In This Episode: We talk to D. Anastassia Lauterbach about what it actually takes to think clearly about AI when everyone else is either panicking, posturing, or treating it like magic. She brings a rare mix of operator experience, board-level governance perspective, and deep curiosity about how AI will reshape business, education, and society. We get into why AI literacy matters more than hype, what leaders keep getting wrong about adoption, and why understanding the limits of these systems is just as important as understanding their potential. If there's a throughline here, it's this: the future belongs to people who can engage with AI seriously, not just loudly. What We Cover: Why AI literacy matters more than shallow tool fluency. How business leaders should think about AI governance, risk, and real adoption. The gap between AI hype and what these systems can actually do. Why education, critical thinking, and human judgment still matter more than ever. How Anastassia thinks about the long game for AI, business, and society. Guest Bio: D. Anastassia Lauterbach is a technology strategist, founder, author, and board director focused on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and corporate governance. She is the founder and CEO of AI Edutainment and has served in senior leadership and board roles across global technology and business organizations, including Qualcomm, Deutsche Telekom, easyJet, and Dun & Bradstreet. She is the author of The Artificial Intelligence Imperative and has taught and spoken widely on AI, innovation, and responsible technology. Enjoy the episode. This show is brought to you by Wrench.ai. Follow Dan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbaird/ X: https://x.com/mrdanbaird Follow Dr. Lauterbach: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-anastassia-lauterbach-021a004/ Follow the Pod: YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@burnthemappodcast Twitter/X: https://x.com/BurnTheMapPod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnthemappodcast/ TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@burnthemappodcast BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/burnthemappodcast.bsky.social Selected Links From This Episode: Romy & Roby on Amazon AI Edutainment: https://www.aiedutainment.ai AI Snacks with Romy and Roby Wrench.ai: https://wrench.ai People and Organizations Mentioned: Andrew Ng Yann LeCun Jürgen Schmidhuber Judea Pearl Stephen Wolfram Sam Altman DeepMind Anthropic OpenAI Meta Deutsche Telekom House of Lords Show Notes & Timestamps: 01:01 — Anastassia's path: computational linguistics, immigration, big tech, and education 03:35 — Why AI hype exploded—and why most companies still don't understand the fundamentals 05:32 — AI literacy vs. AI fluency, and the House of Lords initiative 06:20 — What people get wrong about LLMs, reasoning, and consciousness 08:00 — Causality, counterfactuals, and why today's AI still falls short 10:05 — World models, human learning, and what machines still can't do well 11:43 — Theory of mind, chimpanzees, and the alignment problem 14:43 — Chinese open-weight models, cost advantages, and practical business use cases 18:10 — What Anastassia thinks Europe got wrong with the AI Act 21:47 — Synthetic data, bias, and copies of copies of copies 24:16 — Why "unbiased AI" is a fantasy 25:10 — AI as electricity—and why people still need to understand how it works 28:29 — Hallucinations, legal risk, and why narrow use cases matter 31:09 — Will AI widen the gap between the excellent and the passive? 34:34 — Why students want AI leadership and teachers often don't provide it 38:59 — Agentic workflows, governance, and the need for auditability 42:14 — GPU compute, CAPEX risk, and the hidden economics of AI infrastructure 49:14 — Personalized learning, education infrastructure, and what AI should actually improve 52:21 — What kids need most: applied math, writing, and disciplined skill-building 01:00:04 — Romy & Roby, where to find Anastassia, and what she's building next