Please welcome ServiceNow's Senior Vice President, Global Partnerships, and Channels, Erica Volini. (upbeat music) - Thank you. Okay, hi, everyone. Well, I think you're in for a little bit of a treat because this is our AI luminary panel, but we're actually gonna be delving deep into this discussion of human imagination and creativity, which you might think, "But I thought this was about AI." But our two panelists are gonna explain exactly what creativity and imagination have everything to do with the world of technology and AI. So I wanna start by introducing them. Kate O'Neill is the Chief Technology Humanist and CEO of KO Insights. I love that title. It is a strategic advisory firm committed to improving the human experience at scale, especially in data-driven, algorithmically optimized, and AI-led interactions. She is the author of five books and was named to the Thinkers 50 Radar in 2020. Vince Kadlubek is the founder and CEO of Meow Wolf, an American arts and entertainment company that creates large-scale interactive and immersive art installations, opening portals of possibility. Vince focuses on projects at the intersection of theme parks, imagination, immersive art, and experience. So please join me in welcoming Kate and Vince to the stage. Thank you for being here. Okay, feels good to sit down. So we're talking about imagination, we're talking about human creativity, and we're also talking about AI. So some people in the audience may be thinking why? How do these topics go together? And why is unlocking human creativity and imagination so important right now in this age of AI that we're in? Kate, can you get us started? - Yeah, sure. I think, you know, it's really important that we are in touch with what makes us human as we think about scaling the systems around us. That we really think about what do we wanna make more of? What do we wanna accentuate? What do we wanna amplify and accelerate? And I think the default assumption is going to be accelerate business objectives, right? Like, make business more successful, which we absolutely should do as long as we're making business successful in alignment with what makes humans thrive. So we're looking for that overlap, and I think where imagination and creativity and all these kind of innovative opportunities come up, that's clearly a place where there's thriving going on. So we wanna accelerate and amplify that as much as possible. That's where I think the crucial moment really is right now. - Yeah, I totally agree. And I wanna come back and get your perspective. Vince, let me turn it over to you just to get the conversation started. Now you're in this world of immersive art installations, which by the way, we could probably just have this session showing these incredible installations, but we're not. But tell us how does this creative process, how does imagination and creativity come inform your view of AI and technology? - Yeah, I think like, you know, this has been a story for a very long time. Like, this is nothing new. The human experience has been that of an increasing amount of expressing, of our imagination, increasing amount of creating and being creative in the world. I oftentimes like to think like ask this question like how many things were created from the imagination in 10,000 BC versus how many things are created from the imagination today? And kind of look at that graph and like everything around us right now, the entirety of this building and everything that you're looking at, the clothes that we're wearing, like everything was created from the imagination inside of this space. So there is this crazy bell curve that's happening with that. Technology has played a huge role, obviously, in that bell curve, in that crazy curve. It's like, and I hope that AI is a continuation of that same story, and I'm pretty confident, I have a lot of faith in that story, that what it actually is doing, like by making things more efficient, by taking things off of our plate that we don't need to be using our mind for, that we have the ability then as humans and at scale to be able to put our minds towards the things that only humans can do, that AI will never be able to do, that computers will never be able to do. And that is in the realm of envisioning and creating the world around us. - So it sounds like you have a great deal of optimism. - I do. - About creativity and imagination, not only continuing but exponentially increasing is what I'm hearing. - For sure. I think, you know, I have faith in humanity, to be honest. Like, we've been through this before, you know, like I'm sure back in the day when Adobe introduced Photoshop, there was probably a lot of like graphic designers out there that are like, "Oh, there we go, my job's gonna be taken. Like there's a computer, there's a piece of software that's gonna do all the work that I normally do, and then anyone's gonna be able to just jump onto Photoshop and create a deck." But the opposite became true. It actually enabled even more graphic designers out in the world and it actually was a tool that graphic designers now use to make even more brilliant work. So I, you know, I have faith that the human, that the audience can tell where brilliance lies. And I have faith that brilliance will always be driven by the human by the human imagination. - I love that sentiment and I truly I hope that's true in the future. And I actually believe the exact same thing. Kate, you've had this incredible career driving innovation through human-centered technology solutions. So Vince talked to us about the opportunity and the potential for humans. Do you think imagination and creativity also help us to really advance what we're doing with AI? Does it have that same effect on the technology revolution? - Oh, yeah, I think so. I think it gives us the opportunity to think about you know what we want to encode in AI. You know, machines I always say machines are what we encode of ourselves, right? Like machines represent or algorithms or AI or whatever represents our biases as well as our values, right? We're getting to say this is what matters so we are encoding that. And I think this is a real opportunity for us to say, "Well, what matters about you know how we interact and what creativity looks like, what the realm of creativity looks like and how do we encode that?" So I do think that it's a moment where we can say you know as we scale AI around us, how could we scale AI in such a way that we are saying that's what matters and let's bring that up. So that looks like AI being more anticipatory, AI being more sort of able to adapt to our patterns. By the way, that also means that the data relationship is one of trust which is a leap right now because there's definitely some privacy and security issues as all of you know. So I think that that's where there's some imagining beyond the limitations that has to happen. The art of the possible has to be part of this discussion but once we can imagine you know AI helping me schedule around my mood as well as my availability or I don't know it's just things like that where I'm like, "Oh, this is a creative task. Let's make sure you're in a creative mindset when we put this on your calendar." There's a lot of opportunity I think to play with what AI could do for us in that realm. - I know, I would love a technology that senses my mood and then when I'm in a bad mood just shut the doors around me so no one can find me. If someone could invent that, that would be incredible. So you guys are approaching it from a very optimistic perspective but I think we all know there's fear out there. There is just fear of the unknown that's out there and so I think in a way some people get paralyzed by that fear and almost shut down their creativity and imagination versus embracing it. You both have teams that you work with. How do you inspire your teams to move past fear and to really embrace and bring that imagination and creativity into the work that they're doing and embrace the technology at the same time? Vince or Kate? - Yeah, I mean I think what's interesting about AI is that we use it, we have a single term, artificial intelligence, and we can use that term AI at like at the workplace, but it's not one thing. It's like there's a thousand different potential usage, you know, uses and functions of AI. And I you know, I work at Meow Wolf and so I'm around artists, creatives, filmmakers, visual artists. And so the term AI is like immediately just sort of conjures up like Midjourney or DALL-E, you know? And that is very scary. - Yeah. - And it's scary for a you know a few reasons. It's scary because yes like other artists' work has been used to create the base model that's generating the outputs. And that's without credit and that's without and so there's actual artists whose careers are being sort of derailed or being very like, you know, kind of, generalized because of AI. It's also those scary because AI, the content that kind of comes out of these creative tools currently is quickly becoming very boring. Like how many people are already bored with the way Midjourney looks or DALL-E looks, like you now can just sort of like see it, you recognize it and you're like there's nothing interesting going on here. And I think when we play that out over time, we're gonna be flooded with so much media that is generated by AI, so much media it's gonna be generated. What stands out, what's gonna stand out? And so that's how I've been trying to bring the conversation into the creative space of Meow Wolf. It's like you know, let's have faith in the audience. Let's have faith in the consumer, you know? And honestly like you know a good example for me is "Everything Everywhere All At Once." Like that movie is insane and wonderful and so weird and so abstracted and yet it made a huge splash and it won all these academy awards and it's a huge box off to success. Like people know brilliance when they see it. And so it's like have faith that people are gonna be like not interested in the sort of copy paste, you know Midjourney, DALL-E kind of suite of outputs and have faith that like the artist is always gonna matter. - Yeah, you know, it reminds me so much of what was said on the keynote, John Mathis said exactly that. He was asked by Nick (indistinct), "Are you afraid? Are you worried?" And he's like, "No because weirdness will always prevail." - Which I thought was like that was an incredible statement. I think the audience really appreciate I did because it's like but that's the sentiment of what you're expressing, right? You know, we'll be able to sort through the true creativity which is an interesting concept. Kate, you were gonna add something into that? - Yeah, it was just any fans of information theory in the audience, anyone? Like do we see oh we have a couple of hands. - Two hands. - You know that in information theory that there's you know the relationship to probability and meaning like if something is more probable or more predictable, it is actually less meaningful. Like the chance of something being able to be predicted is the more boring, it's the more you know, the less meaningful output. And I actually have a really firm belief in the idea that meaning is one of the most fundamental human characteristics like our attention to meaning and our tendency to create meaning and seek meaning and sort of thrive around meaning. So we need to be thinking about what is unpredictable. We need to be thinking about how do we bring you know the not expected elements into it which I think is very similar to what you're talking about there. So that means that we have to be looking at our own experiences and looking for juxtapositions and how do we kind of put that thing next to this thing and what does that make us think of? And that's all gonna be opportunities for creativity. I think AI can really help us with that. Absolutely. And you know be sort of a in a sense a co-collaborator that helps us think of random ideas and look at the juxtapositions and find opportunities to look for what's interesting there. But in general I think in this first iteration, these first stages of generative AI as you say like we're seeing an awful lot of you know sort of regression to the mean a lot of things that are going back to very predictable and boring. So our job is to keep bringing the weirdness into it. - And keep things, making things unpredictable and interesting for ourselves as much as for meaning in general for future humans. - I think that's I think in a way that's hard for a lot of people, right? I mean it feels like this idea of being radical you know, putting yourself fully out there talking about meaning at work. - Which I also love but I think is is a hard concept for people to embrace. There's almost a bias against it because it feels like it is a deviation from the mean. So how do we help people overcome those biases so they can really unlock these radical new ideas and explore these things that aren't common, that aren't standard? How do we do it? - So I have a friend I worked a for a long time in Nashville in my moonlighting, I was a songwriter, and so I have a lot of songwriter friends. I have a friend named Cliff Goldmacher, you should all hire him. He does workshops and training on creativity. What he does is actually work with the teams that are in his sessions to write songs. So these are corporate teams who come to that who come to him to his sessions and they are writing songs in this session. Are they going to be chart toppers? Of course not, most likely no. But they're going to break through these barriers of perceived creative limits. And what it's actually going to do too is help people in their teams be able to say, "Look, this was embarrassing. This was awkward. I felt like I didn't wanna show you my draft of my song but I'm getting over that fear of rejection and I'm putting up something interesting for us to be able to you know bounce around together." And I think it's that fear of rejection and that fear of being vulnerable, that fear of doing something weird. As we keep we're kind of coming back to this theme of weird a couple of times I think, and that's what keeps people inhibited. And you know, in this safe space where they're not putting out much of themselves, and they're not putting out the ideas that may seem too out there, but I think we have to move past that if we're going to get to the interesting stuff and get to the stuff that's actually going to make for innovation and interesting outcomes. Do you have anything to add? - Yeah, I mean, the biases and sort of blockers especially in technology, you know, there's a lot of like fear of technology and kind of refusal to use it or like you know, and there's a lot of just sort of like cultural pushback in ways I think that like overcoming what you know, what sort of needs to happen to overcome this or at least how I've overcome these biases in my own perspective has been kind of stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of kind of human trajectory and starting to get a better understanding of like what it is that we're up to. Like what is going on with this species that we're a part of? Like what the hell is happening basically? And like stepping back and being like what are we moving towards? To what end are we innovating? To what end are we being creative? To what end are we, you know, developing technology? And honestly, like coming to a place where we can kind of see, we can see the vision for where humanity's going, and that is honestly just like a huge deficiency generally with our species is that we don't, there's not leadership around where we're going. There's a lot of fears, there's a lot of like fear as to where we're going. There's a lot of like doomsday narratives. There's a lot of like how terrible things are gonna be if we keep going down these tracks. But there's no one stepping up and telling stories about what happens, you know, what happens to our species, that what could happen in positive ways with usage of technology. There's no one telling that story. - You know. - I can jump in if I can, if you don't mind, 'cause I wanna say I actually think there are and that but the problem is that the people who are telling that story are telling it for their own gain. And I think it's making people cynical about that story, right? The people who are telling that story are, you know, they're the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who stand to make a lot of money on the growth and scaling of AI and so nobody believes that that's possible, that the outcomes that they're describing where we all thrive are possible. They're like ruining it for the rest of us. So I think that the thing you're saying is true, and also we need to have a more holistic discourse, a more, you know, disciplined discourse that all of us participate in where we acknowledge what could go wrong and what the harms and risks are and what could go right and how we would get there and how we're going to actively commit every day to doing the work that's going to take to get us there. I'm sorry to step on. - No, I actually think it's a really important point because this intersection of the disciplines, and you know, it's funny listening to the both of you, and now hearing you're a songwriter. - It's like you're both extremely creative, so you're sharing this point of view. You were a songwriter, you're doing these incredible art installations. And it might feel like okay, that's what they're saying because they're already naturally creative. But what if I am doing technical work, technical education, how do we inject that in? How do we get that cross-industry thinking happening so that we're injecting this concept of creativity and we're bridging that gap so it doesn't just feel like it's disconnected over here? - I think juxtaposition is one of the most important things that we can do in any kind of creative work. I think thinking about random connections between things and trying to find what could possibly be interesting about that is where we go, and I do this in my book "Pixels in Place". I talk about how the, you know, the digital and physical designs of our experiences inform one another and that we have all these metaphors of space and physical place in our digital design like you know, windows and exits and entrances and pages and all that kind of thing, but there are also metaphors that we haven't used that should be informative by their absence. Like why don't we have doors? Why don't we have floors or stairs or anything like that? What do those mean? What would they mean if they existed? And what are we omitting by not having those metaphors at play in our digital spaces? What could we do that we don't need to use those metaphors but what does it suggest to us by having those metaphors be part of our sort of creative play around innovation and around the opportunity for technology? I think there's so many ways that we can you know, kind of remove some of these limitations in our teams and in our innovation work and thinking about future readiness within our technologies, within our companies by thinking about you know, these playful opportunities. How would AI approach this if it were a poet? How would you know a child describe this function or whatever? Like looking for those opportunities to be playful is gonna be a real eyeopener for any kind of product or technology. - And do you believe that exists? I mean Vince, do you believe that that ability to ask those kinds of questions even exists in a corporate setting? I mean you're the CEO of a company. - I do, yeah, I absolutely do. I think that like I mean I just, I got I just got off stage you know, at the one of the Think Big sessions talking about you know no matter what company you're in and no matter what department you run or division you run, there's value in bringing, there's value in bringing the spirit of spontaneity into people's lives if nothing else for cultural reasons, if nothing else for bringing kind of good vibes and quality momentum to your team. And I think that's when you ask like you know, sort of the learnings of creativity, you know imagination, art, like infusing those into more technical functions. It's really about you know providing space for people to explore the unknown or providing opportunities for things to feel possible. Getting out of the like, you know getting out of the repetition and the knowability of our workplace and bringing some space in that like inspires new thought or even just a new energy. I mean it's ironic. It's like we're developing AI tools to hopefully alleviate us from a lot of the like repetitive, you know, kind of technical functions. So if we're developing those tools in order to try to relieve ourselves of those functions then while we're developing those tools, let's try to also make sure that we're alleviating folks of those functions you know, at least a little bit. - That's true. I'm curious this concept of playful thinking, right? That you mentioned which I love having a one-year-old and a five-year-old myself, I'm like "Yes, let's think about like a child." That sounds amazing. You know, there's all these ethical concerns around all of this technology, but do you think in a way that if we took this kind of playful thinking approach that we might actually make AI safer and maybe more aligned to our human values because we're not approaching it, thinking in a process mindset but instead in a playful mindset? - Yeah, and it's a really important point because I think one of the opportunities that taking that creative playful mindset to the terrain of responsible and ethical AI and technology development, it affords us the chance to say you know, how could we think about you know sort of use constraints thinking. Constraints are really helpful in any kind of creative exercise, right? That's a fun little way to give yourself some boundaries that make it challenging. And one of the things you can say is you know, we know that there are going to be consequences or like when we scale this solution, things are going to happen that we didn't intend. Unintended consequences are a big discussion within responsible tech. So how could we better envision those? And I think it's gonna take to put ourselves in the situation where we think a year out, five years out, 10 years out from whatever our solution is and try to it being wildly successful. You know one of the things I like to point out is we often talk a lot about what could go wrong in projects, and we so rarely talk about what could go right and that not talking about what could go right means that we don't often think about the impact of scale. What happens when this is wildly successful and a lot of people are using it and it's changing their lives? What do we want their lives to look like? And we have to bring an optimistic view to that as well as that realistic pragmatic lens of let's make sure we're managing for all the risks and harms that could come about as a result of that. But let's also make sure we can inject something of good into that too. Let's bring some play, some life, some meaningfulness. You know this whole idea of like us automating everything that's mundane and routine is totally true and we absolutely need to do that. And at the same time I always caution that we need to be thinking about where we bring automation into processes. about bringing meaning into those processes too. Like how do we bring empathy into the automation that we're creating? Because if you imagine forward years from now that most of the services and experiences in the world are automated and they've all been automated so that they can take mundanity off of our plates, that means we're in a world that has mundane meaningless experiences all around us at scale, and no one wants that. We would want to have play, we would want to have opportunity for meaningful connections still be there, so I think that's the real opportunity is to bring those facets into the work. - Yeah, I think that's fast, I've never thought about it that way. We always think about the mundane comes off, it goes to the side and we never see it again. I've never thought to myself that just means we're surrounded by it. That's a really interesting frame. So we're coming to the end of this, I wanna ask one more question of each of you and I'm gonna ask both of you to fast forward okay, it's 15 to 20 years from now, daunting to think about okay, we have mastered this concept of human AI co-creativity. What does that future look like? How would it transform the world we're living in? Vince maybe I'll start with you. - Imagining 15 to 20 years in the future, you know and thinking about AI, I mean I can't just think about AI by itself, it's probably a combination of AI and spatial computing together and then also some form of headset or you know some form something that covers our vision with an overlay of the world. If we've mastered that 15 to 20 years from now, then we are all individually walking around in our own world of creation by choice, that we're able to be in a creative state at all times and exist within almost a dreamlike state like a choice-driven dreamlike state, you know, based on our own intentions at any time. I think that's where we're wanting to head anyway. I think ultimately we wanna be able to sort of paint the world and experience everybody else's painting of the world as well. - You know so I think like you know, I've talked about like meta's and meta's horizon worlds quite a bit you know, on metaverse panels and stuff and how boring it is and just how lifeless and lack of creativity is in that world and horizon worlds inside of the quest. And I think that like you know what we all desire is to be in immersed inside of the minds of dreamers and then subsequently immersed inside of the mind of ourself as the dreamer. - And so hopefully that's where we're going. - I love that idea. Like we're all walking around in these like bubbles of imagination and creativity and playfulness and positivity. I mean that sounds amazing to me. Kate what would you add on to that? - I think I would add very little. I think what you said is such a great answer but I would just say that I think that throughout technology history, we've wanted to create more connections with one another. Some of those attempts have gone horribly awry and we know that in history. But I think at the moment that we are ever trying to create a new tool or technology or platform or system or whatever, oftentimes one of our motives is this will help us better connect with one another. And I genuinely hope that one of the benefits that AI affords us is the opportunity to you know quickly brainstorm and ideate and get through executions and sync through ramifications so that we can actually start to create better connections with one another in those deployments of technology. You know these creative dreamlike states and spaces that we would inhabit, I have always thought augmented reality was one of the most exciting technologies that could be the most dominant technology around us. And we just cannot seem to figure out the killer use case for it, but I think we're close. I think we're getting there with the combination with AI. So a lot of it will have to do with sort of bringing these very imaginative creative experiences together and I think a lot of it is going to have to do with connecting and feeling like we're part of community together. And if we can knock those two out, then we're gonna be living in a much better time you know while solving all the other problems that there are to solve in 20 years. - I mean it sounds very utopian to me and I love that. And I think this whole conference has been filled with so much positivity and optimism. It's a great way to end this session. So I just wanna thank Kate and Vince, thank you so much for being here. Round of applause for Kate and Vince, please. Creativity and imagination and the world of technology, let's get back together in 15, 20 years and see if this reality has come true. Thank you.