Dr. Lia DiBello is the Chief Science Officer of ACSILabs, Inc, which makes the FutureView Platform — a virtual reality training platform used by the US military and by certain large businesses to accelerate expertise. I last talked to Lia about her groundbreaking work explicating the mental model of business expertise, and in fact created this podcast to interview her. She’s back today to talk about her use of AI to accelerate expertise.
Neil Sahota is the CEO of ACSILabs. Neil was part of the original IBM Watson team that won the Jeopardy challenge. After that challenge, he was, amongst things, the person responsible for IBM’s Watson ecosystem strategy, and an IBM Master Inventor (which is a designation for IBM employees who have made outstanding contributions to the IP creation process at IBM). Since leaving Big Blue, Neil has been Artificial Intelligence Advisor to the United Nations, published a book about AI in 2019, and started the UN’s AI For Good Initiative, which is currently hosted under the International Telecommunications Union.
In this episode, we take a human-first perspective on using and deploying AI in real world business and military contexts. We discuss Lia and Neil’s history with AI, talk about good and bad implementations of AI they’ve seen in real-world environments, and discuss what it means to get more folks to an expert-level at human-AI symbiosis.
Shownotes
ASCI Labs — https://acsilabs.org/
ASCI Labs in the Navy STP marketplace — https://acsilabs.org/acsi-labs-has-met-the-requirements-to-be-listed-in-the-navy-stp-virtual-transition-marketplace/
AIQ (Artificial Intelligence Quotient): Helping People Get Smart about the Smart Machines They Are Using — https://medium.com/about-work/helping-people-get-smart-about-smart-machines-they-are-using-f9e0095846fe
AIQ: Artificial Intelligence Quotient — https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/seeing-what-others-dont/202007/aiq-artificial-intelligence-quotient
Hoffman, R.R., Mueller, S.T., Klein, G., & Litman, J. (2018). "Metrics for Explainable AI: Challenges and Prospects." Technical Report, Explainable AI Program, DARPA, Washington, DC. — https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04608
Timestamps
Eric Nehrlich is an executive coach, and was formerly the chief of staff on the Google Search Ads team. Before becoming chief of staff, Eric was part of the team that got Google's revenue forecasting down from an error rate of 10-20% to an error rate of around 0.5%. We open up with some wild stories of Google's early attempts at revenue forecasting, and then dig into how that forecasting success happened. Along the way, Eric explains how he, his boss, and his team developed a fingertip feel for variation in data.
We then switch gears to talk about Eric's coaching practice. We discuss the differences between mentorship and coaching, and talk about the tricky art of helping leaders grow their impact. Eric has a wealth of knowledge on coming up with small experiments in order to make personal growth easier. We talk about how he comes up with those experiments, and what some of those experiments look like in practice.
Finally, we close with a chat about Eric's upcoming book.
- Eric's Executive Coaching practice: https://www.toomanytrees.com/
- Eric's upcoming book is named You Have a Choice, and you may sign up for updates here: https://www.toomanytrees.com/book
- Eric's LinkedIn (where he posts insights every week): https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehrlich
- Eric's blog: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/
- Eric's newsletter: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/newsletter/ (which I highly recommend)
- Full list of coaching and leadership development resources that Eric recommends: https://www.toomanytrees.com/resources
- Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35167685-surely-you-re-joking-mr-feynman
- Becoming Data Driven in Business Series: https://commoncog.com/becoming-data-driven-in-business/
- Be Good To Your Mentors: https://commoncog.com/be-good-to-your-mentors/
- Eric Nehrlich — Commitment, Competence, Structure: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2017/10/20/why-dont-we-change/
- James Clear — Atomic Habits (on Structure): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40121378
- Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey — Immunity to Change: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/hgse100/story/changing-better
- Eric Nehrlich's post on Immunity to Change https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2018/06/18/immunity-to-change-methodology/
- Claire Hughes Johnson — Scaling People: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63063173-scaling-people
- Eric's thoughts on Scaling People: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nehrlich_google-stripe-leadership-activity-7044441138623127552-jhau
- Dan Martell — Buy Back Your Time: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60880804
- Terrence Real — Us Getting Past You and Me: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58502657-us
- Eric's post on Us Getting Past You and Me: https://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2023/02/21/us-getting-past-you-and-me-to-build-a-more-loving-relationship-by-terrence-real/
Lesley Sim coached the Singaporean Ultimate Women's World Championship team in 2020. We open with an introduction to the sport of Ultimate (sometimes known as frisbee), her experience coaching the women's team in late 2019, and then move on to her remarkable approach to pedagogical development and skill acceleration in the game of Ultimate.
Along the way, we talk about desirable and undesirable problems in training, playing to play vs playing to win, and how she used a training method originally designed for dolphins and dogs and adapted it to humans — with great success!
Lesley's Twitter — https://twitter.com/lesley_pizza
Lesley's Personal Site — https://lesley.pizza/
Newsletter Glue — https://newsletterglue.com/
Karen Pryor's Book Reading the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals (on TAG Teach) — https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2412884
How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis — https://www.goodreads.com/el/book/show/1837402.How_to_Get_Rich
Sticky.fm, Lesley's Podcast on Building Sticky Newsletters — https://sticky.fm/