Nicklas Bergman | How to Stay Sceptical in an Algorithmic World

Autogenerated Transcript

146 - Nicklas Bergman
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Jesper Conrad: 00:10
Today we're together with Nicholas Bergman. And first of all, Nicholas, welcome. It's good to see you in your little spaceship here. Yes. Thank you.

Nicklas Bergman: 00:21
The ISS. Sorry if the downlink is not that good, but we'll do what we can here, right?

Jesper Conrad: 00:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, first of all, a greeting to one of our listeners, Mark, who's also a personal friend, who have listened to a lot of our podcast and reached out to me and said, I think you will be able to have an interesting conversation with Nicholas. He has read a lot of your books, and I took him up on it. So here we the first thing that I'm curious about, and it might be simple for many, but not me. It is, you are a so-called futurist, Nicholas. What does that mean?

Nicklas Bergman: 00:58
Actually, lately I've tried to get away from that description and labeling, partly because it's being overused, and partly because there's so many well-educated, really smart people working with futurology and forecasting. And I don't want to piggyback on their expertise in actually building future scenarios and that. So lately I've been starting to call myself more of a tech explorer where eternally curious about where we're heading. I always live in the future. I'm never in the present, more or less. I'm always looking forward to the next thing for good and bad. Meaning that, yes, I work with preparing myself, my audiences, whatever audience it is, for the future. But I don't want to pretend to be something that I'm not. A futurist is not like a lawyer or an auditor where you have a strict scheme or a doctor where you have to go through a specific education to get a degree, but still, out of respect of real futurists, I'm maybe a hobby futurist and more of a tech explorer than if that makes sense.

Cecilie Conrad: 02:10
So looking into how technology and the new developments in technology is affecting the future.

Nicklas Bergman: 02:23
Well, affecting us and how that will play out in the future. I mean, my day job is as a venture capitalist, very early stage, what people now call deep tech, but science-based innovations, spin-outs from universities, startups with a high technology component, usually with a high technological risk. That's my day job. In that sense, being an explorer or a futurist or whatever you call it, for me, it's to try to understand where technology is heading so that we can create the best opportunities for a company that is going in a specific direction in a specific technology field. But it can also be working with governments and trying to understand how changes in technology, how changes in innovation, how new innovations will change society. Or with a company, a large established company looking at how do we prepare for what's to come? Because we've seen now with all these digital technologies and now AI is everywhere for good and bad, where companies and organizations and governments are really, really struggling to understand what will this mean? How can we prepare and how can we try to understand how to be where in what direction should we go to prepare the best we can for this uncertainty, so to speak.

Jesper Conrad: 03:48
And it is a big uncertainty.

Cecilie Conrad: 03:51
So can you just give us a short version of that?

Nicklas Bergman: 03:55
What I find interesting is that when looking at these things, I find it really, really interesting to look back. And I just read this great quote: the four most expensive words in English is this time is different. And that was coined by this hedge fund investor in 2000, uh, right after the dot-com boom boom and bust and all that. Meaning that rarely or hardly ever we see occurrences or instances that has not happened before. I mean, now it's AI, but if you look back and understand the history, what we've gone through since the beginning of the industrialization, we can see that the introduction of the steam engine or electricity or the computer, it goes roughly in the same way. Meaning that we go through a time of experimentation and turbulence, we don't really know how to use these things, and then that eventually stabilizes, we start seeing interesting use cases, and then we get a huge change in society. With some technologies, this takes long, and with others it's going a lot faster. And of course, today we're distributing a new AI tool, you can do that in minutes or seconds, and you're global in an instant. Of course, it's different from building steam engines or laying down railway tracks, right? So the societal change in some aspects is faster now, especially if it doesn't have to do with infrastructure build-ups. But still, our fear or amazement or whatever feeling we have around a new innovation, we've seen that fear or amazement, or whatever emotions we have around it. We've seen that before.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:07
Yesterday we had some friends over for dinner and uh talked about chat GBT, and so she had to do a recap of some lessons she's giving and send in like a little summary every day after work. And she thought that's just such a waste of time to do it because the core of what I'm doing is teaching, not proving that I'm teaching. So she started using chat GBT to just record the whole session and then do a recap and then review it, send that in. And we talked about is that cheating? It's not cheating, it's just using technology in a way that's faster. And then we compared it to it's like, is it cheating to use a phone instead of shouting? It's just a new piece of technology, and I think maybe the phones people were frustrated with the fact that we could talk each other to each other on long distances that we didn't have to travel and that would ruin everything. Did it really?

Nicklas Bergman: 07:05
I mean, it's really interesting. When does it turn into cheating? I mean, somewhere along the line it does, right? I don't think this is an example of cheating, definitely not. But two things come to mind. One is the Amish people in the US. They are traditionalists, they don't use that much technology, but they also, as I understand, they also have to decide how they should use everything that is coming. Meaning that it's based on how much this innovation, whatever it is, will change their way of life. Then we can discuss is it a good, right decision or the wrong decision. That's up to each and everyone to decide, right? But at least they are thoughtful about how they use these things. That's one thing. And then another is I think it's the uh what is called the Dubai Future Foundation that just launched a set of labels on how if a video or a text or an image is everything from 100% human generated to 100% AI generated. So that they have a set of labels that we can go ever from these two extremes to collaborating with AI or whatever it is. So there's I think there's different ways of looking at this. And for your friend as a teacher, my cynical guess is that that report that she files, no one ever reads it, meaning that it doesn't really matter what you write in it, and I think that's an excellent use of a chat GPT software, whatever it is, because it's summarizing something that you know about. Yeah, I use these tools all the time, and I use it as brainstorming tools when writing something. I use it not for fact-checking, but for fact-finding, probably, just to get a lot of information in, condense it, and try to understand it. So for summarizing in that, it's interesting, although I never trust it fully, of course. But what's interesting is that the instances where I use it, where I get the best use out of it, is in areas that I'm at least somewhat knowledgeable about. Where I, for example, evaluating an investment case. I've done that for the last 25 years off and on. Meaning using an AI, a generative AI model to look at a case, it can help me find different angles. I don't do it all the time, but sometimes when I do it, I get a whole set of questions or summarizes, market, whatever it is, and I can almost always see that okay, they got this thing wrong and this thing wrong. This is totally like way far out, so far away from the actual case that I can definitely immediately see that this is useless. But every once in a while I get an input, an in-road, a question, something that that fuels my curiosity, meaning that I can go in a direction that I didn't really think of. Meaning that these tools are very useful for me if they're in an area that I know of, meaning that I would never use it in in totally new areas. Unless I'm very well aware of the fact that it's hallucinating and making things up. So I think the teacher example is good.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:19
It reminds me of some 30, maybe not 30. How old am I? 25 years ago when I was done with university. I was studying at the University of Copenhagen, which is a traditional conservative university, and I was speaking, I'm a psychologist, and I was speaking with a new student who also studied psychology, but at an experimental university doing only case studies, and we discussed the value of these conservative values of knowing the history of science, the history of philosophy, history of psychology. I've been reading so many books just to know things, just to have a lot of facts in my mind before we started doing more case-specific things. And she was way younger than me, and she said, I don't need all that base knowledge because I can just look it up. Now we have the internet. And I thought, no, you can't, because you don't know what you're looking for. You don't know what you don't know, you don't have these, all these. Sometimes I talk about it like when we need to think, we have a little a lot of dots, that's our knowledge points, and we have to draw new lines between them. If you don't have the dots, there are no lines to draw. It's a little bit the same, you can't use AI to explore something you know nothing about.

Nicklas Bergman: 12:38
No, and in the same way, you can't start thinking about things you don't know anything about, and people do, and I think that's the problem with this technology that people use it in the wrong circumstances, and that is definitely a challenge. And I agree, in in my studies, like from first grade up through university, and my studies after university, there's a lot of that that I never use, of course. Some of that is useless information that I had to learn. I remember I studied German and I had to learn like a riddle, 23 German verbs that control something in and it was so useless. I still know it. I'm not gonna do it today, but I still know these 23 German verbs, and it's totally useless. So, what they should have done is let me spend six years trying to learn some conversational German so that I can order food or have a conversation with someone. But that's the flip side of it, where you really learn good things you never use and useless things that you never use. But as you say, based on that, that's sort of my knowledge base, and then I build on that, meaning that subconsciously somewhere, I think all this information is useful, even though I never think of it. Uh, but maybe subconsciously I can connect dots between my German studies and something else. I don't know. I can still basically read a German newspaper if I force myself to do it, and maybe that's good. I don't know. But what's all what I find interesting also is that there is information that is so easily accessible today, meaning that for the next generation, for our kids, I can see that with my kids, that they they learn in a different way, which I think it's good. There's a lot more reflection, a lot more stating your arguments, making sure that they hold, that they are solid, checking their sources, being this critique of your sources. All these things when I was a kid, I never in school discussed the value or the quality of my sources, because the sources were there. There were the encyclopedias, for example, and we knew that this is the truth, or at least it was the truth as we saw it, as everyone understood it. So I think some of these things is they approach knowledge in a different way that I think is a lot more useful today, with the reflections, with the critique, with a lot more argumentative. And I think these things are really important. But I agree, you should not you need a basic understanding of the world to be able to have these discussions. Absolutely.

Jesper Conrad: 15:39
Nicholas, I would like to hear your thoughts on how all this new technology, AI, social media, which have been here for a long time now, interfering with social life. What are your thoughts on this going into the future or some years down the road? I will start with referring to an episode we had with a young man in the start of his 30s, and he had decided to turn off the internet. Not the whole one, it's still here for the rest of us, but he only accessed it something like three hours a week. And one of the findings he did was that it had been a social appetite suppressant for him. That was how he presented it. That when he turned it off, he saw that he now went out and became more social. Then, reflecting more on it, I work with a Canadian psychologist, Gordon Newfeld. If I put his lens on, then he is more or less saying, make sure you cover the attachment approach first. That yes, computers can be scary, social media can interrupt stuff, but not if the base of human interaction and attachment is solid, founded with your parents, for example. And I am weighing up these two options, turning it off completely. I find Gag is a lovely guy, but it's also too wild for me. And then when I look at our young adult daughter who is 26, they have the evenings where they play card games and stuff. So part of me is looking at all this technology and social media as maybe we who are 50 plus are the ones that have had difficulty learning it. And the younger generation are handling it in a way better way where they're actually more in reality. They're doing more social stuff than we do. Maybe it's just part of being young and not being caught up in having a family and work and all that. I'm not sure. So it's a quite broad field, I'm trying to fold out, but where do you see AI, technology, social media affects human connection? Maybe that's what I'm asking about.

Nicklas Bergman: 18:09
Technology creates this social connection between us today. I don't think you would have traveled to Stockholm to do this interview, right? So I mean that's one perspective of it. What I find interesting is that our relationship to these tools, these gadgets or these apps, they change over time. I remember my first emails mid-1990s, or how I used email in the 1990s. It was the only time I was employed for a couple years, otherwise, I've been self-employed my whole life. And that way that I used it then is completely different from how I use it today. In which instances I use it and how I write my emails is very different today from what I did then. Meaning that emails, at least for me, I know that people struggle with getting like hundreds of emails each day if you're in a large organization. I don't get that. For me, it would be horrible, but at least I feel that I have some control over the way I use my email, for example. Then you have Slack channels, which I try to avoid as well. You have WhatsApp, which works really well for me, for example. So there's all these different types of communication that you use in differ under different circumstances for different purposes. So I think that whatever it is, we develop a way of using these things that hopefully works for us, at least better than it does at the beginning. Take social media then, Facebook, for example. I I think I was as an early adopter, as really curious about all these new things. I think I was quite early on Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and these. Last time I was on Facebook was when I had a birthday four years ago, and I thanked people who congratulated me and haven't been there since then. And before that, it was like maybe once a year when it was my birthday. So I don't use Facebook anymore at all. I rarely log into Instagram, I don't use X for a number of reasons these days. I appreciate threads sometimes. If I'm able to curate my feed in a good way or LinkedIn, where I get information, news, and interesting content. But I also find myself doom scrolling and just looking at for me, it was Instagram. My whole feed suddenly was small houses for some reason. Because I stopped at one of those or clicked at one of those, and the houses turned out, they went smaller and smaller for each time I went into this. So I don't use these things that much. What I'm trying to get at is that the way we use these things changed over time. For our generation that's been pre-internet, I think it's a constant struggle, but finally you start using them in the right way. Or in a way that potentially works for you. What I find fascinating is when I look at my kids, for example. I got three kids, 20, 18, and 14. My 20-year-old, he logged out of more or less all social media. He's not interested. And he's gone full circle, reading a lot of like physical books, being very much in the present, working in the outdoors right now, in between high school and university, probably. So he's very much away from that. And then look at my 14-year-old who was born after we had smartphones and lived her whole life online. And for her, it's constantly available, and she talks to her friends in the morning, they have group chats or video chats with her friends when they get ready for school. They they constantly interact, and in some way, I find that as something very social, engaging, interacting in a good way. But then, of course, she probably spends what I think too much time on on doom scrolling on TikTok, for example, because it's so addictive. So that that's the other side of that. But I can definitely see that part of the way she uses these things is positive, meaning that she probably in one way she can handle it better than I can. But then, of course, I really force myself not to use these things. I don't think she has that same perspective or ability as of now. And then we have third example of my 18-year-old. She's very creative, she's studying animation and game design today. She really loves that creative side of it. She draws a lot, both on pen and with pen and paper and on with digital tools like iPads. And she's she's also diagnosed with autism type one, which is high-functioning autism. And in our discussions with her, and also with her teachers and people in psychology, for example, because we've discussed this with screen time and that, and for her, it's sometimes a way of comfort and disconnect. And she disconnects from her physical life because she's overwhelmed with impressions from large crowds or noisy environments or whatever it is. Then she can put on a pair of headphones and really look at a movie or whatever it is. So for her, sometimes it's a very good thing to use these tools. So I have a very mixed emotions because I'm well aware of that, at least my two youngest kids are using some of these things way too much. But then suddenly I see something that they create online: a short movie with friends. They spend the whole weekend doing a short movie about something or creating an edit on something else and posting it online and get a lot of feedback on that. And people are cheering and thinking, Oh, this is good. When will you put out the next one, etc.? So again, I think it is complicated, and I sometimes see that our kids can handle this and take out the good parts of these tools better than we can. But of course, also I see that Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, I'm very well aware that their whole business idea is the more time we spend in front of these screens, the better it is for them, the more money they make. And unfortunately, especially TikTok is really good at getting us hooked on this. So there's definitely a flip side. But I'm just trying sometimes to see the positive things on these because I also realize that it's very hard. You mentioned this guy that disconnects apart from three hours a week. I think that's impressive. I think it all depends on what you do for what kind of work and what kind of life you have. I think it's really impressive, and maybe I would like to try that. But for me, the internet and these generative AI systems and all this is a source of it fuels my curiosity in a very, very interesting way, meaning that I sometimes go down these strange rabbit holes, too far down some of these rabbit holes. And it's being made possible because of this vast trove of information that we have online. So for me, I don't think I would like to disconnect, but I want to handle it in the best way. And on the other side of that, this with trying to understand and learn how to use these tools in the best way that works for you. As I said earlier, being curious and a bit skeptical, make it work for you and not that someone else pushes it onto you. Ten years ago, I went full digital. I was only reading on Kindles and online and all that. And I didn't really enjoy that, I realized. Meaning that now I'm back and buying a lot of physical books. So when it's fiction or it's non-fiction, I try to read it in physical books. If it's research reports or whatever it is, then of course it's still PDFs online. I don't print them out. But when it's more for reading for pleasure or for getting information in a different setting in a different way, I very much prefer physical books today, which for me swung the pendulum back to actually being in the physical world a lot more than I was like 10 years ago.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:04
One perspective in this conversation could be that we're talking about how do we use or how do we relate to the technologies available and the way they play out. You mentioned how your children are using technology and social media, and so we all worry about that. We see how it's unfolding in our society and we think about how do we relate to that, how do we act, what's the plan? So that's one thing we're talking about. And what I hear is something down the lines of we have to stop and think. You talked about the Amish people, and basically maybe we don't want to live exactly like them, but what we can admire is this we have a lifestyle, we have a way that we like, and we're not changing it just because a new shiny object is flying by.

Nicklas Bergman: 28:44
No, exactly. They they're questioning the need for whatever it is, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:48
So maybe the stop and think is the centerpiece, and that's what we're doing with a conversation like this. And I'm thinking we're talking about how can we protect ourselves from the negatives, and also how do we protect our children from the negatives and what are they really? Is that what that's one angle of what we're talking about, right? You say dudes, they spend too much time, but then you also say game design and rabbit holes and all these things that we all know that both exist.

Nicklas Bergman: 29:24
Yeah, I think we we agree that it's not the technology per se, it's the way how we use it. Just another example, my son. Now he's traveling, he's in the other side of the world today, but meeting up with his friends, doing something, going to the movies or playing soccer together or something, uh, Friday night, and then they split up, everyone goes back to their homes and they log on and they play games together, meaning that they continue to be together, but in a different way. And and that's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as they go outside and actually do something physical and whatever it is, right? As a parent or as an adult, you think, oh, he's in front of his screen again, and then if you realize that he's chatting with people that he spent the whole day with, so they continue this. Or my 18-year-old daughter, her best friend, is is not living in Sweden. She's been living abroad for many, many years, and their only way to connect is online, which they do all the time, which is really, really good for her. So again, use it in the best way possible, but at least for yourself, question how you should use it so that you're in charge of these things, so that they don't take over and decide how you should use them. My youngest daughter, she's totally online all the time, more or less. And I think even they realize that they want to be physically interacting with each other. I mean, meeting, socializing like this. And the result of that is, for example, that for the last couple of months or so, she's been meeting with friends Friday nights, playing board games. Which is really, really cool that they actually do that. That they probably sit with their phones anyway, but at least there's five, seven, ten people in the same room around the table doing something together in the physical world, and also listening to a lot of music, looking, watching YouTube and TikTok with dances and whatever it is. But then last night went to a concert, live concert in Stockholm, and was just thrilled, loved it, had so much fun with her friends and that. So I can actually also see the shift where she matures in the same way that we mature, and you start being in charge of how you use these things, and that's something very positive. And I think that realizing that you mature, that I mature and start using these things in different ways, that my kids mature and start using these things in different ways, playing board games or logging off or whatever it is.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:17
If the check question is, are we living the life we want to live right now? Then doom scrolling, no one wants to do that a lot. Maybe you do want to do it as a you said just disconnect, chill. Maybe some people like I personally don't like it because I notice how I feel after if I spend some time looking at stupid videos, or I very rarely do that because it affects me for a long time after. People don't have that. So maybe the Czech question is are we living the life we want to live? We had maybe 10 years ago, we would say we would use the word reality about everything you say the physical world, and our kids got really annoyed with us. It's not reality when I'm playing an online game with my friends. This is part of my reality, it's real, I'm not hallucinating. I'm there's actually a game, and we took that critique and learned wait a minute, this is part of reality.

Nicklas Bergman: 33:16
It is, and it's so easy to be critical about these things with your kids. So there's quite a few things that I remember now. One one is the Apple, they're really good at making commercials, they are so emotional sometimes. I think I've even cried once when I saw an Apple Advert, and I think it was that one where the family is going to the grandparents over Christmas, and the kids are only looking at their screens. And after three, four days, the the this sort of eruption, and then the parents and the grandparents are so upset about this, and then the kids show that they did this video about Christmas, spending Christmas with the grandparents, and then you suddenly use the technology in a good way, which is what Apple does. I mean, they want you to buy these things, of course. But I've also seen that with my kids where you think they spend too much time on the screens, and suddenly they come back with a short movie, or they did one thing, what is that last year for Father's Day? To me, really great short film about a nerdy thing that I like, and then you realize okay, they spend time online and with these screens, and they're actually being created. I was at this huge tech conference, what is that, 10 years ago. My son was 10, 12, something, played a lot of Minecraft with his friends, and I came back from this tech conference and had this Minecraft sword, like rubber, pixelated by like a rubber sword, and I gave it to him. And I was so happy because I found this great gift for him when I was abroad. Something that connected to him and we were interested in, and also easy to pack and didn't weigh too much when you were flying back home, right? And then I gave it to him and he said exactly the same reaction as your kids, and say, Thank you, Dad. I already have 100 of these in the real Minecraft, so you just it just collected dust somewhere, never used it. And that's exactly what you're saying. For him, the reality was online in this game. The reality in Minecraft was not the physical sword, it was the actual 100 swords that he had in Minecraft. Then I did a Minecraft zombie pig costume for him once for Halloween, which was then back in what I see the physical world and outside of Minecraft. So, well, I think sometimes they teach us a lot about how to relate to these things. Definitely.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:50
Sometimes I've noticed I have to be a helping hand for them to growing up, right? So we are some sort of I don't know, guide guideline, or we have to be someone they can lean on with many things. And sometimes I don't have the answer, but at least I have the question, and we explore together. Is this playing the role that it should play in our life? Is it getting in the way of our goals, or is it I mean, are we happy basically? Are we do we feel content when we wake up in the morning? Are we looking forward to our days? So that kind of questions can I ask with them? And I have to be open when and listen if they say, but what I want to do right now is to explore this game nine hours a day. I'm having fun with it, or walk in the afternoon to get some sunshine, and it's enough. I'm not going to do this for 10 years, but right now this is what I want to do. Fair enough. And sometimes when it's really makes me feel uncomfortable, because it does sometimes, I've noticed if I let go and let it have full circle, then maybe it looks like doom scrolling, but after 10 days, I realize it's actually a rabbit hole. They're exploring something and they're figuring something out, and sometimes they're figuring out doom scrolling, realizing oh, TikTok is not healthy for me, or okay, people are really stupid on the internet. Let me find different sources because this is clearly fake. This is not, and they learn things that I don't think I can learn them in this lifetime. The way they can spot a fake AI picture, they spot it like before I've even seen the picture, they can tell me it's fake. Be there with them, but at the same time be open to it, plays a different role in their life.

Nicklas Bergman: 37:39
I can see that as well. As I said, I'm not spending any time on Facebook, for example, anymore. But I love to ski, I love the winter, and I really, really enjoy that. And I'm also struggling with some injuries, back injury, no back injury from skiing. My physiotherapist had two full pages of different injuries that I had once and asked, Can I write a PhD thesis on you? But that's a different story. But meaning that I really I love the outdoors, I love skiing, but I'm not as good as a skier, and I'm not in that the right physical shape anymore, meaning that I still remember how it was when I was younger, and I'm still mentally still there, think that I can do all these things, but I probably can't. So that's the backstory. I remember just remember this very clearly that online I can watch all these skiing films and the great backcountry things that people do, and you can get immersed and inspired of all these things, and then going on YouTube, watching, being inspired of all these things that you can see, and then going on Facebook in the winter, like January, February, March. And my since I I share this interest with a lot of my friends, I see their postings on what they are doing for the winter holidays, and it's the more the most amazing mountains and the most snow, the powder, the sunny days, the heli skiing, the cat skiing, whatever it is. And you think, and then I'm here with a bad back and that can't really do these things, and you think that everyone else is doing this all the time, and you get sort of depressed because that their life is a lot better than mine, right? Which is the bad side of seeing all these things, but then you realize that you have 10 examples of ski trips, and they're from 10 different people, meaning that they each spend one or two days each on this, accumulated. It feels like everyone else is doing it all the time, but it's their snapshots of something that they really enjoy. Like, so on the one hand, being inspired by other people doing amazing adventures and skiing or whatever it is online, on the other side, being feeling depressed because everyone else is doing all these things that you can do, and it accumulates. The impression, the feeling is that everyone else has this great life where they can ski all the time, whatever it is, right? And I think that's just an example from me and from skiing, but I think people feel that because and that's the social pressure that comes from social media sometimes, where in this case it was ski holidays, but it can be having a nice home or gardening or cooking or doing this amazing 10-hour cooking session on a Wednesday, and you think that everyone else is doing that, and it's just a snapshot of something very specific for a specific day or whatever it is, which I think many of these things make you feel it's competitive in a really, really bad way.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:49
Talking about how does it make you feel and what role is it playing in your life? Is it supporting the trends that you want supported in your life and in your children's lives? And it's I find it highly relevant to stop and think about how any activity is affecting small scale and big scale the life that we're living. Choices we make, we have to group make them. So are we doing Facebook or not? It's a choice, and if you choose to do it, it has some mechanisms that will make you do it all the time, or not very few people go on Facebook every Monday for one hour. Looking at how does this choice affect my life? Am I choosing to exercise for 10 minutes every morning? And is that making me happy, or is it just putting me in distress and pain? Should I rather do something else? That kind of reflection is relevant for everything we do. It's maybe especially these technologies that yeah, of course.

Nicklas Bergman: 41:50
And as I said in the beginning here, where you get a new technology coming into your life, and you embrace it or you start using it, and then you use it. Probably all of us use it in the wrong way in the beginning. And then it evolves into something that fits in your life. And I think for me with emails and texting and these things, I think I'm there. For me on Facebook, I'm there because I don't use it anymore. I'm still somewhat struggling with my relationship to LinkedIn, for example. It's very useful for me, but it's also extremely frustrating with the algorithms and it can be time consuming and doom scrolling there as well, right? But also, if I struggle with these things, if I feel that I get depressed is a strong word, but I feel like being sad or sort of mildly depressed when I see all my friends doing all these fun things online, right? How can my kids, my how can a teenager react to that? That must be really, really difficult for them. Because I have my I live my whole life, I got my experiences, my background, my my knowledge about these things. And even I have problems relating to it. I have problems logging off, I have problems seeing through my feed and realizing that it's not everyone doing this all the time. They do one day each, like for with the skiing, for example. And so that's for me, that's very challenging in trying to understand how I can help my kids relate to this in the best way. Because I struggle, on the one hand, I struggle with it. On the other hand, they are probably quite often more experienced in this than I am.

Cecilie Conrad: 43:50
We talked on the podcast, I don't know, maybe six months ago, with an American woman who is living in Copenhagen and wrote a book about the Danish way of parenting, is the title. And she had this very nice phrasing of it where she said, having conversations with your teenagers about this, it's about acknowledging that there are things we know that they don't know, but there are also things they know that we don't know exactly about this technology and how it's unfolding. So it has to be, and that's her thing that she likes about Scandinavian parenting, that we're level, we have a different it's not a very authoritarian way of relating to our children. So if we can have these conversations respectfully and open-minded, thinking, okay, this affects me in this way. And when I look at you, it looks to me as if it affects you in a similar way. But tell me about your experience. Sometimes they just have a different way around it, or a different way it's unfolding, or they're okay with it affecting them that way because that depression or lower sort of base emotion that you can have coming out of a interaction with, let's say, Facebook, they can shake that off faster. Yeah, probably. Yeah. So I think that kind of just passing that message so we don't react with control and use the word screen time and start making up rules and tell them how this works. And it's like heroin for your brain and all this mainstream, I don't know, people are parroting each other saying things that makes actually no sense. But have a conversation where both ends know we both know something, the other one doesn't know about how this works.

Jesper Conrad: 45:53
It makes me reflect on a conversation we had with Darcia Naves, who have written a book called The Evolved Nest. And she told this story about an anthropologist visiting a tribe somewhere and asking, Hey, why are you letting the kids play with bow and arrow? Isn't that dangerous? And the story goes that the elders there said, but these are the tools for the for their future. They need to know how to work with them, but we of course don't give them the poisonous arrows to play with. We're not stupid. And here we are in a fast-paced technology technology world where things come so fast, where the question is, how can we know which arrows are poisonous before we have cut ourselves on them?

Nicklas Bergman: 46:38
No, no, no, exactly. And and when you talk about the arrows and also listening to your kids, because sometimes they know these things better than I do, sometimes. And that's perfect. Nowadays, when my dad, he's 82, when he has a problem with his laptop or iPad or phone, I send him to my youngest because he knows everything about the phones, right? Which is good. But I just want comment on what this with the arrows. Yes, I mean that then it's it's a tribe somewhere where this is natural to them, right? But we also tend to take away so many of these potentially dangerous things from our kids, which turns it into a problem down the road, right? So I once listened to this American guy who had taken up on this, and he had class for young kids, like eight, ten, twelve something, where he taught them on how to use a knife. Like not a knife in the kitchen, but a night, an outdoor knife, like bigger ones. And someone said, Oh, but that those knives are dangerous. Well, yeah, if you don't know how to use them. So his whole take on this was he taught the kids on how to use knives. They got a certificate, just more or less for fun, meaning that they now were good at using knives because meaning that when they needed to use a knife, they knew how to do it, so they wouldn't cut themselves. And I think that that there's connection to that perspective with how we use social media or computers or whatever it is. It's not, and as you say, Cecile, about screen time and that it's not dangerous per se. It all comes down to how you make a use, make these things you be usable for you, and also how you prepare for the poisonous arrows or the sharp knives or whatever it is, meaning that you yourself, together with your kids or your friends, you realize that there are some there are dark corners of the internet, there are bad ways of using these things, and just make everyone aware of that.

Jesper Conrad: 49:21
Do you think we're too scared of shiny new choice? So instead of shiny new choice, it's scary new choice, where it's like, I don't know what it is, so you can't touch it, and therefore we miss having those conversations.

Nicklas Bergman: 49:35
Sometimes, yes. I mean, we have the these old cliches more or less about videos like VHS and all the violence that we have there. We had the video games, we have social media, we have smartphones, and we have all these things where yes, used in the wrong way, they can be dangerous, they can get people going down the wrong rabbit holes, and that is of course a challenge. But sometimes I think we you have people like me that fully embrace these things with a sort of skeptical view. But I really try everything that's you more or less, and then I realized this is not useful for me, and I really put it to the side. But so for me, the natural reaction is curiosity. Then you have people, and there's nothing right or wrong in this, but you have people that where the natural reaction is fear, and I think those two perspectives means that you in society you start a conversation around it, and generative AI is a very, very good example of that right now, where you have the doomsayers that this will take all our jobs, etc. And yet other people say no, it will help us, it will create new meaningful work, and blah blah blah. Whatever it is, and I think through that conversation we will take this forward and maybe come to some kind of a not conclusion, but a way of relating to these things that actually work. And that goes in my family for myself, in my family, in my community. It goes the the this trickles down in the companies I work with, my investments, me speaking on stage, in politics, in lawmaking, in society as a whole. Hopefully, these and I always try to, as I said several times now, being curious and a bit skeptical about these things. And I always try when I'm in front of people on stage, for example, to make people understand that you can't just log out and let someone else decide for you. Not scientists, not corporate people, not lawmakers, not politicians, no one. Because each and every one of these people, most of them think that they're 100% convinced. Most of them, not everyone, but they're convinced that they are doing this for the greater good. I do this research on AI or on quantum computing or on nuclear, whatever it is, because I think this will create a better world, right? Most people think that way. I start this company providing this product because it will help people. We discussed this in the parliament because we'll make life better for Danes or Swedes or Europeans or whatever, right? But they all have their perspective and their reasons for doing this that you don't have. For a researcher, yes, they do this research, they uh they publish this, but they all they do this because they think it's irrelevant, but they also do it because they get funding, they get grants for their next research project, meaning that it supports their way of living. And that does not necessarily align with your views on this. Politicians, they have in Sweden a maximum of four years perspective up until the next election, or actually, it's probably less than that, it's probably somewhere between two and three years because it takes some time to get settled once you win the election, and then after one year before the next election, you start have to start preparing for that. So the time perspective there is very short. Meaning that these I think each and every one of us needs to think for ourselves how we should relate to these things, but we also need to be part of the conversation. We need to be online, offline, in reality, whatever kind of reality we think we are in, we need to be vocal about these things and talk about it and discuss it so that we stay on top of these things, that we are still in charge of all these new innovations, whatever it is that's coming our way. And then you see that people overreact sometimes. We see that, for example, that yes, there's quite a lot of violence sometimes in in video games or in VHS movie rentals, but it also creates a there's also a lot of creativity around that. Indie movies coming out, great experiences, great documentaries, people socializing online in gaming, for example, etc. etc. And we have in lawmaking, you can see that in the EU, for example, where GDPR and some of these regulations around uh social media, online, privacy, and AI has maybe in some instances been taken a bit too far. I definitely agree with and I 100% respect of respect for the perspective where you should protect the consumer, protect the individual. But when it comes to GDPR, all of us now we just click. It's not that we read these things, we don't. So I think in theory, I think that was a really good idea. In practical terms, we only we just click and it's not useful anymore, right? And the same with these AI acts that the EU has put out that regulates AI. There are now discussions of stepping back a bit to create a bit more freedom to to create these things and to build these things and to use them, because we also see a challenge from from the US and China specifically, where they have totally different perspectives on, especially in China, on privacy and how you can use these things. And then the trade-off is okay, if we regulate a lot more, then we will get behind, meaning that we will not be able to be part of actually discussing on how these things should be developed and used, right? So, long story short, I think sometimes there's a bit too much fear. To answer your question of what is it, 10 minutes? That sometimes we we take these things a bit far, we're a bit too afraid of them. But through a discussion and through debate around these things, maybe eventually we find the good balance in this. At least that's my hope.

Cecilie Conrad: 56:13
And it sounds like this is the exact same on an international scale as in a family.

Cecilie Conrad: 56:22
Actually, balance is about being curious and skeptical at the same time and having conversations and look at how does this work, but also with I noted it actually, the greater good, the better world, help people make life better. What is the good life having that? Is it serving me so not exploring it and just running with it, doing it what it can do, but think about what kind of life do we want to live and how does this tool help or not help with that? We are back to AI, which is nice. We started with AI, we're back to AI now.

Jesper Conrad: 57:01
Yeah, and to try to round up the conversation with AI, I wanted to share a wonderful experience I had, which is learning languages as a traveler coming from the Nordic. You we have a very small language, the Danish. And then when you start learning the Latin languages like Spanish, Italian, French, and then start to look at the English language, then you begin to ponder some of the words. And for example, I love dessert like many of us, and I looked at desserve and dessert. There's a sound that is similar. Do they have a root that is connected? And with my good friend AI, I just asked, and it explained to me that no, it sounds similar, but dessert comes from old before 1600 friends, dessert. I pronounce it correctly, which means to clean the table. So desserts is something you do after having cleaned the table, and then in 1600 it changed, and just that to be able to get that knowledge in your pocket. Oh my god, it's good.

Nicklas Bergman: 58:11
The problem is now that you will have live translations through your headphones, you don't need to learn different languages.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:19
Is that true though? And do we have time to go into that discussion? And we've already talked for a while. I just heard another person I know who is quite knowledgeable about tech and how it's all going and all these things, and she said the same thing. It will be obsolete to learn languages because we will get an earplug and it will just translate. And I speak a few languages, and I feel like learning a language is learning a culture, and the nuances and how you express yourself in different languages. I learned different languages at different times in my life, so I can even feel how nuances in my personality that has grown after I learned a specific language has a different has different options, like a different playground to play at.

Nicklas Bergman: 59:52
Then it's really useful. But I don't think we'll stop learning languages, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Cecilie Conrad: 59:58
I always think that that these things are evolving and that it might be way better 10 years from now than it is now.

Nicklas Bergman: 01:00:05
Probably, probably. But I think I mean you're just not impressed when I see them.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:00:09
You're also from Scandinavia, Swedish is way bigger than Danish, but it's still a relatively small language.

Nicklas Bergman: 01:00:15
Well, with 10 million instead of five, right? Or something. So it's uh time, yeah, of course.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:00:22
Yeah, but I mean it's still it's just we just had some problems with an Airbnb host. And one of the things I asked in the beginning was, are you using auto-translation? In order to find a common language that we can both speak. And I realized, oh, so he speaks French and he's using auto-translation. That is not going to, I actually speak French, so why don't we just communicate in French? And then maybe my French is not great, but maybe at least the misunderstandings could be from the question. Anyway, I just had it, and it created a lot of problems. This auto-translation, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. French is a quite big language, yeah. French cannot be auto-translated into English in the community.

Nicklas Bergman: 01:01:08
But I mean, you just not to go down a very deep rabbit hole where I spend a lot of time since I work with venture capital, the AI bubble. And one part of the AI bubble is the overpromising from some of these large language models. My my stand on this is that yes, AI will be tremendously useful. It will change the way we live, the way we work, the way we build our societies, as the steam engine or electricity did. But where we are now with generative AI, I don't see that we can scale the large language models for several reasons. Physical reasons, with the energy and data centers and that build up, for example. I I can't see that generative AI will take us into some kind of artificial general intelligence or superintelligence because it's not scalable. There will be other kinds of AI in the future, nearer. Distant future that will potentially create those kinds of intelligences because generative AI, they have a no understanding of the outside world. It's only trained on the images or the text that is put into, right? So that creates a problem when loads of investment, loads of human capacity, you loads of human brain power or actual power is being put into developing these systems, which for me is useful if you use them in the right way, but it's a dead end, it's not the way towards a greater kind of AI, a lot bigger, more intelligent kind of AI. Meaning that we spend today, in my opinion, way too much time, energy, and money into building these things where it will not give us the perfect translator or the perfect research scientist or whatever it is, right? But that's maybe a topic for another discussion. But just a couple of weeks ago wrote an essay, the AI Bubbles, and maybe you want to share that with the audience as well. It's probably obsolete. If you take more than 10 minutes to edit this one, my essay would probably be obsolete before that.

Jesper Conrad: 01:03:28
So how fast things go. And also through here, it was wonderful talking with you. Nicholas, if people want to read more about your works and dig into some of your books, etc., where is the best place to read about all that?

Nicklas Bergman: 01:03:46
Well, I do the occasional essays on Substack. Of course, I have a website. I publish a couple of books. I want to write more, but I just haven't had the time as of now. But I really want to do that. But maybe just subscribe on Substack or connect with me on LinkedIn where I post the occasional things.

Jesper Conrad: 01:04:04
Thanks a lot for your time. It was an interesting conversation.

Nicklas Bergman: 01:04:08
All good. Happy to be part of it. Thank you.