Human Meets AI: Technology's Evolution with Chuck DeVries

“Chuck DeVries: The next generation is the homotechnicus, where we evolve and we become one with the AI."

Alex Cullimore: Hello, Cristina.

Cristina Amigoni: Hello.

Alex Cullimore: We just finished up the conversation with somebody we've talked to for years at this point, but we've never gotten to just have like a really good breakdown conversation, and we ended up talking all kinds of things with our guest, Chuck DeVries.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. He is a technologist with very human-centric views and mindset in the way he shows up. So, it was very fascinating to just hear him talk about AI since he does a lot of research and playing around that, and the human intersection, and authenticity, and all those things, the future of the world according to Chuck.

Alex Cullimore: And Chuck is a very authentic person, so it's very easy to have that bridge over, to talk about that authenticity, talk about the future of AI, talk about technology. It's a very fun conversation.

Cristina Amigoni: Very fun conversation. Enjoy. 

Alex Cullimore: Enjoy.

[INTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that’s with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves.

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni.

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

BOTH: Let's dive in.

"Authenticity means freedom."

"Authenticity means going with your gut."

"Authenticity is bringing a 100% of yourself. Not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you."

"Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself."

"It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true."

"Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be."

It's transparency, relatability. No frills, no makeup, just being."

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today, Christin and I are joined by our guest, Chuck DeVries. Welcome to the podcast, Chuck. 

Chuck DeVries: I am ever so thrilled to be here.

Cristina Amigoni: Welcome.

Alex Cullimore: We're happy to have you. We've worked with Chuck in a lot of different capacities. Now, we know him to be very, both human-centric and a deep technologist. But Chuck, would you mind giving us just a little background on kind of your story and what brought you here?

Chuck DeVries: Sure. Well, if you go back far enough, I grew up on a dairy farm, which that, you would think would not have a lot to do with becoming a technologist, but it did. My dad was very clear as I was growing up that I was, was his retirement plan. So, I better pay attention in school and get a good education. One of the things that you learn on a dairy farm is that you do not want to be a dairy farmer, or at least, that's what I took out of that. 

Cristina Amigoni: That was part of the retirement plan. 

Alex Cullimore: A self-limiting career.

Chuck DeVries: I was not going to be a good retirement plan if I stayed there. I knew that part was true.

Alex Cullimore: Internships aren't popular in the dairy community. It's not a lot.

Chuck DeVries: No, no. The cows don't care. That was the other thing that I learned. My wife still gives me a me a hard time, because I will still actually say that. Like, "The cows don't care if you have a tummy ache. You go down there and you feed them anyway." I guess we could say that, I contribute that to my work ethic.

But from there, I've always been in computers, even when I was young. They actually shipped me off to college to go and play with computers while I was in grade school. I've been a nerd my whole life. It's not new news. It is not a new development. It's been that way forever. But then, I went to school for computer science in Binghamton University and graduated out of that. Went into the Defense Contracting Board for a while, and that's how I ended up in Texas. I was at Hughes Training. They were Hughes Bot's link flight simulation. So, I ended up in Texas as part of that acquisition, and went from there through consulting, and a variety of other different roles and jobs. I have broken stuff in almost every industry that you can imagine at this point, and I have put together most of it again.

Then, over the last 12, 13 -ish years, I've been here with Vizient, and hopefully making a difference in health care, and evolving tech here. So, that's been my sort of my journey. I picked up a master's along the way as well when I first came down here to Texas, because they gave me local tuition. So, it was a good time to go with a couple of other folks. Yes, I even went there for data science. So, my master's is in computer science, information science, and I did a thesis on Bayesian networks and relating math. So, everything's a probability. So, that's how you can tell if somebody is a Bayesian or not, is if you ask them if the sun will come up, and then they'll tell you, "Probably." It's really high probability, but it's still only a probability.

Alex Cullimore: It's very likely. It's not – 

Chuck DeVries: Highly likely, but maybe not.

Alex Cullimore: Today might be the day.

Chuck DeVries: Yes, you'll never know.

Alex Cullimore: What kind of marries some of the human and AI portions for you, because you've done a lot of human leadership, you deal with people a lot, you're also very big into the AI space, which is currently very much in a cutting-edge space as far as all the applications particular within a place like Vizient. So, I'm curious how does that all melt together for you. 

Chuck DeVries: I have heard AI is a thing, sometimes. So, there's been a wave after wave of technology change. Whether you go when you say electricity, and how it's coming in, or whether you're talking about the Internet or all the different waves of things. AI is another one and it's moving fast. But with each one of those waves, it only goes as fast as people's ability to understand it, rocket, put it into use, figure out how to – in the case of electricity, had to rearrange the factory floor so that you could take advantage of the power, rather than having to be around the one wheel that turned. In this particular case, what are you going to do with the workflows? What does it actually mean to me? It's a particularly existential one too, in a number of different places, right? 

There's all kinds of – you want to get a popular YouTube video say, "Okay, this bot is going to replace you." But I better check that out, right? Whether you're a developer or whether you're a business person, that doesn't matter. There's some impact to your job and what's going to happen. So, it's been – to me, it's been a really important aspect of this, is to meet people where they are, and then help them to be able to share with one another what they have found to be the most productive uses. 

Because then, it's not some weird technologist telling them, "Hey, you should use this tool and it will replace all of these things for you." It's, "Hey, I found this thing, it's really useful. I do these sorts of things." Then, those folks that are like that person can also say, "Yes, I'm like them. They have a lot more relevance to me than, than say, Chuck, because they do the same job that I do, and I can get some efficiency out of that too." That's a far more useful way to be able to look at it. Because otherwise, a lot of times, we look at it far too often. AI is a genie right now. It's like, I asked the genie a question, the genie gives me an answer. Unfortunately, like many genies, there's always a trick in there. So, you got to figure that out to ask the genie the question right.

Alex Cullimore: That makes sense. I remember the last big fad with the cloud, that was going to save everything. We were all going to move into the cloud, everything – after some suspicion, which we're currently kind of in the suspicion phase of the AI adoption curve, what it became – what it was, which is just a helpful tool in some places and we got better at using it.

Chuck DeVries: Yes. I think the future with AI is the ability for, because they keep getting smarter and smarter. That takes more and more compute power, GPUs, take more and more. I think Jensen Huang recently said, it takes that 100 times more GPUs right now to do the inference for what's behind ChatGPT, as it did when they first launched two years ago now, which seems like both forever. Two years feels like it's been forever, and it's really short, all at the same time. But they'd gotten so much smarter, and you can see that in the models where when it first came out, it was like, "Wow, I can ask it a question. It'll give me a smarter answer. It's like Google, but better. Or it gives me more description."

Then, it got a little bit smarter than that, and it started to be this really smart kid that was trying to prove that it was smart, by giving you a whole lot of detail, more than you could actually rock as a person. So now, the models are starting to get smart enough, they're doing some of the introspective sort of thinking, model two sort of thinking, where it's considering, "Okay, this is how I want to answer it. These are all the pieces to that," and they can give a much better and more concise answer. So, we're going to see that.

Then now, with the wave of agentic systems, which is basically the ability to act on the world and not just do things that technology does, system-to-system conversations, but being able to take the same actions as a person could. There's, I think, a whole new wave of productivity that  come from there. Again, all of that's going to be dependent upon people's ability to tap that, and to learn and grow.

Alex Cullimore: I am making a slightly basic assumption here, but as a human, I'm curious what this means to you and what you would like to see happen. Maybe you're not a human. 

Chuck DeVries: I'm a big fan of the singularity. Since I was a small child, I've been intent on living forever and never die. While many people have thought I was crazy, there are other people who have written books, and they believe – actually, there's reason to believe both with AI, and the increasing speed of AI, and with quantum, their recent advances in quantum, there are ways to be able to solve everything from healthcare, and science there, to supply chain, and all kinds of other different things at a level that we've never been able to before.

Essentially, we age because your DNA accumulates errors over time. We have the ability to edit those errors now. Of course, it also gives you fatal cancer. So, most people choose not to do that. But you just stop aging. So, I mean, it is, it is truth in advertising. It is true. But if you can figure out the ways to be able to do that, which were the promise of AI, the promise of quantum, those are sorts of things that you could do. S

What I would love to see is just progressively making people's lives better. I am a fan of the more utopic version of the future than the dystopic version of the future. Terminator is never going to become a thing, because it would be far more effective for the AI to bribe us as humans to do terrible things than to build an army of robots. So, don't worry about that.

Cristina Amigoni: That makes a lot of sense.

Alex Cullimore: That's much less worrisome, yes. Now, I feel better, I'm going to sleep better tonight. 

Chuck DeVries: You're very easily motivated.

Cristina Amigoni: That's plenty happening even without AI, so we're on the right path.

Alex Cullimore: But we could do it so much faster.

Chuck DeVries: Yes. If we get to that age of it, and you take a look at those confluence of factors of AI, and quantum, and all those pieces coming together. If you get to a point where everybody has what they need, humans are more free to be able to do the things that matter. You're free to make a difference. Your needs can be met through those things. That's what I would love to see come from all of this stuff, which I know sounds a little out there, but it's within the realm of possibilities. Especially if we all work together on it versus as a bunch of separate. I want to get profit out of this the most.

Alex Cullimore: Easy, and statistics would say.

Chuck DeVries: Yes, probably as in history, history is not on our side. 

Cristina Amigoni: History is not on our side.

Alex Cullimore: The waiting is against us on this one. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. So, besides Terminator showing up, which that's definitely a fear that a lot of people have. As a leader, how do you show up for the humans? Also knowing that they are swimming in a lot of this fear. Like, I also find AI to be the scapegoat now. Whenever something doesn't work, it's like, "Well, that's the AI's fault." I'm like, no, that's actually, you're not putting the glass in the dishwasher. AI had nothing to do with that. 

Chuck DeVries: Yes. If AI had just reinvented the robot to put the dish in the dishwasher before, and then, it would have been fun. So, some of the keys there, in my opinion anyway, I think it's authenticity. It's about showing up and not pretending that you're more comfortable, that I'm more comfortable than I am with all these things. Like there's so many unknowns and pretending that I don't have to go through it. Everybody's got to go through that seven stages of grief as you accept the different pieces that go through there. Even if something awesome comes about, and hey, I can just ask a question here, and it can do 90% of my job, and I'm free to do a bunch of other really cool and awesome things. You still have that whole sense of loss that you got to process and go through. 

So, I think as a leader, it's part of your job to figure out how to engineer those experiences for people to help them through that set of steps. You got to be able to lay the path forward, kind of show people, hey, this is why, even though this, and this, and this might go away, here's the other side of positive things. Then, you got to be able to ride with them as they go through the valley, and climb back up on the other side. Not in a fluffy sort of, "Everything's going to be awesome side of a way." But in a realistic kind of a way where you show up, and you listen, then you understand what those things really are, and build from there, versus proof by repeated assertion may still be a proof, but it's not a very useful one.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, that makes a lot of sense, especially the going with them through the process and understanding where they're coming from.

Chuck DeVries: This is one of my – it's probably a more funny story, but it's also a little weird story. Early on in the days of ChatGPT, one of the major talk tracks, and it's still around quite a bit was around, hey, generative AI is going to replace all of the developers. So, we started to get questions from some of the senior leaders and strategy people around, "Okay, well, when do you think we're going to be able to replace all the developers?" Like, one, I don't really think that we're going to replace all the developers. Because, even if you replace all of the coding that happens, there's a whole lot of other things. Like understanding and all those pieces, but put all that stuff aside.

Eventually, they'd ask the question enough times. I'm like, "Let me show you how easy it is to disrupt what it is that you do." I asked a couple questions. I got it to give me a strategy set of points around how to be able to build a business to do a set of things. I had to generate a PowerPoint deck and I said, "Look, all rules will be disrupted." And they stopped asking me questions for at least six months.

Cristina Amigoni: That's good. That's very good.

Alex Cullimore: That's proof by seniors.

Cristina Amigoni: It's not just developers. We could actually replace everyone.

Chuck DeVries: Right. This is the – I don't know, if you go back all the way to the Luddites and the looms, it displaced the artisans who were doing that work, and that's why they were upset. They weren't necessarily upset that, "Hey, now, fabric is cheaper, and we can go wider, and we've driven down the cause." They were upset because it upset their living, it upset their life plan and what was going to happen with their children. It was within a generation that things had kind of renormalized and there were different professions that came about the way that textiles were created. We actually became much better for humanity as a whole, even

though it did definitely have impact on those artisans.

We're going to see some similar sort of effects here with AI, where it's going to displace some things. This one is scarier for, I think, people who maybe have traditionally thought, well, it's not going to affect my job, I'm a knowledge worker, and you can't do that. But this one squarely aimed at the knowledge worker. This is all about knowledge. It basically can answer PhD level questions, it can put together business plans, it can put together a bunch of those things. That just means that we're going to have to figure out, all right., what does that mean that we're going to do next? How do we utilize that? How do we manage that suite of now really smart little bots that I got an army of intern PhD students, and I can't let them run on their own? That would be crazy. If I can set up the environment directly around them, I can get some really awesome stuff together.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, makes sense. One thing I think about in terms of technology and AI is definitely challenging this – technology has moved us very quickly. I mean, when it's moved from being tape cassettes in the nineties, to now, we're talking about AI here, like a mere 30 years later. AI itself has so much advancement, even within, like you're just saying it's been two years, which feels simultaneously like a month and a decade, all at the same time. It is both. One thing that is challenging is keeping up with things, and not in the keeping up with knowing all of the things, but humans have a time to process change every time there's a change. AI is moving so fast and technology has always moved a little faster than we've been able to keep up with. Social media came around and that has taken us well to start to get our heads around it. I think we do, we do get our heads around it. But if you have something that's moving as fast as AI, what are ways people can at least maybe either spare their sanity or just know that this is going to move faster than we're going to be on top of?

Chuck DeVries: So, the only real defense that you have in this particular one is, you work with people to learn how to have a learning attitude. If you are counting on things never changing, you are for a life of disappointment, and that's been true for a long time. Yes, this is a very fast pace of things that are moving. Well, it's part of my job to try and keep up with all the different things that are going on. Every other week, I do Chuck Chat with the tech audience, and I've added in a two-week increment of news. I could spend the whole time just talking about what happened.

It's crazy how fast a lot of these things are moving. But you have to – you engineer as part of that experience the joy in learning, the fun in exploring and experimentation. For me, it's great, because I am really a large child, a large bald child with a beard, but I'm still a child. I bounce from one cool experience to the next cool experience and so on. "This one's new. Look, I made it do that. I made it do a thing."

My wife, God bless her. Most of the time, she just encourage and said, "Yes, that's very nice, dear." But it is the ability to find things that people are passionate about, whether they do get enjoyment out of it, and tie it to some of those things, so that they do get enjoyment out of that learning. So, when we first started the journey here, I grabbed a number of people in our 10% time to say, "Okay. We're going to start working on some of this stuff as a side project." 

Then, literally, within like three months, it became a full-time gig for that team doing gen AI work, and we built the VizChat system, which was kind of our internal ChatGPT, so that we could roll that out safely within the company. Then, now, we're doing some other stuff with agentic pieces, where I've got a different Mary band of people who enjoy stuff like QA, the quality assurance pieces, and understanding how you structure, test things, and being able to feed that to agents to build the code, and do the testing for us automatically, making a quality assurance person's life easier.

The more you can meet people where they are, and make it real, and still make it fun, and make it something where you're getting that spark, you're getting that joy of the synapses connecting, and the neurons firing. That's really the best way to keep it as a positive experience versus the, we, as a technology organization are going to roll this tool out to you, and then, you're going to have to use it, that it's not a good recipe for acceptance or fast learning. Any time that you push someone, the default reaction is, they will push back. If you come and you give them something to go to, they will come, and you'll build more energy and momentum. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, true. It usually happens perfectly when you push something.

Chuck DeVries: Right. Doesn't it?

Cristina Amigoni: To a whole organization telling me, "You will do it this way."

Alex Cullimore: Works every time.

Chuck DeVries: As far as their goal, is to get them to push the other direction. You can win almost 100% guaranteed that they will.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, they will go back to paper and pen.

Chuck DeVries: Just to remind you.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. What do you see AI being something that's not there yet in organizations? What else could it help do without threatening somebody's identity?

Alex Cullimore: I think if I could –

Chuck DeVries: Almost in all things, there are things where it will threaten  with somebody, because there's – it's always somebody's most important thing, whatever the thing. I do think that the current wave of things that are hitting, there's probably a couple

factors in the answer. So, one of them, the ability to inform strategy, so not to replace strategy, but the ability to inform strategy. It's really good at gathering a bunch of information. The current wave of generative AI stuff is based upon large language models. So, it is inherently language, it's language oriented. So, it turns out, it's really good with words. A lot of the emergent behaviors, especially as we add in the contemplative things, allow it to be able to think deeper, takes a lot more compute resources to be able to do that, and more, and more, and more.

But the ability to do that and bring more depth to answers, to ask questions that you haven't thought about before, to be able to bring in additional things to push on, to challenge your insights. If you know how to ask some of those different questions, it will do that. By default, a lot of the training that we've done with them is to build an echo chamber machine. So, it will always tell you that you're very smart. It will always tell you that it's a really good idea. Unless you tell it, "Yes, don't do that. Put me on this. Let's exchange some ideas."

The other thing that I think that you will see a wave of that we don't really understand yet. I think this is, it's probably the bigger opportunity. It's the trillions of dollars of opportunity, but it's also the one that everyone is trying to figure out, is how the agentic pieces are going to come through. So, if you think about it, like in the world of robotics, the world is built – our world is built for humans. We have optimized, it turns out, the things that we use and the things that we do for us, for thinkers with dexterity, and eyes that can perceive stuff, and all those types of things. Which is why I personally would argue that your dishwasher, your washing machine for your clothes, those count as robots. They're not really as exciting as ones that have the digits that are now coming very, very quickly. Agentech on AI is going to be very much the same. Like, it will be able to interact with the web as we have built it for humans. It will be able to interact with systems the way that we have built it for humans, including seeing what's on the page, figuring out what buttons it needs to click. 

I think that's going to open up a wealth of automation at the business user level that you don't necessarily need to have a technologist for, that will remove a lot of toil. Businesses operate on bureaucracy for consistency. That doesn't mean it's bad, bureaucracy gets a bad rep, because it's bureaucracy. But the ability to take, and then automate some of those things, I think there's a lot of untapped potential there that will remove a lot of toil from people's lives. Then, that will free up their time to be able to do other more creative things.

Cristina Amigoni: Sounds good. I wouldn't mind some bureaucracy being eliminated.

Chuck DeVries: In the right place, bureaucracy is fantastic.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Chuck DeVries: In the right place –

Cristina Amigoni: As long as I don't have to be the one in it, I'm fine.

Chuck DeVries: Exactly. It's great for other people. I guess that's the truth of being in the architecture business, a good bit of my career. As everybody agrees, there should be a standard for this, for those people. Not for me.

Cristina Amigoni: For those people.

Chuck DeVries: For those people.

Alex Cullimore: It would make it so easy if I could put them in a box, and I could just treat it like a box.

Chuck DeVries: They would just do what they were told.

Cristina Amigoni: That would make life a lot easier.

Alex Cullimore: It's definitely like a great vision of what AI can be. It's a great vision of like, "Hey, let's, let's reduce some of that. It could be great at a lot of those things. I like the idea that I can do some of the critical thinking. It then forces the question to make us be even more critical about the critical thinking. If it's giving us a lot of thoughts, then we have to be more critical about what it's coming up with and what we can do with it. Not just trust it outright, and not just defy it outright. But actually, figure out what's valuable about what it's saying.

I'm always curious because there's examples like the assembly lines. When everybody thought for a little while that a 40-hour work week is a thing of the past, and we don't need that. We have processes, people will have so much leisure time. AI seems like another chance for us to, yes, it could take a lot of responsibilities, but we don't seem to be able to divorce ourselves as a people from, let's do 40 hours a week. What does that either look like? What are those 40 hours start to look like? Or, what do we do to help people, maybe manage the transition if we don't need that?

Chuck DeVries: That is a fantastic question, and one that I am personally ill-equipped to answer. I mean, I'll give you my thoughts on it anyway.

Cristina Amigoni: You can ask AI and see what it –

Chuck DeVries: There you go. There's already a term floating around in AI and AI research circles of productivity leakage, so that people are figuring out how to be able to use these tools to be able to alleviate some of their work. And they're just doing it quietly, and then, using that time to go get more coffee or go talk at the water cooler for longer or whatever. And so, you're getting productivity gains, but you're not seeing value as a return. So, I think this is one of the ones where it's going to take time for us to figure out there's new measures that are going to have to be put in place. There's new incentives that are going to have to be put in place.

The things that will – most companies are terrible at measuring productivity already. So, you introduce some tools that make productivity better or great. You still don't measure it. You still don't know. It feels better, so it must be good, right? This is part of why we were rolling out our gen AI pieces across the company. We've gone with the joy factor as our measure. Like, do people enjoy using it? Has it made a positive difference in their life? That's the first measure.

Then, we get a little deeper to say, okay, here's the 20 tasks that you do in an average day. Are you spending less time doing this and more time doing this? And then, you can get it to more discrete measures. But leading off with that part tends to – it makes people – you get much more of a kick response, like you're just trying to get productivity out of me. It's sort of like, when you see something in social media, and it's obvious they're just trying to sell you something. Like, your brain kicks into a different gear and goes, "I am dubious. I am dubious about all of these things. You're coming to somebody with, "Here's a bunch of measures of how we can show you where you're going to be more productive." You are selling me something and I am dubious. 

But if you hit them joy, are you happier? Is it making it positive? Yes, yes, it is. All right. Then, they can help you with what those measures actually should be, and that makes sense. It's going to take a bunch of rewiring to be able to do that. I don't think we know what we would want to do either. So, let's say, it all went away. Suddenly, we have these all-powerful gen AI bots that can handle all distribution and everyone's needs are met all the time. Then, what are we going to do as humanity?

Cristina Amigoni: That's a good question.

Chuck DeVries: That is a very existential question. I hope for the utopia, but the violent monkey side is also still there. They still may choose to fight and wrestle and do other stupid things.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, they're still definitely going to power grab and money grab. 

Chuck DeVries: That's what drives a lot of it. An interesting thing to think about. Right now, there are billions and billions of dollars going into this stuff. Whether it's GPU capacity, it's inference capacity, and it's across every continent, and country and many different companies, and everybody's chasing this. It is very much akin to the bandwidth race when that was occurring. and people were laying cables across the ocean and running all these things everywhere.

The return on investment was only there for a very few in the end. There's a lot of money that was lost, but then, it opened up so many other secondary effects, and tertiary effects in terms of all the bandwidth that we have now. All the waves of the Internet, the Internet's capability. It's not just, "Hey –" I remember – not to date myself, but, "I found this really cool thing, it's the browser, Mosaic, it goes to this web and you go over."

Cristina Amigoni: I remember.

Chuck DeVries: That was what I could play with. I could use it for golfer, and I can go find research papers. That was it. Versus now. –

Cristina Amigoni: I remember that.

Chuck DeVries: – you can buy everything, you can get your groceries, you can do all of these different things. It's very different with AI as well. So, yes, that's part of what, in a sense, both nation states and companies to go because they want to be able to claim that value. But I choose to believe – how's that? I choose to believe that in a world where there is enough plenty for everyone, that humanity won't be so petty as to prevent others from being able to participate in that plenty.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, it's a good hope. 

Chuck DeVries: I like Kurzweil's singularity philosophy on that one, is that, it's so vast, and the opportunity –

Cristina Amigoni: If only.

Chuck DeVries: – the ability is so vast. What kind of a--holes would we be to just keep it to just a few?

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, that's a whole other podcast.

Chuck DeVries: It is.

Cristina Amigoni: That is a whole other podcast.

Chuck DeVries: I don't know if you want to do the dark theories though.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly.

Alex Cullimore: We got some we could come from.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, history has shown us that unfortunately, that happens. How can humans feel like they're not, or not become obsolete as all of this happens, especially in the workplace?

Chuck DeVries: This is a wholly unsatisfactory answer, but it is the answer that I have. We have not, as humans, become obsolete in any of our previous inventions. 

Cristina Amigoni: That's true. That's very true.

Chuck DeVries: I don't see a reason to believe that we will become obsolete. Now, the things that we value and the things that we think make us valuable, those may change, fundamentally, as these things go forward. But we've evolved a lot. We used to run around as migratory tribes of people. We don't do that anymore. We now live in cities for good or sill. We have a mixed distribution system. One point in time, the majority of the populace was required to just worry about food. We don't do that anymore either. Now, we've got, hey, the majority of the populace worries about thinking. Maybe we don't have to do that anymore.

We need to have some form of challenge. I think we'll have to have some form of creativity. We'll see a different outcome. Like I said, wholly unsatisfactory, but it's the answer I have.

Cristina Amigoni: It's a good one.

Alex Cullimore: It's good bet. 

Chuck DeVries: If you sign up for some of the more sci-fi kinds of things, the next generation, it's the homotechnicus, where we evolve and we become one with the AI. So, there's already a number of different things where brain augmentation, like the ability to hit technology, and imagine if you could tap all of the knowledge inside of the AI there in your own brain, what would that allow you to be able to do? Both interesting and disturbing stat was, they did a survey across CEOs and other high-ranking folks, and said, "Hey, if this was available to you, would you do it?" And one third said, "Yes, without hesitation." One third said, "No." The other third said, "Yes, but mostly because, that first third would."

Alex Cullimore: Was that an option on this?

Chuck DeVries: Just for the records, I would say – as what you were saying. I acknowledge, I was becoming the peer pressure.

Cristina Amigoni: And there goes critical thinker.

Alex Cullimore: I won't be the first one, but I will absolutely be in line if it starts to form a line.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It feels like we're going backwards on critical thinking there a little bit.

Chuck DeVries: I don't know. I choose to view it like this. The reason why I love being alive right now is, I am a human who bounces around asking questions, and it could be anything from, "I wonder why that bug is colored that way" to "Huh, what direction do the atoms bounce when they hit something?" I can just ask now and I can get an answer, and it does –

Cristina Amigoni: True.

Chuck DeVries: It's not even really hard. Whereas, you go back 50 years, let alone a couple hundred years. Unless you were one of the more truly astute and thinking toward people, you didn't even have access to that sort of stuff. So, it's really not that far off that we're just getting closer and closer to being able to tap any of that knowledge at any point anywhere. 

Cristina Amigoni: That's very true.

Alex Cullimore: What are the questions you asked to evaluate the truthiness of an AI output for you? 

Chuck DeVries: So, I've got a couple of tricks. So one, you still have to read it with a little bit of a filter and check the sources. So, little name sources, but I have found, it still just makes stuff up, like it's getting better, and better at not doing that. But if you actually use it for research, and for stuff, and you ask it, I discreetly ask it for reputable peer-reviewed sources on a number of different things that I'm doing. And I ask for links to be able to do that, and I check them. Because I had one for, as somewhat trivial, but interesting example.

My daughter is in school for art. We were researching some different things around restoration of pottery, and it referenced some really fantastic results from a local museum and a video. They did not exist, and they had not existed for ten years. They had been taken off of the Internet. Because the person who published it had passed away, but the museum still had them. So, we were able to contact the museum, still be able to get some of those different pieces, but you can't really site a source that doesn't exist.

The other bit that is a really interesting way to be able to check it is, take your output, and then ask a different session, like a fully different session to validate that output. It sounds insane that asking what should theoretically be the same thing to validate the output, it will almost always – like, why are there hallucinations? Why are there things that are unverifiable? Whatever, it will tell you. There's been actually some research around that, that it's quite good at it to be able to do it. I think as you get towards explainable AI, practices like that are going to be really important. How do you defend the information that goes into it and that comes out.

Cristina Amigoni: That's really cool. One last question, which then, we're going to have to go ask the AI in different sessions, just to see what happens.

Chuck DeVries: Yes. You should take all the questions you've asked me, ask AI, and then see if it gives the same answer as I do. 

Cristina Amigoni: Very true. Very true. But what does authenticity mean to you? 

Chuck DeVries: Wow. All right. All right.

Cristina Amigoni: In five minutes or less.

Chuck DeVries: All right, I will do my best. So, I, from an authenticity point of view, it's showing up as who you are. I firmly believe that that is one of the best ways to be able to both have joy in your life and to be in a situation which is best for you. I find it truly sad that in a lot of cases, as we grow up through our career, we put more energy into covering and being who other people want us to be than being our authentic selves. To the point that sometimes, I think people lose who their authentic self is. And so, they show up as who they think people want them to be. You see that a lot in like senior leaders where you scrub your personality so far, that you've become so vanilla, that you could exchange one C level person for another C level person, and they're going to be the same tritus that comes from an MBA handbook somewhere.

For me, it's the ability to be your authentic self. One of my very frequently said things, both in terms of coaching, and in coaching received is. Be your authentic self with skill? So, there are times to be aware of your surroundings. How can people hear? Don't be – so, another Chuckism, I guess is, don't be so loud that they can't hear what you say.

Cristina Amigoni: I like that.

Chuck DeVries: So, if you're so ferociously who you are, that they tune you out because – well, that dude is always, always a weirdo, and he is always so high energy, I have to turn him down, and it can be difficult. So, being situationally aware to be able to be your authentic self on scale, but still knowing who you are.

As we kick this off, I had the pleasure of growing up on a dairy farm, where my dad reminded me that it didn't matter where somebody else came from, they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else, just like you. Which of course, let me down an experimentation phase of trying to put my pants on both legs at a time, because I am who I am. I'm okay with it. And it's much harder than you would think, actually. I encourage everyone to try it.

Cristina Amigoni: It's all balancing abs, and I don't know.

Chuck DeVries: It is a waste of time and effort, just put them on one leg at a time. I've done the research. But it keeps you a lot more grounded. I have found that I am happiest when I can be my authentic self. So, when I do my Chuck Chats, it's a window into who I am, how I think, and almost unapologetically me.

But it's also really important in that venue to be clear about what I think versus what I'm trying to push on other people or where those things are. Because the same, to me, a real test of a leader is do the people around you feel good about being their authentic selves? One of my core values has been forever is that I want to enable the people around me to be their best selves. I don't care about the color of their skin, their sex, their whatever. 

If I have any failing is probably, I'm an intelligencist. Like the smarter they are, the more I want to see more smarts out of them. But I think the ability to encourage that and bring that out of people, that's one of the best ways to be authentic and to encourage other people to be authentic. It breaks my heart when I do see somebody covering.

Cristina Amigoni: It is heartbreaking.

Chuck DeVries: How's that for a big answer? Through a [crosstalk inaudible 00:37:05] credit.

Cristina Amigoni: That a huge answer. I don't think I have anything else to add to that. 

Alex Cullimore: If you just started the conversation there.

Chuck DeVries: I know, it's a bit of a very different conversation if we started with that one. I probably would have gone down the authenticity route forever. I probably would have ended up crying, so I'm glad that we ended with it instead.

Alex Cullimore: Okay. Well, let's do the second episode where we start with just that.

Chuck DeVries: There you go. Today – on today's episode, we're going to make Chuck cry.

Cristina Amigoni: We have not yet made somebody cry on the podcast. That is going to be a new milestone that we probably need to march towards.

Chuck DeVries: I have some people I can recommend.

Alex Cullimore: I have some real criers. 

Cristina Amigoni: Do you have questions to recommend on how we make them cry?

Chuck DeVries: Oh, yes. No, it depends upon the person. So, you got to know what makes them tick.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes. I've had people cry in coaching sessions. That's when I know it's successful.

Chuck DeVries: Yes. Well, because what ends up happening in a coaching session is that, no one is hard on anyone as themselves.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Chuck DeVries: And your job is to make those connections happen, and you can tell when one happens because you see the neurons fire, you see the look go through, and all shields are down.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, indeed. Yes. Well, we know we can find you on Chuck Chat, and we do. So, that's always good. Where can other find you should they want to?

Chuck DeVries: I mean, LinkedIn. I'm out here on LinkedIn and I tend to put more AI-ey thoughts out there than about anything else, but I would welcome anybody who wants to connect and talk nerdy.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. I just realized the other day that we were not connected.

So, I'm like –

Chuck DeVries: I'm like, how did that happen?

Cristina Amigoni: I guess, we see each other every week. So, it's like, we're connected. 

Chuck DeVries: How did that – how is that possible?

Cristina Amigoni: I know. I was so confused. I'm like, I'm not sure how this is possible. Well, thank you so much, Chuck.

Chuck DeVries: It has truly been a pleasure.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you, Chuck.

[OUTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Uncover the Human. Special thanks to Rachel Sherwood, who help to produce our theme. And of course, our production assistants, Carlee and Niki, for whom we could not do this, or could not publish this. We get to do, basically, the fun parts. Thank you to We Edit Podcasts for editing our podcasts.

Cristina Amigoni: You can find us at podcast@wearesiamo.com. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us at Uncover the Human on social media. Follow us. We Are Siamo is W-E-A-R-E-S-I-A-M-O.com.

Alex Cullimore: Please feel free to reach out with questions, topics you'd like addressed. If you'd like to be on the show, reach out. We're around. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

[END]