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Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Hi there, welcome to the best communication Show. I’m your host Bill Lampton, the biz communication guy, my guests, and I will share strategies and tactics that will boost your business, because we will talk about winning words and ways. It’s a great privilege today to host Bob stone. Bob and I met about 15 years ago, when he invited me to direct an all day communications seminar for century till. Bob and I have kept in touch since then, and I’m going to share with you now, some remarkable highlights of his career. Bob stone from the Los Angeles metropolitan area is chair at Vistage worldwide, the world’s leading executive coaching organization, where he works with a select group of high performing business leaders across various industries and sectors. With over 30 years of experience in strategy, and innovation and business development, Bob is passionate about helping executives and entrepreneurs reach their full potential and accelerate their growth. Bob stone has advised top executives from Google the National Football League, New Zealand Parliament, and other organizations. He leverages his credentials as a certified technology coach, and F A certified commercial pilot to bring clients a unique perspective and practical mindset. Bob stones goal is to empower and assist his clients and unlocking their potential, and finding fulfillment and success and their careers. So join me now in welcoming Bob Stone to the best communication show. Hello, Bob. Hello, Bill.
Bob Stone
It’s great to see you.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Yes. Great to team up with you again, as we did with Century tail about 15 years ago when I was privileged to be your guest presenter that day. And it’s been, as I said a second ago, it’s been great to keep up with the wonderful progress in your career. Today, Bob, we’re going to talk about a topic that has everybody buzzing, and yet, not many of us know what we’re buzzing about. And that’s artificial intelligence. You have become an expert in that as you have and so many areas. And so the first question is, I’d like for you to share with us what exactly is artificial intelligence and where and when and how did it begin?
Bob Stone
Okay. Thank you, Bill. And thank you for the kind introduction. And artificial intelligence, it’s referred to commonly what we’re talking about now is generative AI. So in simple terms, it’s having a computer or machine that seemingly can think and learn on its own. It’s about teaching machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, like understanding languages, recognizing patterns and making decisions. It’s what used to be called machine learning. So in the origins, I think, is what you asked if it dates back to a rat in the 1950s. But it started gaining public attention in the 21st century, thanks to advances in computing power and the availability of vast amounts of data. So AI emerged publicly, it first with bots like voice recognition software, that were used mostly in customer service applications. And the early attempts, as I think you hit on bell I was working on in autonomous vehicles with Bosch. So that those are some of the first places AI issues. So did I answer your question?
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Yes, very much. So. And I guess, I guess what struck me it was where you said that in some ways, there were there were early vestiges of this in the 1950s. Did I catch that correctly?
Bob Stone
Yes, you It’s it started, it wasn’t called AI. Of course, it was it was referred to it several different topics that we talked we that it was, but it became it didn’t become artificial intelligence till sometime after 2001 of the
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
worries, of course, that many people have is what is this going to do to their employment? And what ways Bob, is it going to assist people with their employment? And in what ways? Does it possibly threaten people’s employment?
Bob Stone
That’s a great question. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. What industries is it going to disrupt? I’d start by thinking about the medical industry, in particular pathologist and radiologist, as what’s happening now, with radiology scans, for example. It’s, it’s showing that the computers can be trained or AI progenitor of AI can be trained to catch, for example, cancer detections that a pathologist can’t do. So it’s a supplement now, is it going to replace reading X rays and scans, probably, and probably the radiologists are going to have to move up to more critical skills are going to that’s going to be a mundane task of analyzing X rays, and so forth. The same with topologist. There’s a company called Page cancer detection. It’s it’s a joint venture that the patient is doing with Microsoft. And they have about 10 times the amount of data in scope in stored pathology tissues that Netflix has. So you can if you can imagine the massive amount of memory several billion slides have been digitized, that have been read already. And they will feed that they’ve been feeding that into servers that when like match comes or something near that it’s going to be able to diagnose what’s in that methodology. So it is going to affect the medical community in that type of way. Other big players in the tech area, jobs and technology, coding software development, data analysis are highly susceptible to AI displacement, AI can automate routine coding tasks and data analysis today. And they’re going to reduce a lot of software engineers in the right writing code area, there is going to be a need for them. Hopefully, we’ll need we’ll need them all and will be it will become 10 times more effective because we’re going to need those skills. The other thing that I see a big change that is in media roles, AI can effectively produce written content. And that’s one of the what’s going on now with the Writers Guild and the Hollywood hold the whole Hollywood show that’s going on today. You can write movie scripts, but books from Ai, just feed in general concepts. I’d be happy to go over with you how do you do this? How do you do this on small scale, or large scale models like Chet GPT and Bart are able to do that today, along with Claude is well. Finance and Accounting in the finance sector AI can can automate data analysis and reporting tasks enabling knowledge workers to focus on more strategic and value added activities. Accountants especially and those in intellectual labor roles may face risk as AI takes on some of the responsibilities. Customer service, we’re already seen it as AI chatbots are replacing customer service agents. It’s cost effective, even today to replace human Customer Service Representative representatives. So the people in those jobs are going to have to be retrained and move up hopefully. Same goes for office jobs. Recent develops indicate that office jobs which traditionally demanded cognitive skills, creativity, and higher education levels are now more vulnerable to AI disruption AI, such as large language models can assist with these tasks and roles and they’re they’re impacting highly paid workers now and the last that I thought about are analytical roles. jobs that involve analytical skills like critical thinking, writing science and math. They’re all exposed to AI, for instance, budget analysis, and web developers could see the end of the need for their for their services. So it’s the positive part to note is that AI may replace specific tasks within these roles. It cannot entirely place replace humans. We have capabilities like social skills, empathy, nuanced understanding of situations. AI has limitations, including biases that we’re industries working on. Who’s programming? What are what are the person’s biases, so the team’s biases, and they’re picking it up. So AI is going to have biases and security concerns that is going to require human oversight.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
I’m a person who has not become advanced and AI as you have. I’ve, I suppose I’d say I’ve dabbled in it a little bit. And that one of my marketing and technology advisors, told me how to get on it and how to ask questions. And there were a couple of things I’ve found. And I think this would be the experience of many first timers who are using it. One is that it’s amazingly rapid. In fact, it really got me, Bob, that just as soon as I finished typing a question, almost before I put the question mark, the answer came and it was amazingly rapid, more rapid than somebody else could tell it to you and an answer. I also found that it was, in some instances, surprisingly accurate. For example, I google my own name, that’s a good thing for anybody to do to test it. Much. To my surprise, it came up with a, a sketch of my professional career, my services, my offerings, my clients, all this just a matter of section, seconds. And it was, I would say, a page or two long now the other side of it, that I would, I would welcome your addressing is that I also found you at this stage, maybe because I’m a novice, but I also found it was not necessarily 100% accurate. For example, you know that I’ve been a very long time football fan. And I had some friends who played football where I grew up in Mississippi, played at Ole Miss and played professional football. And so I, I did a biosketch on them. And I would say the biosketch was 75 to 80%. accurate, but it gave a wrong date of death. And it mentioned one person I I questioned I don’t remember if that was a football player or not. But it mentioned the date of his death and his he’s still alive. Nobody total. Yeah, yeah. So I think it’s, it’s amazing. And a minute, we’re going to come back and we’re going to talk Bob about the the ethical considerations, because that certainly has been bounced around. So we’ll be back in a few seconds to talk about that.
Speaker 3
Do you wish you felt competent about giving speeches? Do you want to deal with difficult people constructively? And what about becoming more persuasive in sales, then keep listening now to Dr. Bill Lampton, he spent 20 years in management, so he knows the communication skills you need for success. I urge you to call the biz communication guide today for a no call, but very valuable 30 minute discussion about your communication challenges. Call now. 678-316-4300. Again, that’s 678-316-4300.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Before we’re talking about the the ethical and ethical considerations, and there are some, some very serious ones, I want to go back to what you said about when we use AI, we we need to remember that there’s there’s one important factor with what we generate, that we may need to add and that is empathy. Because this is a I guess I would say this is scientific, it’s mechanical, and some people who, for example, might want You write an article for a newspaper, they could put the topic and something would come out, but it doesn’t have their personality in it. But now, you made a good point there. Let’s move along to talk about the ethical considerations. I think, for example, there are authors who could produce magazine articles and books, there are speech writers, I know there are professional speech writers and they could produce speeches that way. What guidelines would you give us what precautions what insights about when we get into using AI? What are the ethical restraints or guidelines that we should have? Bob?
Bob Stone
That’s a great question, Bill, and a difficult one. And certainly, we’re in we’re in a period of flux, where the government’s trying to decide, and our court system I’m sure will be involved. What are the copyright rules? Who owns who owns what in that area? And how do you proceed? I guess, carefully, would be my advice. Yes, you could write a whole script. And you’re going to have to fact check. Everything is, as Bill mentioned, if it gets things wrong, we call those hallucinations. So they’re all prone to hallucinations. But how is this? i That’s all I could say, see what your the federal government is doing as far as regulating copyright? And how do you protect yourself from it? I think if you have intellectual property that needs to have copyright protection, I would I would talk to your attorney, your that your IP attorney. So does that does that help?
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Yes. And I of course, having been a former college professor on the faculty at University of Georgia, years ago, I can imagine what happens when you have graduate students turn in term papers, it brings to mind an incident, which in some ways is related. And in other words, I’m trying to say that, that plagiarism is nothing new. It is just taking different forms. I remember, I was teaching an honors class and communication. And the students had to write a term paper about a week before the term papers were due, I was reading the Atlanta Journal Constitution. They had a a splendid article, recapping Hitler’s career. The student liked it so much, he copied it and turned it in as a term paper. So obviously, he no longer remained in the Honors Program, we can we can say that plagiarism and false use of somebody’s else’s information has been around a while. I’ll mention Bob, that when I first started publishing articles on the internet, about the second or third year end of that, one day on the internet, I saw an article, the title looked very familiar, I started reading it. The words were very familiar. And the reason it was very familiar was That was my article. Yes, somebody had taken that and posted it as their own with their name. And so my, my, my request to that person was either remove your name, or put my name on there, which which was the case. So using somebody else’s material has been around a long time. Are there you mentioned the federal government might be coming up with some guidelines, which one would help us protect? And of course, I guess, who would it be a patent attorney that we would also talk with to to protect our own material?
Bob Stone
I think it’s it’s a patent and copyright usually is the same attorney but they’re specially attorneys now, just to protect intellectual property. The difference bill from the past to now is you can have that case, yes. Where students or anyone outright, picture article uses it or has AI or, but when you if it could happen innocently. I could type in something around near a topic that you’ve written about not even knowing you are going to publish anything And I could get snippets pieces of your material. And if they’re not foot foot right and carefully, or correctly, which they’re not, usually I can be using your work and have no idea I’m using, I’m using some of your work, some of the person B’s work, some of the person sees work, because I said, let’s, let’s find out what’s the most effective way to give to write a speech on this particular topic? It can happen, I don’t know, how do we protect against that? How do we know we’ll use AI, I guess, to do a search, and they’ll come back with it with anyone that’s used part of your paper or your research.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Bob, we have time for one more question. And that is, as certainly at the outset, when we first started talking a few minutes ago, you talked about the great advances and in the medical field. Yes. And we we’ve all known what business and industry can do. But let’s think for just a minute or two, which is about all we have. What about small businesses? What can and what ways can a small business? I’m a small business owner, myself, and what ways can a small business owner benefit from Ai?
Bob Stone
Okay, quick things that you can do, you can summarize a paper that, let’s say you’re going to give a presentation on a topic that you’re an expert on, or your company that wants to mark it on it, you can summarize your keep key points out of a particular article or paper you’ve written have the AI not only pull it, you can say give me 500 words, no more than 10 bullet points. And it will, then you can have it converted to slides. And you can use another piece of AI probably Dolly, da l l, hyphen AI to create artwork. Like for example, what’s sitting behind me that isn’t created on Dolly, but you could you could have a picture of you on the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge or so you can pull it all together and do a lot of marketing as a small businesses. There’s many eight AI tools and platforms that are very affordable and accessible. For tests like you can automate customer support as a small business, analyzing data, even optimizing your market campaigns, are you doing the right keywords? Those are simple things. I get very familiar if I were a small business and open an account at Bard, Chet GPT, Claude at and Dolly is the artist Coffee Chat GPT, very inexpensive 10 or $20 a month to start. And if you decide you need more, and you you can certainly go from there. But it’s very inexpensive to start even free to start if you want to start with an paid account. But I would recommend definitely checking out those three.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Those are good recommendations for small business. One of my technology expert friends, Terry Brock, has done quite a few seminars and videos on AI demonstrating it. And one day he showed how in just a matter of probably 25 seconds or so he instructed AI to build a PowerPoint. Yes, gave the topic and next thing you know here are 12 or 15 PowerPoint slides which a small business owner might not know how to do that or would have to hire somebody at quite an expenditure to do it. So it is wonderful that not only the top top industries and businesses, which you have worked with for so long that they are benefiting but that small business can get in on this too. Bob this has been a fascinating overview. I know that our viewers and our listeners on the business communication show have benefited tremendously. So please give us your contact information and I know there are those who would like to contact you.
Bob Stone
My personal email is rd stone 50 [email protected]. And if you want to contact me regarding this search, it’s Bob dot stone at Vistage chair.com. My tell my mobile telephone number is 714420 1000.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Thank you Bob and I encourage our viewers and listeners to get in touch with Bob stone as I say I’ve known him for it He’s 15 years when we started, when we worked together on an all day seminar, I’ve had great respect, and still due for his remarkable ongoing professional development check, as Robert shown on LinkedIn, right?
Bob Stone
Yes, my real name courses, Robert. Yeah.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Check Robert Stone on LinkedIn, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll marvel at his his profile and his offerings and, and his his post, he’s an incredible resource. And since Bob has given his contact information, I’m happy to give mine as the best communication guy. Of course, my website is biz bi Z communication. guy.com invite you to go there. And while you’re there, you’ll notice that there’s an opportunity to subscribe to my podcast, and then my YouTube channel and where you will find all the previous sessions of the biz communication show, my YouTube channel, and when you will go to the search bar type in my YouTube handle, which is Bill Lampton PhD. And while you’re there, there is a Subscribe button. So hit the subscribe button. Up until now, I have produced 450, and communication instruction videos, many of them solo, but in the last few years, I’ve called on wonderful guests like Bob stone and have interviewed then also, after you have reviewed my services for corporations and Laters, give me a phone call 678-316-4300. Again, 678-316-4300. And the first call, no obligation, just discuss your communication challenges and your your situation and what you would like to develop and we can take it from there, bomb, I want to know what is a vast topic, but we’ve covered a lot of it, is it? Are there some thoughts you have that could pull this together for us?
Bob Stone
Well, I want to leave everyone with a thought this comes from Geoffrey Hinton, he plan to end who’s the godfather of neural networks, which is what we’ve been talking about. He says that AI will have more than 100 trillion connections in less than five years. That’s the same as a human being. He thinks AI is going to be smarter than humans. What happens next? Are they going to take over? Is AI going to take over? Are we going to be able to harness it? And what’s the rest of the world going to be doing with it our both our friend and our foes? That’s what keeps me up at awake at night.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
It’s a wonderful thought to pull our conversation together, Bob. Thanks again to Bob stone for being our illustrious and informative guest today. Thanks to those of you who joined us on the video portion and on the podcast. Invite you to be with this find the next edition of the biz communication Show. I’m your host Bill Lampton the business communication guy
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
