Tech World Human Skills, Episode 90
Ben Pearce with Wilhelm Klein (Zetamotion)
Transcript. Times match the episode.
[00:02] Ben Pearce
Hi there, I'm Ben Pearce and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. Every episode we talk through how to thrive in the tech world, not just survive. Now, if you want me to work with your team, just give me a shout. I love to help teams be more influential, memorable and successful with their stakeholders. Head over to www.techworldhumanskills.com to book a chat.
[00:30] Ben Pearce
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us as we chat about another fascinating topic. We are talking about the re-pricing of human value. What on earth does that mean? Well, keep listening and all will be revealed. Now, our guest today has got some great experience in this area. He's got a PhD in AI ethics and is the CEO of exciting AI automation company, Zetamotion. So joining us from Germany, please welcome Wilhelm Klein. Wilhelm, it is brilliant to have you with us.
[01:14] Wilhelm Klein
Thank you very much, Ben, and thank you for the brilliant introduction. Very excited for the conversation.
[01:20] Ben Pearce
Well, it's a pleasure to have you with us. Now, for all those people that are listening that have not come across you or your work before, could you tell us a little bit about your background?
[01:32] Wilhelm Klein
Absolutely. I'm one of those hybrid mixture dogs or cats that combine different influences from different areas. Mine is a classic story of going here, going there, following various interests and then finding myself in special places. I have always been a geek from every early age on when I started dissecting my parents' vacuum cleaner and putting it together relatively successfully with just a minor set of screws not finding their place back. And I've been a quite great admirer of science fiction and philosophy, the classic writers and so on. And as I was making my way through education and academia, I found myself pulled in different directions trying to understand the world, trying to understand technologies and also finding my own personal path and my own personal set of values there.
And through different studies in places here in Europe and also quite some time, more than a decade in Asia, in Hong Kong and in Korea, I have arrived at that field of study that at the time was still very, very, very, very niche. And nobody really talked about any of this, but AI ethics was already interesting at the time. Now, of course, everyone talks about it, but 15 years ago, not so much. From there, I did my PhD in this field in technology ethics with some connection to what is now called AI ethics. But I also shortly after I finished my PhD, got engaged in the startup world because well, it's this whole own story, but it has a lot of advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages.
And there's so many opportunities to be had in the entrepreneurship journey. And we started with classic deep tech technology, some cool AI before it was cool in search of a good area of application. We got started in something that was actually motion capture and six degrees of freedom tracking, which is most well known from things like movie making, right? When the guys are running around in the suits with the white blobs everywhere. And we came up with a way of doing that better with the same, almost the same level of precision and saw some very good traction in that as well, especially in the field of large crowd interaction concerts or museum visitors.
And we got started on that in early 2020, which was a fantastic timing to get into anything that has to do with large crowds and lots of people gathering in one area. So more or less overnight, all of that traction and that whole trajectory went out the window and we would we had to find something else to do. And we did, we came across a challenge put out by a large manufacturer in North America. And they had a challenge, which was to do computer vision based quality control. And we figured, hey, look, if we if we ditch the six degrees of freedom tracking, and the three d, if we ditch the three d tracking, and we just double down on the on the item recognition and analysis, we can solve the problem.
And that's how we got into this area. And that sort of connects already to some of the topics that we might be talking about this, the importance of not being too attached to a specific direction or something that that you think is the right direction and finding a new way. And that's, that's where we are now. I'm still trying to keep one leg in academia or in the broader interesting topics of the world. But my main day today is indeed with with Zetamotion.
[06:08] Ben Pearce
Yeah, brilliant. So the topic we're going to talk about today is this phrase, and I know you've written an article about it, it's this idea of re-pricing human value. Now, it sounds really impressive, but I'm not sure I fully understand it. So can we start there and can we unpack what's this topic that we're going to be talking about for the next few minutes?
[06:35] Wilhelm Klein
Absolutely. And it's a bit of a cheeky title, because I mean, technically talking about humans and pricing humans and the value of humans, it kind of can have a bit of a dystopian ring to it as well, which is intentionally to grab some attention, right. But it does it does connect to the term human resources, which in itself, you might also think has a strange ring to it if you think about it. But it is true that from from a systems perspective as a as a company, as an organization, humans bring a certain value to that larger organizational goal to that larger organizational structure. And that value is shifting.
And the shift is due to the wider and easier availability of intelligence, broadly speaking. So in a sense, for the last, well, essentially forever, but especially since industrialization, skills like raw intelligence, analytical power, the ability to connect the dots to ingest a lot of material to memorize, to be able to to go through the various parts and steps often of an organizational task was priced very highly. Right. This is what we all went to university for. We learned to to be able to review, to research, to read, to produce output from what we understood about what we read, for the most part. And quite a lot of us essentially built our ego around that to a good degree as well.
Right. This is what I'm good at. I went to to uni and I learned to be a lawyer, a doctor, engineer, a computer scientist, what, whatever it might be. Right. And the skills that you were taught were mostly cerebral, were mostly, if you want to look at it psychologically, system two things. Right. It's the stuff that that requires a lot of deep thinking. But if you've, you know, if you've paid attention, that's that's exactly what a lot of models are very good at now. And I keep getting better. The kind of things that require this raw power more and more of that is available. Maybe in many areas, it's not quite yet where a top expert might be in terms of performance.
And it still acts as a bit of an idiot savant in some cases. But still, the trend is very obvious. This this simple, reduced cerebral type of work, that kind of ability is going to be replaceable in many ways. And maybe not if not fully replaceable, at least very significantly supplementable, which means there won't be as much demand for that in the future. So this this requires some rethinking. OK, if this ability of us humans, which we previously priced and that's where the repricing comes from, so incredibly highly if that is that ability is available for cheaper and easier and on demand and 24 seven and without any fatigue or moodiness or anything of that.
So, for example, for a human being of a sort, where where does the the next value or the additional value of the human lie? And how can we focus on that? Or what does that mean for us as as a manager or as an employee? Where does that lead us? That's where where that question came from.
[10:48] Ben Pearce
So, this re-pricing of value is saying lots of the technical heavy lifting there are remembering the learning all of these things and then regurgitating it into solutions, all of that kind of stuff or writing code that's going to solve a problem. All of that kind of heavy lifting can be outsourced to AI more and more and more and therefore if that was just your value, sadly that's going down in price because it might be cheaper. Might be. I mean the economics are changing quite regularly on AI at the moment but it might be cheaper to get that from AI and maybe higher quality to get that from AI than it is and so therefore you're saying those skills are devaluing.
So, I mean it's starting to get pretty obvious but why is that important to people? Why is this issue important to people?
[11:41] Wilhelm Klein
Yeah. And here I would I would probably differentiate between a kind of management perspective and employee perspective. And I'll start from from the management perspective, because as as someone who is indeed hiring and that is the position that I am in, I maybe 10 years ago, I may have just hired for raw intelligence and I may have accepted certain, call it, shortcomings or disadvantages in terms of what is sometimes referred to as soft skills. And at least that would not have been my priority or maybe not as much. And now I'm very, very mindful of that. I do. I of course, I have to care about skill.
But that skill, that hard skill is now very much also encompassing the ability to to stay up to date with what's happening on the AI front. But what I'm paying even more attention to is what's the human? What's the person behind it? Right. What how how far along are they on their personal journey to become a well grounded, fully integrated human essentially? Right. How well do they fit? How well are they able to use wisdom to see where to steer the available intelligence that we have on tap basically? And I need someone who can who is is a great addition to the team and is able to deal with a corporate setup because I don't have space for someone who can't do that anymore.
But then also to, as I said, have the kind of wisdom that that additional perspective that we need to see beyond the immediate task, beyond the immediate skill set to connect the dots from a wider perspective and see where else we can pull another angle or another type of technology into our company, into whatever we are looking to achieve and make use of that productively. Right. So there's this this this it's a bit complex to to encompass all of these added dimensions that flow into it. But what I what I wrote in my article was very much referencing what I what I what I recommend, especially young people where I sometimes speak at schools to focus on what they do.
And that's also what I'm looking for for given future employee, which is this well roundedness and groundedness. And that encompasses elements of of the personal development, the personal journey, and then also a well rounded world perspective and knowledge, not just an insular ability to to have a very hard skill set on one narrow topic, but to really understand broader processes as well and keep an eye on what's happening in the world, essentially.
[15:03] Ben Pearce
So, as a leader of a tech company you're saying the people that I need for me to be successful as an organisation have changed and now just having the technical chops the subject matter expertise is not enough and the people I need need to be more well rounded and they need to have those soft professional human skills whatever you want to call them but they are becoming more and more important for you becoming successful as an organisation. And then what about if we flip that from an individual's perspective? So if you're not leading a company but you're somebody that's trying to thrive in the industry tell me about that.
[15:42] Wilhelm Klein
Yeah, yeah, in a sense, it's it's applying what I what I said I'm looking for. But it's to go a bit more into detail. What exactly do I mean by that? It means, right, to just return for a moment to that, to that question, what do I need as a tech company? Let's let's unpack that for a moment, because we are seeing a kind of compression in the in the corporate world, and especially in the startup world, because the startup world is the they are the entities that have to move the fastest and have the highest pressure in terms of competition. So what we see is that everyone has to accelerate.
And previously, the acceleration may have been covered by additional people. And that was accepted. That is what investors would would accept, okay, you need to grow, you need to scale, you need more people, that's going to be covered, right, and that can be priced into your products and so on. Now, the prices of the products are driven down by competition, investors are expecting more to be done with less people. And if you have less people doing more work, that means it's all built on leverage and leveraging these tools and these available new technologies, which means I have a core team, which where everyone has to be excellent, essentially, the core team has to work like a beautiful, not just machine, but a beautiful human superstructure that can greatly leverage their individual skills and individual input and supplement it with the AI tools available and then produce output that previously would require twice or three times the amount of people.
And this is the structure that we're heading towards for all organizations. I'm absolutely certain. And if that is true, there is no place anymore for anyone who just used to be this simple cog in the machine that just did one task. Everyone now has to be an orchestrator of these various leveraging tools. Otherwise, you're falling behind because you might find someone else who who does this, right. And that is, on the one hand, as I said, the ability to use all of these tools. But it is also the ability to, to keep an finger on the pulse of what's happening, to have the the necessary range of experiences of perspectives to know what's going on in the world, right.
So returning to what I what I tell students when I'm invited to speak at a high school, because it very much applies to anyone as an individual, whether you're a student or later in your career, go out, go leave your country, spend some time abroad, right, work in a different culture, find yourself in a setting that you're uncomfortable with. Why? Because it broadens your mind, it opens up creativity, it gives you new perspectives, right. And I tried to have a very, very diverse team of different people from different parts of the world with different perspectives. And that's where some of the real magic happens when we all get together and we talk, and then someone may have visited some country somewhere and they had some solution for something that nobody thought of, right.
So this is really, really, really part of, of what I believe is going to be more and more important. What kind of person are you not just what skill set you have, but how well traveled are you how well informed are you of what's happening, not just technology wise, but also society, culturally, politically, right. All of this is going to become more and more important. But then deeper, where we go to a very personal and some might call it spiritual level is the personal journey, the the questions of how do I work, how do I function and reviewing yourself in from that perspective as well.
And how do I work in an organization? Who am I really? Or what is this this construct is walking talking biobot that is housing its own sort of intelligence right in inside of this wetware. How does it function? What makes it tick? What? What is it? What are my goals? What do I want? And how do I work? When so some some examples might be on for my own personal journey, things that that require metacognition and that takes time to learn would be something as simple as preparing some material and spending many hours on on a given presentation. And then sending that over to an advisor, for example, and the advisor sends it back and it's all red lined.
And I immediately may may have that reaction going, Oh, come on. Screw you. Right. And then then that's the moment, right? That's the moment where you need to step back and look at this like, what, what, where's that reaction coming from? I explicitly sent this in order to receive feedback. And clearly the goal here from an organizational superstructure perspective is to achieve the best outcome of what we are looking to do here, which in this case is producing this document, right? And I sent it deliberately in order to get feedback and advice. And yet I get it back. And what does my brain spit out immediately?
Oh, come on. Screw you. Which is rubbish. How that's completely unconstructive. Right. And this is this is something that I believe easily you can just dismiss and say, OK, that's just, you know, that's just human, right? You don't pay closer attention to it. But that's the kind of skill. That's the kind of ability that I mean when I, when I say, where are you on your, on your journey, on your personal integration journey and your personal self understanding journey. So that's the, that's the time we should stop and look at really deeply at the question, where does that come from? What was it my ambition to impress this advisor rather than have the best task completion that I theoretically set out to do?
What is it that offends me? Is my ego hurt by this? And what can I learn from that? What's happening inside myself? And how can I get better at this? And that's, that's the kind of inner work that that is becoming more and more important because that's, that's the kind of that that's what can make that can elevate a mediocre company to one that is running with passion, with, with, with drive, with energy. And lots of people who are very well aware of themselves, of their abilities, of their shortcomings, of their weaknesses, where they're very open about that, where they are very accepting of it with themselves and with others, communicate freely about it.
And you can get rid of so much friction, all of the anger, the jealousy, the interpersonal messiness that sometimes can really bog down companies and gets worse the bigger the team grows. All of this is becoming more important and it's becoming more accentuated as the teams compress and have to leverage or have to make more from less. So that's why we are arriving at this, at this idea that that's a real repricing happening. And this is something that you should really, really pay more attention to.
[24:33] Ben Pearce
So let's have a think then if we are somebody from a background that has been, let's say, a more specialist technical subject matter expert, that's sort of where, where you've how you've paid the mortgage for the last few years. Practically, what would you do then to start to make you to reprice yourself or modify yourself to so that you can reprice yourself in the modern AI world?
[25:02] Wilhelm Klein
And maybe that's a bit counterintuitive, right? I assume that everyone knows that you have to upskill yourself already on the hard skills, right? Everyone knows, yes, I have to spend more time on learning how to use these, these AI tools. But counterintuitively, you need to really invest in yourself as well. So the same way, and you can take that from an engineering perspective, that might be helpful. View yourself as non exceptional. You are not different from the machine, basically. You're just a different machine. You're a walking, talking bio bot that has evolved through time to carry the genes forward. And in order to do that, you need a decision making system that can navigate an unsecured world and make predictions.
That's exactly what the brain is basically, right? Or even beyond that, take the whole bio form that is generating your consciousness, that is generating your persona. And it's also generating that construct that you call yourself, right? Which is a story that the brain tells itself and reinvents every morning when you wake up, okay, we're booting up that self again. And that is something that you can review very systematically and from a very engineering perspective. Where does it come from? What are the components? Where, how does that self construct itself? And how does that self react and navigate? And there's a long tradition and different cultural perspectives.
And you can see how to do that effectively. From a psychological perspective, it's called metacognition. The ability to review yourself and realize yourself as from a third party perspective or third person perspective, essentially. And realize that you are a construct as well. And you can then see where it comes from. And you can spend deliberate time on working through that. So concretely, what does it mean? You can start with something as simple as journaling. You can start your morning and your evening, or finish your day in the evening and start your day in the morning by writing down some reflections, setting some goals, reviewing reactions, reviewing thoughts that you have and trying to trace where those come from, what the deeper mechanisms there are, what you are happy with and what you're not happy with.
Quite often, most people, I would say, have an idea of themselves and who they would like to be. And then they have the reality. And quite often, we are better at lawyering the actual real person that is navigating in the world and trying to find excuses and explanations why it isn't living up to. Who we want to be. But rather than doing that, rather than doing post hoc lawyering and rationalization, it really pays to instead look at it very closely and see, okay, where is this mismatch between the person that I could be and that I want to be. And the person that is actually instantiated and is actually operating in the world.
And here, I mean, there's a lot of traditions that one might look at. But my personal flavor of this would be from a mindfulness perspective, which is just trying to be aware as much as possible in every second of your life, essentially. What is happening? Where is what is in the world? What is coming at me? And then also being very aware of your inner workings. And perhaps very importantly, always look at that with benign eyes, always looking at your reactions and not be judgmental about it. You might react in a way that you don't want to react. So don't beat yourself up about it afterwards.
Oh, you idiot, you shouldn't have said that. That's not good. Instead, say, okay, it happened. And there was a reason why, why that happened. Let's look at that and see what we can do better in the future.
[29:52] Ben Pearce
So I think if I sort of try and play back what I think I've heard is it's this idea that you're trying to understand yourself, be self-aware of yourself a little bit more and things like journaling might be a great way to help you do that and to be able to step outside and think of yourself a bit like a system, a bit like a piece of architecture and think, "Ah, okay, right, well, this thing's happening and I'm reacting like that. Why is that?" and like picking that apart and then from there you can start to say, "Well, actually, these might be some gaps or these might be some improvement areas.
These might be some things that I could do differently." And then you can build a bit of a logical plan on going, "Right, do this thing, this thing, this thing and this might help me develop this area, this gap that I might have or this area that I want to develop in."
[30:50] Wilhelm Klein
How much time does one spend maintaining the car, upgrading the car, looking at the causal chains inside the machines, inside the engine and so on, right? And fine tuning that and getting it to the best possible state. And that's what we should do as well. And you can do that as well with with your own brain with your own full machinery. It's just it takes that that bit of self awareness. It takes that stepping outside your just everyday experience because it's so easy to just flow through the day without paying attention. And in many ways, the world that we live in a structure to do that and give you distractions at any point of time that allows you to just go from shallow experience to shallow experience, which is not meant as a judgment.
It's meant as a perspective shallowness. You're not going deep in your experience or in your awareness of what's operating there in the world.
[31:57] Ben Pearce
And if you sort of think about some of the people that you've seen perhaps go through this journey a little bit, is there any common themes? Is there any common gaps to use that phrase that I learned earlier that people often have to and that you see commonly people need to invest time into developing?
[32:27] Wilhelm Klein
There's quite often someone at the table who seems a bit more calm than others, who seems less reactive, who seems to be level headed. And very often when you when you talk to that person, they have gone through some some very dramatic event because that's that's a great, great, very unfortunate in many cases, but it is a it is a shortcut. If you will, for a lot of people to to be a lot more matter aware of who they are, what's important in life, what is important, what is worth paying attention to or getting right up about and what isn't. So there are these examples already out there.
But then equally, you also find the people with with the known cognitive biases or the known traits that that you find in less integrated people, you get the pathological people pleasers, for example, who rather than focusing on the goal, just want to make the immediate supervisor happy at all costs. And they're extremely anxious about receiving negative feedback, for example, I'm in that camp, to some degree, originally, I, that's one of these things that I had to really learn to overcome to do much better with with negative feedback and to stop looking so much at trying to please and have people like me, but rather actually focus on the things that are that are important.
Right. And be less needy of recognition and validation from third parties, but just be happy with myself. And there are many types like this that you can find the anxious people, the overly protective people, the ego driven people, all of which are characteristics of an integrated personality, essentially. And if you can, if you can identify that in yourself, that's fantastic, then then that's a great step to get started. Another item that or another suggestion, what, what one can do is you may have had some opportunity to engage in a leadership seminar, or there are sometimes team building events and activities or I see you some efforts, especially from HR departments usually that try to get people out of the simple task focused mode.
I would invite everyone to maybe try to take that a bit more seriously or to actually, yeah, allow space for that and to see the value in that many companies even have budget for someone who wants to take meditation seminar or wants to pick up a course on mindfulness or something along those lines. Right. Because it is it is beneficial for the company as well. But these are clear. These are great starting points for anyone who wants to work on on that side of their their skill set or their their their their journey a bit more.
[36:03] Ben Pearce
Do you know what? I've just glanced at the clock and time has just vanished. It's evaporated and we're heading towards the end of the episode. So I guess we've talked about quite a lot of quite deep and maybe quite challenging topics here. What would be your key takeaways? How would you summarize the kind of conversation and key takeaways for people to take away?
[36:31] Wilhelm Klein
Now, I would say that the change that we are seeing, the coming disruptions to to use the buzzword are an invitation, an invitation to do something for yourself to pay attention to the the kind of thoughts and things that you may have otherwise dismissed as something not so important. Or I'll deal with that later, right? The kind of sometimes existential angst or questions or unhappy items that you don't like about yourself. But you you you just swish them aside and don't know I have to bog down. I have to concentrate on what's important. I have to concentrate on my work. I don't have time for this messy human stuff.
This is an invitation to actually deal with that because this is now the important thing. Right. Where previously you may have thought, ah, this is this can wait. This is not my priority. Make it your priority. Now is the time to deal with these kind of things because the future organizations, the future superstructures that you might be part of will heavily rely on the people that that are integrated, that are the most well grounded, well informed, well read people. And that's what I would recommend everyone to to to steer towards to to see that they can become that.
[37:56] Ben Pearce
Yeah, no. It's fascinating as I sort of reflect on it and sort of reflect on my years in industry as well. It's almost like, I think it's always been the case that if you had somebody that was technically super smart, that could also empathize with customers, that had some tenacity to solve problems, could communicate effectively to different sponsors, they were always going to be prized people and they were going to be successful. But there was also the back office where perhaps you didn't need all of that and you could get away with it. And actually what you're sort of saying is that that is now becoming the normal.
The back office is disappearing and that's what we need. We need people that can think creatively, empathize with people, communicate effectively, exercise great judgment, and have got some good AI skills so they can orchestrate some of the deep tech that's handing behind it. That's going to be the new normal is kind of what you're saying.
[38:58] Wilhelm Klein
Exactly. That's exactly right. And of course, being on this show, that's very much teaching, preaching to the to the choir, right? That's exactly right. This was already these people were already the superstars. But what was previously superstars is now becoming the only required people, essentially, in the back office will disappear more and more. And you want to be in that you want to get out of that back office and you want to be one of those superstars yourself.
[39:31] Ben Pearce
Yeah, fascinating. Well, now if people have really enjoyed what we've been talking about and want to find more about the things that you've written, the things you do, how can people best get in touch with you?
[39:44] Wilhelm Klein
Yeah. And I'm on LinkedIn, of course, as everyone is. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me via our website, zetamotion.com But I also have a personal website called Wilhelm Klein dot net all in small letters and no, no dots in between.
[40:08] Ben Pearce
Brilliant. And I'll pop that in the show notes so that people can find that. And that's where your article is that we've based a lot on this, you know, on the re-pricing. That's come from an article that's on there as well. So, well, I mean, the final thing for me to say is it's been a brilliant conversation. Really enjoyed thinking about this topic with you in a different way. So thank you so much for spending time with us.
[40:32] Wilhelm Klein
Thank you, Ben. Very, very much enjoyed it. Thank you.
[40:39] Ben Pearce
Don't go yet. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and rate the show. It really helps us grow and book new great guests. And remember, if the podcast isn't enough for you and you want weekly micro-learning delivered straight to your inbox, sign up to the Tech World Human Skills Weekly. Head over to www.techworldhumanskills.com to sign up.
