human beings
06:54
can take um and also there are
06:56
increasingly going to be
06:58
bills you can vote on so like everyone
07:01
should go vote
07:03
in general right but also make an
07:05
informed
07:06
vote and like look at whether there are
07:08
laws
07:09
in your municipality or in your city or
07:11
in your state around these things and
07:13
inform yourself on whether or not this
07:15
is going to give you more rights
07:16
over your information and whether you
07:18
want that and then vote accordingly so
07:20
uh that would be kind of my very high
07:22
level take that’s perfect
07:24
the time we had yeah no that’s perfect
07:26
and it sounds like you know
07:27
we’ve already talked about you know what
07:28
you sort of recommend to or what you
07:30
think
07:31
that uh government and sort of political
07:33
systems can do
07:34
and there’s there’s the the government
07:37
piece there’s the corporate piece
07:39
there’s the individual piece and that
07:40
individual piece i you know i come back
07:42
to this too it’s
07:43
it’s just saying again and again we have
07:44
to be very careful and very mindful
07:47
about you know how we’re participating
07:49
in different kinds of technology knowing
07:50
as you say
07:51
that we are paying at some level for
07:54
that participation
07:55
and and for that technology so super
07:58
super important
07:59
concepts uh i just want to make sure to
08:02
be
08:02
able to on screen thank you so much for
08:05
your time
08:06
for your flexibility and for uh putting
08:08
up with coming back on after
08:10
you know who knows why our signal
08:12
dropped it might have been one of the
08:14
pets in the background just saying
08:15
enough
08:16
of this it could be the cat
08:19
has had enough she’s trying to nap
08:21
[Laughter]
08:23
well i think this was wonderful and i
08:25
hope everybody got a lot out of it
08:27
um i want to thank you for being here
08:29
and hopefully we’ll even maybe come back
08:30
and do a part two
08:32
uh part three now at some point in the
08:35
future
08:35
so uh rahman thank you very much for
08:37
being here oh
08:39
before we go uh sorry where can people
08:41
find you online
08:43
oh yeah well you know my twitter it’s
08:46
ru chow r-u-c-h-o-w-d-h uh and on my
08:49
website which is just my name ramon
08:51
choudary.com
08:52
perfect all right thank you so much all
09:01
right