Kes Sampanthar on centaurians, augmented intelligence, diagetic prototyping, and unique human thinking (AC Ep30)

“Read broadly because your uniqueness will come from the corpus of information your brain has trained on.”

– Kes Sampanthar

About Kes Sampanthar

Kes Sampanthar is Managing Director at BCG BrightHouse, leading Innovation + Purpose. He is an award-winning innovator, technologist, game designer, and consultant to some of the world’s largest organizations. He speaks extensively on technology, design thinking, innovation strategy, and behavioral change, and is the author of the Substack, The Centaurian.

LinkedIn: Kes Sampanathar

Substack: @thecentaurian

Twitter: @KesSampanthar

What you will learn

• Navigating the confluence of artificial intelligence and human empathy
• Augmenting human potential in the age of Generative AI
• Exploring the paradox of generative AI in creativity and competition
• Shaping the future with diegetic prototyping
• Reframing competition and innovation in the AI era
• Unlocking the synergy between human creativity and AI
• Decoding the architecture of thought, from cognitive blueprints to AI applications

Episode Resources

ChatGPT
Deep Blue
ChessBase
Stockfish
BCG Harvard Research
LLM
Netflix
YouTube
Roblox
GitHub copilot
Amazon
Alibaba

People

Marvin Minsky

John McCarthy

Usain Bolt

Garry Kasparov

Magnus Carlsen

Stanislas Dehaene

Jeff Hawkins

Charlie Munger

Andy Clark

Book

Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information by Ross Dawson

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Kes, it’s wonderful to have you on the show.

Kes Sampanthar: It’s great to be here. Ross. Thank you for inviting me.

Ross: So tell me Kes, what is a Centurion?

Kes: A centurion is somebody who uses AI to augment their ability to think, their ability to work, their ability to engage with the AI, to, what I call ‘augmented intelligence’, and in a way that we have sort of been slowly evolving our brains. Now, as we hit that next sort of stage of what I see is the next stage of evolution.

Ross: I very much agree. So, how did you come to get here? You know, just in a nutshell, how did you come to be focusing on this very important topic?

Kes: Long journey, like many of us. So I actually started AI research 30 years ago. So, I was doing neural networks, genetic algorithms, parallel computation, as part of sort of academic research, and then I lost funding, and ended up going to a think tank, and consulting, starting a number of startups that dove into neuroscience over the last 20 years. I really liked the fact that the 90s, that led to the decade of the brain, ended up developing a behavioral design methodology called motivational design. And then, over the last sort of decades, slowly, actually getting back into AI, and starting to use it, obviously, as machine learning started evolving, data science started exploding. And then, most recently, what I really loved when ChatGPT finally got to that stage was, I realized that we were as close to what I’ve been envisioning for a long time, at the same time, the idea of AI, which I’ve been looking at for a decade now. And then with hands-on access, hands-on sort of experimentation with vision Pro, and I realized that they’ve solved a lot of the problems I’d been identifying. So this idea of augmented reality meets augmented intelligence was where I thought, I’ve been waiting for a long time. 

Ross: A lot of people, when they watch, are really focused on what people are searching for in AI, and seem to be saying, ‘Well, how do you make the AI better?’ There’s a relatively small number of people who ask, ‘Well, how does the AI make humans better?’ So, what is it about you that makes you focus on that?

Kes: At some level, it’s like, it really is like, computing went off in two directions very early on. So when I first started, you had Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy going on AI. And honestly, when I was younger, that’s where I thought, I wanted to be like AI research. And I was very excited about neural networks. But I slowly started realizing, to understand how to create AI, I started studying neuroscience and human behavior. And as I sort of started growing up, I realized that it was very important to focus on humans. So, I’ve spent the last 20 years really on human centered design, behavioral design, how do you ensure the prosperity of humans going forward. We’re very unique species in a lot of ways. And I realized that we’re the first species in evolution, who not only can, have that intellect, which allows us to understand things. We’re the first most empathetic organism which cares not only ourselves; but, other living systems and the universe at large. 

So at some level, it’s like, I wanted to make sure as we move forward, that, we augmented humans and brought them along, because, keeping this arc of progression going, so I felt like too, as much as it’s, it’s like, there’s a lot of people who will come to math and science of AI, which I love. But I wanted to focus on the harder piece, which I thought was not getting covered enough. As much as I love user experience designers and people, human-centered design. They don’t go deep enough into understanding how the brain works, or they don’t understand AI at a deep enough level to actually understand how to create the interfaces. So being at this unique intersection of deep AI, plus deep human insights. I thought I was in a very unique position to actually help in this sort of intersection, and how do you design this future interface.

Ross: Yeah, well, I’m very much in favor of humans and their potential, which was still far from expressed. And now I’ve got some tools to help it. So I actually started in computing, my career in computing went off and some other directions, and actually got quite a lot into cognitive psychology. And then at one point, I decided that I should describe myself as a born again, technologist coming back to the technology, because the tech understood the technology was, in fact, what we needed to augment and connect and catalyze humans. So yes. So there’s the idea of central I mean, of course, that’s, that’s an individual concept, as any other as an individual centaur. But this could also be applied in organizations. And I presume that working in a think tank as you do, then that’s probably part of your scope, as well, thinking about organization. So that person might start with organizations then come back to the individual. So how should organizational leaders be thinking about bringing this centaur into their organization, making it a centaur organization?

Kes: One of the things which worried me, especially over the last year, is the way large consulting companies and large organizations and some certain CEOs were talking about Gen AI . They were talking about it very similarly to robotic process automation, this idea of automating more and more of our work. Since the start of technology, we’ve been focused on automating things away. Whether it’s the loom. how we evolved agriculture, how we created factories for manufacturing – it’s been a long journey of turning human labor. And, instead of using our muscles, being able to use technology to be able to do some of that physical labor. Over the last sort of 50 to 60 years, we’ve been using technology in the sense of IT, to be able to help, what I would say, sort of, like, do more cognitive work, right? So, mostly, it was low, low sort of cognitive work, low level cognitive work. And we automated away a lot of those jobs. And we’ve done that, but at the same time, we’ve increased and improved the kind of jobs which we evolve to everybody else. 

I started my career, the idea of being a innovation consultant, human-centered designer, even an AI, like, was not really heard of except out of academia. I wanted to focus on helping organizations, be able to do something beyond just automating away. Because there’s a lot of talk about this idea that, we don’t need humans anymore, right? You know, where we’re basically heading further equivalent, that the p