Generative AI Doesn’t Care About Your Ego

• The significant role of design in technology and the importance of human-centered design in AI. (11:17)
• The transformation and democratization of AI, its widespread adoption and its impact on society. (15:33)
• The potential of generative AI across various domains and its role in enhancing productivity and creative problem-solving. (19:55)
• The emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility in technology, particularly for people with disabilities, and the economic importance of catering to this demographic. (26:05)
• The launch of Vibes Ai, a startup focused on creating more intuitive and human-centered computing experiences. (37:21)

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Within the next three years, the adoption of AI will continue to flourish, independent to those who are fearful of it. The people who are fearful of it and do not up-skill now will be left behind. And not only will we have a wealth gap, but the difference between the haves and the have-nots are going to be the difference between whether or not you have access to intelligence and whether or not you do not have access.

Speaker 2:

Hey, Stephen, why don’t you tell us who you’re talking to in this episode of the podcast?

Stephen:

Normally we wait a couple of weeks before we record these intros, but I’m fresh out of an interview now with Joanna Peña-Bickley, and honestly, she’s one of the best people I’ve ever talked with, so I’m still full of enthusiasm. Joanna is a design engineer, but also a pioneer of AI in industry. She’s worked for Amazon, for Uber and for IBM, and she’s known as the mother of cognitive experience design. So we talked a lot about how AI is used in industry, and where it’s going to be used in the future as well, so it was an incredible interview.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It sounds like it would be. I think one of our interns was listening in and you said that she was moved by it very deeply.

Stephen:

So Juliana is like our production assistant, and we force her to listen to the podcast sometimes. And you can tell, she’s not always as enthusiastic as we are. But she was really moved by this interview. And I think, particularly about the fact that Joanna was really … She’s a key advocate of women in engineering. So Joanna has a program called Designed By Us, and it’s about getting minorities and people who are not otherwise involved in engineering, into being engineers and into using AI in their communities as well.

And so one of the things that I’ve noticed in the time we’ve been doing this podcast, which is less than a year, is that some of the questions I was asking in the early days to AI people, like, do you have to be a data scientist to use AI? Which seems now really naive, because with Joanna, we’re talking about how AI could be used by everybody, and that’s the really exciting thing about this interview for me, I think.

Speaker 2:

Well, let’s take a listen.

Stephen:

Hello, and welcome to the Engineer Innovation podcast. Today, my guest is Joanna Peña-Bickley, who’s a design engineer, sometimes known as the mother of cognitive experience design. Joanna is a pioneer in AI, generative design and has worked for companies such as Amazon, Uber and IBM. Joanna has also been named as one of Fortune’s most powerful women, a 2022 Hispanic star, and a power woman of New York. Welcome, Joanna. How are you this morning?

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

I’m well. Thanks so much for having me today.

Stephen:

I’m really excited to have you on the podcast. I think you are the most qualified guest we’ve ever had. And over the past few days, I’ve been obsessively listening to your talks and podcast appearances, not because I’m stalking you, but through professional research.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Those have been like an evolution of my career and attitudes about the world of tech and design.

Stephen:

But that’s really interesting though, because one of the things you said on the podcast is that you came of age when computers came of age. I want to take you right back to the very beginning, and tell me about your first experiences with computers.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

I was born in the ’70s. The computer revolution was actually happening across the United States, not just in the Silicon Valley. I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. And one of the exciting things that was going on in Texas at the time were the emergence of companies like Texas Instruments and Compact. We had what they would call the Silicon Prairie at the time. And this was late ’70s, late ’80s. And I came of age during that time. Look, we were the last feral generation, where we didn’t have a lot of tracking and things like that. And so what that meant was my daytimes were spent some time between watching MTV, which was a wonderful babysitter, a cultural babysitter, and then the second part was actually deconstructing every consumer electronic that we had in the house. And so much of it was that, beyond watching MTV, I was a big sci-fi junkie as a kid and it was at that point in my life where I believed that tech could be used for really good things.

As a Star Trek junkie, anything that was on the Starship Enterprise I looked at and try to make real. Everything from a speaker that you could speak to, this is in the ’70s, all the way to really rethinking things like radio transistors and stuff. In The States, we actually had this place called RadioShack. Anytime that I could, I would gather my allowance, or gather money I had from doing neighborhood chores, and go to the RadioShack to go build something new. But so much of it, for me, has always been that there is a thread between fiction and invention.

And so whether it was magic shoes, a magic carpet … My mother was in the area of interior design and architecture. I grew up in a design studio. People would say, “How did you fall into design… where did design and engineering come into it?” I’m like, I grew up in a design studio, and I watched this phenomenal woman build a business and work with engineers to make that business happen. So everything from residential homes, to commercial spaces, to government work. And so as I watched her business grow, we had a really great space in the back of her office in a warehouse that was full of gadgets and toys and things like that that you could construct new stuff.

Stephen:

Break and explore and test. And I think that’s something that’s missing, sometimes, in the modern world, isn’t it, for I think our generation because I was born in ’72 as well. My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. I think yours is a Commodore 64, which was a bit posher than the Spectrum. There was only so many games you could buy and you had to learn how to program those computers yourself. Our parents used to warn us, don’t do that because you might break it. But we tried and we pressed all the buttons and we broke things, which I think is, probably for our generation, one of our greatest strengths, I think.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Oh, absolutely. We have the ability … Games was obviously for me. As a kid, and I share with the audience, I was a terrible student in school, but computers for whatever reason, the area of computer science was both an area of joy. It brought joy, and it was one of those places where I could learn at my own speed and do so in a way that was … It felt inventive, and it felt inventive in a number of ways for its time. I was hacking games, trying to break the game. What was in the engineering of the game? The next part of it was around the area of communications. And it’s because I’ve always been a pretty good communicator. I was always trying to use the internet to create new communications methods. We would play DJ in front of the radio. Can we broadcast over the internet?

There were just things that you could say, what if? And it was early. It was the ’80s. But it was also coming at a time when personal computing was coming up, at the same time, in a way that it was this vision, I think, of the people like Steve Jobs and the folks at IBM that imagined a world where we would have a personal computer on every desk. And so with that vision, I felt so lucky that I had parents that could afford a personal computer on our desktop. And that personal computer actually led to the career that I’m in today.

Stephen:

Which is the same for me because if I hadn’t had that first computer … I taught myself the program.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Me too.

Stephen:

And at that moment, is when my career as an engineer was defined for me because afterwards everything seemed straightforward after that. So how did you transition from those childhood experiences into your professional career? What was that like?

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

My entire career has been a stumble. And a stumble in that when a door opened, I walked through it. And so with that, I would say that I actually went to school for journalism, and I worked at TV stations. And at the time, TV stations were where communications technology were taking off. And as somebody who was self-taught in so many different ways, I’m one of those great kinesthetic learners. Somebody gave me an opportunity to have an internship in my high school years at the local CBS and ABC stations, and they could not get rid of me.

Stephen:

So tell us a bit more about those formative experiences then in your career.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Those formative experiences, for me, actually started … Nothing in my career was ever a straight line, and I always followed my interests and my heart. And because I had those great computer skills, some of those technical skills took me into newsrooms. My early days, I was actually allowed to go and have an internship in my early teens while in high school at a local TV station, and that was like putting a kid in a candy store. Everything from working satellite technology … And I will tell you, old school tape-to-tape.

Stephen:

With a razor blade as well. Did you ever do any of that physical cutting tape with razor blades and gluing it back together? That’s what it used to be like.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

I did. I started off as a sports intern and I migrated into the newsroom, and they just couldn’t get rid of me. And I kept showing up summer after summer and my badge still worked. They would take me out on stories. And most of technical audiences will appreciate this, I’m dyslexic. And part of being dyslexic means that you just learn a different way and learning a different way for me is kinesthetic learning, learning through observation or learning through experimentation. So I’m a hands-on learner. And so being hands-on in the newsroom meant that I worked everything from the assignments desk, to editing tape in the field, to actually producing broadcasts. The more I stayed, the more I caught down at the craft of it was fantastic. So I did that for a number of years, and lo and behold, I was able to turn that into a money-making career.

But one of the things that I found was, there was a very big challenge in the news business at the time. And one of those challenges was the expense for local affiliates to broadcast utilizing satellite and get their stories to the national feeds. And so mid-to-late ’90s, early days of the internet, I went home and started asking myself, what if we could send video? We had just transitioned to digital editing. What if we could just send it over these T1 lines? And that inevitably was the jump into that career. By asking that question and hacking together one of the first streaming media players, what I realized was as much as I enjoyed storytelling, I knew that I could do a better job telling stories about technology or utilizing storytelling to envision a better way to do things, which is invention. So there’s that link between fiction and invention. That is essentially how I stumbled through the door.

But what I will tell you is that there was no roadmap. It was the Wild West of the early internet. And with that, I started my own first company and streaming media was a big part of it and we ended up doing so much of the web design and web development work for local O and O stations and inevitably for the big corporations.

Stephen:

So one of your many titles or nicknames is the mother of cognitive experience design. Can you tell us a bit about what cognitive experience design is? And how you got the nickname as well, would be good.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

It’s always an honor when people say it, and I hear it said out loud. During this great career that I’ve had, I spent some time at IBM, and it was at a time when IBM was commercializing Watson. And commercializing Watson in a way that was bringing it into enterprise use cases, big enterprises in the fields of health and automotives, and defense. There was no real design language behind it. We focused so much on the technology, as we often do, but we never thought about the human factors around with it. I had actually coined the term cognitive experience design at a time where there were zero frameworks for how to apply human-centered design to artificial intelligence. And lo and behold, we got to go build 44 design studios and train lots of designers in the area of cognitive experience design.

So I go to Great Britain, I get on stage, and as I’m walking on stage, the announcer says, “I’m introducing you to the mother of cognitive experience design.” Wow. Where did that come from? It really came from the community of designers. They had done their research on me. They had said, listen, the idea that cognitive computing and AI are one and the same. We have spent our whole lives, at least for me in my career the last 15 years trying to teach machines to learn like humans. AI was actually going to be a big solver of cognitive problems for humans. And let me just illuminate that a little bit for everybody. Today we are in a data deluge. And we knew several years ago that AI was going to be the perfect way to refine that or come in and play a really helpful role to human beings in a world where we’re bloated with data, but we’re starving for wisdom or starving for insight. And you have to do so much to find that insight or find that wisdom that artificial intelligence was going to be able to come in and do that.

We started working towards that and creating tools that would help cut the cognitive load of people on any given task or basis by introducing elements of artificial intelligence into everything from discovery, new entertainment … Think about our streaming platforms. The discovery of new products, all the way to discovery of drugs in pharmaceuticals. Because in the world, if we started to think about it, one of the bigger use cases, and why I called it cognitive experience design was that when I was working with physicians who were in the area of oncology, cancer treatments, on average, they were dealing with so much incoming data. Over 2000 studies a day are published in just that practice. And so, in order for your physician to be at the top of their game, they’d have to be reading 2000 studies a day. And what cognitive computing or artificial intelligence does is actually develop that corpus of information, refine that information, and then become an assistant to the physician and helping them give them cognitive superpowers in things like diagnosis, drug discovery, cancer trials, things like that.

And so that’s where the term actually came out of, knowing that we wanted to call it cognitive, as opposed to AI design, because design at its core, when it’s its very best, it’s human-centered. And how do you bring human-centered AI together in a way that actually is solving real human problems? Those human problems start right here. And so the mirror between we, were creating machines to think like humans and we were solving cognitive problems … If we’re essentially outsourcing some of our skills out to those machines, that’s where cognitive experience design came to bear.

Stephen:

I want to come back to that in a second, but I think that one of the big features of the past 12 months has been the democratization of AI. I interviewed some of our AI specialists at Siemens a year ago, and I was asking them really dumb questions about do you have to be a data scientist to interact with AI? And then ChatGPT comes along and LLMs, and suddenly everybody’s interacting with AI every day. Well, not everybody, but lots of people. So that’s been a huge development this year. An interface by which some of the work that you’ve been doing can be realized by almost everybody.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

That’s absolutely right. So let me just say to the listeners, for those of you who think AI is having a hot girl summer, it is having a hot girl summer after a very long menopause. So much of the last year has been … You talked about the democratization, but actually, we’ve been working at a steady clip for many years around the usage of AI. And as many of your listeners know, I was mom to Alexa for several years, and there it is. Alexa sits on top of a large language model. Her use cases are very different from ChatGPT. And if you look at ChatGPT, I think the phenomenon behind that is that people say, is this a fad? And the reality is, no. We actually entered a new era of computing about 2014. It has taken this time to hit a cacophony of adoption by more and more people, and I think comfort with more and more people. I would sit in offices and people would say, when is mobile technology going to take off? And I looked around the room, and I said, “Do all of you have mobile phones?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “It’s taken off.” A lot of that was going on with AI.

But the impetus behind the democratization, actually, was design, by design. Here you have a very simple … And I will say albeit 1950s interface, that enables you to use natural language to use it. And by doing that, by utilizing natural language in the form of a browser or something as simple as a prompt, what that has enabled is that if you look at the hundred million users that it took for Netflix to get in five years, it took ChatGPT to get in one.

So there was, I think, a lot of steps that were going on in the background, but the early adopters went, “I already have an Alexa device in my home, so you’re telling me I can utilize this in everyday work to write letters, answer the bad emails that I really don’t care about and start doing really interesting things?” And the answer was absolutely. And so I think by design … And I think to the good fortune and the folks over at OpenAI was about radical simplicity in creating an interface that you didn’t need to know how to code. I think as you and I both know, we’re the minority in the world. There aren’t enough people who know how to code. And so to be able to speak natural human language and have a machine understand it, and then retrieve information back to you, we are at that point that Arthur C. Clark once coined, which was, it is when we have these technologies that when they’re introduced that they become indistinguishable from magic. And so when you use, whether it’s an Alexa device or ChatGPT that are sitting on top of these great forms of LLMs, a Large Language Model that you feel like you’re working with a little bit of magic.

Stephen:

I’ve read all the books. I’ve read Stephen Wolfram’s book about how ChatGPT works. I understand how it works. But in reality, when you use, it’s like magic. And I think, like most people, when it was first released, you went in, you got it to write a few poems, did some funny stuff, and then people said, “Oh, it can write computer code.” And I was completely skeptical. But one of my big problems is that as a 1970s guy, I learned to program in Basic and Fortran 77. Not so good at programming object-oriented languages like Python. And so lots of the problems I wanted to solve in my engineering, my personal life, I couldn’t because I didn’t have the coding skills. Now all of a sudden, I don’t have to write Python because I can have a conversation with ChatGPT, a two-way conversation as well where I can tell it what I want. And you have to learn how to speak to ChatGPT. Prompt engineering is a thing. It has to be a two-way conversation. And together and we write computer code, which is far superior to anything that I could possibly do myself. My productivity has increased sometimes on these problems by several hundred percent. I’m doing things which I never could have done, and I think that’s incredible. I think that’s the real benefit of ChatGPT, and we’re only scratching the surface as well.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

What’s exciting is that I think that we are seeing generative AI applied to so many different spaces in new and unique ways. And while ChatGPT I think is one remarkable tool, I too … I’ve created my own GPTs. One of the things that I did in the middle of my career during my IBM days was actually went up and re-skilled and sharpened up on those Python skills. So to that, I think one of the things that has been great as the engineering side of my head says that, what it is like sometimes having a team of engineers to review my code because one of the things that it does really good is actually pick up my errors. I’ve become code blind after a little bit. It’s like when I’ve written a paper, I become blind to the mistakes that are in the paper.

And, like all humans, we often think our work is the most novel. So what I love about working with generative AI is that it doesn’t have an ego, and it’s not looking to not hurt my feelings. To have it come in and correct me and to look at something and go, oh my gosh, or I hadn’t thought about it that way, or let me brainstorm a new way of doing it. It does come back with really remarkable results. But what I will tell you is it works on several different levels. And what I always appreciated of it is, that when you think about it, the focus and the capital that went into training domain after domain … The part there for it to be able to spit out answers, be it in mathematics, in code, in art, in art direction, things like that, it’s taken a really good while to get that up and running. And what is exciting to me is that the abundance of use cases.

Now, like all big technologies, it is not all roses right now. It feels like we are back in the 1980s. Everybody says, “Oh no, the emergence of the internet.” I said, it’s a little bit of that. Yes, it’s a little bit of the emergence of the internet, but I actually think it’s also the emergence of new hardware. And so one of the things that’s really exciting me in this space is there are new hardware companies coming out that are rethinking the operating system from an AI-first perspective. You have companies like Humane, you have companies like Rabbit. And my company, Vibes AI, is a really good example of a new generation of companies that are coming into it from the hardware and software place, that says, we need to rethink computing and the way that we use computers utilizing AI as the core of the operating system rather than an assistant that feels gadgetry or secondary to the operating system it’s on.

Stephen:

As an engineer, we talked about our early experiences in computing. We were lucky because we were almost second generation so we could interact with a computer using a keyboard. The people that went not very far in front of us had to use punch cards. And I’m recording this just down the road from Bletchley Park, where the Enigma project was. They used to get through a million punch cards a week or something incredible. The generation after us used complete computer mouses to interact with computers. And so I had to learn to learn a language on a keyboard. Then you have to learn how to navigate these menus. And I know you worked for … Uber’s fantastic. I love Uber. But even when I go to Uber, I don’t want to have to click through the menus. What I want to say to Uber is, I want a taxi in 25 minutes, but not if it costs more than 30 bucks. And having those communications that you can be able to communicate with any computer program using natural language is going to be an incredible game changer.

You mentioned that you’re dyslexic. There’s lots of people who are not able to interact with technology. You hear all the time that banks are closing and how will old people go to the bank because they can’t interact with apps? They can’t interact with apps because they can’t do the menu systems and the touch screens. If you could actually talk to an intelligent assistant or AI … And I think there’s lots of opportunities in all aspects of our lives to change everything. So rethinking it from the start is really important.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Absolutely. And I’ll tell you, in my years at Amazon, one of the things that I loved about working with Alexa is … Let me start with … First of all, when I took the role they said, “You’re going to get to come work on smart speakers.” And I was like, “I have been working on that since I was about 10 years old.” Matter of fact, the first fire I ever started in my home by accident was me trying to rig some old Hifi stereo speakers to an antenna to see if I could just play wireless speakers. In this world, it was like entering that kid in a candy store again. But when you got down to understanding why and the purpose behind it … As somebody who learned to read via cassette tape … And actually, it was through actually … One of my first books that I could read on my own was a Walt Disney book that had a record player that was embedded in it. And you put this little record … They had this really neat little gadget that you put on it, and it would read to you. And so I read along with that. I was always a books-on-tape person. I would read out loud, and then in order for me to store that information in my computer, I would re-listen to it with the book. And so it really just created a deeper understanding.

So, voila. When they start putting things like, Audible comes out with their first gadgetry in that space because they were a hardware company, out in New York, New Jersey. Before iPods were around, they were early in the space. And I was one of those early adopters so that I could read. If we fast-forward to my Alexa days, and then you go, “Okay, here I am utilizing Alexa to do everything from read my PRFAQs.” I had developed a couple of skills within Amazon. Amazon’s a very big reading culture, and it’s no surprise that Jeff pushed the Kindle because he’s an avid reader. And so one of the things that I loved working on Alexa was to be able to enable her to be then a digital reader that I always needed and be sitting at my desk to help me read documents, to help me do things. But then, what I realized was, I was actually getting more done and understanding more and learning more in ways I couldn’t do before. So that’s purely out of the dyslexic park.

And then when I got to work with other people with other disabilities because that was such a focus for us at Alexa. That people with disabilities … That first of all, so many companies ignore people with disabilities, when they are a $7.2 trillion-dollar market. They and their caregivers are a market to be had and you should pay attention to them. Not because it’s good business, but because it’s actually a profitable business. And so in the early days, we actually worked a lot on technologies that enabled better aging in place. My parents are baby boomers, and they’re a little bit different from their parents, that generation. And they’re the generation that doesn’t want to be told what to do because they revolutionized the world. We’ll give them that. And they got to go to Woodstock. That was my parents’ generation. And they didn’t want to be told what to do. And they’re really the first adopters of AI technology, in a way that did everyday use case from reminders in the kitchen, to help in the bedroom, to security. And particularly as they are aging in place, what I’m finding with GenXers is that we’ve become the sandwich generation. We have children, and we are sandwiched by taking care of our parents.

And during COVID, there was a couple of really amazing magical use cases. One of them was children, adult children, checking in on their parents in new and safer ways. I think one of my favorite, and I think most heartening that we walked away from was, if you remember in the early days of COVID, we were at a global PPE shortage. And so that meant that doctors and nurses could not often enter the rooms of where their patients were, and loved ones could not see their loved ones because they were in a quarantine tank. We just didn’t know how lethal or how volatile things were.

We donated thousands of Alexa devices so that people could use drop-in to check in on patients. And that to me was like, all of the sudden, made so much of the hacking and the technology and AI useful in ways that we hadn’t thought it could be. But those use cases emerged from a technology, that while it wasn’t necessarily intended to do, was actually saving lives at the time. And so you walk away and go, you know what? It’s worth the three in the mornings hacking of code together. It’s worth all of the voice design and the arguments and the shifting of PRFAQs back and forth during a time when what you realized was, not only had Alexa become an indispensable companion in people’s homes, but that we knew that we could move her out of the home.

Stephen:

If you look in the media, there’s lots of dystopian narrative about AI and all the evils of AI, but you are consistently an advocate of all the good that AI can do in enhancing humans and enhancing relationships as well, in the example you just talked about.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Yeah. Here’s what I would tell you. I am a tech enthusiast. Start there. You cannot not be by being a design engineer. So immediately, you get into a place of, I am definitely an optimist about the world and technology, but I’ve made no bones about the dangers of it either. And I think that’s true of every technology that every industrial revolution has ever produced. And I think we need to frame up where AI sits and how it enters the world right now, and why we are experiencing this area of fear. And, look, there is a lot of narrative fallacy out there about what it can and it can’t do. There is very much a fear of it taking over and, for us, hitting a point of singularity. We’re not there yet. Will we get there? I don’t know. I think we as humans actually get to make these decisions.

And AI is controlled by humans, and the vast majority of humans that are working in this space have good intention. But there are bad actors out there. And, some of us are not necessarily bad actors, some of us are capitalists. And being a capitalist isn’t such a bad thing, but when you use capitalism as the excuse to create technologies that have done harm to our youth. That have no restrictions on disinformation or misinformation. Or understand that there are ways to utilize this technology that maybe shouldn’t be used right now. That we as a society aren’t mature enough to utilize it, then we as inventors need to put those holds in place. And I think that’s so much of the conversation that we’re having now… but right now … and I share this with you and your teems and your listeners, the conversation that we are having between utopia and dystopia is actually having a chilling effect on minorities and women. It’s doing two things: Number one, it’s keeping them out of the space of AI.

And here’s the challenge behind it. The implication behind that is, that within the next three years, the adoption of AI will continue to flourish independent to those who are fearful of it. The people who are fearful of it and do not up skill now will be left behind. And not only will we have a wealth gap, but the difference between the haves and the have-nots are going to be the difference between whether or not you have access to intelligence and whether or not you do not have access. Just like connectivity is the difference between have and have-nots. Rural communities that don’t have access to e-commerce … I hate this term, but in the United States we call them low-information voters or low-information constituents. It’s low information because they don’t have the connectivity to get new information in new ways. And so that’s the thing I think that we as engineers and designers, human-centered designers need to keep at the forefront, that we can utilize technology, be it AI, be Quantum, the next evolution out of what comes out of this, or new chips and new things that we could do. But if we don’t look at the whole of society, as opposed to the early adopters and the wealthy, then we are going to continue to be burdened by the ills of what people do with AI.

Stephen:

On that inclusivity piece as well then, you are obviously a huge advocate for inclusivity of all minorities. Can you tell us a bit about Designed By Us, which I think is called AI Design Corps these days? What is that initiative all about?

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

So let me start with, it started by Designed By Us. I come out of a family … I’ve got the circus family of designers. My mom was a designer in the world of architecture. I’m a design engineer, and lo and behold, I have four kids. And of those four kids, I got one that works at Amazon. He’s got that accounting engineering mind. He’s an operations engineer. He doesn’t put engineer at the end of his thing, but lo and behold, he really is an ops guy. And then I have three girls, and every one of the girls is in some kind of technology in their art form. So I have one that’s music tech, I’ve got one that is in theater tech and another one that’s working on our master’s degree in the world of theater. So, one of the exciting things that we did is, listen, we have been incredibly privileged.

This career as a design engineer has provided us with incredible opportunities. And we thought it was time to start paying back. Paying back. I am Latino in the United States, and what does that mean? So as I’m a Mexican American, I had remarkable opportunities at both education and doors that have opened up to me, but those doors haven’t always opened up to everybody. And so, the big initiative behind the AI Design Corps, which we recently just rebranded, is really focusing on bringing intelligence and what we call science, technology, engineering, arts, math and design. It’s not enough to have STEM alone. STEM alone was not producing, and is not producing, the kinds of talent that we need in our global workforce to work with AI. We need people that come out of the arts, and design, because those are problem-solving, and the humanities. And those humanities bring a much more human-centered way of adapting into it.

So a lot of the work that we do is we go into underrepresented communities. We have brought it into refugee camps. Today, we actually have a pilot program where we put an AI design lab in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a charter school where we do workshops with high schoolers, and we enable them with new skills. All of the skills that you need to work with AI, prompt engineering, we give them AI literacy and then we put them to work as entrepreneurs. And so much of the work we do in there is, it’s not enough to do a boot camp. We want them to apply those skills to actually empowering something in their community. So they take on community problems, and we fund those problems. So much of the work that I do in the non-for-profit space is actually bringing that hacker culture that I was born into, creating hacker spaces so that people can learn in a hands-on way.

Stephen:

That’s really amazing. That’s incredible. And I think the benefits for those people and for their communities, the upside is enormous. So thank you for that. Tell us a bit about what projects you’re currently involved with Joanna.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

As you well know, I also have a podcast. It’s called Designed By. I feel like my career has taken me all over the world. I have gotten to meet some of the wildest thinkers and really inspiring action-oriented changemakers in the world. And so much of the work that I do is bringing awareness to the work that we do in the world of design and engineering, and how important it is. Because I think that if you cannot see it, you will not be it. So that’s what Designed By is about. Really illuminating the people that are actually utilizing, new technologies and new design to improve not just new products. I think we always think about design as like, oh, it’s just what it looks like. But I come out of the place where design really, truly is the belief that… design is about visionary leadership.

And so, born with the belief that designing our world, whether it’s our governments, our business, or our personal life, is actually the ultimate act of leadership. And design is about making intentional choices and not leaving life to chance. And so I love talking with people that have not left life to chance and are designing a new future for them.

And the last thing I’ll talk about is actually a very exciting startup. I have left Amazon Alexa and Uber to actually start up a new remarkable AI-first computing company, and it is called Vibes AI. And like all good computing companies, we are working under wraps and in a stealth mode right now on one-of-a-kind first computer that we believe that every human being will be able to use. And, I think, it’s so exciting, at a time when it’s a real … What I would tell you is that we’re working on an intervention. We’re working on an intervention to technologies that frankly have become distractions. And, I am not down with the vision of the world that says ‘this’ is the future of computing, that ‘this’ is how I’m going to sit my every day and do all of the work that I do. It’s the wrong vision. Steve Jobs would not have produced that world.

Now, will AR/VR take a role in it, and will it become a use case? It absolutely is now. And there’s so many enterprises. I think they made some beautiful goggles that I’m absolutely looking forward to do it, but I’m not going to spend more than two hours a day with a hunk of metal sitting on my face. But what we will do, and I think what we will be able to do is actually work from the human out and wear devices that enable that compute to be a little bit more invisible, a lot more natural, and actually an intervention to an app world, to a world that works … Think about it this way, individualized… when you think about it, everybody needs an individualized assistant, but it’s more than an assistant. They’re getting their own operating system.

And so, that’s what Vibes AI is producing. I can’t tell you any more than that, unless your audience wants to sign an NDA. We are very close to making a few big announcements. For Valentine’s Day we’re going to have a vibes drop. So when people go to vibesbioware.ai on Valentine’s Day, you can expect a little bit of a surprise for our customers. And we are doing it because we believe that technology can be the arbitrator and the sender and the mechanism by which we send a love letter to our prospective customers. And, so for us, working on this, bringing my old Alexa team back into bear … People from Google have joined the company, people from Amazon Alexa. We’ve all left big tech because we know there’s a better way, and we think that better way needs to be an intervention at a time when we have a loneliness epidemic and we believe that our technologies can uplift people and do so in a way that is both accessible to all people, but accessible to people that may not have the means to enable these technologies today.

Stephen:

I love that. That’s super exciting, and you have to promise to come back on.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

We’ll have to do a full demo, and Siemens is talking to my COO about chips right now.

Stephen:

Excellent. Thank you so much for being an excellent guest. I highly recommend the podcast. I’ve been binge-listening to it across the last few days. So thank you, Joanna for being an excellent guest. And thank you for listening to the Engineer Innovation Podcast.

Joanna Peña-Bickley:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 4:

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