As part of its presence at SXSW Sydney in 2024, The Growth Distillery hosted a series of 10 vodcasts (a podcast with video) hosted by Dan Krigstein and branded Rules Don’t Apply.
The third guest in the series was Noelle Russell, the chief AI officer at the AI Leadership Institute.
Rules Don’t Apply Episode 3: Dan Krigstein with Noelle Russell
Dan started the interview introducing his guest: Noelle is an award-winning technologist who specialises in helping companies with data, cloud computing, conversational AI, generative AI, and LLMs. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, AWS, Amazon Alexa and is a globally renowned champion for data and AI literacy.
She is the founder of the I Heart AI community teaching responsible AI for everyone. She has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP, Most Valuable Professional.
Noelle is frequently LinkedIn’s top voice in AI as well as LinkedIn’s top voice in executive coaching.
She manages all this as well as having six kids!
Dan then began the interview asking about Noelle’s biggest concerns with AI.
Noelle: I would probably say my biggest concern is around literacy.
I’m very worried about the gap that’s being created with this technology. I’m an example of this. I got into tech the first time when the world was going to end with Y2K and they didn’t ask questions. They were just like, we need smart people who are willing to work really hard and get into this.
I taught myself how to code. I never finished high school. I never finished college because Y2K gave me this opportunity to kind of jump in. And we’re now in the same kind of moment where this technology is incredibly, increasingly fast, very worrisome.
We need more divergent thinkers in the space than ever. It’s actually filled with people who aren’t extremely divergent and thinking very homogeneous.
My biggest concern is that the right people won’t be involved, won’t even be invited to the party.
I just look at high school kids. I volunteer and I teach all the things I do to those kids, but this is not a program in the school where we grew up.
So I worry about that because in a world where we’re thinking about how people are going to use this technology. I foresee if we’re not super careful that there’ll be people who don’t get served that end up being consumers and potentially even used by this technology.
Dan: On the other side of the coin though, the power of learning is in everyone’s hands. You don’t need to go to an Ivy League school anymore because if you’ve got an iPhone or a smartphone, with the right type of prompts, you can pretty much learn anything.
Noelle: A hundred percent. I think the biggest challenge with that is in order to build the right types of prompts, you do need to have kind of clarity of thought and a good understanding of human communication, which is a bit ironic, right? Because we’re talking to machines. But in order to talk well to machines, you really have to have a good command of the human language.
See also:
• Rules Don’t Apply: The Battle for Creativity: AI vs. Humanity with Futurist Brian David Johnson
• Layne Beachley first guest on Rules Don’t Apply vodcast series from The Growth Distillery