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we grow up with the movies and you know and books and that highlight just the dangers of Technology you know from The
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Matrix Terminator and 2001 Space Odyssey or blade done or whatever it is and those kind of stories do inform
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um how we think about technology moving forward and especially today that we almost seem to be living in a Sci-Fi
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movie in a way where every day we read a newspaper and we just thinking wow I could never thought this would happen
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welcome to the ripple effect the podcast that takes you on a journey through the
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minds of work and faculty I'm your host Dan Looney and in each episode we'll be
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diving deep into the inspiration behind the groundbreaking research that Wharton
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professors have conducted and exploring how their findings resonate with the world today we'll be covering a diverse
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range of topics bringing you the latest insights and knowledge that you can apply to your life into work so get
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ready to dive into new ideas with the ripple effect Stefano you've done a lot of
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conversations and and papers on this topic what was it that kind of Drew your attention uh to this area of consumer
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Behavior I've been doing work on consumer decision making for over two decades now
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and I've been fascinated by the topic of consumer Behavior because it's such a
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big part of what we do every day you know small decisions like whatever buying a coffee or toothpaste but also
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big decisions like you know buying a house or or a car and I think you have a big role to you know to to play in our
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well-being in the way we live our lives reflects a lot of things about who we are and what we want to be and so I
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think understanding consumer behavior is a very interesting fascinating fascinating lens into human psychology
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and of course as a business school Professor there's also a lot of interesting questions to ask that can
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help you know businesses and companies do better and so now we're in getting in more and
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more into this intersection of consumer behavior and how AI is playing a role how has that kind of framed your uh your
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look at at where we stand right now you know I didn't do any work related to AI
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or technology up to about 10 years ago actually my first half of my career was on completely different topics and then
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I just got interested in this because I started reading about what AI was becoming able to do and now going back
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about 2014 where the first crazy things started appearing like you know a a agent that can understand your speech or
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a self-driving car and I just you know I have originally a background in statistics and I just got curious to
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know how this neural networks we're now going to suddenly be able to do these
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things and so it became an interest and then it became a warning because then I started looking more into it and
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realized just how how powerful this technology was going to be and you know we're still in early days actually you
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know and um the implication this would have for my own children I were thinking about what kind of education they need
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at that time it was also the academic director of a big program at uh you know the university I used to work and I was
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thinking okay what do we need to teach these kids you know it's not just that
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they would have a job next year but they would have a job 10 years from now and so that became it became an area concern
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the conclusive to my professional interest at that point then I thought you know nobody's studying this in
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research we don't know much about how people perceive AI how I make them feel
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and what are the barriers to adoption and what kind of concerns people have with it and so I basically you know
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started developing this new line of research and it's been keeping me busy I
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would think that and you mentioned that for some people uh it's somewhat of a
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polarizing topic when you're thinking about how AI is having an impact but then again as you just kind of alluded
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to the hope is that for younger Generations specifically that this is going to become just kind of a normal
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part of the process of Life as we move forward correct yeah and you know if this is the kind of topic where it
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leaves no one indifference I mean you you I never speak to anyone who said I I don't know it's not interesting it's not
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relevant it's not important everybody recognizes this a momentous change I would argue historical uh change and uh
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that you will have implication for all kind of stuff in life from you know our ability to have an included Society to
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our ability to sustain Democratic processes and then on the positive incredible potential of improving
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welfare well-being and the economy so um I think there is another element to it which is really informed by popular
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culture we grow up with the movies and you know and books and that highlight just the dangers of Technology you know
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from The Matrix Terminator and 2001 A Space Odyssey or a blade done or whatever it is and those kind of stories
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do inform um how we think about technology moving forward and especially today that we
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almost seem to be living in a Sci-Fi movie in a way where every day we read a newspaper and we just thinking wow I
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could never thought this would happen and so at that moment of upheaval and change then I think some of these fears
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are also bubbling up because of that so when you think about how our identities are potentially impacted by AI I would
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imagine it's kind of a broad scope of areas that you can think about at this
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point yeah you can look a lot of different topics and I think a bit generally a question that you can ask which I find
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really interesting it's not just to ask what do people think of AI you know a
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lot of people want to learn about want to know that and how do we you know improve consumer uh belief through
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acceptance or technology for your tech company that's obviously an important
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question but maybe maybe more important or more interesting even is to think about how AI
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changes the way we think about ourselves and and there is a link to to Identity the identity like our human identity and
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more specifically also our identity and specific domains for example in consumption or at work you know there
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are a lot of things that we do in life we don't do them only for instrumental
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reasons to get a job done you know many of them are like that you know just want
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to get their job done but many things we do them partly because that's who we are
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you know we we uh we have hobbies we have passions we have ways in which we construe our personas to ourselves and
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to other people and and those personas are important and technology and automation can be a threat to those
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personas there's more and more of the activities can be made by done by machines so for example at the workplace
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one big barrier to or let's say a a potential stamping block for a lot of tech deployments in organizations is
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that people feel threatened by it you know that they may not want to adopt technology because they feel they can do
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it better or because they're afraid and now they're irrelevant so because they
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are worried about what's coming next and so some resistance is partly due to this
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by this perceived threat that people may have sometimes so communicating properly
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about technology is important and also understanding how this technology might affect people's feelings of identity so
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imagine that I am a really passionate into cooking for example and there are certain things that I do in cooking that
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I don't want to be replaced by maybe I'm baking bread imagine and I'm
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okay with using a donating machine that would automate the the physical labor of
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needy the dough which is kind of you know hard work and boring and but what I don't want is a machine that automates
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my cognitive skills my unique ability is to understand what ingredients we need and how you actually bake the bread so I
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might be feel something like a bread baking machine is be highly threatening to me and you can think of that in a lot
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of different activities maybe you can think about it in your own life you know what activities do you like and and
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which activities do you feel technology helps you and sometimes can hinder you if you're fishing if you are you know a
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cyclist if you are you know whatever musician like it could be a lot of different things is there a concern then
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to a degree of of having that level of automation of kind of a loss of skills at times with human beings with some of
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the things that you said that we'd love to do that potentially we might lose
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those at some point down the road is killing and people have been emphasized before and I was referring
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more to social emotional processes of feeling replaced which people may find highly aversive
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um even threatening but indeed that is this issue also you know skills you use it you you you develop them by using
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them you know the the typical saying is you know use it to lose it and that goes
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also with Automation and we've had some we think discussions in some professional contexts for example
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airline pilots or doctors where if you don't practice certain skills you may
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not be able to you know perform a task well and especially in situations where you may have a standard mode of
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operation which is highly automated and where the automation switches off when there is a crisis that is a moment when
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you really need the Newman agent to be on top of things and highly skilled but we've never get to practice things we
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might not be ready when the moment comes but our health our input is really needed that goes also for driving a car
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or imagine you know another pilot system or would drive you everywhere and then switches off when there is something
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really difficult on the road and now you haven't been doing driving for you know
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weeks and you don't know what to do you know that's an issue how does it
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potentially impact the labor force do you think and and even to a degree the workplace uh that we may see in the in
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the years ahead there's a lot of discussion now in labor economics and related fields on the impact of
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automation for the demand for labor and what kind of Labor so um this is not my field of expertise but
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it's a really interesting topic both from a policy making point of view but also just from a you know a regular
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person point of view where you might want to think about what is it that I'm
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gonna do you know in you know five ten years from now and the um consensus seems to think that the current wave of
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automation stands out in the potential to automate a lot of different tasks within organizations we've moved away
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from physical labor to cognitive labor and this is a big story of Industrial Revolution and so we ended up from the
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factory floor into the office right and now we are being kind of kicked out of the office and it's not clear with other
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place we can go to to the song and those are the fears people have but there's a
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lot of excitement too there is you know taking for example generative AI is you know just a new literature springing up
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now I was trying to understand what the impact of this technology for productivity image some of the early
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data are just stunning I mean you know enormous increase in productivity so there's a lot to be also you know
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excited about my own interest is a bit different from this my own research is not so much on demand for labor but more
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about workers perception of uh um of what it means to deploy more and more technology in the workplace and just to
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make a couple of examples we have a paper came out two years ago where we look at
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um we say the psychological correlates of technological unemployment meaning does it feel different when you replace
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by Machine versus when you replace by another person and what we find is that it does feel different and in fact it
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feels better that you perceive um replacement by a machine as being less threatening generally than
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replacement by another human worker because you don't tend to compare yourself to an algorithm or a robot and
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be replaced by another person therefore it's just more threatening because it's
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not a nice comparison to make you know the job went to someone else however we in the same paper we find that these
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kind of feelings are highly contingent on your temporal Focus if you think about how you feel what's more
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threatening what you prefer now then people do find a robotic replacement to be less threatening to your sense of
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self but if I ask you a different question and now I ask you what do you think about the future your economic
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future then now the preference switches around and now actually people find robotic replacement more threatening you
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know robotic replacement is a cue for a skill obsolescence you know we're talking about risk healing and
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riskilling so the moment that I get fired and I get replaced by another marketing Professor let's say I can go
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out there and try to look for another job like the one that I lost but if I get replaced by an algorithm which that
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becomes an early Professor well you know they're never gonna be another job for
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me so that's that's basically the logic of this temporal switch in another line
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of research this is a new one we haven't even published this paper uh what we're
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looking at is um uh people with the stereotypes about Ai and how they can or beliefs about Ai and how this can spill
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over to uh to the people who somehow were connected to the eye so imagine um a company relying on AI for employee
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selection that's increasingly common nowadays and what we're finding is that
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people hold stereotypes about the people that get recruited through AI systems such that if you're an employee and
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someone a colleague of yours for example learned that you were hired through an AI driven selection process people tend
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to hold the belief that you have inferior interpersonal skills they also hold the belief that you have
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Superior analytical skills so they kind of reflect the stereotypes that we have about technology onto the people that
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were selected by technology and that's probably actually in some early data we
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have and other data that doesn't just be the case actually AI can be very good at
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selecting based on interpersonal skills but people don't always believe does the impact of chat GPT play a role
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into that thought process of how AI as a replacement can be sometimes less threatening I mean chat GPT I think for
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a lot of people is believed to be a benefit at least in the early going of the work that it can do
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not so much as a replacement but as a as a support for what somebody is doing in
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the workplace its launched in November has been I think a very important moment in the
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diffusion of AI technology in society I mean this technology of generative AI has been around already for a little
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while but before it was confined in relatively narrow uh you know coordinate of society whether that was a tech
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sector or Academia or some other place like that and the deployment at scale of a technology like that where in order to
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now being able to use a generative AI algorithm like cha GPT you would only need an email address semester three
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minute registration process makes basically adoption possible for everybody and you know people have been
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so intrigued by this is this you know probably you know the listeners I've heard this already but it has been it's
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a product with the fastest adoption ever recorded it took only five days to reach
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a million users it took less than eight weeks to reach a mere 100 million users and and so basically everybody's trying
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it and playing with it and the first experience is just amazement you know that an algorithm can do this and I
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believe I probably speak for many of us but it's not obvious that any of us who
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think something like that we would be able to see in our own lifetimes and it's happening so fast so
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um yeah this is the exciting around it and of course most people that make an account for jet GPT what do they do with
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it silly things you know you want to write I don't know you ask him to write
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your own bio and just to see what he does or you ask it to write a rap song about you know Shakespeare or some kind
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of silly thing a gimmicky thing but it's very easy to understand just how pervasive the impact of this technology
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can be in a lot of different jobs I mean you can think about your own job what do
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you do in a day and however many of the things that you do in a day could be done at a reasonable level by technology
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like this with fairly limited prompting and so of course it's not as good as a
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lot of the stuff that we do but it's good enough for a lot of users and maybe
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in some context it's actually as good or maybe even better than what we can do
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ourselves well let me let me ask you then also in in your Realm of the marketing world of how AI you think will
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be continued to play a role moving forward in terms of its connection with the consumer and what the consumer will
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be expecting back from companies who are obviously using this technology yeah definitely consumer expectations
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are going up very quickly so now for example think about chatbots your expectation about the chatbot was going
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to be able to do it's gone up a lot in the last year or two and maybe from expecting a very rudimentary and
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probably you know unsuccessful kind of interaction you probably now have expectation of interaction can be pretty
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smooth and probably affected so I think that means that companies cannot rest on
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their Laurel that they keep improving they need to deploy technology for the benefit of customers and when they don't
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do that they'll likely be left behind but there are also issues around AI safety for example I know it's that the
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technology gets deployed at scale in society and there's more and more people
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are interacting with it there are also situations where we can see dangers for consumers and for example you know with
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already media stories about people falling in love with AI or you know living the the husband because AI advise
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them too and it was this famous story in the New York Times about being AI a couple of months ago
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you know the journalist was that was back to to leave the uh the wife or for a child of being Ai and uh and so
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clearly this is potentially an issue especially if you have consumers potential with mental health issues who
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interact with technology you could easily see how this can become problematic the thing to understand here
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that these algorithms are are machine learning algorithms and make predictions and respond in contexts you cannot know
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beforehand what they're going to say so if a consumer for example expresses a
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wish to end their own life it's not clear that this algorithm will say anything helpful or or safe and the the
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person who called this technology also cannot know it's not like a scripted where you know someone with clinical
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understanding of that circumstance will be able to you know embed safe instructions in the in the system the
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system does what the system does and and might not be what we needed to do so there are issues around AI safety really
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we're going to see a lot of actions also in the regulation side but I think it's
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you know exciting and also scared at the same time yes so is it kind of important
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then to kind of frame the use of AI as complementary to what we already have in society instead of relying upon it as
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kind of the the next step and how to do everything in in our lives yeah I agree Dan I think you make a good point and I
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think too much of the discussion around the AI over the last few years has been of the kind I call human or AI human or
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machine meaning we've been thinking about how we can take the human out of the equation take for example
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self-driving car the way that the algorithm been working is that you have a human driver driving on the road with
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an algorithm recording everything that's happening and then the algorithm would
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learn what to do when a particular set of parameters face the algorithm so now in this situation what would a human do
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copying the human this is basically how a lot of this machine learning algorithm
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work but I think we need to change gear now and I think we need to go into the mindset I call human and machine not
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just understand how we can mimic a human decision process so we can maybe do it instead of the human but focus more on
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how do we Leverage The Unique capabilities of algorithms and of humans which are different and complementary in
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order to improve business processes so it's not about you know replacing the
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human I think it's making the human more effective more inspiring more productive
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thank you for listening to the ripple effect we hope you found this episode informative and engaging don't forget to
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