Are You Ready for The Cyborgs

Okay. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me today in a relatively unconventional talk during Abu Dhabi finance week. I am Nancy Gleason from the Muhammad bin Zed University of Artificial Intelligence and I'm answering the cheesy question, are we ready for the cyborgs? But I also came to tell you that chat GPT is not the point.

A lot of us hear about all of these different language models. They are important. They have changed work for many organizations. They have automated reading and writing which has disrupted education and other fields. But it is not the point.

The point is how we respond to these kinds of technologies and so that we are prepared for the coming waves. And it is not easy to adopt this technology. We have seen examples time and again where firms have said this is actually disrupting productivity. People want to go back to the way it was before. This is because there are adoption curves.

There is learning friction and for a period of time with this technology our old way of doing things is more efficient than the time it takes to learn how to do new things. And this is causing a lack of business transformation. Humans are the stop. We know electricity is the lock, but humans are the stop often. Uh and as Wayne Butterfield from interg in the UK has explained, AI is not magic.

Employees are creatures of habit. We cannot just turn these tools on and hope for new efficiencies and even new asset classes. more work has to be done and this is why I'm telling you chachi pt is not the point yes 40% of what you do today in the knowledge economy will have to shift in the next six years four years 2026 so it's requiring new forms of human excellence that we do not yet monetize and this is the purpose of my talk Mustafa Sulleman the CEO of AI Microsoft has a book out, the coming wave. I always recommend it. But what he's explaining is you need to be expecting or we need to be expecting a chat GPT level disruption every year for the next 10 years.

And that means reflecting on how you responded to the LLM you were exposed to. Maybe it's Llama if you're from Saudi Arabia or Deep Seek or some other model. Maybe you're dead set on Gemini and Google or you're a Microsoft family and you're using Copilot. Whatever the model is, it's not the point. It's how you responded to it.

What did you do? Did your kids expose it to you? Was it a colleague? Was it work? Was it a talk like this?

When did you first hear about generative AI? And what did you do to respond? And the reason this is important is because generative AI is already yesterday. Firms that aren't using it are desperately trying to catch up. If they aren't catching up, my argument would be they will eventually go out of business.

That could be a slow trickle, could be 10, 15 years, can not ride the wave and see what happens. But here we have Jensen Hang, the CEO of Nvidia last January, now almost a year ago, but he's been saying this in similar talks since then, that generative AI and the things like chat GPT are very important, but they're at the bottom of a J curve. And we are already in the agentic AI moment. Now, if you're here from the UAE, you may know that the his highness has a commitment to make the Abu Dhabi government AI native by 2027. What this means is that it's being run by AI agents and other things to be AI native.

It doesn't exclusively mean that. And of course, Nvidia has a product called Nemo, which will enable you to roll agents out in your organizations. Many Abu Dhabi firms and UAE firms are already doing this, but a lot of people don't even know what an agent is. Essentially, it executes tasks for you. In a prompt, the way you would use a chatbot like chat GPT, you telling it step by step what to do, and it doesn't know the outcome you want.

With an agent, you tell it the outcome you want it to do, and it thinks of the best and most optimal way to deliver that for you. It is a different way of functioning. And this isn't tomorrow. Um, two weeks ago or three weeks ago now, I visited a high school in Beijing. Beijing number 101.

It is the number one high school in China. That school has 800 different agents that specify what the individual students need. They have psychologists, math tutors, roommate negotiators, uh, comprehensive test study partners, nutritionists, athletic coaches, all as agents. And the really scary about agents, the scary part about agents for me is is not the stuff I've just described. It is that your IT department becomes your HR department.

Let's just let that soak in for a minute. That's terrifying. Your CIO is now your chief human resources officer because AI agents have to be trained to perform specific tasks. They need to be trained in the culture of your organization. And then weird stuff starts happening.

Your AI agent is your best friend at work. Your AI agent is helping you complete tasks. And there are huge privacy concerns. There's huge IP concerns. But this is the future.

This is the 2026. After that is physical AI. And what I'm talking to you about about today is what's after physical AI. Yes, you will all have agentic physical robots in your organizations if you are working in the GCC in the near future. But right now, for example, our buildings don't have the docking stations to charge them at night.

There's physical infrastructure holding that back even as robotics advances. But this is the J curve. This means employability is about learning. If employability is about learning, and I'm very focused on number eight, because curiosity is a muscle you have to flex and strength train just like a bicep. It can wayne.

And curiosity and lifelong learning have to go together. And if you're in the ballpark of my youthful age, we are tired. I don't know about you, but I don't want to learn anything else. I'm pretty tired. So the premium, the human capital premium is on people willing enough to find the energy to keep learning how to use all these new technologies, thinking about how they change your clients, thinking about how they change your workflows, and being curious enough to create new ways of doing things.

This is what I call humans plus technology in my most recent book which is an edited volume of youth but also with world economic forum is calling this a human plus machine frontier. You will do less work alone and if you work exclusively alone and no one works with you you're automatable unless you're a soloreneur which is a different category of work. But this is the evolution we are making in the next four years. Not for the whole world. You have to be connected to consistent electricity.

You have to be digitally literate and you have to have a firm that supports this kind of innovation and a regulatory environment that lets you use these products without being concerned about privacy and IP. Now the other way this is changing if if learning becomes an employable skill then a new piece of this is how you get the edge on learning many of us have injectables inside us right now you may be wearing a pacemaker or an insulin pump or maybe you use ultrauman right this is an injectable that tracks your glucose so that you can work out more optimally these are different ways in which people are already injecting themselves with technology to enhance their performance, not just medically reach average human health. And non-invasive BCIs are a huge market. BCI is brain computer interface chip, but it doesn't have to be connected to the brain to make you enhanced. Injectables and wearables are the infrastructure layer of human capital.

And I want to say that again because a lot of people are talking about the infrastructure layers of AI being tokens and agents. But the infrastructure layer of human capital is injectables and wearables. How do we take that list of eight skills and optimize ourselves on it? This changes human productivity, risk associated with human productivity, and employability. And the best example I can give you is that the glasses I'm wearing right now have my speech embedded in them and you can't see it.

These are called even realities. And I use this to memorize stat to not have to memorize stats. I give a lot of public talks. My speeches are tweaked for the audience. So I get confused about which thing I'm trying to say.

So right now the words are here if I want them and it scrolls if I want them either by a ring or on my phone. This took me probably 20 hours and my 15-year-old coaching me to figure out how to use this professionally. That is that uptick that makes something gimmicky like this not be adopted. And by the way, women adopt these kinds of things 22% less than men for a bunch of reasons. But this is a wearable that enhances my productivity and my employability.

And soon this will be available in contact lens form. These glasses aren't comfortable. they need to be charged etc. Expanse has a huge contract here in the UAE and there are other companies like Mojo Vision who are producing smart contact lenses. Now if you think about education for example I have colleagues in higher education that say we need rooms where the students have no access to computers so we can verify skills with pencil and blue books like we did in the 1970s and 80s and 90s.

But if your students coming from high school were trained by AI agents and they are wearing smart contact lenses, then the technology is embedded in them and the way they know and learn and function and perform in the workplace is based on embedded technology. And that's why I'm asking, are we ready for cyborgs? Not to be cheesy, but when are you a different asset class? When are you nonhuman? And what is the regulatory environment for that?

You may have heard of brain computer interface chips. These are chips implanted into the brain that connect your your brain to a computer. It's pretty the title is explanatory. There are about 80 humans on the planet who have already had this procedure conducted. For whatever reason, all the countries allowing this all agree that this is only for medical purposes today.

Right? All of the people that have these injected are parapolgics. They cannot walk. they have broken their neck or they have ALS, a degenerative disease um that disconnects the brain from muscle function, right? But for example, the gentleman on your bottom right is using his brain to tell a robot arm that he's thirsty and to bring him water.

Whereas in the past, a parapolgic would have to wait for a nurse to set an alarm and maybe check if you're thirsty every hour. And you have to drink even if you aren't thirsty because that's when the water's being brought to you. And the gentleman in the upper right uh Nolan Arbog was the first person to be injected with Neuralink's brain computer interface chip owned by Elon Musk. And here he's playing the board game Risk with his mind. So he can now engage in board games and video games.

You can write an email with your thoughts. The first tweet sent by Brain Computer Interface Chip was from a gentleman in in Australia in 2021. that technology as is advancing but Neuralink is ahead of everybody else. They are by the way this isn't far away in some distant land. We are uh have open trials here at Cleveland Clinic at the hospital right in your view when you step out these doors.

Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi has UAE Prime in partnership with Neurolink to provide this medical service for parapolgics here in the UAE. But the other thing that Neurolink has is a robot that can do this at scale. The other organizations doing this are playing with the technology and how it connects to the brain. It is Neuralink that has developed a robot that could put this in healthy people at scale. And I've screenshot from their website their mission, right?

create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow. That is putting brain chips in all of us to enhance those employable skills I mentioned. It changes how we function when you don't have to learn new content. It's there in your head. Now, there are huge legal ramifications for this.

It's not what well is it one way, right? We're still studying this. Could you tell a BCI human to commit murder? And who's responsible? Who's liable for that in that case?

Right? There are huge legal implications. But we have to prepare for a human plus technology world in which identity and personhood are changing. What makes you a person? What is the legal ramifications for that?

And if you read literature and history when we have divided out enhanced populations, it has not been nice. It has not been pretty. It has not aligned to the values of our faiths. So we need to think carefully about human rights, equality. Could you put this in someone under 18?

Can you put this in someone non-medically right now? The answer is no. In the public sphere, no. Would there be employment discrimination if a firm said we will only hire BCIE enhanced humans or we will not hire BCI enhanced humans? So this becomes a real legal question for us.

And we get into the area of what's called neuro rights. Who owns my thoughts if I have a brain computer interface chip? The person who created the software. Chile was the first country to move on this constitutionally and created a neurorights bill and within their Supreme Court explaining that EEG, which is the the technical term for a BCI interface data, the data retrieved from that merits a mental privacy protection. We don't always control our own thoughts, own thoughts, right?

Everybody has intrusive thoughts they're not proud of or they spend a lot of money trying to get rid of with therapy. This owns all of that. So you have to be very careful about the regulatory environment within which we determine what is privacy. It is shifting as a result of this technology. And what I'm here to tell you is there's now a cyborg premium on human capital.

This is that infrastructure layer I'm telling you about. We're heading towards a world where some workers have neuro co-processors that makes them better at some tasks than your non-enhanced employees. And the way I like to describe this is would you let your child or niece or sister marry someone with a brain computer interface chip? And you think about that and you're like, I don't feel good about my child doing that. or maybe you do.

But the real answer there is that the parents of the brain computer interface chip enhanced child worry about their child marrying someone who's not enhanced. Those who are not enhanced become less capable in the workplace at least. And countries that invest in the BCI ecosystems will be ahead of this curve. And here I give you the example of China, which is building an industry at nearly 20% growth yearon-year with projections at 5.6 billion R&B by 2027.

When a country builds domestic BCI ecosystems in this way, they lay the groundwork to have a human capital advantage that hasn't existed before. And so the questions you're asking if you're at Resolve and you're coming from the legal background or if you're in finance and you're wondering where to spend your money and who to back as a startup, it's will global capital flows flow to jurisdictions that allow aggressive cognitive enhancements with high value workers and will institutional investors require you to report on augmentation policies in human capital disclosures the same way we do now for diversity. university metrics and other kinds of continuing professional development and lensure. These are the questions that have real money behind them. Now, maybe I've freaked you out on a personal level, us in this room, not macroeconomics.

What are you supposed to go do? How will you upskill yourself? Think back to what I said about chat GPT not being the point. What did you do to respond? And how can you cut that time in half now that you know BCIs are on the horizon?

What do you do to go learn what they are? Who do you listen to? What do you read? Dubai Future Foundation is an excellent resource. Following uh the productivity of Neuralink is an excellent way to do this.

There are other BCI enhanced companies. There's one called Black Rockck in Utah which is building a car for a parapolgic so he can drive with his thoughts. There's very cool things happening in this space. But you have to balance your wellness and faith with the confusingness of the ethics associated with changing the human body. Self-care and well-being are essential to this.

The only thing we have in common is that we all need sleep. And if you aren't getting enough sleep, you won't be able to handle a Chad GPT level disruption every year for the next 10 years. And the ethics are going to get different. So combining your wellness, your faith and your sleep hygiene is the most the best way to stay employable and to keep learning in this context. Thank you all very much for listening.