Are you using AI or is AI using you? | Ricardo Luiz | Season finale

We talk a lot on this show about what AI can do. This one's about what it can quietly take, if you let it.

Ricardo Luiz has spent over twenty years building products at the intersection of psychology, UX and AI, and his warning is simple: the moment you outsource what to think, you've outsourced who you are. AI is good enough and fast enough that most people won't notice the handoff happening.

We get into exactly where the line sits between AI amplifying you and AI quietly making you dependent on it. Ricardo's test: if the tool disappeared tomorrow, would you panic or would you just slow down? Panic means you were never really driving.

We also get into why Anthropic named 'understanding what's happening inside the black box' a real 2026 goal, why intent is the one word Ricardo wants you to sit with before opening another AI tool and a story involving a dog, a cancer diagnosis and a vaccine formula that shouldn't have existed. Plus a study on why people trust an AI's medical answer over an actual doctor's, even when it's wrong.

And we get honest about the economics nobody wants to talk about. The tools feel cheap right now because the real cost isn't being charged yet. Ricardo's bet: give it two years and the businesses behind these tools will have to charge what they actually cost and not everyone will be able to afford what they've gotten used to.

Fair warning: this one might change how you use every AI tool you touch after it.

About Ricardo: Ricardo is a product leader focused on AI-native product development, mentorship and the cultivation of communities of practice. He's spent his career turning ambiguous problems into shipped products and individual contributors into the teams everyone wants to work on. He mentors emerging and senior PMs across geographies, hosts peer-learning circles and believes the most effective thing a senior practitioner can do is multiply other practitioners. 

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uxluiz/
- UXDX: https://uxdx.com/profile/ricard-luiz/
- WUD Portugal: https://wudportugal.com/orador/ricardo-luiz/

Mentioned in this episode:

• 'The Urgency of Interpretability' - Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability
• The study on over-trust in AI-generated medical responses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15266
• Coverage of the Claude Max plan usage-limits lawsuit (Engadget): https://www.engadget.com/2194626/anthropic-hit-with-lawsuit-over-its-claude-max-usage-limits/

Season 2 ends here. Season 3 arrives in September and takes the show beyond tech; we will have doctors, chefs, scientists, artists, all asked the same closing question. Subscribe now so you're there for episode one.

Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:08

Human X Intelligent is a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of AI, from all of us living through it. Today's guest is Ricardo Luigi. He's a product leader with over 20 years of experience waving psychology, UX, and AI together to build things that actually work for people. What he understands about how we think, how we lead, and what it means to stay at the wheel when the tools get smarter. That is exactly the conversation I wanted to have. The question we're real exploring today is what does it mean to use AI with intent? Not just to use it, but to know why. Let's go. I want to give you some context for why I invited Ricardo into this conversation. A lot of what we talk about here is about not letting the tools outrun the thinking. Ricardo has been two decades building at exactly that intersection, understanding how people learn, how they make decisions, and then designing systems that work with that rather than against it. His background is in neurocognitive science and human-computer interaction, which means that when he talks about critical thinking, he is not just using a popular phrase. He has a very specific idea of what it is and what it costs to lose it. So let's start with one that I think it's a good one a good start, uh starting point, I would say, which is are we at risk of outsourcing not just tasks to AI, but our ability to think critically?

SPEAKER_01 1:31

I really hope not. Okay. It's something that I always tell my mentees, my my students when I'm teaching, is that man, this is something that we should never relinquish, is the critical thinking capacity. I think that if someone is afraid of being replaced by AI in somewhere in whatever position we are talking about, they have to think about what is the amount of critical uh critical thinking that they have involved in their day-to-day operations. Because that is the sweet, that is the magic potion, right? I was having this uh conversation in another podcast uh a few weeks ago, and I was saying that for me, the most appalling thing about how people are facing and thinking about AI is that they think that this is the awkward magic one. They have just to wave it and say a few magic words and something magic happens.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

And they forget that you have to have a plan. So the the the grammat that you have inside your head needs to be used for you to build the process that you need to have, even before you think about how do you use AI afterwards. Okay, because it's everyone is super excited about agents and co-work on cloth and uh building this and building that. I am also, but for me, the most exciting part is to think about what kind of systems, what kind of process are you building with AI and how do you supervise AI to make sure that it's not gigo, garbage in, garbage out uh all the time. That is a magic. So I really hope that people I know that we are lazy as a as a species. So inevitably it will happen. People will relinquish their critical thinking ability into uh an AI of some sorts, and humanoid robot, whatever.

SPEAKER_02 3:15

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

They will it will happen. It's not if, it's when. But I really hope that the majority of people that have some critical thinking ability understand how valuable that is, how precious that is, and how key that is going to be to make sure that we are not just, you know, building for the masses, you know, just for stuff that it's blends, vanilla tasting, whatever. One critical thing about AI that we we need to understand is that the way that still these models think and interact and they learn is that they learn with pests. Okay. So if you have to think about innovation, if you have to critical think about uh something, you can use all of these tools because this is what we're talking about. It's a technology, it's it's a tool that you can use, a very sophisticated one. Okay, and as we all learn that famous expression, like when things are advanced enough, we tend to see it as magic, right? So we are at that breaking point of getting there, that okay, this is going to be freaky enough that we have to think that something magic is happening on the inside. And by the way, it is because still to this day, we don't quite understand 100% what happens during the training and what's happening in inside that black box. I was super excited when last year Anthropic said this is going to be our goal for 2026 is to understand better what happens inside the black box. Because again, we are dealing with the technology that we don't fully understand. And that's that's the thing that was like interesting. So, what usually happens when we do that? It's one of two things, right? So I'm a very optimistic person, so I always think that the better the best of any situation is going to happen. I'm always proved wrong. So I was one of those people that actually for a while believed that after COVID we will become such a better society and all of that. And then Mel, that went away in 12 hours. I was like, okay, not really.

SPEAKER_04 5:24

At least events came back, the in-person events that kind of remind me of actually this week's episode that I just shared. For the people listening, it wasn't not this week, it was a few weeks ago, but still. It's still relevant because it kind of reminded me because for me specifically, last year I was trying multiple different uh tools, and I got to a point where I had like around six tools, and I was not thinking at all. I was doing research on a specific user experience. I don't know, really the feature, let's say it like this, and I had to stop. I had to really stop and like, okay, I need to actually have a process to do this. Let's just do the old pen and paper and go back to the roots. And that actually went right away with what you're saying about the critical thinking and how we need to see in the process how we can uh leverage our critical thinking and the rest being optimized with these agents, wherever we decide to go, like Claude. But I found this um something that I would like to share with you. I don't know if you know this, but Claude uh does something when you reply to it, it always like most tools, but it will reply in a way that is look like this correct, and you will share it like it's correct. Most of the times it is not correct. They've been studying this and it is not correct. So I guess my question, and I think this is a great starting point from there, is where do you draw the line between using AI as leverage and becoming dependent on it? Because I think your perspective is very important for this conversation and also your personal experience to make sure that you stay in control.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Yeah, I'm I'm I'm laughing because just yesterday that happened to me. I'm so used right now to use Claude as one of the tools to do some some stuff that I tried. It's that time of the year that kids are asking me, Oh, can we print some eggs so I we can color them and blah blah blah. And I was like, okay, let's let's let's do this on Claude. And my kitten, the oldest time and me, we were looking at this. Uh it's it's taking a while, right? And then the result was subpar. And I was like, okay, let's do the old Google search and let's find some models. Yes. And it it was better, it was faster. So the the line there needs to be, we we need to be very self-conscious of what do we want to use these tools for, right? And we can build a very sophisticated system to deal with everything in our lives, and we can relinquish the sad, boring stuff away. But we need to understand two things. One, if we do this systematically, then we lose control. Just I I think a few nights ago I was thinking about this, how this reminds me of a very crappy movie. I think it's Adam Sandler's. It's uh I don't know if it's clique or something that the name of the movie. But he has a remote control that he can fast forward not to listen or mute, not to listen to the kid, not to listen. And he gets to a point that he's sad alone because he missed all the action. Because he skips all of those boring moments, all of a sudden he had no connection with the kids, he lost connection with the family, he got divorced because the wife didn't listen, all of those details. So for me, this is the thin red line in between leveraging and then becoming super dependent on it. Is that what happens if I turn this off? Okay, will I panic or will I just become slower and back to my normal speed from a few weeks ago or a few months ago? Right? That's that's a red line. That I I think that we should have a metric of the are you panicking or not if I turn off the the AI tools in the system. And if you panic, you're not ready. Okay, you're not ready to use them wisely, and it's it's that holy grail moment of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where choose wisely to the cup. It's like that it's the same, right? It is a very powerful thing. You can build very powerful systems, you have to have an intent behind it. And for me, this is the one of the magic words that we need to start thinking and talking about is intent. So, what is the intent that you have behind the usage of this tool? Are you just doing this because you're bored? And then and again, these tools are brilliant on touching a very specific nerve of our mindset as a as a species. Dopamine is a very powerful thing. Accomplishing stuff, it's a very powerful tool to influence and make people dependent on. So if I'm if I have this thing now that enables me to build and achieve and na na na, I'm hooked because I'm winning. Especially it becomes a magic-winning tool for the people that were not able to code, not able to design, not able. And now they are able to do either decent enough or even more powerful. But just the other day, I was baffled about for me a quantum leap that Manush did on their behalf. They now build APKs like that, and they enable you to publish in the stores iOS and Android. Like, what? Okay, okay, lovable, please do this. I have to have it. Um so this is something that we need to think about, right? We need to process the where is the thin red line that we want to impose ourselves, and then what happens if for some reason it gets turned off or they double the price of the subscription? Will you, as an addicted to sell your house to keep paying for that subscription, or will you say, okay, this doesn't make sense, it doesn't the roy is not there anymore. I have to go back, I have but I have the process, I follow a system, it's still in place, it's gonna take me weeks instead of hours.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Okay, now I have to fight back to understand how I can go back to the to the hours instead of the weeks. But that's that's the the the red line for me is that intense, and then how are you using those tools and what are you using those tools for? Yeah and and making sure that you are not dependent, that you didn't turn off, or actually that you need to turn on the autopilot of your life, and then you just it's easy because I just put here in the inputs, something uh goes out on the output. It's good enough, I know, but have you checked it? As you were saying, is it is it just being super empathetical with you saying nice things that you want to hear? Or and this is something that I do in my interactions with the the agents and with the tools, is that I always ask for them to have a contrarian perspective and a very critical analysis of the output, okay, and ask me very challenging questions. Yeah. So we make sure that we are heading in the right direction.

SPEAKER_04 12:22

The beginning of you, how you were replying, and also before, like you know, positive, always trying to find. I would like to share like a positive story that I reminded based on what you said, because there's a dog story. So this dog, um I don't know if you know the story, but if you do let me know. But this dog had cancer or have cancer. And the owner, as we know, pet owners love, love, love the animals. It's there, like family, right? So he needed to find a way because no one told him, like everyone told him that it was done, the dog did not survive, there was nothing they could do. And he said, no, now we have Jet GPT, now we have Claude, now we have all of these tools. I will find a solution. So he went to a facility to to do all of the testing, have all of the information, he grabbed all of that, put on GPT, and of course he knew a bit of code, he understood a bit of a few things, science, etc. But he put all of that there and it created a formula for a specific uh vaccine that he could give to the dog. So he went to again to the same place, and they created this, and the dog is getting better. Oh wow, this is what we should be doing. We shouldn't be worried about getting a job or whatever. Well, of course, we need to worry about getting a job. But I mean, this should be our focus on having, first of all, having our animals for longer and longer, of course, but finding solutions. Right. It's to find solutions for something good. But I also have something on the other side, and I would like to know your opinion on it because I don't know if you know this, but people who are not well versed in artificial intelligence that use these tools believe more and search more on ChatGPT, for example, which is the one that most people search or know they are not well versed in AI, they search on these tools and have more trust in these tools than Google. I don't know if you knew this, but I guess what I want to ask is because you spend a lot of time mentoring, I know you mentor more on the tech side, but if you had to mentor, for example, your kids, I don't know if your wife works in the tech or not, but uh you know, so or or people from your family, I would say, what is what would you say to them and how would you explain the different perspective?

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah. So again, um it's out there in the in the internet, so I can talk about it. It's uh I shared an episode that that we had here at home regarding exactly that. So one of the most powerful things that we had as it changed, especially GPT4 onwards, is that the tools became really good at talking human. And that's powerful. Because one thing is that you get a very engineering way of seeing the world, like Google, okay? Still an engineering way of seeing the world. You ask a question in a very bullion way, okay, and we all know if we do more and comas and blah blah blah, what happens because we can manipulate the logic of the implementation of the set engine, and we get those results. We get the ranked lists of stuff based on whatever criteria we put as an input, blah blah. That is not the human way of doing it. Humans like narratives, humans like stories. So, what happens when ChatGPD gives you an answer if you realize is that it tells you basically it answers like a human you would. So that's why you have more trust in some of this. After a while, you you recognize something familiar with the system. So that that's why it's easier to relate to this. And I was just reading a study the other day uh on a study that they split the sample. Half of the people were actually doing a this was a blind test, so they didn't see what was on the other side, and they had an actual doctor and a GPT kind of machine doing the the same thing. People related more, like three times more with the machine than with the actual doctor.

SPEAKER_04 16:19

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 16:20

That's that says a lot.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

And this is like why? Because the machine has no notion of time.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

So they are just there to please you. And most of the trainings, most of the filters that we put in the in the buffers that we have between the inputs and outputs, they all trigger the same things. They all are very easy to manipulate how you get the answer. Now, if you go to ChatGPT, you can even modulate the personality of the board to be more witty because you don't like the friendliness all the time and all of that. That's the challenge, right? So it's like, okay. So one of the things that I always try to teach, and especially my kids, is that they have to be, again, critical thinking. They have to question the answer that they are getting. It's not for the sake of questioning, but okay, can you provide me the sources of that? Can I actually see one of the sources? Okay, provide me with a real example of that application so we know that it's happening. Okay? And I love the example that you gave about the optimistic or the positive side of things. Because again, whenever we develop a new technology that usually opens a green field at a blue ocean of opportunities, because now you are deploying a new perspective on an old problem. And there's always chances that we might we might have something very different. Molding molecule molecules was something that we were not able to do. And thanks to the computation power that we now have, COVID was not as nasty as it was because we were able to modulate molecules so much faster, so much more different than we used to do. Then we find we found the vaccination formulas a lot easier. I I didn't know that, sorry, but it's uh it's a great example.

SPEAKER_04 18:12

It's nice.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Again, I usually give the example of ALO that was developed by some of my former colleagues from Unbabble as a great example of how to deploy technology for good. You enable patients that are no longer able to control all their muscle activity, most of the time they lose their ability to talk and all of that, and then you give back that to people. So that's the other side of the AI technology, or you develop an algorithm to prevent cancer or to detect early signals of a disease or something like that. That that's the powerful side of the not mass market side of things. But for me, the most interesting uh part about uh about this, because again, I'm sure that we have great technology that is used. Sorry for the expression crap, right? Um I I was I was hearing a lot of things a few weeks ago about what were people expecting when they invented something, and then the LC was so much different, bro. When the internet was invented was to kind of ease the communication between departments, right? In the the army, and then in in between research centers and all of that. Yeah. I think that if we went back 30 years ago and we said uh 40 and said, guys, this is gonna be used for social networks, and they will kill themselves. Like that.

SPEAKER_04 19:39

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

People always have the downsides and the and the good side.

SPEAKER_04 19:43

Yeah, but it's the same. Uh that's that's actually a good thing because I was talking with a friend today actually, and she was telling him about an event that she went in Porto about AI. And she was very she did a workshop and she was before she was very anxious because she was thinking about what artificial intelligence is gonna like everyone is gonna to lose their job, there's no there's going to be a big problem in society, and that there might happen, but it will be if we think about historical reproduction or growth in this environment, and of course, this was this is a big boom right now, and we are still in a bubble, if we call it a bubble, uh, because there is also some people that don't call it a bubble anymore, they call it the real life, and there's never gonna burst. So it really depends on who you're talking with. But like you were saying about the computers, even before computers, there were the mathematics, which was a woman that started this, we had nothing to do, the goal was nothing to do with computers, and then it went with the computers. So, I guess for me, what I start to think is where will all of this go? How will we use this in a way to make us even better than yesterday? Are we going to go like on the two different TV shows? One that is the robots that are gonna kill us, and the other one that is the utopia, the the dream of being having buildings on the sky, traveling, whatever it is, Elon Musk's kind of dream or the Sam Altman kind of dream. It's kind of true though.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

But uh I hope those are not the only true option.

SPEAKER_04 21:15

I don't know, but it's it's what comes to mind right now. Actually, what what do you think would be a good option or an option that you think is more um that can mostly happen or it's more prone to happen?

SPEAKER_01 21:29

And first of all, I I am a part of that generation that is super frustrated because we all watch Back to the Future too many times. Then it's like, where are my overboards? I don't see them. That's that's one of no but but being being a bit more serious, we don't know, right? That's that's the um the interesting part is that we never know in which moment we are of the transformation of or how transformative that technology is going to be until we are. Deep into it and a few years in it. I had no idea. When I started to play with computers, I was 10 or 11, something like that. I had no idea that what I was doing, messing with the keyboards, looking at a black and orange screen with the command line and doing all of my crazy things and then with my friends, that that was actually going to be the future. That was actually going to be the way that people interacted with the world. That we would be able to talk with people on the other side of the planet and have calls with 20 people. That was never the plan, right? And and we none of us had any idea because our internet went like and it was super slow, super slow. I was late at night, line by line, getting the photos from Pathfinder. I was like, yeah, this is Mars. Really cool. I'm such a cool guy watching this, and it only took an hour to get a picture. Yay! So we never know what happens. What I really like, I have a very selfish goal for all of the technology that we've been developing. Okay. And I've said this to all my friends and family is that I have like a bucket list of two or three things that are super selfish about technology right now. I want self-driving cars because I really want after my 60s, I really want to get in the car, say I want to go there, buy, I'm gonna nap. And I nap until I get there, done. Okay, that's all I want. And then if something can prevent me from having a serious disease, blah blah man, perfect. I get into this machine, it gives me a diagnosis, and I've like, okay, you have to do this, that, and that, and you should not eat this and that because you have that. Perfect, cool, thank you. Okay, that's it. And then something that enables me to speak every single language, okay, in real time. That's my my my thought. Everything else, or everything, we have no idea. I always have this example back at Unbelievable. I had very, very smart people working with me, PhD level people, okay, winning competitions. And I still remember the day that someone in the team told me, Oh, there's this new thing called Transformers. This is really cool. We should experiment this at the company. And I was super impressed. So they were excited, talking about the transformers that we should use transformers somehow to change the models that we had, the neural networks that we had at the company, and all of that. And I'm like, okay, that's an experiment. And then all of a sudden, I start talking about what's so fantastic about these transformers that you're talking about. Oh, this is a new architecture of the neural networks, and this is gonna be amazing. This is going to change. Okay. And then I remember after a few months, and we started talking, they were talking about this concept of having an engine and model capable of digesting knowledge and then reproducing in a very generative way. Text, because we were talking about text. And I was like, okay, but when do you think that is going to be possible? Ah, with the advances that we have now, maybe 2030 is going to be the year. Like, okay, it took like four years.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

So we were we were a bit low. So it it's always fantastic to see how we assess stuff. Then sometimes it takes longer, right? Sometimes it takes so less time. So I'm still very frustrated because when I was at WiseVreams, we had access to a lot of patents because we were talking, we were dealing with a lot of cutting-edge technology. And I saw when Samsung patents the flexible screens. But it was not this, sorry, the spread that we see in the market. It was very flexible stuff. So imagine like wearing a flexible thing that is interactive all the way and all that. It was like, whoa, that's sci-fi like in the movies. I like this. And my math was in 10 years this will probably be mass market. Still isn't like, what the hell? We talked about Grafin when the the options, storage of information, energy, and all that. We we never get there. So it's always a mystery.

SPEAKER_04 26:10

Yeah. I think it kind of makes us think that the reality that we create in the moment, sometimes it's not gonna happen at all. And I can't I I kind of feel like that's very reassuring in a way, because uh it kind of surprises us, hopefully in a positive way, or at least mostly in a positive way. But I would like to go back a little bit to what you do in the day-to-day and grab everything that we've been talking about, because I do think that even though we've been discussing things that are more historic, more than like your experience with working and new tools, new ways, new frameworks, whatever it is, I think based on all of the experience that you have for the other side of mentoring, which is more on the tech side because we already talked about personal life and or day-to-day lives, what would you say that to your mentors today to feel more at ease or at least more prepared to the changes that are happening, even though we don't know 100% what those changes are?

SPEAKER_01 27:09

So this is applicable to any person in in one of my teams or my mentees, whoever. And the other day we were talking about this. Like, what are the traits that we need to uh like either to identify, pinpoint, or exercise in someone to make sure that though they are how how should we say it's um AI safe or something like that. So it makes that what is the tool belt that you need to have to prevent you from being redundant uh when when AI hits the market in a in a really big way. For me, there's no difference between now and 20 years ago. Zero difference. If you are a curious, passionate, proactive person, regardless of the transformation, blah blah, you are going to do good. I don't know what it is, I don't know in what field, but you're good. Okay? Because if you are curious, proactive, and passionate about something, there's only one destiny for you. You are you're bound to be good at doing something. Okay, there's no no other way. Okay, and this is something that I I'm trying to think about how do I train this in my kids, right? It's like by by example, it has to be one. Okay, so I was very mindful of involving them in some of the areas, but I made the mistake of taking my oldest daughter to a competition the other day, uh, where I was a member of a jury, and we were they were pitching ideas and tech ideas and all of that, and I took her, and now she does shark tech at home.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

I know.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

And I was like, okay, that mission is accomplished. But that that kind of spirit that you don't if if you are put in the situation and you are more curious than afraid, that you're more proactive than just complaining about it, and then that you are just passionate and and actually, man, I don't know what the solution is, but uh I'm really excited because I'm I'm just looking for what is going to be the solution for this, instead of just moaning and saying, eh, yeah, this is going to be the end of the world, why care? I'm gonna do my nine to five, and that's it. If you have that personality, then you're in bad in a very bad position. Because the world is always transforming, right? Before AI was the computers, before computers was I don't know, the typewriter, and then blah blah blah, and then the industrial revolution. We always have these transformations that shook society, okay? We always need to adapt. I don't know if I'm gonna do doom and gloom uh here, but uh you always have those shook moments, you have the aftershock of uh a revolution like this. We had the the bubble in the 2000s because everything was flying. And and again, one thing that we have to understand about AI the business economics of all these tools that we are using are still not there, which means that we are still not paying the real costs of this technology.

SPEAKER_04 30:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

So what we think now is cheap. It's it's cheap because they are betting on this is going to be mass, used by a lot of people a lot of times, so we get the value and the return in a few years. What happens is that that time is running out really quickly. So my bet is in the next two years, we'll understand what the real cost of using these tools is. And my feeling is that this is not gonna it's not gonna be for everyone.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

So you will have probably not for the first time, like when computers came out, were they for everyone? No. Okay. It took us a while, it took us like 20 years to have maybe more, to have a true mass market for the personal computers. Um, 40 years or something like that. It will be faster for AI for AI, but I'm sure that we'll have a period of a few years that AI is not going to be for everyone. It's not going to be affordable because the business economics is not going to be there. Either someone is going to bet a trillion dollars on making sure that that happens, okay, and they have very deep pockets to do it, or that is not going to happen. So I'm very curious to understand what's going to happen in the next two years because the money is not going to run forever. And then we will understand what the business what the real business economic units of economic really are. And just yesterday I was watching a post on X that said plot clients in the $200 per month plan use the equivalent to $27,000 of tokens. So what happens? Plot just changed the business model so they kept the amount of tokens that you could actually use in their max whatever plan. We very quickly will understand what the real cost of this technology really is. And my bet is that it's not going to be for everyone. So yes, you will have people that not just know how to use it, but are able to afford it.

SPEAKER_04 32:11

Maybe that's actually an interesting point. I haven't heard that specific point. So thank you for sharing. You kind of bitching me because, especially because uh ChatGPT was the quickest tool or to ever have like more than lots and lots and lots of millions of users in just I think it's like five to seven days. It was crazy, it was unprecedented. And now look at them, they've been having a few troubles. Now they found a solution, but how long will they have that solution? How would you use this perspective when it comes to actually building products? Because you're creating processes right now with these AI tools, but if it starts to be that you cannot use them anymore, how will you go back to something that you already created? Yes, of course, you had it in the past, but now it's different. So I would like to learn your perspective on it.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

Wow, that that would be a very bitter taste in my mouth for sure. Yeah, no idea. Really no idea. Because imagine it it's one of those cases that you got spoiled, and now you have that princess behavior that you know, what do you mean? I don't I don't I'm not able to eat caviar every day. What? Yeah. I don't have a chauffeur to take me everywhere. What? So rude. You yeah, ruse. Come on. Is that what normal people do? Public transportation? Yikes. Okay, so it it's that feeling that once you've tried and it works and you have some control and you've built your systems, and everyone is talking about what I think is the one of the coolest ways to address this is that people are being enhanced, right? We are all becoming or we are gaining superpowers when we use this kind of technologies. And imagine that you are a superhero, and then someone sprays you with kryptonites, and then you are not a superhero anymore. Jesus. The PTSD on that person is going to be big.

SPEAKER_04 34:14

Okay, so you become a farmer, no? Like he became a farmer when he'll there's a new there's a new series, he became a farmer. That's why I'm talking.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Well, it's one of my secret plans anyway, so yeah, I will I have that.

SPEAKER_04 34:28

Already ready.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

I'll grow mushrooms, so it's it's part of my my retirement plan for sure. It's going to be hard, right? And and it's not gonna happen. Period. It's it there's no way for us to turn back now. The the thing that will happen is that people will become more sophisticated on using this. One mistake that we all do, okay, me included, we all live in this bubble. People that are talking about this, they're already inside the bubble. Some of us are more in the core of the bubble, some of us are in the more fringe part of the bubble. We are all there. Because if we look around, not everyone is obsessed by AI. People understand that something, that there's something, people chat on ChatGPT. They don't have this set of superpowers like some of us are having building. So and again, does AI make bakes bread? Does AI goes to the field and does it now, still not there yet? I usually joke around these days saying that if you really want to have a job of the future, be a plumber or an electrician. Because man, those are hard to find, really expensive, and man, jobs that use your hands are going to be very hard for the next 20 years. So that that's going to be the magic one. But I I think that most people in our area, what they need to think about is that if we use these tools, and my my expectation, and and I usually have a very nice graphic to share this, is that you now are 80% busy doing relationship um sorry, um transactional stuff, like meetings, producing reports, blah blah blah. It's an exchange of time for the output, right? With these tools, you kind of squeeze compressed that and you do the same output, sometimes double that output with better quality in 20% of the time. So now you get 40% of your time freed to do what? My expectation, my hope as the dreamer that I am is that you have to spend it with people understanding better what the other people are doing, their complaints, their needs, their wishes, because true innovation, and this is something that we forgot about from the Greek times, is that true revolution in our ways of thinking and how we saw the world and it came mathematics and philosophy happens when you you actually stop and watch other people, watch the world, how it interacts, how it moves, and then and then all of a sudden you have that epiphany. And the cool thing about this this time of where we live in is that with all of this access that we have to information, to technology, my expectation is that very smart people that have very different angles from that perspective because they are more in technical, and they are more into this. And they look at the same problem and they see a very different approach, like the one you're saying. What? Why shouldn't I use this technology to get all of this data analyzed, and then I just cook a formula to say how I or to try and do this. Okay? Of course, then we have to talk about safety and trials and all the so it's it's not a lucky shot every single time for sure.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

But that's my expectation that we by compressing the time that we have for the transactional stuff, we bet on the relational stuff, right? Understanding better people, understanding a little bit more of the world. And why not? I'm a big d believer in the four-week day of work. So, and again, if we talked 150 years ago to someone about having Sunday off, it was like, what are you probably was a communist person or something, I don't know what what they were called. If we talked 80 years ago, 70 years ago about having your weekends off, that was still not a thing. Okay, so one thing that anthropology taught me is that Indians always thought that the white people were crazy because they worked their asses off. Because they said we work enough to feed ourselves, to store stuff for the winter, nah nah, and then we are good. So we have a lot of playtime, we have a lot of family, society, social, blah blah blah. So one thing that we lost and we need to get back is the social part of the interaction with other people. We have become a very weird society, and that's my hope that the part that I really hope to get with this technology is that people that get so excited about solving other people's problems, and then they have the superpower of using these technologies, they become so obsessed with doing it that they start talking with more people because they want more problems to solve. And that will change their perspective. That will change that the way that they see the world, hopefully, right? Because they get to talk with other people.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

I really hope that that exposure to others will change how sometimes you know very tunnel focused we are that we forget that other people may have other ways to interpret the world.

SPEAKER_04 39:46

Yeah. I think it gets to the it will get to a point where everything becomes so generic, so roboticalized, that you get two points. You get to the point where agents work with agents or robots work with robots for for people, or the other part, which is people actually using some of the tools, and how do we relate to the or how do people relate to? Because the right now the the percentage of retention on products that have mostly artificial intelligence is much lower, and a lot of companies are closing because of that. So I guess my question for you would be that what would you say to these people that got to this point? So if they are hearing this in let's say two years, like you were saying, like in two years maybe everything will change in a certain way, what would you say to these people that they should be doing? I'm kind of I'm kind of curious about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

It's interesting, right? Because it is, but for me, it's always about the fundamentals.

SPEAKER_04 40:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

If people understand how it is that we and again, I was I was sharing this before we start recording, is that why I I went to neurocognitive science. But I wanted to do AI at my time, which meant robotics, right? Because I really wanted to understand two things, right? One is that how we learn and how we think, and the other one is that how can I learn more to understand how to better build for people. So that was my the human-computer interaction side of things was my concern. And so if I have to share something with people that are listening to this and they are afraid of uh AI, especially if they are in the digital product kind of area, the two things are very simple to understand. Is that one is that if you understand people and how people think, it's going to be good. And the other one is that spend time about learning more about the surroundings, the the world around you, right? Because and history is a is a great teacher.

SPEAKER_04 41:47

What can they do today in order to be ready for their for the future or at least for the present future?

SPEAKER_01 41:56

Okay, it's a good one. So it's a process, right? So you have to experiment, try some of these tools, some of these technologies, then understand how they would fit in your process, in what you do, what would be the ones that you would like, what would be the parts of the things that you do now that will you would be not only comfortable but excited to use these sidekicks, this technology as an embedded part of the what you do. So you have to expose yourself to these technologies, you have to try them out, and then it's like our double diamond that we love so much. Like you have to diverge and then you have to converge. Then to understand, select what the what are the ones that make sense, which in this case it's super tough because they change all the time. So it means that you have to the cycle, it's a true lean cycle that you have to do, it's a true agile cycle that you have to try out and then incorporate, and then try out and then incorporate, try out. Because the last part is to incorporate, like you try out, you see what makes sense, where would they fit, and then you incorporate them in your toolkits, and you start using them, and then you assess because the the life cycle of these tools is so fast that OpenAI has the biggest, brandest, newest, coolest thing today, entropic tomorrow, and then Google does something outstanding, and then Lovable presents, and then Manush does blah blah blah. That you have you have to become comfortable at being the maestro in the orchestra, right? So and and then again, why is the critical thinking so important in this in this process is that you are the one with the architectural conception ability to understand what would be the best use case for X, Y, and Z. And then if you build the system the first time, you know how to refine it, how to enhance it, how to replace A with Z, and then you're super comfortable with this process. Yeah, it's going to be tough times. Times for people that do not like to change and experiment. It's going to be really exciting times and fun for those that really like to experiment, try out new things, and then solve problems.

SPEAKER_02 44:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:15

I'm gonna see this clearly. There's two sides of the spectrum. That it's be it those would be like the opposite of the norm curves that we know so much, right? I I do think that we are going to have something like this. The other side of the round. Because you have a lot of people that are going to hate it, a lot of people that are gonna love it, and then in in between, you don't have too many people because society right now is not ready for that. So you you're going to do you're going to have the against and the pros very well positioned because I'm not comfortable with this thing. I'm super comfortable and I love the superpowers, and that's going to be the the conversation. So my recommendation is that try out, understand how you can incorporate it, incorporate and use the crap out of it, and then repeat the cycle. And you should do this like every three to four months, repeat the cycle because technology is going to change. And if you want to make the better use of it, just do it.

SPEAKER_04 45:14

Yeah. So I would like to say thank you very much, Ricard, for everything you shared today, and for everyone that is listening. We got to experience a lot of different places, I would say. And it's very interesting. It's very interesting to see. Um, so I would like to end this episode again by saying thank you. And if you need anything or if you have any questions about anything that Ricardo shared today, please send him a lot of messages. Bother him a lot, and just have fun. But honestly, just uh make sure to connect with him. I think that's very important. As you saw, there's a lot of shared here. There's more, 100%. We spent one hour before speaking. So just yeah, but again, thank you so much, Ricardo, and thank you everyone for listening.

SPEAKER_01 46:03

Madalena, as always, it was a pleasure, man. And I hope we we talk again soon. Yeah. And we invite people to an in-person event, and we have these crazy conversations with a lot of other people so they can actually witness the different points of view and perspectives on all of this. But it's really important for them to start understanding that that AI is not a fab, it's not a trend. It's it is a part of the technology that it's going to be here for a while. And it's up to them to understand if they are going to stay still or if they are not riding the wave. I don't like that that that specific term, but if they are going to make the best out of it, which I hope they do, because for the sake of them, it it's going to be a lot better for how they work and what they can do at work. And it was really cool, really fun. We had a few uh other interactions during the conversation, which were a lot of fun. So I really enjoyed the conversation today with you, and I really hope people will engage with the with the episode and they they follow you as well.

SPEAKER_04 47:05

Thank you. That was Ricardo Luis. And what I'll carry from this conversation is the idea of intent. Why do we use these tools? Ricard kept coming back to that word, and I think this is the one that changes everything. Why? Because if you know why you're reaching for the tool, you're still in the driver's seat. And if you don't, that's when it starts to drive in you. What strikes me is that he didn't come with an AI answer, he came with a human one. Curiosity, passion, approactivity, and everything in between. The tools change. Those that make their humans don't. If this episode opens something for you, share it. That's how this show grows. Through people who care about these questions, finding other people who do as well. Follow us at HumanX Intelligent and subscribe wherever you listen. Stay curious, stay human. Thank you for watching.