Listen on Apple
Listen on Spotify
Read a post about the conference
Machine Transcription: (subject to typographical errors from speech to text software)
Larry Magid: I’m Larry Magid, and this is Are We Doing Tech Right, a podcast from ConnectSafely where we speak with experts from tech, education, government, and academia about tech policies, platforms, and habits that affect our daily lives. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe and visit us at connectsafely.org.
As you know, the title of this podcast is, Are We Doing Tech Right? Which means we look at what we’re doing right, and frankly, what we’re doing wrong. And whether it’s right or wrong, a reality about the tech world is that much of it is centered in Silicon Valley, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and other urban areas around the United States and the rest of the world.
But there are a lot of people who don’t live in big cities, and what comes out of Silicon Valley affects them, even though they have very little impact as to what it is. And that includes artificial intelligence, including generative AI, which is Largely being foisted upon the world from Bay Area companies.
So I was delighted when I had an opportunity to go up to Ashland, Oregon in mid September to attend the region AI 2024 summit, a conference that was centered in and focused on this relatively rural community. Ashland is a town of 21, 000 people in the Oregon Rogue Valley. It’s most famous for its Shakespeare Festival.
But this year, it was also the home of a conference where people interested in AI, artificial intelligence, gathered to talk about how AI could apply to their region just north of the California border. What I discovered is that the interest and the needs of people in this community are quite different from those of the people who developed the technology, mostly based in Silicon Valley and other urban areas.
And it occurred to me that the same is likely to be true in other rural areas of the United States, and for that matter, the rest of the world. Conference co organizer Thor Muller had been a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had lived and worked in other urban areas, most recently Amsterdam, until he relocated to Ashland to be near family.
Thor Muller
Conference Co-coordinator and Entrepeneur
Thor Muller: I saw that much of what I took for granted in a big city, you don’t get over here. Namely, you don’t get population density. And what that means is that there’s low connectivity. Even though there are incredible minds here, incredible people doing incredible projects, they aren’t necessarily aware of each other.
They’re not collaborating together as a result. So I started the Rogue Valley AI Lab a little over a year ago, and I realized that if you create an attractor, the brilliant people would come out of the woodwork and find each other and start to collaborate. And I just thought that was a remarkable phenomenon that was underappreciated around here anyway.
And the other thing I realized was that the kinds of approaches people brought to this technology AI were quite different in mix and in quality compared to what I’ve seen in the Bay area and in Amsterdam in part because there’s not a lot of money sloshing around here. People are focused on projects close to home, like restoring wilderness or dealing with challenges in the educational system or rethinking our food system.
And so these are the kinds of people who are coming together. And I thought Well, if it’s true here, it’s probably true in many other places as well. And so along with my partners in this production, we decided to create an event that would refocus technology and AI in particular around a bioregional frame, which means how do we use technology to solve problems that are closest and dearest to our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities.
Larry: One of the things that struck me about this conference, especially after having attended events in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and other big cities, was the lack of inside industry jargon and almost obsessive talk about monetization.
How are all these technologies going to make us rich? Here in Ashland, what I sensed was a mix of spirituality, which is kind of what you might expect in Oregon, at least parts of Oregon, with a great deal of practicality. Including specific projects that would improve the environment among other things.
Thor: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, as somebody who was in the Bay Area, grew up in the Bay Area, I think the thing that has changed is the, a, the Bay Area is now an industry town in the way that we used to think of LA as, you know, a media place. Bay Area is a technology place. And it. Is sloshing with money, right? And that just affects how you think about where you spend your time.
And we, we over here in Southern Oregon, we live at the edge of wildfire country, right? It’s an existential threat to us in a way that it isn’t necessarily in San Francisco. So we have to be practical, you know, we, we have to. Think about these technologies as solving real problems that matter to us.
And it’s not, you know, optimizing advertising or generating, you know, better marketing copy. It is literally how do we make resilient forests so that the fires don’t spread and kill us all right at the same time, people are brought here to Have meaningful lives. And that, that isn’t merely lives of ideas and, you know, and of the mind it’s of the heart and the body.
And so we wanted this event to be a holistic event. So when people talk about AI, they feel it in their bones. It might be, they feel fear. Or it might be that they feel hope. And that was something we wanted to embed in the design of the conference as well. That it was, you can’t just talk about things and expect the rational mind to override what you feel deep down.
And so we think that’s an important part of the discussion of these matters, but also of the bonding of a community.
Toshi Anders Hoo
Institute of the Future
Like me, Toshi Anders Hoo , is a Bay Area resident, and he happens to also be the director of Emerging Media at the Institute of the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank that helps companies, non profits, and other organizations develop strategies for what’s likely to come their way at some point.
And also like me, he recognizes that the Bay Area brings a perspective that isn’t necessarily reflective of many of the communities that are going to be using the technology.
Toshi Anders Hoo: Although I’m a proud resident of the Bay Area and moved there for, for lots of wonderful reasons. I do think the conversation around AI and technology in general is incredibly overly focused on kind of what, what’s happening in the Bay Area.
And I think there’s a lack of diversity in the vision, the thinking, the language, the incentives that is really kind of making the conversation about AI really very limited and not as open as it needs to be given the kind of widespread impact and potential this technology has. I’m here in large part to listen.
And to hear what, how other people are thinking about this, the sense making they’re doing, priorities, concerns, the frameworks that they’re using to try to understand what this means, what we should be doing to adapt, how, what we should be advocating for. So that’s part of why I’m coming here as a researcher.
One of the conference participants was Heather Stafford, the Executive Director and CEO of the Rogue Workforce Partnership, a business-led coalition that works to strengthen the economy of the Rogue Valley region.
Heather Stafford
Executive Director, Rogue Workforce
Heather: Coming alongside economic development, community development, all of those things, you know, what humans do for work and livelihood is of paramount importance.
Importance. And so I’m here to, you know, really explore AI, what that means for the future of work.
Larry: Like conference coordinator Thor Mueller, Heather Stafford is interested in how AI can be used and influenced by ordinary people. Rather than just tech titans.
Heather: What are everyday humans, right? The ones that the economy doesn’t work for.
The middle class that’s shrinking in this country in particular. What influence are they going to have over this? Are we working to create users of a system that’s being rolled out? Or are we content creators and generators? And can we learn to write and influence this system to solve really big problems?
That’s why I think the connection at this conference to regenerative is very interesting.
Larry: As they work for a specialist, Stafford argues that generative AI Isn’t about putting people out of work but empowering what is becoming a shrinking labor force to be more productive, not just to make more money for their employers, but for their own benefit.
Heather: And technology, if you just look at wages, you know, digital literacy and digital skills are a very vast divide for wages, for employability, and we have a shrinking demographic. Fertility rates are half of what they were in 1920 in the United States. Half. That’s significant. And so we work with a lot of industries and a lot of employers that are saying, I didn’t necessarily want to adopt automation and AI and robotics, but I, there simply aren’t enough humans left to do this type of work.
The humans in the workforce have more options. So how do we as a system, as a country, as a region, as workforce boards and economic development agencies and educational institutions come together like what’s happening at REGEN AI conference and dream up ways to enable those very most left out of the economy for a long time to become digitally literate in a new world where we think about literacy.
And if you can use natural language and talk to computers. Your time to market is so much faster in the workforce. It’s a much more trainable skill. You don’t have to go to school for six years and learn how to code. You have to ask the right questions.
Cynthia Salbato
Scienceworks Museum
Larry: AI is not just for commercial enterprises. Cynthia Salvato helps the local nonprofit science museum maximize its resources in ways that smaller museums like itself have trouble doing, certainly compared to some of the larger museums.
In urban areas.
Cynthia: We have a limited amount of resources. Our science museum is in an area that can’t really support it. We just don’t have the numbers of people that will go to it. We don’t have again, the financial wherewithal. So with AI, we can staff more judiciously. We can use our money and leverage it so that we can create programming.
Using AI to help us act like we’re a big operation like OMSI or Exploratorium. And so rural science museums, rural towns, there’s this group of us that have come together around resiliency and fire prevention. We are writing an EPA grant. That EPA grant could change things for us, but again, we need AI to really help us
Larry: And Sylvato said that one of the differences between this rural community and some of the big cities need to work with each other more so than these bigger cities.
Cynthia: In the bigger cities, you know, you’re seeking space and privacy. Here, we have to seek each other out, come together, bring our creative projects, and then work together, and AI makes it easier to do that. It is a tool for collaboration. The conference was also an opportunity to think about AI and human rights.
Brittan Heller
Stanford Law School’s program in law, science, and technology.
Brittan: This conference was a good fit for human rights, kind of because of the name, Regen AI. When the first time I heard it, I thought it was Regen AI.
And I think the pun is very intentional. If you look at some of the global approaches to AI regulation, you see huge efforts, multi stakeholder processes from the UN, big international levels, you see countries trying to deal with this on their own national sphere. You really don’t see two things in the AI regulatory space.
One of them is a community based approach. So how is this going to impact cities, towns, groups of people, groups of individuals? When you look at human rights, one of the new frontiers is collective rights. Can a group of people serve as a right holder rather than a country or an individual? So it’s pretty fascinating to me.
The second is we don’t have regional approaches. When you look at all of the challenges that we may have with environmental impacts or conflict of laws, you don’t see regions of the world coming together and saying this is going to impact us specifically and differently. And that’s actually a hole in international law.
Larry: Although Heller came to the conference to speak about human rights and AI from a regional perspective. She also listened and learned something that she considered very valuable.
Brittan: The most valuable takeaway for me was at the end of a workshop that I’d been asked to facilitate about how human rights and AI will uniquely impact communities like Ashland.
I was really humbled by the type of input that I got from people there. The conclusion of the workshop, I did an exercise asking people what an Ashland based or a Rogue Valley regional version of AI would look like, and how that would differ from something coming from a company in Silicon Valley. I thought that the feedback I got, I was expecting something kind of intellectual, maybe something almost economics based, but it was really centered around issues of identity and people talking about what made their community the place that they chose to live and the place that they were proud of.
And if you can see AI helping people build better community bonds and feel stronger ties to their neighbors and share the parts of their community that make it different and special with other people. I think that’s a positive development that I hadn’t anticipated.
Jordan Plawner
Pacific AI Advisory
Larry: Another conference speaker, Jordan Plawner, who runs the Pacific AI Advisory, said that AI can empower humans to do what they’re best at, rather than things that they’re not particularly good at.
Jordan: AI is good and best really at what humans are not as good at and recognizing patterns and existing data and even something like we call generative AI or large language models. They’re effectively, while they’re quite amazing, they’re just predicting and generating content. Based on the content that’s been trained on and then the the question that you gave it And so it’s really good at mimicking human beings, but it’s not good at what humans are good at which is envisioning a different future transforming the world around us invention entrepreneurship creativity cooperation and of course We look at the world’s greatest challenges and problems right now or even objectives and goals on the positive side there’s no one person.
It requires, you know, many, many people, if not thousands of people to work together on the shared goal that people have.
Larry: But what about the downside? Certainly, some people are going to be left behind by AI, generative AI. And the types of businesses that you consult with may find themselves laying people off as a result of greater efficiency, thanks to this technology.
That may be good for the business, but not so much for the worker.
Jordan: Well, I think this is an opportunity and again, it won’t be taken by every business. Businesses need visionary leaders. We need visionary people in our society overall. But this is really an opportunity to elevate work. While we should respect everybody’s work and the work that they do, we should also look for opportunities to elevate people’s work where they can lean more into what is being human.
Clearly in the near term. A. I. S. Pace will be incredibly disruptive faster than any other sort of aspect of the technology revolution, right? You know, faster than cars replaced horses. We never said horses should continue on, right? We all welcomed in the car, but it also took a generation or two. This is gonna happen within a generation, and that absolutely is gonna be disruptive.
And I look for the leaders. And part of my job is to help set the vision for leaders. If we could increase your productivity by 10 or 20%. How could you use that to make your company more visionary, more strategic, and make, you know, more transformative in the area that you’re operating in? And I think the myopic leaders are the ones who are going to be saying, well, I’m going to lay off 10 or 20 percent of my staff.
Well, in the near term, that’s going to happen. But what’s going to really happen is those companies are actually going to go out of business. Because the companies that thought that were more thoughtful about it. And upskill their labor force, retrain their labor force and use that savings and productivity and moved it into innovation, moved it into strategy, moved into the transformation.
They’ll just leap ahead. From those who just thought of it as a cost savings tool.
Larry: While I applaud Jordan Pluner’s aspirations and optimism, I worry that a lot of employers are not nearly as strategic and forward thinking as he is, and, and I am concerned about the layoffs that I think are inevitable as a result of generative AI, at least in the short run.
Although we have seen that almost every major technological innovation has in the long run, helped create even more jobs than they eliminated, but unfortunately not for some of the people who may have lost their jobs. The fear of job loss is just one of the many fears that are associated with generative AI.
And those fears are part of what inspired conference co creator Ian Ingram to help launch this regenerative AI conference.
Ian: People are scared of what they perceive AI to be. And they have a kind of mental model of what AI is and whether that’s true or not, it’s informed by pop culture. It’s informed by, by history, by observations.
And, that model is what they act on. And so I, I got to thinking the conversations I’m having, people are saying that they’re scared of it, but they’re also saying it’s Skynet or it’s Siri, and I’m, I’m wanting people to, to have the correct, as correct of a mental model of what current AI tools are so that when they act on that, it’s from a place that’s based in, in reality, that there’s, there’s limitations to the capabilities of people.
Current generation tools and what are those and what are the real world percussions of for example putting a machine in the place of a that was once only reserved for a human to make decisions and the, the seriousness, the depth in which that arises. So this, this is, that’s how the event started out.
And, I really wanted to take it a step further and say, how should we react? You know, if we were informed about the current state of AI tools, what would be a better way to, to act upon That, that knowledge and better is a loaded term. What does better mean to Facebook and Amazon and, and open AI?
What does better mean to the owner of the bakery down the street, and what does it better mean to the environment, to our, our, our crops, our soil? And so I realized that this is a much bigger conversation, and this is not, it’s not an event where I want to get up and say, do AI, because AI is cool, or interesting, or unique, or complex, or intriguing.
No, let’s, let’s understand what it is and then see how it’s going to affect from a, a bioregional perspective, from a local perspective. Integrated systems, our, our economy, our community, how can it be used to empower those who are doing work stewarding our homeless population? population, taking care of our students, the future of our workforce.
AI is affecting everywhere from healthcare to, to agriculture, to, to learning education, small business. And so let’s bring those people here to talk about it, to have an informed discussion with resources so that they can act upon a mental model that has more dexterity, more clarity. It’s stratified in ways that they can make the decisions that they’re responsible for.
With as up to date information about AI as possible.
Larry: After just two days in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, I came away inspired by the beauty of the region and the authenticity of the people I met. It was a very diverse group from folks who reminded me of the hippies that as a baby boomer, I came to know in the late sixties to people working in nonprofits and government agencies, along with some tech entrepreneurs who I might’ve run into in Silicon Valley.
But the experience was more than just a sum total of the people, it was the environment, the topic, and the mutual commitment to solving real problems using every means available, ranging from the holistic natural approaches to the latest technologies. It was also a mutual understanding that regardless of our lifestyle, belief systems, or politics, We’re all in this together.
Are We Doing Tech Right? is produced by Christopher Le. Maureen Kochan is the executive producer. Theme music by Will Magid. I’m Larry Magid.