Ryan Vet on The Asset: AI, Purpose and the Value of Being Human

Thanks, Scott. Good to see you, too.

Yeah, I think with any advancement, I'm a living paradox. I love all the new tech gadgets. If they come out, I get one. I just got some new gadgets installed in my house, actually. Love anything that's new and advancing, but at the same time, having lived in the technology world for so long in many different facets, primarily software, including early days of AI, one of the things I always try to contemplate is, what are we trading? For every advance forward, what are we giving up? When I wrote that piece on Gen Beta not needing a driver's license, I think one of the big things we aren't even realizing, it's the same thing as a self-checkout phenomenon. You're walking through the grocery store, you're leaving, you're scanning something, you never have to interface with a human, which on one hand, I love. It's convenient, it's simple, it's less friction. On the other hand, what are we giving up in the process? I think that's the real risk beyond technology, because I'd argue they are safer. Self-driving cars are safer. They're focused on one thing and only one thing. They're not checking their cell phone, they're not yelling at the kid in the backseat or yelling at the driver that cut them off. They're focused on getting someone there safely. I think there's a lot of advantages from a safety standpoint, but there's a human component that I think we don't talk about enough.

I definitely think it's a thing. Loneliness is huge, and a company with the loneliness is anxiety, and a lot of that anxiety is placed on going out in public places. People say, hey, I'm lonely, but I can't go out there because it's scary and I don't know what's out there. In 2023, the Surgeon General said loneliness was a public health crisis. We have seen loneliness tied to so many different things, delayed marriage rates, declining birth rates, and mothers being concerned about being alone raising kids is a leading reason for women not wanting to have kids. We often put that on finances and other things, but if you get down to the psychological feeling, that often ranks high. You start looking at it, and I think the world is more lonely, and we're seeing Gen Z, who is the most isolated generation, who has their mirror in their pocket that's always catering to exactly what they want, and the algorithms are always giving them what they want. We're seeing them actually revolt around this. We're seeing malls come back for the first time in decades. We're seeing Barnes & Noble open 60 new locations. Starbucks is revamping some of their locations that they're keeping open to make them that third place, that Costco place. Starbucks won't give you free samples, but it'll be that place for you to come and be in person.

Yeah, I was a huge proponent of virtualization for a long time, long before COVID sort of mandated it for our world. The teams I led, we had flex time, we had go work from home whenever you can, go spend time with the kids, because that was the right answer. I think there are so many benefits to that. At the same time, again, everything has a trade-off. There's an equal and opposite reaction. I think when we look at some of that virtualization, your friend describes it well, going to Costco. There's a reason he does that. He misses the water cooler. I think there's a lot to be said for those water cooler moments. We're seeing a lot of companies pull in very opposite directions. Some double down on this remote work being a place for all people, no matter what's going on in your life. We have some people saying, no, we have to return to the office. We're seeing a very, very divided workforce. Both are causing people to leave companies, because some people realize the necessity for that communication. I was recently reading a study, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it was looking at effective work. In a 40-hour work week, traditional 40-hour work week, how many effective hours are actually worked? It was almost half. It was not as many as you would hope. What they're saying is when you're working remotely, you feel this need to fill it with meetings or fill it with other things that make meaningful work for those eight hours because you're not popping over the cubicle and saying hello or sitting at the water cooler or anything like that. I think as human beings, we need that interruption to some extent, and we need that community. I have always said community is essential to life in everything we do. As much as I too am an introvert, and I would skip those Costco runs every single day if I could. I would Instacart it. I do know that there is a human element that we need to be in relationship with other people. When we put that relationship on a machine or AI or something like that, it's really devastating and it can have a massive impact on our lives.

Yeah, I've been a fan of AI for a long time, long before we had generative AI in its current form. I was part of some startups that were doing some really interesting things like facial recognition was a big deal from your cell phone. Now anyone can just do it with chat in just a couple of seconds. I'm a fan of AI, but I think one of the things that I started to realize back in the early 2010s when I was working with it is we start to put too much pressure or too much reliance on technology. Technology has obviously accelerated our ability to do so much. At some point, there's a trade-off and there's a consequence. I often call it piggybacking or passing. What I mean by that is if you're trying to figure out how AI works in your workforce, piggybacking is this idea of, hey, you know what? A kid's piggybacking because they can't hike the mountain by themselves yet. They're on their parents' back or shoulders because they don't have the strength, the ability, the skill set, or the know how to do whatever it is that the person who's walking can do. That's piggybacking. Passing on the other hand means you've earned a spot in the game. That is the idea that whether, you know, take a sport, any sport you want, but let's say basketball because we're around that time of year, you're passing the ball to somebody, they pass it back to you. It's a back and forth and you've earned your spot to be there on the court. You're not looking from the stands or anything like that. And so my question to many leaders is, okay, where is it that you're piggybacking or where is it that you're passing? And passing means that your team can step back in, grab the ball back, pass back and forth between the machine and the human. But as soon as you start piggybacking, you're offloading or offsetting that reliance that you have on another human being to a machine. And that's where it can get really dangerous.

It's here to stay. And I think what we're seeing now is it's becoming more visible. Not that it hasn't existed, but we're seeing it manifest in many ways, like Flock cameras. That technology is not new and it's just trendy to talk about. So I think we're going to see more and more visibility of AI and where it's already been working. But when you're thinking of the individual, and I'm going to oversimplify for the sake of time, but if you look at the car, for example, everyone had to learn stick shift. Now you go to a Gen Alpha that's in driver's ed right now. They don't even know what a stick shift is. They're asking, does that mean an electric car or not electric car? They have no idea. And is that autopilot? But you learned the basic principles of the road. When you looked at the computer, there were some people who got so overwhelmed by the computer because there was all these at the time kilobytes and megabytes and then gigabytes and terabytes. And they didn't understand what RAM meant or GPU. All of this information that was just noise. But then at the end of the day, most people can use a computer today. They couldn't tell you how it's made. They couldn't tell you what's going on underneath the casing of the computer. Same thing with social media. Everybody had to be on social media and you had to optimize your account, pick the best picture and make sure you put the right reaction to a post and comment it the right way. And now it's like, hey, it's just tool and it's just there. So I think we have to sort of hold a generative AI in particular in that same vein. It's like it is there. It's going to be a part of our life. It's already been a part of our life longer than most of us are willing to admit. And we just need to figure out how it fits into our daily routine, but not get so wrapped up into it. I'm seeing I got a text the other day from someone that I've worked with. And he's a leader in his organization. And he was telling me all the things and tactical skills he was doing on AI. And I said, OK, what are you doing right now that's uniquely human? Because that's what's going to survive. AI is going to be there. It's going to morph. We're going to have by the time this airs, there'll be five new models out on every one of the platforms and they'll be doing new things with new promises for a better tomorrow. And that's all well and good. But if you try to always keep up with that, you're going to exhaust yourself. What are the fundamentals you need to know so you can be ready for the future? Don't put your head in the sand. And then what can you do that's uniquely human? That's really what we have to ask ourselves as the world's changing and as leaders in particular, what are we doing today that a machine can never replace? And there's quite a bit.

That's a great question. I think I bring up the example of college, right? If you decide before you step foot on a campus and you go to your first party, if you decide before you step on campus that I'm not going to ever drink beer until I'm 21 and someone hands you that red Solo Cup at your first party, your chances of saying no to that are exponentially higher regardless of the peer pressure because you already decided it before you even got to that party. On the flip side, if you go into school saying, I am going to find every party and I'm going to be that guy, you're going to go seek out the parties before you even get put into that situation. But both were pre-decided. And I think the same holds true here in the AI conversations. You hit on something that's really scary. Most developers working on these platforms have no idea what's going on in the black box, right? It is truly black box technology. There's very little visibility and insight. And again, that's a gross overgeneralization, but people don't know what's going on. And I think that is really frightening, but we can understand the implications it could have on culture and society when it does replace human jobs, when it does become a relationship dependent being or entity. We're seeing that with teens right now, a significant number of teens increasing every single day are putting some sort of emotional stake into chat or Claude or even a third-party type LLM. That's really, really concerning. So how do we put those parameters, again, looking at the human side of things, like what won't we let AI do regardless of how far it goes? What are those triggers that will make us reevaluate whether or not that boundary is set in place? And what are those things we are going to just open the floodgates with and run towards? But I think instead of looking at it from a technological lens, which is our default, we have to look at it from a human lens and say, hey, where are we going to allow technology into our world? Instead of saying, hey, where are we going to enter into technology's world? It's what I say with kids. Whenever someone's having kids, I very rarely offer unsolicited advice, but if they do ask, I'll always say, hey, your kids are being born into your world, you're not being born into theirs. So don't let your world revolve around their lives, let their lives revolve around your world. And I think the same is true with AI.

Yeah, I think one thing that's always fascinating to me is human formation, right? What forms one generation and ultimately influences the next? It's this idea of the generational pendulum. We've seen it swing back and forth so many times, but often the next generation is a reflection of the way in which they were raised. So in the past, a lot of my predictions and looking forward to the future have always been around technology because that's where I've spent a lot of time. That's where I get excited, but I've taken a step back and I still have many technological predictions from humanoid robots and all that coming out in my report. So there are some things I haven't tabled that, but I think the question that I'm tackling more, it's not even, is AI coming for jobs? The answer is yes, and it's also going to create jobs. It's just going to be just like any technological upset. It is going to be more profound, I think. But really what I'm looking at is, hey, what's happening to the family unit? What's happening to the political environment? What's happening to communities right now as a result of AI? Because all of that influences your next generation of workers, your current generation of workers, what motivates people to work. And I think those are some of the things that I'm spending a little bit more time on. And it's been really fascinating to look at the trends that were happening before generative AI, which is really where we're using this word, AI. What was happening before, what's happening since, and where those lines are going, and what that means for culture and society moving forward.

Yeah, as I shared when we were at your event, there's really an evolution you've seen over the last 70 years. And it's first where it started with community and technology accelerated the community for connectedness. And then it moved from changing the community to changing the home. It became a little bit more concrete. And then once you look down, the last 10 to 15 years have been all about changing the individual. And so if you look at anyone born or at formative years in their life in the last 15 years, everything that they've had, as far as any advancement, any societal forces have been focused on the individual and making it, it's all about you. It's all about your brand, your desire. So that American dream that once it was the house is now the individual and their own story. And I think that influences so many different aspects of life. And when the leaders of companies try to make it feel more like a team or like a family, Gen Z pushes back on that in particular for we're talking about a specific generation. Gen Z is like, I don't want my family at work. We're seeing up to 38% of Gen Zers, I believe is the stat that have are estranged with a family member, whether sibling or parents or someone in their immediate family, a significant number that's up almost [three times] on any previous generation. So that's the wrong approach is saying, hey, let's be a family at work. And so then some companies are like, well, we just need to go remote because if they all go remote, then we know that they're working two jobs or we know that they're only working three hours a day and that's okay, but we still have the employee. So you're on all these different sides of the argument but I think what leaders really need to sit down is say, hey, the one thing still no matter what that every generation consistently has always wanted in a job is purpose. They want to know that what they're doing matters and that hasn't changed. It's been consistent for almost six generations. And when you look at that data and you start to see, hey, you know, in the top three things is always why someone does what they do. That's what leaders need to get back to and it sounds oversimplified, but leaders are trying to throw benefits and pay and flexible work and technology perks and all which are great and you need to do that. But when was the last time you sat down and said, hey, this is why your role is important and it might not seem important now, but when you do this, it makes everything else matter. I think of the video that went viral from the Charlotte airport, they had a guy cleaning. You know, he was one of the custodial staff and he would just always sing and he would get to know people and he went viral because he said, I understand that people are usually busy and frantic and I hope that the part of the airport that they travel through with me is clean and enjoyable and safe. And that's my job and that's why I'm here and that's the impact I get to make. And he saw his purpose is so much more than picking up someone's trash or the Cheerios that my kids might have, you know, thrown on the floor as we were running between flights.

Not just mine.

Yeah, thanks for that, Scott. I am probably too easy to find, but, you know, Ryan Vet, R-Y-A-N-V-E-T, don't add letters, it is that simple. But just ryanvet.com, you can go ahead and check out my podcast, completely free, my newsletter, also totally a free resource, and then see some of the other studies that I do, as well as things like the 2027 Prediction Guide.

Thanks, Scott.