Cybertraps Podcast

Welcome to Cyber Traps podcast.

I'm Jethro Jones, your host, and I am here again at the Inch 360 conference in beautiful Spokane, Washington on the Gonzaga campus, and I've got Adam Gigstad here with me.

Adam, welcome to the show.

Appreciate you being here.

Yeah, thanks.

Glad to be here.

Yeah.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do.

Yeah, so I have a consultancy that I work with a number of partners and agencies and companies to basically use ai.

We try to use the most cutting edge AI we can find to solve problems that are causing issues in both day-to-day flows, and pushing the envelope on how we can do things better and innovate in ways more quickly.

And, cover more area than we would without those tools.

And so I'm always checking out the latest tools that are being published and iterated on and trying to integrate those into the work of both existing projects.

And I consult with startups to help them kind of get established more quickly and have couple that I am on a leadership team myself.

Yeah, very cool.

The AI space, there's a lot going on there and a lot of fast developments and things that.

You know, it's been around for decades and yet everybody learned about it.

Essentially, it became accessible is how I talk about it in 2022, when chat GPT was released.

But people have known about it and done things with it for a long time before that.

So one of the things that I'm really interested in is everybody's talking about using AI to speed things up and do things faster.

When I talk about this, one of the things I ask is.

Do you even need to do that thing in the first place?

Because sometimes it, you don't need AI to help you do it faster.

You just need to not do it because it's not actually essential.

What first, what's your take on that approach?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of inertia in the processes we have, and so part of it's a people problem of asking anyone do you actually need to do this?

You know, sometimes it's kind of, they get defensive like, well, this is the way we've always done

it.

Yeah,

yeah.

So sometimes I think the first step is.

You know, if you can use AI to get early wins and bring the cost of doing that down that can be helpful for a while you figure out is this whatever it is, something we should actually be doing or doing in this way.

Yeah.

So the other piece that I talk about AI a lot is using it for innovation or to do things that you couldn't do beforehand.

And so what are your thoughts on expanding our capabilities using AI instead of just speeding things up?

yes.

I have a lot of thoughts on this.

As a software engineer that uses a lot of AI tools, the capabilities that I have as someone who's been in software for a while to do things with languages and tools that I have never even heard about sometimes is just extraordinary.

For example, I'm working in Postgres and, oh, there's not a Postgres extension for this thing I'm gonna do.

I'll just use the AI tool to go write one.

And it might be 10 lines and I can review it another AI to make sure it's not like having glaring security issues and deploy it.

And that's a couple hour process versus like, oh, I need to go hire a Postgres extension developer.

Right.

And you're seeing that with.

A lot of people in their development processes who are embracing that kind of workflow to really get those those multipliers and their output by doing things in that way.

/

Yeah I think those kinds of examples are incredibly powerful.

And if I may just share one that, that makes a lot of sense for me and is a little more close to home.

My oldest daughter has Down Syndrome and she needed to give a talk and she can write and text and communicate fairly well.

But doing something like a five minute talk is a pretty big ask for her.

And so what we did is I had her write everything out in her.

In her long form and she texted it to me and it was just gibberish long run on sentence it was hard to understand and, but I put it into the AI and I said, here's what she's talking about.

Here's the background, here's her perspective and here's what she wrote so far.

Write a talk.

And so then she, it wrote this talk that actually turned out to be.

Very coherent, really got to the heart of what she was trying to say so that the meaning was there and the value was there.

And then when she went to go deliver it, she can read.

And so she was able to read that talk and do a much better job than she would have otherwise.

Couple months later, she was actually here at Gonzaga talking to a special education class, and I didn't do any of that, and I put her in front of those kids and.

And it was just, it was really terrible because she didn't have a tool that could help her articulate what she was really feeling.

And in the moment she got too flustered and couldn't communicate effectively.

Whereas had we gotten some questions beforehand and written those out and given her responses, then used AI to help her write those in a way that other people could understand, then it would've been a much more beneficial thing.

And when I did that with her, I was like, okay, this is where.

This is really powerful because it's not just like, let's write an email.

We didn't need to write, or let's write an email that you could just write yourself.

This was taking her capability and this paper came out a few months ago that was about cognitive debt, and I call this cognitive equity that
you are putting money in the bank, essentially getting equity on this skillset that you don't ha have access to and how powerful that is.

Any thoughts about that?

I do actually.

I've been thinking about this a lot of, I mean, I think that's adjacent to the idea of using AI for accessibility improvements and so myself, I've historically had some
issues with attention exec and executive function, and so when I've been using software and I've been fortunate to have those skills to build software that helps me offload.

Mental tasks that might have been difficult to juggle into systems that I can create.

It takes a long time for me to create them, but I can do it.

'cause I've been trying at it for a long time, but then when these AI tools came out, it's like, it was immediately like, oh wow, okay, this is even better.

I can do more of this.

Just in terms of managing information both just in, individual sessions, but I'm very interested in like memory systems for organizing large.

Pools of information and I suspect that maybe if you don't have some of those issues, you actually might miss the potential of these tools to help with that for everyone regardless of issues they have.

And so since I've thought about it so much, I feel like I recognize that potential in a lot of these tools right away for situations just like that,

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's one of the things that, that my life experience has given me, this perspective that other people may not have.

And I see ways that it can really be empowering and supportive and very helpful and like make things possible for my daughter specifically, that just were not possible before.

And so in, in the field of disability and assistive technology devices, there are a lot of things that open those doors for kids.

Kids who are nonverbal, who can use, like things like Prolo q to be able to say something the AI makes it possible for them to put those things together and then not just say, me, go to the
store, but they can say, I'd like to go to the store so that it's something that is not this robotic, awkward thing, but it actually can bring in some of their personality, some of their voice.

Those things are possible.

They're not perfect yet for sure, but they are certainly possible and can really help people who have disabilities.

And like you said, people who don't have those disabilities or don't have exposure to 'em may not see what a boon that could be.

Yeah.

and actually there was a hackathon style event a couple years ago that I was the lead on a project that was presenting there, and I still think it would be an interesting thing to build.

I didn't end up building it, but even then a few, maybe six months after GPT came out this idea of building a while you're in a
meeting or a conversation even like this, having a visualization that gives you a tree view of the concepts that are being discussed.

As they're happening.

So you can look at that and anchor yourself in the context of the con conversation.

Say you have working memory issues or some other disability, like just that whole body of software.

I think there's so much we can do there.

And even now with the bigger, faster models.

I mean in general I'm optimist about AI and I think we should be using it to help people make their lives better and maybe

Work less and have higher quality interactions with people and their families.

And I think those types of things really fit in that space.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And we're at the very beginning of this, right?

Like it's, we got a long way to go before we see what these things can really do.

And I imagine the empowerment of my daughter being able to lead a more normal life because of some of these interventions that can help her.

Yeah, it's it's interesting.

One of my colleagues, Graham Moorhead told me that when he got into ai around 2000, so a little while ago

bit before chat, GPT

he like he was getting into it late and that he might've missed it.

Yeah.

And now looking back, it's like, yeah, that was maybe a miscalculation.

But he got a great headstart and con contribute a lot now.

But I think and a few years ago when I was having that same thought of like, oh, I'm doing these other things, but maybe AI seems interesting.

I was actually working at Google and testing out their internal LLMs that hadn't been released yet.

They hadn't started really releasing them for mainstream use, and I was using it.

And just thought, wow, okay, so this is where we're at now.

This is weird and awesome and maybe I should go build in this space.

And so now that's what I'm doing.

But even then I was like, okay, well I don't have a master's in AI and ml.

Am I gonna be able to break into this?

And it turns out that's not a strict requirement

Yeah.

That might be a strict requirement to have a specific job at a specific company, but that's not necessarily a requirement to do things with it, especially with all these commercially available consumer facing tools that do exist.

And you can do a lot of cool stuff with them already.

Yeah, definitely.

yeah.

So Adam, how do people connect with you?

Learn more about what you're doing?

Yeah, so, they can find me on LinkedIn or message me over email adammakingstadtech.com working on a lot of cool projects.

So always glad to connect with other people working on things or who need help with things.

Very passionate about this area.

And so, love to connect with anyone who's interested.

Cool.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.