Let's get past both positive and negative hype to address the real identity-shifting revolutionary impacts of AI on identity, organizations, geopolitical structures, and the process of thinking in and of itself. What does this transformational technology do to people? How does it inflect them, define them, alter them? After society goes through the looking glass of AI transformation the question facing us is: WHO are YOU? Our work with AI should focus on WHY not HOW. The technical details of HOW matter but how they come home to our humanity matters more. Prompt engineering is collaborative thinking, not "just" programming. It goes even further into a "Third Mind," an emergent cognitive domain that results from that collaboration and is neither the AI's nor ours, but something distinct. We are living in a K-shaped world of distributed intelligence, divided between those who engage powerfully with AIs and those who take responses and run with them. Just taking what it outputs as gospel creates mistakes. The human must be in the loop. But how that human thinks will be different. That difference and how to leverage it is the subject of this talk Let's get past both positive and negative hype to address the real identity-shifting revolutionary impacts of AI on identity, organizations, geopolitical structures, and the process of thinking in and of itself. What does this transformational technology do to people? How does it inflect them, define them, alter them? After society goes through the looking glass of AI transformation the question facing us is: WHO are YOU? Our work with AI should focus on WHY not HOW. The technical details of HOW matter but how they come home to our humanity matters more. Prompt engineering is collaborative thinking, not "just" programming. It goes even further into a "Third Mind," an emergent cognitive domain that results from that collaboration and is neither the AI's nor ours, but something distinct. We are living in a K-shaped world of distributed intelligence, divided between those who engage powerfully with AIs and those who take responses and run with them. Just taking what it outputs as gospel creates mistakes. The human must be in the loop. But how that human thinks will be different. That difference and how to leverage it is the subject of this talk
About the Presenter: Richard Thieme
Richard Thieme has spent more than thirty years speaking and writing about what technology does to human beings and its lasting impact on identity, cognition, and culture. He has keynoted security conferences in fifteen countries, 27 times for Def Con. His fictional Mobius Trilogy was praised by CIA, DIA and NSA veterans for authenticity. His non-fiction essay collection Islands in the Clickstream was distributed to thousands in 60 countries before publication. The pioneering study UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry to which he contributed is in over 100 university libraries. He has spoken for the Pentagon Security Forum, NSA, Secret Service, FBI, US Dept of the Treasury, Los Alamos National Lab and Microsoft, Medtronic, Bank of America, Allstate Insurance, Johnson Controls, GE, and numerous universities and government organizations.
