Cognitive Experience Design (CXD): Designing AI Systems for Trust

All right. Hello and welcome. It's January 17th, 2025. And we're in Active Inference Guest Stream 96.1 with Ron Edelman discussing Designing Intelligent Experiences for Trust. So thank you, Ron, for joining and looking forward to your presentation and the discussion. All right. So really happy to be here. I must say that I'm only here because I randomly reached out to Carl and he was very kind and generous. And he decided to, you know, entertain some conversations. And those, this has been about two years, those conversations led to a couple of presentations, meeting some really incredible people involved in Active Inference. And it really kind of set me on a new course, new ways of thinking. And I wanted to share a more practical, perhaps implementation practitioner approach to what are the real world problems we're seeing with integrating the brilliant community of people who are trained in Bayesian statistics. It's a completely different way to think about problem solving. And if you start working with product managers, with designers, business folks, they might have just a very different framework for thinking about how to create systems. And I just want to kind of share an experience I had, which kind of changed my life. And it was about music. And I was really struggling to learn the Western style of music. And I had a teacher who studied in India. And so they have a different way. It's instead of writing things down in straight lines and you, you sing your music first. It's called conical. So quarter notes would be takidimi, takidimi, takidimi, takidimi, takidimi, right? Triplets would be takita, takita, takita, takita, takita. And that system of learning accelerated me more than in a few weeks than years of like taking music lessons. And the reason that this I think is important is because it introduced me to the idea around having a trusted source of truth in collaboration. All of a sudden, when I was playing music, we could all agree, you know, metronomes, timing, it opened up an entire language for me for how to interface with others, be completely creative, have that freedom to collaborate. But it was also safe, right? Like it was also we could remain within the constraints of the system. And that unlocked all kinds of incredible learning experiences for me. And since then, I've viewed information flowing through organizational networks, kind of through the lens of music. Like what is our metronome that allows us to collaborate when we're building software, when we're providing recommendations to customers, when we're troubleshooting operational and business processes. And I think Carl enjoyed my analogy of synchronization and music when talking about these systems. So he called it computational psychiatry, not words I would use. But that's, that's how this journey kind of began for me. So just a little bit about me. I've written two books now. The first one was came out last year. It's unifying business data and code. It was, it was incredible to write an O'Reilly book. And that book deal got me a second book deal, The Language of Innovation, which is coming out in a couple of months. And my life has been around meeting like incredibly talented people and figuring how do we leverage that creative brain power and passion and help organizations minimize their costs. And I think that I view myself as kind of a bridge, a connector between all these different worlds. And unifying business data and code was kind of my first exploration into how we formalize methodologies to get everyone to have, quote unquote, a metronome. So how did we get to this, to the idea of like, why is trust interesting? Well, it started with a conversation with Carl, I think at his theoretical neurobiology group, where I asked, what is the definition of understanding? And he was like, well, it's quite simply, it's the, it's a shared model, right? If you both have the same inputs, you should both have the same outputs. And that for me was how I…