The Human Code
The Human Code" podcast unravels the intricate blend of technology, leadership, and personal growth, featuring insights from visionary leaders and innovators shaping the future. Host Don Finley dives deep into the human stories behind technological advancements, inspiring listeners at the crossroads of humanity and tech.
The Human Code
Redefining Careers in an AI World with Mikah Sellers
Transforming the Future of Work: AI's Impact with Mikah Sellers
In this episode of The Human Code, host Don Finley explores the intersection of technology, leadership, and personal growth with guest Mikah Sellers, an entrepreneurial executive and AI specialist. The discussion delves into the evolution of marketing with technology, the potential and challenges of AI in enhancing human potential, the future of work, and the essential skills needed for success in an AI-driven world. Mikah shares his insights on the rapid advancements in AI, potential regulatory needs, and the importance of human elements in leveraging AI effectively. The conversation provides valuable perspectives for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about the impacts of AI on various industries.
00:00 Introduction to The Human Code
00:49 Guest Introduction: Mikah Sellers
01:14 Evolution of Marketing with Technology
01:20 AI's Role in Enhancing Human Potential
01:28 Future of Work in an AI-Driven World
02:17 Mikah's Career Journey and Insights
05:07 The Three-Legged Stool: Technology, Government, and Academia
10:19 AI in Customer Service and Beyond
12:45 Regulation and Ethical Considerations of AI
34:23 Preparing for the Future: Skills and Education
37:04 Conclusion and Contact Information
Welcome to The Human Code, the podcast where technology meets humanity, and the future is shaped by the leaders and innovators of today. I'm your host, Don Finley, inviting you on a journey through the fascinating world of tech, leadership, and personal growth. Here, we delve into the stories of visionary minds, Who are not only driving technological advancement, but also embodying the personal journeys and insights that inspire us all. Each episode, we explore the intersections where human ingenuity meets the cutting edge of technology, unpacking the experiences, challenges, and triumphs that define our era. So, whether you are a tech enthusiast, an inspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the human narratives behind the digital revolution, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Human Code.
In this episode, we're excited to welcome Micah sellers, a dynamic and entrepreneurial executive known for his unconventional strategies that drive revenue and capture market share. Micah has a remarkable track record of leading organizations towards growth and productivity. Making him a sought after leader in an evolving and competitive market. Today, Micah. And I will share how marketing has evolved with technology and the new skills marketers need to succeed. The ways AI can enhance human potential focusing on improving efficiency while preserving the human touch. The essential skills and mindsets needed to prepare for the future of work and an AI driven world. Join us today. As we dive into these engaging topics with Mica sellers. This episode is jam packed. With valuable insights that will inspire you to rethink how you approach your career and the integration of technology. I wouldn't miss it.
Don Finley:welcome back another episode of The Human Code. I'm here with Micah Sellers, who we're going to talk about the connection between humanity, technology, organizational development. Micah has an excellent career that he's built over the years, has his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as being faculty at Georgetown University for 12 years as well. there's many things that I'm leaving out of this, but Micah, thank you so much for being with us today. And I just got to ask you, what got you interested or what's kept you interested in, what's happening in technology and humanity?
Mikah Sellers:First, Yeah. Thanks for inviting me on. i'm glad to be here. it's a topic that i'm really passionate about. I would say it really goes. Back to the beginning of my career, when I first came out of the military and came into the civilian world, I got into this interesting intersection of like marketing and technology. And as I'm sure you're aware, through the early aughts of the two thousands, All the way up to today. Marketing has been transformed dramatically, you've seen CRM and market automation and, dozens and dozens of platforms, That marketers use today, to do their jobs. So technology really transformed marketing and also transformed the nature of being a marketer, Like in the old days, right? Like you just had to be really good at like ad and copy and design and be creative. but we saw, the transformation of marketing, with MarTech, marketers had to become technologists, right? And they had to learn how to do basic scripting and basic markup and understand, Boolean logic, to do all kinds of advanced queries. And they had to learn, how to do analytics and reporting. And, understand sentiment analysis and all kinds of things that, 20 years ago were just not a thing. and that really intrigued me, When I started seeing technology other elements of the workforce. And that was intriguing. And I started thinking about, all right, what is this going to mean for. At large, and, somewhere around, it was around 2011, I started teaching, at Georgetown and, specifically in the master's program for technology management. And a lot of the students, we're starting to see the trends, Of how. need to adapt and need to adapt how they educate their workforces, how they develop their workforces, Not just in terms of, the practical, in, day out stuff, but also leadership and how leadership needs to start to think about career development and career progression. And that really intrigued me. So somewhere along the lines, I had this crazy idea of going back and getting my doctorate. And, I decided to focus on leadership and learning, at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. and one of the things that I became deeply interested in is the future of work. And, how technology is shaping the future of work. But the more I delve into it. the more I realized that it's like, there's this three legged soul, right? That we really need to embrace in order to adapt as a society, which is, you know, organizations need to understand how technology is transforming their workplace and how it's going to impact their workers. Government, needs to understand how all these things are taking place and what the implications of those things are, both from a regulatory perspective, but also from investment perspective, we need government, to subsidize, a lot of times, massive, shifts in society. And this is one of those things, right? But also from a regulatory perspective, because There we have to put guardrails in, right? to protect, both workers, but also the general public, as these technologies get rolled out, as we've seen, AI is amazing. it has tremendous potential, but it can also be used for really nefarious purposes,
Don Finley:Oh, absolutely.
Mikah Sellers:and abused, So, government has. To put the right regulatory frameworks in to make that happen. The third leg of that school is academia, and academia, needs to adapt based on what AI is going to enable us to do and how humans are going to be interacting with AI, what is the human. element, That's going to make AI really effective. Because as we know, AI is not sentient, it doesn't have human emotion, it, AI is never going to have an emotional quotient. That's a human thing, right?
Don Finley:I don't know, man. I might disagree with you on that one. But at the same time, I agree that today's not the day.
Mikah Sellers:It can think it, right? It's, AI is never
Don Finley:very good at mimicking
Mikah Sellers:yeah, It's never gonna have a soul. It's never gonna have a soul. It's never gonna be a human, And,
Don Finley:It's definitely different than a human.
Mikah Sellers:Yeah. I think, even as we get into like really advanced AI, super intelligent AI, It's still not going to be human, like when you think about for example, generative AI, yeah. Can you like put in some, great keywords and can train the AI to make the sort of okay art that puts out iteratively better, Yes. But can you tell that it was generated by Absolutely. Because it lacks a certain amount of humanity, and we see things differently, right? AI is not going to be able to interpret that, but Can I get you off the spine a little bit here? But, I think, as I began to get really interested in that intersection Of, technology and the future of work and how we need to adjust and adapt, some things that occurred to me is, the pace of change, has dramatically accelerated. we saw, in the nineties, Like computing, And Moore's law, every year, processors would get significantly better. And just. Kind of over
Don Finley:Doubling every 18 months.
Mikah Sellers:Yeah, and the speed of that with technology specifically things like AI, Or are moving much faster, And I think we're also on the precipice of some really amazing breakthroughs in computing, Which will take AI even to the next level, with super computing, Quantum computing is going to just make things so much more accessible, And we're also seeing, I think what's interesting, Is three, four, five years ago, AI was in its very nascent stages in industry, But we've seen the rapid progression, and adoption, of AI by businesses in almost every industry.
Don Finley:and it's also a completely different, mindset around AI implementation today than it was three, four years ago. my background, like I have an undergrad in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence. And so like I graduated early two thousands, basically AI. There wasn't enough compute and there wasn't enough data to do the, things that we do today. And it wasn't until the mid 2010s that we saw, image classification really come about and the recognition of what we could do with GPUs and the collection of data that we had on the internet. But even from 20, 14 up until 2021, really, we were seeing things that were very narrow in their implementation of what this artificial intelligence could do. It could recognize a picture. It could draw you a crazy image, but not in the way that generative AI does today. We were doing like content style transfer. hey, I have this picture and I have this Monet, make this picture look like Monet. I honestly was of the mindset that like, Hey, we're going to actually, the jobs that we're going to automate away with AI are going to be more of like the blue collar worker type jobs or like the low skill type tasks that would end up being something that we could define narrowly. And so it narrow focus AI, but now I've seen the change of.
Mikah Sellers:Cinefix?
Don Finley:a point where we're talking about like intelligence and the cost of intelligence being driven to zero with what we're looking at with the transformer architectures and then the emerging qualities of like reasoning and logic that are showing up in these. Now, are they super intelligent? I don't think so, and I don't think that we're at a point where it actually has a great understanding or depth of understanding of what it's doing. And it's still at some point a probabilistic machine. But what we can do with it is fascinating. And the implementations that we're doing today, is a lot different than what we were talking about two years ago and how we're impacting customer service and relationships is incredible from like the opportunities that exist there.
Mikah Sellers:Yeah, 100 percent that's a great example. I worked at a company called EverEyes, Which is a global company that provides, contact centers for Big brands all over the world. And, one of my main focuses there was in AI, Leveraging AI for AI enabled chatbots, conversational assistance, robotic process automation, et cetera, And I think what I saw there, though, is, there's this idea, that, you can, reduce your headcount, in the contact center. and to some degree, that may be true. However, The way that companies should really be approaching this, is AI should be a tool to allow humans to reach their full potential, But that doesn't necessarily mean that you should remove humans, Take the Contact Center for Existence. you can AI, to route people intelligently, to, the right person, Or you can use AI to monitor the conversation, And identify when you know the conversation's getting hot, maybe you need to bring in, a supervisor, you need to escalate it, Or, when you are detecting right, that you know somebody who is, a super valuable customer, with a tremendous lifetime value, is about to, jenison the brand, those are all really important things. But what I also saw, people still value talking to people. at the end of the day, and, you can't remove the human equation altogether, That would just be the overall wrong approach. there are also some really interesting things I saw, that are emerging in the context that are just wild, Like the ability, to make somebody from the Philippines sound like Joe from Texas in real time. You
Don Finley:guess. Yeah.
Mikah Sellers:removing their accent altogether. in a way that's cool and in other ways, it's incredibly scary, because the technology that enables that, also is the technology that enables things like deep fakes, and, things that can be used for really, nefarious and abusive purposes.
Don Finley:It's like the balance between nuclear energy and the nuclear bomb, Like on one side, you could use the technology for something that helps millions of people. And on the other side, it can hurt many. what kind of guardrails do you think we need in place to, to see some of these benefits? Or like, how can we in our own lives make that determination?
Mikah Sellers:Yeah, that's what, honestly, one of the things that scares me the most to be candid, Because let's just take a step back, Let's just look at the Internet broadly, since the emergence of the Internet, governments all around the world have been slow to regulate. We're still seeing that. When every time, Facebook executives or ex executives or Google executives get called up on the Hill, and there's all these congressional hearings. What they're addressing, is the fact that still this thing is very largely unregulated. The interrupts are very largely unregulated. yeah, we've seen some protections come on board, in terms of consumer protections and things around email marketing, the Can Spam Act and stuff like that. But it's really, just a very thin layer of regulation. And then when you look at something like AI, that has significant potential, for abuse, I think, it's going to take, that three legged stool industry, government, academia, All coming together. And some kind of super Congress, To think about all the different ways we need to regulate this. And then we need, to put guardrails in place, sooner than later. because this just keeps evolving so fast and the implementation is going so fast, that if we don't put those regulations into place, we could see some real harm both, to. The consuming public, but also to the workforce and not necessarily, looking at all the things we need to do to adjust and adapt in order to make this work for society broadly.
Don Finley:I always come back to what is my ideal vision of like, where we go with this? And a couple of things that you've brought up that I also agree with is you got to look at like how the AI serves humanity. in regards to like actually making a solution so that we can connect better with people or that we can fulfill our goals in a more effective way. I've been involved in, process automation, process efficiency look for, a while. And
Mikah Sellers:language
Don Finley:put down like reduced head count in an ROI analysis and a hundred percent of the time, like not a single head gets cut. Most organizations don't have as many people as they would like to have. They already have those people on the books and there's probably two other jobs that aren't getting done when they go through and automate some of that. So they tend to retrain people in the organization or enhance the skills that they have. So it's a nice like up leveling, but when it comes to AI and like the intelligence that we're talking about bringing to the table, what's your ideal situation for that? what's the utopian outlook?
Mikah Sellers:Look, I think you just spoke to it, which is, we should be thinking about AI in terms of, allowing. Humanity to reach their full potential, AI can, eliminate routine mundane tasks, it can eliminate even some tasks, which requires some levels of intelligence, however, I think we should be thinking about how the workforce leverages that, To 10 X themselves. But then also to use the time that's gained back, To put more human work in, to add more value, think about, for example, customer service, If you can reduce a call, the transaction time by 30%, wouldn't that enable that agent, to then. Build relationships, you're not, theoretically, you could build a relationship with AI. I think you probably want to see a mental health, support if you're doing that, but I think, the end of the day, people build relationships with people. And, in that case, the customer service agent could spend more time. With the customer, Understanding the customer, how the customer wants to relate and interact with the brand. that would be the idea, and the ability for, pattern recognition, To enable that agent, To ask smarter questions.
Don Finley:but at the same time helping to deepen that relationship and that connection that comes off of. Yeah. Yeah.
Mikah Sellers:100%, And I think, we could see that, And not just the context. Let's take, for example, other professions, Where we're going to see this rapidly transform, the workforce. Paralegals, they do a lot of routine process oriented stuff, even, to some degree, Examining things like case law, You can probably get, AI to do that at a pretty high level, but it will still take, human level of interpretation, So then go back at the end, And figure out is what the AI telling me. really have weight and bearing in this particular case. that's where you get 10X a lawyer, you take, for example, marketing, there are a lot of things, That AI can do when it comes to marketing, But then at the end of the day, there's still going to be. The human element, as a marketer thinking about how humans are receiving this message, cause how we interpret and process things, It's not how a machine. interpret and process things. So we're still going to need, the human, you mentioned earlier, generative ai. And I think that's a great example. there's been this ongoing, conversation, in. marketing broadly. and, I came from the agency space early in my career. And, there was this overwhelming concern, That AI was going to replace user experience designers, And graphic designers. And I think again, to some degree, It could, but is the work that's going to be produced. going to have that human element, That human quality. if we rely a hundred percent on machines to do it, no, but that's what I think we need to start to look at how we think about AI, it's applications in industry, how our workers are going to be interacting with AI, how we hire and train people, and equip them to understand AI and how
Don Finley:What do you think are the best, like what that skill set change that you're talking about, is where we're now looking at AI is performing a task, it's no longer the tool that requires the human to operate. It's the tool that operates itself and can make some decisions for itself. And When I sometimes explain this, I basically say just think of AI as another worker that you're putting in. But at the same time, the skill necessary to manage that worker is now your responsibility. So instead of being the technician, you're the manager in this relationship. how do you see this playing out as far as how organizations are bringing these tools into to help?
Mikah Sellers:Yeah, I think, one of the things I've always, been concerned about, when it comes to AI is that, the old Geico principle, Garbage in, garbage out, Because, is going to determine, the output you get, and we've seen that, And lots of, Really, horrible experiments where, you know, even AI has, generated some, racist content, I, think we need to, figure out, that human computer interface, how we design systems and we design work. And we train workers right. To interact with those machines with the AI to produce the very best results. And, and I do think there is going to need to be a deep discussion between industry and academia, and when we think about, workforce of the future and how we're, and what we're training people to do. in college, how we're educating people, it's going to have to adapt and change because a lot of the stuff, that we used to focus on, will just no longer really be all that relevant, when you have the ability, To get an answer in a nanosecond,
Don Finley:why develop a skill set? kind of situation if that skill set is easily going to be duplicated by the machine. But I think finding our purpose and finding the thing that really makes us alive is where the AI can help us accomplish what that is while taking off the work that is, boring, or at least boring to us.
Mikah Sellers:I think, if I were to think of it as like an analogy, like in the enterprise, the leader of the organization, It's like the composer, When it comes to AI, right. And everybody that's in the workforce, playing an instrument and the instrument that they're playing is AI, And they're using AI to do their work. And it's the composer's responsibility, To make sure that everybody is on the same sheet of music, doing the right things at the right time. To produce the right results. and I think, a lot that goes into that. And there's a lot that we haven't thought of. And we've definitely seen, lots of examples, of where companies are moving really fast. AI, they're not necessarily thinking through all of the potential challenges, That exists with that, both internally, as well as the results that are produced to customers externally. So I think, we're in this unique point in time, Where we really need. those three legs that come together, On that stool, and address, these big challenges. Because, if we look, 10 or 15 years out, there, is the potential, For A massive shift right in the labor force. that's inevitable, right? Whether it's 15%, 20%, 25%, who knows, if I could prognosticate like that, I would have bought NVIDIA stock. five years ago before they got an AI bandwagon and I'd be over a million there right now, but, I think we know that change is coming. So how do we address it? from a government perspective, In terms of like how we're investing in education, how we're working with industry, To create regulations, to create guardrails for AI protections for, Consumers, but also protections for the brands themselves, Because the brands also have inherent risk, and then academia, cause let's be honest, Academia is even worse than government, It moves at a glacial pace in terms of change and transformation and education. Glacial pace.
Don Finley:And that's what I was going to ask you about. Like we have a technology that is moving so fast and we have industry that moves almost at a breakneck pace no matter what's going on. So give them any bit of like leeway and business kind of does what business does. It serves a market need and pushes aside some of that like social disaster that could possibly happen. Whereas like government has a bit of a small, a slower cycle to it. Like we were talking, the internet still is, somewhat unregulated. privacy controls in the United States are somewhat abysmal, in comparison to the European Union, which literally just passed that legislation a couple of years ago. And so like we're almost like 15 years behind, from a regulatory standpoint on the internet and AI seems to be You know, changing at a breakneck pace, or at least if we continue on the curve that we're on, we're heading into, some pretty intense times. And you're saying academia is on a slower cycle than what we have.
Mikah Sellers:Yeah, even slower than government, which is crazy, When you think about how slow government is, take porn for example, they just finally, passed laws that require, you to, acknowledge and verify your age and everything to access that stuff, Which, should have been done 20 years ago, But when you think about, how slow the internet's moved in terms of the regulatory pace, AI, right? The challenges that AI presents are 100x, Once it really gets embedded into all these systems. You take, for example, social media, Still the wild west, In terms of how it's regulated. What about when virtual AI driven influencers, Start to really propagate the internet 24
Don Finley:you familiar? Yeah. Are you familiar with the dead internet theory?
Mikah Sellers:Yeah.
Don Finley:Yeah.
Mikah Sellers:But it's going to be crazy. When you think about, that's going to really transform things that, you've seen, just even recently, Like the new experiments with the latest release of chat GPT 4, Where it's super interactive, Like the ability, For, brands to leverage, virtual influencers, virtual. Customer service, it's all right there, but at the same time, there's almost no regulatory framework in place to govern how those systems are going to operate and how they're going to interact with the public, what they are and are not allowed to do, what they are and are not allowed to say, these things are things that we really need to take into consideration. And when you think about, going back to that, 10, 15, 20 years out, the changes in the workforce, if we don't address how the workforce is going to transform over that time period now, we're going to be in a really bad spot in 10, 15, 20 years, Like our unemployment rate could be astronomical.
Don Finley:Oh Yeah. and what do you think the break, like we don't even have to define this, but there's a breaking point at which our government programs and our social safety nets crumble. Exactly. And we actually are at a point right now where the technology is showing itself to be a possible, tool of causing that collapse. if we don't do something. And whether that's five years, 10 years, 15 years from now, it still is showing as a possibility, right? we're fine. We're driving the cost of intelligence to zero.
Mikah Sellers:Oh yeah. 100%. you think about just the sheer number of industries, that could be impacted. we're on the precipice now, Where, in five years you could go into McDonald's and not interact with.
Don Finley:I think there's actually There are McDonald's that don't have, people taking orders anymore. Like they're all doing it by phone or by, touch screen display. So yeah,
Mikah Sellers:Yeah, like even where the, where the robots are like actually making the burgers and putting it on the counter and you don't interact with them to see what you would make. that's not Jetsonian future anymore, five, 10 years removed, It's totally possible. to your point, Like even those low skill, jobs, and I'm not saying that in a negative way, they're just, They're not jobs that require, super high levels of intelligence. when those jobs are replaced, what do those people do? Yeah. and we're talking about a significant portion of the economy. Yeah.
Don Finley:And even if we just go to, let's use truck drivers as one thing. I think there's 10 million people employed in driving trucks right now. And so you solve the problem of autonomous driving. And within a few years, the ROI of replacing your fleet with autonomous trucks and saving that money is just gonna be,
Mikah Sellers:Astronomically.
Don Finley:it's almost, Yeah. it's astronomical. It's a no brainer. And so the thing that's limiting how quickly that industry gets destroyed would be how fast you could actually transition the fleet. So it's a production capability. some of those jobs would transition into the creation of that, but that's still also a short term type of blurb as far as the replacement of everything What do you do as far as retraining? Yeah. where do you go? And then what happens when you're getting retrained and the job that you're training for is now the next one that's on the chopping block.
Mikah Sellers:Again, to your point, we're not that far away from those things, Like the V2X technologies, The vehicle to vehicle to infrastructure technologies, They have to be implemented in order to create that kind of swarm environment for those vehicles to operate autonomously. We're pretty close, In Volvo's, pretty close, On, Autonomous, tractor trailers, those experiments are ongoing, So we're talking five, 10 years, this could be a very different reality to your point, though. we need to come together as a society to have a conversation about what is the future of work for humans, And what are the jobs of the future and how do we need. To invest in that future as a society, government, How's government going to invest? How is academia going to shift in order to fulfill the demand of the future, I think these are things that are moving far too slow. and frankly, without getting too far off the phone, we're not having the right conversations in society right now. we're having, conversations about things that are on the fringe and not really important. And, we've become, so polarized and in all of our conversations, in the media and in government, We're just not talking about the things that are really important and will really transform in a very big way. but at the same time, we need to be really optimistic about what this transformation can bring, the thorniest problems, In human history. Are solvable with AI, In particular, superintelligent AI, we can see the end of cancer in five to 10 years with AI, Yeah, we could really see, a dramatic shift, In climate change, in fighting climate change, With AI, our ability, to, Move into space, at a super accelerated pace will be dramatically different, With superintelligent AI. There's so many things that are positive, right? but at the same time, we have to address the fact that this is going to mean large scale change for how we work. and what the future of work really looks like. I am concerned, That the pace of change, To your point, marching us towards some kind of cliff that
Don Finley:I, and I totally agree with you that we've got three legs to this. And you look through history and every civilization has that power struggle of the merchants, the academia, the clerics, as well as the, government officials, who holds the strength in what area. if one of those legs goes too fast or goes too far off and the other legs can't respond, that could lead to a collapse of the stool.
Mikah Sellers:That's industry. You're right. industry is that leg, It's going to move
Don Finley:It's going to go so fast. Exactly. And it is always looking to solve problems, Like in good business solves pain points. The problem with our capitalistic society, at least this is from my point of view, is capitalism needs regulation to actually give it some guardrails so that it is supporting the people underneath it. And without that, you end up with a capitalist society that kind of just is. serves the few and may leave behind the many where government kind of offers that balance point between the two spaces.
Mikah Sellers:as a Gen Xer, the
Don Finley:Yeah. Yeah.
Mikah Sellers:the one thing that does give me great hope, is that. the generations that are coming up now, have a different worldview, than previous generations, at least when, as it relates to, the role of capitalism and society and the role of government, and, how we should be, Operating as a society, I think, I'm really optimistic about the changes that I'm seeing there. That said, you know, the inevitable, kind of laissez-faire, environment that we're in with respect to technology regulation, if we don't address it pretty soon. there are some potential disastrous outcomes, That, that we could see. just take this year, for example, don't know about you, but I am not looking forward to, as we progress through the summer and we see, the implementation of AI, in. the political spectrum, We're gonna see, you in invariably, Like tons of deep fakes and we're already seeing it,
Don Finley:We're already seeing it,
Mikah Sellers:but, the pace of that is going to accelerate, and to some degree, not having the regulations in place, to, to address these things, it creates significant challenges, Because, who knows where the boundaries are. what you can and can't do. It's not
Don Finley:just this morning, and who's going to regulate it, if we don't, as a society come together and say, this is where the boundary is, we're leaving it up to really like open AI and other AI companies to provide that regulation. Today, OpenAI kicked off five, I think it was five different organizations that were using their platform to create misinformation. And my first reaction to this was only five. I was really surprised that was the number I thought, if they were watching for this, there would be a ton. of accounts that were actually being used to create misinformation campaigns, because I've been seeing it all over the place as far as image generation, text generation, seeing, comments from relatively new social media accounts that provide basically like the same kind of talking points in different ways, but are responding to actual people, but they're doing it at such a breakneck pace that it's hard to actually disseminate. am I talking to a real person or not?
Mikah Sellers:And frankly, too many people are just so preoccupied that they would never take the time to actually figure that out.
Don Finley:And you and I are in this, have a passion for that future of work, have a passion for AI. And that's why I look at it. Cause I was like, you just end up developing an eye for this and being like, that response seems really. Like I would type that into chat GPT, Right. Like I could know, and if I did enough of a persona around it, it does have that. It's far enough along where it's not just so general, but at the same time, it has all those like telltale signs that it comes from AI. And at the same point, we're getting to that uncanny valley where it is so close that it could be very deceptive and is easily. along those lines, I gotta say, Micah, it's been a real blast having you on. The one last thing that I want to ask you is, what do you think that people can do to prepare for this new world? They're like, what's a skillset that they personally can develop to help them on this journey?
Mikah Sellers:That's a pretty broad question, Because it can depend greatly on, what you do professionally, I would say broadly. I think that from an education perspective, Like the one thing that will not change right is, we need to be focused on Developing our critical thinking and reasoning skills, And that's something, that will always benefit, anybody in the workforce. One of the things that I'm really focused on, personally, and actually I did my doctoral dissertation on, is, how we develop and foster our emotional quotient, Like our EQ, because, that's something, that is a skill, that can be developed and fine tuned. And I think if we're thinking about how we're going to be interacting with AI, going back to that garbage in, garbage out rule, our ability, to, to train, The systems to be a little bit more human coming from a human that, that might be the best input. so I think, how we, we train the workforce moving forward it's going to change dramatically. I think even the way that we, we approach undergraduate education, it's going to change dramatically. and then as we look at, for example, master's programs, how to work with AI, in your industry, specifically, as it relates to your industry. If you look at most of the programs out there right now, It's not in the curriculum, it's not something they're even remotely thinking about. and I think academia is going to have to make a shift pretty quickly, to catch up to where industry is going to be. that's the tail wagging the dog, At the end of the day, almost all the things that happen in education. All be it slowly, or influenced by what happens in industry. Because they're creating the product, For industry. And at the end of the day, right now, they're not creating the best products for industry because they're not tailoring, the curriculum, And the development tracks to address the future needs of industry when it comes to technologies that are all wrapped around AI,
Don Finley:That is an absolutely great answer. And I agree with you. It's critical thinking, and then also understanding how you're going to manage the AI, in that Like, how do you actually work with it? And that is one of the first places that I've heard of. we're not talking about AI replacing you, we're talking about people who know AI and how to utilize it will be the next competition when it comes to either your job or, moving forward. So it is a really positive place to be. again, as. there any place where our audience would like to reach out to you. Is there any place to reach you at, or can they find you on social media?
Mikah Sellers:can find me on social media, I'm on Instagram, but I'm also, I also have a website, michaelsullars. com and my email is hello at michaelsullars. com.
Don Finley:Awesome. My friend, Micah, it's been an absolute pleasure being here with you today. And thank you again for making the time to talk to us.
Mikah Sellers:thanks for having me on, appreciate it.
Don Finley:Thank you for tuning into The Human Code, sponsored by FINdustries, where we harness AI to elevate your business. By improving operational efficiency and accelerating growth, we turn opportunities into reality. Let FINdustries be your guide to AI mastery, making success inevitable. Explore how at FINdustries. co.
