Fuzzy or Techie?! Why AI Needs More Interdisciplinary thinkers. Feat. Scott Hartley & Carla Gannis

Does AI need more fuzzy thinkers? How can we increase interdisciplinary perspectives in emerging tech? Can an interdisciplinary lens help us better foresee unintended consequences? In this episode of thinkPod, we are joined by Scott Hartley (author of The Fuzzy and The Techie: Why Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World) and interdisciplinary artist Carla Gannis. We talk to Scott and Carla about the disciplines missing in the AI conversation, how we can bring greater ethical thinking into AI, and the dramatic influence of sci-fi writers on emerging tech. We also tackle whether a four-year degree is an antiquated idea, how the mundane uses of AI can often be more important, and the borderless nature of data.

Connect with us & the guests:
thinkLeaders @IBMthinkLeaders
Scott Hartley @scottehartley
Carla Gannis @carlagannis

HartleyGlobal.com
CarlaGannis.com

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and best-selling author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a Financial Times business book of the month, and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company's Bracken Bower Prize for an author under 35. He is a global keynote speaker on future of work, and human skills in our technology age. He has served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and a Venture Partner at Metamorphic Ventures. Prior to venture capital, Scott worked at Google, Facebook, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He has been a contributing author at MIT Press, and has written for publications such as Quartz, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, and been featured in USA Today, Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal. He holds three degrees from Stanford and Columbia, has finished six marathon and Ironman 70.3 triathlons. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has visited over 70 countries.

Carla Gannis is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces virtual and physical works that are darkly comical in their contemplation of human, earthly and cosmological conditions. Fascinated by digital semiotics and the lineage of hybrid identity, Gannis takes a horror vacui approach to her artistic practice, culling inspiration from networked communication, art and literary history, emerging technologies and speculative fiction.
Gannis’s work has appeared in exhibitions, screenings and internet projects across the globe. Recent projects include “Portraits in Landscape,” Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY and “Sunrise/Sunset,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport. A regular lecturer on art, innovation and society, in March 2019 Gannis was a speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival on the panel “Human Presence and Humor Make Us Better Storytellers.” Publications who have featured Gannis’s work include The Creators Project, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, El PaÍs and The LA Times, among others. In 2015 her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press.

Gannis received an MFA in painting from Boston University in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century she is faculty and assistant chair of the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.