Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

Professor Michael Gerlich is back on the show, calling from Zurich, Switzerland. His new book, The Convenience Trap: What Happens When AI Becomes the Mind Behind Our Lives is about the threats to what I call our "cognitive autonomy" when we use AI the wrong way. And it turns out that the ways we tend to use it are mostly the wrong way, which was what Michael was talking about last October, because he is the author of a widely-cited study showing that students’ use of AI for cognitive offloading impaired their critical thinking. But his new research shows that following what he calls the structured prompting protocol, of using your brain first, AI second, results in improved learning.

Michael is the Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School. His research and publications largely focus on the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence. He’s also taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge, and other institutions. He’s also been an adviser to the President and the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbekistan Cabinet, and ministers of economic affairs in Azerbaijan.

We start with a - frankly shocking - story that shows how dependent students have become on AI, then talk about how to avoid cognitive offloading, how to use AI more effectively, the anchoring effect of AI use, using a GPS as an analogy, and the risks of unexamined AI use.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

What is AI doing and going to do to job opportunities? What does it mean to have enough, and who has too little, and what’s fair? One answer to that is to look at inequality; how different are the financial circumstances of one set of people compared to another?

I continue talking with Jeremy Ney, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and author of an upcoming book about opportunity and inequality in America. He writes the American Inequality newsletter and was previously a macroeconomic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. His work on regional divides and economic mobility has appeared in TIME Magazine, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, PBS, and on the TED stage.

In our conclusion, we talk about Universal Basic Income, taxes and other systems of wealth redistribution, whether AI should be treated as a public utility, AI and redlining, AI causing cognitive inequalities in education, and where we should be looking to for change.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

What is AI doing and going to do to job opportunities? What does it mean to have enough, and who has too little, and what’s fair? One answer to that is to look at inequality; how different are the financial circumstances of one set of people compared to another?

Here to help us understand that is Jeremy Ney, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and author of an upcoming book about opportunity and inequality in America. He writes the American Inequality newsletter and was previously a macroeconomic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. His work on regional divides and economic mobility has appeared in TIME Magazine, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, PBS, and on the TED stage.

We talk about how AI affects inequality in job availability, particularly recent college grads, and Jeremy has crunched a lot of current data about that. Is the answer to become a plumber or electrician? Where is the wealth dividend from automation going? We talk about the difference between low-wage and low-skill work, the Gini Coefficient, socioeconomic mobility, the cost of higher education vs the college wage premium and how schools and AI might democratize that dilemma.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

I am talking with Rob May, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroMetric AI, optimizing inference for multi-model AI systems, and returning to the show after 5 years. We're making sense of how rapid advances in AI—especially the shift from training to real-world inference—are reshaping work, business strategy, and the roles of humans. They accelerate productivity while increasing cognitive demands and redefining where human judgment still matters.

A serial entrepreneur, Rob has founded and scaled multiple successful companies including Backupify, Talla, Dianthus, and BrandGuard. He’s also an active angel investor with over 100 portfolio companies and brings firsthand insight into the evolution of AI entrepreneurship. His expertise lies at the intersection of AI research, applied inference, and startup strategy. He is also the co-host of the AI in NYC Show, where he discusses the latest breakthroughs in AI infrastructure and reasoning with top founders, investors, and researchers.

We conclude the interview by talking about AI processing on local devices, natural limits to automation, the shift in competitive advantage from execution to creativity, and restructuring of the economy and the workforce. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

Rapid advances in AI—especially the shift from training to real-world inference—are reshaping work, business strategy, and the roles of humans. They accelerate productivity while increasing cognitive demands and redefining where human judgment still matters. Here to help us get a handle on that and returning to the show after five years is Rob May, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroMetric AI, a pioneering company optimizing inference for multi-model AI systems. A serial entrepreneur, Rob has founded and scaled multiple successful companies including Backupify, Talla, Dianthus, and BrandGuard. He’s also an active angel investor with over 100 portfolio companies and brings firsthand insight into the evolution of AI entrepreneurship. His expertise lies at the intersection of AI research, applied inference, and startup strategy. He is also the co-host of the AI in NYC Show, where he discusses the latest breakthroughs in AI infrastructure and reasoning with top founders, investors, and researchers.

We talk about how the bottleneck in business is shifting from labor to cognition, the paradoxical way AI is increasing workloads and cognitive strain, the rise of inference as the core AI economy, and how infrastructure constraints are pushing towards a more distributed AI ecosystem.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.