Dr. Cynthia Cook, a distinguished lecturer in sociology, delves into the profound effects of artificial intelligence on our aging society. This episode will uncover how AI is not just a tool for the young and tech-savvy but a pivotal ally in enhancing the quality of life for the elderly
Dr. Cynthia Cook Adjunct professor of Sociology at California State University San Bernardino specializes in globalization social demography and the sociology of Aging in our conversation we'll explore the implications of AI on the Aging population We're going to discuss this highly anticipated topic I had a lot of people in our community waiting to watch the recording and to listen to the podcast um because this touches home for many many people a lot of people are wondering like what does AI mean as I'm growing older um and you know and also the Aging population they tend to be less tax-savvy than the rest of the population especially the younger generation so they definitely have legitimate concerns and we're going to explore this with you but before we do that I would love to hear from your journey into sociology and what makes you what make what makes you interested in aging and Health disparities as a topic.
I'm an African-American female okay I grew up in New York New York City Brooklyn and Queens. My first job was at the New York State Health Department and I was assigned to work with a research scientist on long-term care.
There was a program called Nicha New York State Health Utilization Review Program and what we were primarily interested in at that time was whether or not hospitals were overutilizing their services primarily with Medicaid patients. We were also concerned about whether or not hospitals were keeping um Medicaid elderly patients in hospitals longer than necessary uh because they could not find a nursing home a skilled nursing home. I started at the New York State Health Department as a public administration intern I then had the position of research assistant I went on to become a senior research analyst again focusing on the same thing um whether or not hospital healthcare providers were overutilizing or underutilizing their facilities with Medicaid patients being concerned whether or not because the patient was Medicaid they did not get the same quality of care as a paying patient or a patient who had a different Health insurer so I did that for five years I then left and I went to work in Chicago I worked for Nork um National research opinion National National Opinion Research Center.
okay not with AARP at 50 but I consider myself a senior until I turned 65 or 62 at that point uh but I was amazed at some of the stereotypes student had about the elderly you know they thought they were all going to be fragile all going to be walking around with gray hair and and sticks and so I I had like about maybe 300 students that semester uh some in my um Introduction to Sociology class but some also in a sociology of Aging class that I was teaching at that time uh so I did a survey inh housee survey with them and
one of the questions that I asked them was did you want to live to be 100 and the answers that I got was when they said no they said because you'll be fragile you you'll be old you'll be crippled you won't be able to do anything and so I was really shocked that that was their perception of Aging now some of them were a little bit more positive some of them said yes so that I could see my grandchildren my great grandchildren so that I could see all the changes that are taking place but I think most young people had the
perception that aging is a time of inactivity fragility and and just you no longer being a productive uh individual in society that is not true okay I presently and I and I know you didn't know this but I presently live at an independent senior living facility in Riverside and there are two two parts to this there's the independent part where people live in single family homes they're independent they don't need any type of assistance they're active they walk for two hours a day they go to the
gym uh they they're very active seniors and then of course there is that senior population that needs some type of uh nursing care okay um but I think my interest in aging today has more to do with the fact that I am aging and I also see of course that the baby boom population is aging we've got about maybe 18 almost 18% of the population that is 65 and older many of them are still very active many of them are out there many are still working okay now of course the other side of this is that our younger population is dwindling okay
the fertility rate is only like 1.7 for American women okay the um the natural increase okay the population natural increase is only like 0.1 which means that it'll take us 700 years to double our population uh and so I think the problem isn't an aging population for uh for the United States for America I think the problem is a dwindling working age population and a dwindling a lower fertility rate the fertility rate is less than the replacement level the replacement level of course is 2.1 and we are at 1.7 okay and of course
with everything going on in the world today and some of the policies or um Expressions that our leaders have expressed uh who don't seem to realize that the reason why the US population is still healthy is because of immigration I mean I was really annoyed with Trump someone who knew absolutely nothing who didn't realize that when our population grows every 10 years you know the growth is not a natural increase that increase in population usually has to do uh with migration so um I don't really see aging
as a problem I see uh the Aging elderly senior population still being productive still working uh and um yeah the interest is there because I'm now a senior okay and I I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that people are living longer um women are having fewer children and um I don't really like AI I gotta tell you that we're gonna come to that so so you've touched on um you've touch on many interesting topics that I'd like to talk to you about personally I'm very passionate
about longevity and um I've been looking into a lot of um you know as you said ways to not only extend my life to 100 I would love to live to 100 or Beyond only if my health spam is as good if I could continue doing the activities that I enjoy doing then definitely um long life would be something that we wish for all but I think you know the people in your class had had legitimate um reasons to say no to to to longer life because as as you know they have seen probably in their um in their lives that yeah
usually aging comes with a lot of health issues and um you know it's so sad because a lot of people live years in their uh late lives stuck to a bed and to a television and this is probably the why the perception is like no I don't want to live this kind of life um so before we go into to all of this I want to ask you to kind of like Define in simple terms what is the sociology of Aging we know that aging is a problem is not necessarily a problem aging is a field of study but what's the sociology
angle to that field of study I think um when we do the sociology of Aging we are primarily concerned with with seniors but we're also concerned with the other age groups okay um it's usually look at looking at all of the positive benefits of Aging as well as some of the negatives okay no longer being productive uh friends passing on loneliness um Health Care issues um you know income issues uh so all of that is part of the sociology of Aging yes but it's not just looking at seniors it really is looking
at the entire life course okay from birth all the way to the end so all of that is part of the sociology of Aging but it is focusing primarily on the elderly population yes does also get into a little bit of agism okay and that is those NE negative stereotypes about the elderly and um yeah yeah basic can you can you L can you linger more on this last piece agism and the negative connotations to aging I think well agism and some of those negative connotations is some of the things that you sometimes see in the
media where the elderly person is perceived more as a joke uh than being a serious individual uh a couple of years ago they used to they had this commercial where is the beef okay and of course it was an elderly woman running around saying where is the beef uh so I I think that's what I I also remember a couple of years ago when I was teaching in New York City and I was talking I'm I'm trying to remember what I was talking about um but anyway it was we got into Macy's I'm not advertising for
Mac's uh but uh I said something like you know people you know Macy's may be setting the trend in terms of what you're going to buy on their commercials and they said and this stuck with me and this was before I think I got to FAMU and did the study on Aging with those students there they said the commercials Macy's is always showing you all these young people shopping there but they said but young people can't afford to shop there so when you go shopping at Macy's you see all these middle-aged
people and I thought about that I said they're right you know when they do these advertisements they like to put all these young people on now they've changed it they they now they've decided and I wasn't just I didn't want to restrict it to Macy's but normally when you're looking at some of the advertisements on TV they always put a young person on okay and so now they are changing it and they're giving you a mixture of young and old they're giving you more diversity so they're not just
showing you that white male anymore they're showing you other ethnic groups that make up the US so it is changing it's changing slowly but of course that would have been agism with Macy's putting all these young people in who can't afford to shop there it's interesting that you touched on this one because my background is in marketing and I totally get it why Brands like to show young people it it hits multiple birds in one stone for one Brands care about the life cycle of the customer so
you want to Target the younger customer so that if you get a customer at a younger age the idea in marketing is that you want to keep that customer the LIF spam of that acquisition is longer than if you like let's say Target an older customer so I think this is where it's coming from and then the second bird or the second element to that is the fact that young you know even older people have aspiration to remain young and to feel young so if you put like younger individuals in your ads then like the people will say okay I you know
if the younger generation are wearing this I want to go and wear it as well so I can appear younger so there's that probably an explanation that I'm I can offer you from my background in marketing um but of course go ahead exception because I yeah I think what they're doing is they're saying if you buy my product you'll look like this and we all know that's not true okay they're saying these are the type of people buy my Pro my products so if this is the if this is the image that you were looking
for then shop here buy this product but the reality was that um the reality was that the people who could afford to shop there um we older okay but the other thing about agism I'm sorry with the phone the other thing about agism is that it doesn't just apply to the elderly okay may have been a term that was originally coined to apply to the elderly but it also applies to young people because agism is really about discrimination discrimination against a person because of their age and so there are many young people who say that they
too get discriminated against because they don't have the experience okay okay or they don't have the skill but most of the time when we're talking about ages and we really aren talking about discrimination um against the elderly so that's great fantastic I I want to uh linger back on what you said in the introduction about uh the health span issue as well as the the growing population so before uh for preparing for this episode I went to YouTube and I was watching the different studies and and work there so surprisingly and this
is very good for us is that there there I didn't find anybody who's work who's touching who concerned about the the the intersection between technology and Ai and aging so this is probably a unique opportunity for us to be discussing this topic but other areas they talked about like the as I said the health span versus the lifespan and um and then and then they mentioned that there are three type of countries today there's the uh the wealthy first countries Japan United States and uh northern Europe these are
the ones who are seeing highest um number of U of of Aging population um and as you mentioned uh the the fertility is not replacing uh the the population so these countries are dependent on migration to F on to fill in the work Gap that they have and then there's the the the poor um countries who um have a high fertility rate and then um have also High mortality rate in the in the Aging population so what what can you say about about this Dynamic and what I've touched on touched upon okay so first I would say
um very few people are going to probably make it to 100 okay but that was just the the the age that I use for this particular group of students okay um I think for the United States the life expectancy um is about maybe 78 for men and 81 for women but of course that is changing because people are living longer they they are healthier uh they have started um in their youth uh with a good diet good exercise and so as they age um I think the objective is for people to age healthily I don't think we can afford to have a large elderly
population uh with a lot of health issues with a lot of chronic health issues so I think we have to work on um improving that not only for the elderly now but for the Next Generation coming behind them okay and and that is because we we probably will have a shortage of care workers okay now when we look at the uh the demographics uh it is your high income countries like the United States western Europe Japan um Singapore Korea South Korea where the um fertility rate has gone down the population growth rate has gone
down and even China is concerned about their not so much their population growth but the fact that they will have a large elderly population and will not have that large working age population that they had that's supposedly improve their economic um development okay that whole demographic dividend for China had to do with a large working age population that was very productive um what we're seeing and this is all part of that migration um people moving from the south to the north is that there is a high fertility
rate in many of your uh low-income countries okay and many of those low-income countries are going to be in Africa Asia and Latin America okay uh there's a high fertility rate there's a high birth rate but they also have a very small elderly population so that when you're looking at Africa only about 3% of the population there in 2022 was 65 or older okay so they've got a young population where the medium age could be 15 18 where that just means that more than 50% of the population is under the
age of 18 which is good okay we've got a many excuse me we have a medium age of about 38 39 which means that half the population is under under age 39 and the other half is older okay but also when you look at the number of children being born between zero and five those cohorts they're relatively low okay so I think what we're seeing and what we see this already when we look at the caretakers okay if they're not family members they're usually immigrants they're usually people who have migrated to this
country okay uh so what we're seeing is that the the South okay uh Latin America Asia Oceana Africa they have a much younger population okay unfortunately many of those regions those areas don't have the economic opportunities available for that young population so they are going to be migrating okay they migrate once they get their degrees they migrate any chance they can get because there are more opportunities outside outside their country it seems go ahead it seems that there's a trade here in in there's a
trade between the high income and lwi income countries the low income countries are producing people uh and then they export the the talent to the uh to the high income country who are not um producing as many people if if I want to put it in a simple terms you put it in simple terms and today Western Europe is more receptive to immigration than what it was 20 or 30 years ago because their population um their working age population is in Decline um we are still struggling with our immigration policy okay uh but I
think our politicians are playing to a certain population that may not know as much as they they should about population growth okay especially in the US um it's a tradeoff but it's a tradeoff where the West benefits but not the east or not the North and I say that because then we get into the brain drain okay and then there's another term we we get the we get their best but then we have to put money into these countries to help develop them because took that brain power that could have been used to
develop the country where they came from um the problem of course that when people are migrating it's because of instability it's because of violence you know it's because of persecution so they're being you know it's that whole Push Pull Theory they're being pushed out most people don't want to leave their Homeland don't want to leave their country to go someplace new they would prefer to stay at home if the opportunities were there if it was a safe environment so so yes we're being we're we're we're reaping
the benefits of those countries because they have not been able to stabilize they have not been able to to provide the education and economic opportunities that their population needs which would help them to develop quicker it's interesting that you say that uh you know that you believe that migration is a an asset to the High income countries because myself like I just moved to the to the United States two years ago and in my head I'm like I'm so grateful that you know I I I come here and my country
is Lebanon is a corrupt country there's like so many um bad things happening there and I and I for me like it's a it's a it's a great opportunity to be living in the United States of course I'm doing my very best to contribute and make my my stay here meaningful and helpful and and and um you know valuable to the to the host country but it's also a great opportunity as you said for me because of I'm coming for for better opportunities and better quality of life and um this is exactly why we we come
here so I want to uh shift now this the conversation to your field of study and uh what have been your research in your PhD what are you currently involved in in terms of research in that matter before we head into AI in the the last section well my research has focused on health disparities both Global and domestic um oh my dissertation was on reducing maternal mortality in the developing World focusing on subsanar and Africa I still delve into that research try to update it now and then I am also I also did research on
traditional U birth attendance basically that was part of the dissertation too uh seeing about training more traditional birth attendants so that they are better able to provide care to pregnant women and make sure they have contact with Health Care Facilities so that if there are any complications women can be referred to them immediately and that would help to reduce some of the mortality in the developing World specifically in subsanar and Africa because I think they have the highest maternal mortality rates after Afghanistan is very high but
Afghanistan is due more to the conflict within the country um yeah so right so that is my research the cultural competency was done when I was at uh kraton and we were concerned that we had certain groups the Sudanese and the uh Vietnamese and that there were some issues that had come up with the with the Vietnamese child uh the teacher noticed that he had these red circles on his back and so she immediately called Child Protective Services which meant that the child was removed from the family and of course
those red circles were what do they call them cing or coining a traditional healing practice which does not signify uh abuse uh and so the family was upset the community was upset at that point because they had to go into court and they had to hire an interpreter because the family didn't speak English and so as a result of that and another incident with the with the Sudanese family there uh we decided to do a study on cultural competency to see whether our health care providers were I'm going to use the
term culturally sensitive because it's a little bit uh uh you know uh derogative to say uh competent so we're very careful about not saying competent uh our studies said cultural proficiency not not wanting to offend anyone uh so we were looking to see if they were culturally sensitive to the VAR when there when people came in you know they didn't have to know the Sudanese culture the Vietnamese culture the Hispanic culture the Native American culture uh but we wanted to know whether or not they were sensitive that these people
may come in with different perceptions of their illness and what they expect from from their providers uh so we also asked the the uh population the the Sudanese the Vietnamese Native American population they African-American Hispanic and we had to include the white population we asked them whether or not they thought their health care providers were culturally sensitive and many of them said no okay many of them talked about the fact that they did not speak English and that um they were sometimes told learn English others were upset
that some of their their uh women were being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as far as they was concerned that was saying they were crazy so there were a lot of miscommunications uh going on so that was the cultural competency study that we did uh at kraton and what it ended up doing was uh making sure that they had more training programs to make sure providers were familiar uh with the some of the processes so that is my re search in in the past that I've done um as well as well I did yeah I did went on
childlessness and women over 40 as well as the aging study so no absolutely you have an incredible track record doctor I did my research so I'm very honored to have you on on the program we as we are talking we have people um commenting in the chat uh Sam says that I was happy to learn that a friend of one of my old clients informed me last week that she was using chat GPT she's not techsavvy but she found the tool easy to use and this is something going to be relevant to our AI uh section of the talk and
also we've got um Rodney saying that this is a very needed discussion thanks for taking the lead for creating the dialogue well thanks to both Rodney and Sam and with this I want to touch upon like you know you you your research is focused on health disparities and aging disparities between different countries and globally and and all of that what would what would you see the Breakthrough in this field where do you see the opportunity here like what would be if if I tell you like imagine you have a magic wand and you can you know
shake that magic wand and got whatever biggest problem of of these disparities solved What would would you solve I think the problem is economics and education I think we see that there is a relationship between uh the health of a population and education and all of that goes hand inand with economics okay um more developed countries have higher life expectancy but more developed countries also have the majority of their population being educated whether that means to having a high school diploma or being literate
okay so when we when we're looking at um when I'm looking at Health disparities uh I look at certain I can usually look at the gross national income per capita of the country and pretty much predict whether or not there is a high maternal mortality rate a high infant mortality rate and also figure out that looking at the gross national income whether the causes of mortality are infectious and parasitic diseases or if they are chronic diseases so that disparity that we're looking at we use this term um
diseases of affluence or degenerative diseases so your high income countries the majority of the population uh the causes of mortality are degenerative disease es diseases of affluence that's going to be diabetes hypertension heart disease cancer those are the chronic diseases okay but those are the diseases that do not U eternalize until you're at least over 40 or 50 then people start having problems with hypertension heart disease um cancer diabetes okay your lwi income countries uh the concerns are
pneumonia malaria yeah yellow fever um oh um coals yeah so they're more malaria what else is out there I'm trying to HIV AIDS okay and notice I didn't say HIV aids for the high income countries because we have access to those anti retral drugs but there are still many places in southern Africa where they don't have access to it okay uh and so the other problem is that once you educate the population then you can have more healthare workers and if you have more healthare workers then you have more
people to provide Health Care Services to the population but it isn't all about health care because that demographic transition that we saw in the high income country countries that are high income today uh that was the result of economic development that was the result of people eating better and safer working conditions okay and better nutrition red reduced the maternal mortality rate it reduced the infant mortality rate and it caused people to live longer because they were healthier okay so it's it's kind of like a
combination of things what you really want to do is improve the economic well-being of the country and hope with reputable governments that it will filter down to the people okay and making sure that people have an adequate diet access to health care when they need it and jobs okay and I think that is what many of these lowincome countries and the last thing of course is you have to educate women okay you have to include women they have to be educated because women are the ones who care for children and what we have found
is that educated women are more likely to take their child to a healthcare provider provider for the least little thing okay and therefore have a higher survival rate okay so you need women okay you need to educate them absolutely yeah so uh I I noticed that you mentioned in the beginning of the podcast that you are on the kind of opposing side of AI and now what when I asked you like what are the biggest issues and it it all boil down to economy and education and especially education of women and I would love this
podcast to uh to switch now into kind of like a u kind of like a debate where where basically I'll be the one defending the technology and AI especially because I'm like obsessed with it and then and then you will be the The Devil's Advocate which means that or or maybe better better choice of words here but you you got my point here like we're trying to have like an interesting intellectual uh debate where we can we can look at the pros and cons of technology and I'm sure that even AI has a lot of cons and a lot of concerns
and ethical problems and we're gonna delve into that but we're we're gonna show both of them but before that I always ask my guests when was the first time you saw chat GPT or you start interacting with chat GPT and what was your impression okay so I am not uh interacting with chat PT I'm not doing it at all I'm familiar with it uh but I'm not using it okay um I I think being a sociologist we have always been concerned with large data because we know that the more data you have the more reliable the results okay so always
for large data sets when I worked at New York State health dep Department we had all the Medicaid form from all over the state we had a large data set that we were working with okay that we were trying to identify some of those apparent practices so I think the large data set is great I think the problem that I have moving away from chat because I really have not used it uh I've I've read everything about it and how people are concerned that it can be easy for students to have uh this machine program write their papers uh
but I tend to give the type of topic that it would be very difficult for um a um computer to write okay so I and I and I just got finish reading about these the strike in Los Angeles and what their concerns were and how they settled they were afraid that they were going to have ai or chat PT what is it PTT that it would be writing the their what is it g GPT chat GPT that yeah that that it would be writing the scripts for the you know for the for the sitcoms for the series and so I can understand that and then the article was also saying how
sometimes it does a really good job in terms of turning it out very quickly but not as good as the original authors and writers okay um so I understand the benefit of it and I know it will probably become the norm in a number of years in about 10 years regardless of all the criticism and complaints you cannot stop progress I already know that so it's here it's here to stay and it may depend on how you monitor it uh how you regulate it but but it's here and it's part and it is something that the Next Generation young
people will utilize they will utilize it okay like uh like Google like when you ask them a question in class the first thing they do is Google it and give you an answer okay uh but so it's here it's here to stay and I think um when when that happens I usually say well what else is related to you gave me the answer but why is that the answer what's going on what's the background to it and and I think that may also be with chat um gbt okay so I think you still have to do research and and from my
understanding um on a couple of um Zoom meetings that I was on where they were using it they said it wasn't as accurate okay that when you gave it a topic uh it sometimes made mistakes uh and I can understand that because I I know that it all depends on how much data has been put into the system in terms of how they how it's going to respond yeah so um you've done a great job in in tackling the limitations of chat GPT uh which by the way chat GPT is very much as you described it's a large data set the only difference is that
this data set is human generated text so basically what they did is they created a computer program that um that consumed hundreds of millions and billions of letters and and text and it kind of uh found a pattern in this in this text uh and this pattern helps you predict the next word and predicts the next sentence and all of a sudden we have a computer program that can write based on all the text that it has received on the internet so it knows about a wide array of topics but it knows basically on a statistical
significance so for example if you know the majority of people let's say are pro-abortion for example so the the computer program will rank pro-abortion sentiment high and and it will start producing text that is pro-abortion um so that's where also the concern on his bias for example if the if the data set that is has been consumed by chat GPT has inherent bias in it against for example African-Americans because against women against trans transgender all of that stuff so this bias will become embedded Within These
Technologies now the only of course needless to say like this is the the thing that all of these big companies who are producing such uh Technologies are working uh hard on on this problem and they're trying to tackle all sorts of bias and ethics within the generation because remember language is a catalyst of uh of information it's uh language is a fundamental to human thoughts so if a machine is producing language as you rightly said that it become the norm to expect that uh taxes coming from machine so um so at the same time though
although we we fully understand the limitations I want to see say okay that the two biggest problems you mentioned related to aging economy economics and education and I could easily see that Technologies like chat GPT and large language models are fundamental to improving opportunities economical opportunities for uh people at the bottom of the um you know of the income level and I can always see it as a educational helper the only difference is that instead of giving assignments that chpd can produce we have to think
in a more creative way of how we teach our children and our um our students so it definitely have big implications on how we teach uh and I know that you're an educator so it's definitely I can see your frustration by like you know lecturing and and putting your heart and soul into trying to make a student learn a concept and then the the student will lazily just go to chat jpt and copy and paste that answer and it's really hard for you to figure out whether it's a machine generated or a human generated because
this technology can replicate what humans can say so the question for you is first of all do you recognize the opportunities as well as if you have anything to comment on what I just said um well I recognize that it is a tool that will be used okay but in the class room the way I usually check to see whether or not someone is the original author of something is you start asking them questions about what they wrote okay and why they wrote it and then of course you need to have um references so I don't doubt that they
will be some students who will use chat GPT yes however I think we have all been introduced to chat PGT when we are writing our emails and all of a sudden the next word pops up and it may not be the word that we want okay but it pops up immediately or when after we've written something and we've sent it out and someone says well what did you write why did you say that and you realize that the machine changed it not you and so you have to say no that is not what I said I didn't put that word in there okay so I think I think
that is also an issue with chat GPT um the grammar okay I used to teach um English is a foreign language English is a second language I know the way you punctuate something can change its meaning the way you put the words down can change its meaning but more important the way you punctuate something can change the actual meaning in terms of what you want to say so that when I am reading a paper and I start to punctuate then I have to say to the writer is this what you meant because I just added some punctuation that I think
you left out okay or I just changed the word is this exactly what you meant I think I get that a lot with students on a on a more Elementary level when they write something and they've used spell check and spell check gave them the wrong spelling for a word so I kind of like see I'm sure the Kinks are going to be ined out of uh chat GPT uh but I'm still a little bit skeptical and I'm hoping that there will be those students who want to be creative and not use chat GPT I I my hesitation it's almost like
students are not doing well in math because are too dependent on the calculator okay growing up we did not have a calculator okay you had to sit there and do the math yourself okay you've go into a supermarket all of the cash registers are programmed so you give them the money they put it in the system the system tells them how much money to give you back they don't know how to do the arithmetic okay and so I think that will also be a problem with chat GPT that if you were depending on a program to write something can you write
something when the computer breaks down okay like my other PC is not working I have seen situations where the computer goes down in a supermarket and you everybody's just standing around they can't do anything uh and you say why don't you just you know do it by hand they don't know how okay everything has been so um that is my concerned about uh G chat gbt that is also my concern about AI yeah yeah that we we've become too dependent on the technology so yeah absolutely it's it's like imagine Google's is going down I
think we expect it right now to to be on all the time and the more people use it the more people depend on it and it becomes the norm just like Google just like the internet we we we take our phones and we expect that there's signal on the phone right like we don't really question that um and I think people will get adjusted to that but I believe personally that people this is a technology as big as the internet this is uh revolutionary this is transformative and it's important in all my surrounding my
friends and my family I'm always telling them you know adopt early adopt the technology as early as you can because because the people who are adopting it early are going to see 10 times productivity improvements and they're going to see a lot more creative ways to interact with this machine because remember when you mentioned about they can copy and paste their assignment the student can copy and paste their assignment well yes but this is only one way to use it like you could use it to brainstorm ideas and then write them in
your own hands I am in my Master's thesis right now and I am um you know I'm in the data analy analysis section of my thesis but it was very helpful for me when I'm writing my literature review didn't mean that I gave it oh write my literature review and it will write me no of course but it helped me find relevant studies find relevant papers it helped me also summarize so instead of like reading a lot in the paper and discovering that oh this is not relevant to my research well you know you could
upload this entire paper hundreds of pages into chat GPT it will give you summaries and it will give you is it relevant to my research or not should I read for for further or should I stop so this is uh just new ways of of using it as as a tool for good in my opinion but again just like the you know the the nuclear energy right like you could use it to power cities with electricity and you could use it to create an atomic bomb I think the same applies to to chat PD what do you say about that I think you said you were using it
as a reference tool okay allowing the chat GPT to write a paragraph with the references for you to go and check and decide if this is something you want to further explore I think in that capacity it would be positive but we do the same thing when we go into the libraries database and we read the abstracts and we decide which articles are pertinent to our research which ones we do not but we become familiar with all of them but we're doing it ourselves now let me just say is as I said before it's progress
it's going to stay when I did my first thesis at Brooklyn College in 1973 74 I had to go to the 42nd Street Library I had to go to the shanberg library I had to go to Columbia University's library and I had to find the articles in the journals in the stack take them out make copies have enough dimes to make copies of the Articles and then go home and read them all and it was set up so that there was an abstract book so you had to go through the abstract book to see which articles you wanted to read and then you had to write down all the
information and then you have to go and find the journals okay and then take them out and then make copies now I look at students today and I try to tell them you have got it easy you don't have to sit there go through a card catalog all you have to do is go home turn on your PC get into the library's database put in your keywords and everything comes up okay yes it's progress we went from having to look at card cataloges going to three or four libraries to get articles to being able to sit at home
and have a librarian you know send you an electronic copy of an article that is not in their database but they got from someone else so it is progress and I recognize it and you're right those who adopted immediately will benefit the most okay but we still have that digital divide we still have people who don't have access to the internet we still have young people during the pandemic there were many young people when the schools shut down they didn't have they didn't have access to the internet they had to have their parents
drive them to a library's um you know um yard campus to get on to the Internet so we are still at the divide in this country that there will be those who will benefit from chat GPT and Ai and then there will be those who are who are left behind so again when we're talking about disparities whether they're are Health disparities economic disparities ities or educational disparities uh the people who will benefit the most and who are benefiting the most from AI are are those who did adopt it soon but then
again we have those who do not have access to the resources um to allow them to benefit okay and I know we we're almost out of time I know that but there was the other thing when you were talking about aging enhancement and um for the elderly and I and and when you you have Singularity and my first introduction to Singularity is a type of uh AI enhancement computer enhancement to certain parts to keep people functioning and I think even if we go in that direction if we come up with some prothesis some pill or
something that um in enhances people's intelligence or helps them to be a little bit more mobile um I think again we're looking at those who can afford it and those who cannot okay so even with respect to the elderly the technology it's going it's the the best example is designer babies who can afford designer babies uh the wealthy the average person is not going to have a surrogate carry her child for her for nine months but the wealthy will they will hire someone to carry it and so we're we're back to
the disparities but AI is here it's not going any place chat GPT is here it's not going any place it it is just how we use it and whether or not we use it all responsibly definitely I just want to say yes I mean most of Technologies they start with being expensive and not accessible to the majority of the people but as they grow they proliferate and then they become accessible to everyone and I think right now and part of my mission personally with Singularity syndicate with this podcast and with the other
community that we have um is to try to bridge that Gap try to make sure that we uh we have an inclus inclusive Society uh even with technologically inclusive society and that's really my mission with doing this podcast and having it focused on AI and and and solving you know how the problems that or the challenges that are faced by this technology I have a Rodney says again in the comments he said the two industries will be disrupted is education and medical and for here I want to also say that um chat GPT has been very uh good
tutor for me like if I have any difficult project or if I have difficult concept that I'm not uh grasping I can tell hey chpt explain this to a five years old and then it will start step by step explaining that concept and I find it very helpful in you know in in in being my teacher and my tutor uh as as I as I want to learn anything so uh Rodney is right about the disruption on education the other part is medical I'm I'm seeing because I'm in the field I've been seeing a lot of people saying that
well I went to this doctor and this doctor and this doctor and they said that uh I have this disease and then I asked chapp and chipt excluded those those diseases and suggested something else again I'm not trying to to to tell the listeners right now that they should depend on chaap for their medical diagnosis because it's not ready yet and it has some accurate issues accuracy issues but what what we're trying to say here is that in the in the the future you're looking at saving lives you're
looking at having access to um Med medic medical diagnosis or um treatment tools for people in Africa and for people uh as as poor as they could get as long as they have an internet connection they might have um a superior um knowledge and they might have Superior Superior medical advice and that's itself is really tackling your uh area of research tackling dispar so this could also be solved as a dis disparity issue another area I want to touch upon is uh during covid you've got thousands of elderly people who have died in their
nursing homes or in their homes in front of their television without any loved ones around them and um and the reason is that also because of elderly people usually are not tax savvy so they would be like oh they don't know how to use the phone properly they they don't know how to message their their family or their loved one that so with this technology especially because it's natural language and this is my research is the efficacy of you know natural language conversational artificial intelligence
is that these elderly people will have access to talk in their natural language with the machine and tell it oh call my son or um you know let's or send a message to my um my son or whatever so it it you can all of a sudden you don't need the device anymore because the machine can understand your natural language and it can you're basically conversing with your PC you're conversing with your phone in natural language you don't need to put on your glasses and start dialing or or or touch and and point and um and and and click
now this technology will enable natural language communication and I think this is also a powerful way that will help in the in the Aging population what do you have to say about that well I think that technology is here that's a Lexus okay that many people have and use uh but I think you're right you do have to educate the elderly on how to use it so I think AI when it comes to Medicine I think AI is very helpful however I I am concerned that we may be reverting people to a number you know um Physicians and
providers like to say well there's a 99% chance there's a 70% chance of this and that and not and I don't think well I for myself I don't want to hear about there's a 70 70% chance I just want to know what my chance are and not what happened with 77 other people because then I want to know what about the other 23% what's going on here uh so I I think you're right the more data that is available to Medicine the more accuracy their diagnosis but again making sure that they look at the whole person and not
just the data it's going to be it's going to be useful yes it's got It's the future yes it will Aid people and many developing countries if they have access to the internet and not to a physician or specialist where they can get that information immediately and not have to travel thousands of miles yes it is going to be beneficial especially in lowincome developing countries yes so uh my criticism is that we sometimes oversimplify everything and there is the opportunity for abuse and and it it will
malfunction it will not be completely accurate and of course the accuracy is also depending on who's putting in the information and who's operating the machine so absolutely I agree and um the last question about um knowing you know AI is here and AI is here to stay what would you give in terms of advice to um high schoolers who are just starting their their life um do you do you recommend going into the field of Sociology do you want like what what what is your advice to these kids I already know you do not major in
sociology um unless you are interested in doing research unless there is a social issue that you want to solve or address I usually tell students in a freshman Sociology class that the areas to go into are health care and Science and um information technology I should say that I learned a lot of what I know about AI from having worked at renair Poly Technic Institute for about four years and when I got there I knew absolutely nothing about Ai and Robotics but my students knew a lot and they shared that information with me they
gave me articles and I'm and I'm s I'm talking about undergraduate students who are very much into Robotics and AI so I got to learn a lot read a lot because I had to catch up because this is the area that my students were in so I needed to try to know almost as much if not as much as them because they were working with this stuff you know 247 this is why they came to RPI so I would I would tell young people the areas to go into are science and math those are the areas for the future and information technology
AI is is the future it will stay it's not going any place and I would want them to be ethical in everything that they do and take into consideration that people are not machines people are human beings they have feelings and um yeah I would say math and science is the area to go into absolutely I mean I'm am having a podcast and I I could technically interview the machine so today we have chat GPT I could I technically simulate chat GPT into a voice recorder or like make it speak and I could literally sit down and talk to ChatGpt but that's definitely not what humans do we love to connect with human beings and you are such a wonderful person to talk to Dr. Cook I am honored and very pleased to have this conversation with you I thank you for your time you've been um you know I think a lot of people have will see the or will listen to this conversation and find it very inspirational and insightful um I think the issues that you touched upon and the insights that you added are very