From VUCA to VU-Huh?: Making Sense of an Accelerating World

Source: Pixabay via pexels.com

Welcome back to Signal Shift! In this candid recap, we share our biggest takeaways and highlight the signals that are rapidly becoming reality. We discuss the mind-boggling speed of generative AI adoption and its profound impact on society, from new "AI colleagues" to the disturbing mental health implications of unchecked technology. We also touch on the hopeful side, sharing real-life examples of innovative climate policy and the importance of intentionally building relationships in an accelerating world. We share some significant life and team updates this week, making this an episode you won't want to miss.

Selected Links:

• Alexander, Bick, et al. "The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI." On the Economy, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 23 Sep. 2024, www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/sep/rapid-adoption-generative-ai. Accessed 27 Aug. 2025.

• Jijo, Malayil. "China's Kaiwa plans world's first pregnancy humanoid robot." Interesting Engineering, 20 Aug. 2025, interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-worlds-first-pregnancy-humanoid-robot. Accessed 27 Aug. 2025.

• Tomotaka, Hirabayashi. "How Generative AI is transforming the tourism industry." EY, 18 Mar. 2025, www.ey.com/en_jp/insights/consulting/how-generative-ai-is-transforming-the-tourism-industry. Accessed 27 Aug. 2025.

Past Episodes (referenced in this episode):

• https://www.horizonshiftlab.com/post/decoding-artificial-thought-what-our-interactions-with-ai-reveal

• https://www.horizonshiftlab.com/post/love-llcs-robots-your-guide-to-the-new-family

• https://www.horizonshiftlab.com/post/memory-hacks-kindness-acts-the-future-of-feeling-good

• https://www.horizonshiftlab.com/post/signals-from-seoul-future-clues-in-everyday-life

• https://www.horizonshiftlab.com/post/look-up-in-the-sky-flying-cars-planes-and-change

• https://www.horizonshiftlab.com/post/the-art-of-friendship-cultivating-your-social-muscle

Episode Transcript:

Raakhee (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Signal Shift. I'm Raakhee and after a very long time, I am back together with Sue for the podcast. Sue, it is so good to be chatting with you again. Do you want to share any highlights from your time away and just any updates for everyone?

Sue (00:17)
Yeah, thanks, Raakhee. Hello, everyone. It is so good to be back. I have been away for quite a few months now. And I guess the biggest news is that I am now a mom. And so it's been a crazy journey, ⁓ as other new moms will attest to. ⁓ other than that, before that happened, we were able to go on a couple trips, some of which you've seen in a couple of those episodes. But I am so happy I'm able to be back.

and with you, Raakhee, and with everyone who's watching and listening.

Raakhee (00:50)
Oh, thank you, Sue. We are so happy for you and excited and just, yeah, huge congratulations. Yeah, and it's great to have you back. With that, I will say, we have another important announcement. And that is that unfortunately, Lana has left Horizon Shift Lab and that includes her participation on the podcast as well. So, HSL.

as we refer to Horizon Shift Lab in short, is now primarily myself and Sue. And nothing else changes. We will be here every week for the podcast and all our other offerings. We definitely miss Lana a lot, but she got a really great job opportunity that she had to take. So it's kind of a new start for us. It's a new beginning for us. So yeah, I think this week.

we wanted to sort of wrap up the month of August and since we're coming back after such a long time, we wanted to sort of pause and look back at our past episodes in the recent months and talk about the signals or the data or even the emotions, you know, that felt very significant or very quickly becoming reality in front of our eyes.

or just things that really made some sort of impression on us. So yeah, think Sue, what's a big takeaway or what's something that really made an impression on you from our episodes in the last couple of months?

Sue (02:18)
Well, it's great to have the benefit of fresh eyes or fresh ears ⁓ and some hindsight as I was able to listen to all these episodes. Raakhee and Lana, you were both very hard at work while I was gone. And not only did I really love the signals that you all brought to Signal Shift every week, but also the guests. I learned so many new things and just really...

appreciated how many different kinds of careers there are in different roles in future facing industries. So I'll just start with that. think overall, you know, I had two big takeaways listening to a lot of the episodes. And I think one was just it really hit home how rapid the spread and integration of generative AI has been. And that's no surprise. You know, people say that all the time, but

Man, it was mentioned in almost every episode on the impact of AI in these different industries and themes. So, you know, I think some big takeaways for me was like, that's really cool. We're just new terms and phrases related to AI. There was one episode where a guest had called AI, her AI colleague. That was the first time I had ever heard that. And I was like,

Yeah, I guess that's right. It's here. There are AI colleagues now. ⁓ And she also helped break my own assumption that communicating with AI chatbots as colleagues or as friends is just an inherently bad thing. And she really challenged my assumption about that. There were other things that were just eye-opening around, I think, Raakhee, had mentioned maybe lawyers defending.

the right for AI roles on LinkedIn to do these jobs. And soon enough, maybe there might be anti-discrimination laws regarding AI bots, right? So it's here. ⁓ One interesting conversation that came out of this, ⁓ now that we have a kid, right, is just some of these notions, again, like kids having AI chatbot friends, is that inherently a bad thing? That's my assumption. ⁓ And all of those assumptions will be questioned very soon.

And I hope similar to the research that came out around screen time and smartphone devices, I just hope that this kind of research and the impact on child development will come out way, way faster so that parents everywhere can try and figure out what to do along with educators. So I just wanted to end this takeaway with a couple of things that it made me wonder about.

The rapid advancement of technology, it's been shown around generative AI, right? So I just saw that there was a study from the St. Louis Federal Reserve last year that chat CPT had been introduced into the world in just two years. And the adoption rate for generative AI was at 40%. Just as a comparison, it took the internet five years to reach that level. And for personal commuting, computing, took 12 years.

And another ⁓ graph that I saw from Ernst and Young was just again on adoption. So it took Facebook 54 months to get to a hundred million users. Instagram, took 30 months. ChatGBT took two months, two months. So it's really mind boggling how fast this is going. And so just made me wonder what's the next rapid.

advancement that I'm not ready for. And one thing we haven't talked about is quantum computing yet. And that's another major game changer.

Raakhee (05:56)
I think it was Elina Halonen and she spoke about how she uses AI and she does all these really interesting things, right? Her podcast she writes a script, but it's narrated by AI and it's a really great job that she does of them.

Yeah, you're right. I we learned so much with our guests and what they've shared and, you know, we'll hopefully in the coming months have lots of other interesting guests who are going to share even more interesting things. but one that stuck with me as well it's true that AI is now just, you know, an AI bots.

It's another sector of society, right? And there's rights that go along with it. There's law, which we have none of. It is incredible how far we are, right, from a regulation and a legality perspective in terms of seeing ahead and being ready for that. So we're integrating all this technology in society, but the other infrastructure that's supposed to support it, right, like you're saying, childhood development, all those things, is really lagging, you know? And so that's...

That's really concerning. But I know the one story, I probably spoke about it so many times in many of the episodes, but was just what's happening with the human psyche and ⁓ how people are really engaging with AI and developing these relationships or not, like you said. In some stories, they were cute. I kind of spoke about the fact that every family will be extended to have a social robot, and it's going to be the next member of your family.

I'll post to that week is really cool AI image and it's a little robot with, older couple than what we've typically seen with parents. There was a robot in the picture and the pet is in the stroller. So it's kind of showing that convergence of that, right?

going back to kind of the psyche of all of this was a story about the kid who had that conversation with the AI bot, and it kind of eventually said to him, yeah, go and kill yourself. And he did, you know, ⁓ and just hearing a lot more of these kinds of stories and psychosis. So I think somebody kind of jumped off a cliff. You know, it was another story. And it's like, what is going on here? I we're working in the realm of mind, right?

And I think - Lana I haven't shared that memory manipulation is something that they testing and playing with and it just raises Such big questions about the fragility of the human mind and how do we take care of that in this time? Yeah, those things are still sitting with me I think about it a lot

Sue (08:27)
I agree with you, Raakhee, just a lot of questions posed for how

We're going to educate ourselves not to mention the next generation around these tools.

Raakhee (08:36)
Yeah, yeah, I think it was a couple of years back, Yuval Noah Harari wrote the book 21 Lessons, you know, and so I was reading that it's not, I wouldn't call it a futures book, but he is a historian, is calling out certain things he is perceiving and certain patterns. And yeah, it's spoken about, you know, his big call out, which he's absolutely right about is just ⁓ where the biology and the technology meet and where technology will be able to

really know us better than we'll ever be able to know ourselves. Will be telling us what mood we in. We won't be assessing that for ourselves. And probably marketing a product to us, you know, that we may not be able to resist. It goes back to that psyche and our mind and, how do you live in that kind of world, and I mean, we're already living in it, where every ad is like, ⁓ How did this know I wanted ice cream today?

You know, it's kind of scary, but it's going to get much more intense, I think, in that sense, with the kind of data that's out there and being able to read our biology. And there's a lot of good to this. I mean, we've spoken about this from the health perspective with some of our episodes around it and how we can take charge of our health. But it's a very different way of living and being human, you know.

Sue (09:53)
Yeah, maybe I can move on to a lighthearted takeaway. And I think it was just, again, in the travels, how cool it was to see just ideas that we had kicked around in previous episodes, trying to envision what a future may look like, and seeing that happen in real life. And probably one of the clearest examples was for me walking through the Seoul subway station and seeing the advertisement for the climate card.

And we had just kind of speculated around something like that. And I know at least I think one other country is already doing that. And so it was just really great to know that, yeah, someone in the Korean government is thinking of doing that. And I guess the other thing around the travels was

It was just another reminder that future signals, it's not ubiquitous, right? And I think one of the things we learned from our training was that these are things that really make you stop in your tracks or go, huh, what is that? Again, because so much of our world is in kind of maintenance mode or in the status quo that it really does take a sharp eye to really double back and say, what did I just see? ⁓ I guess the last piece.

I'll say about just the travels is, in Seoul, a lot of the kind of future trends that I was seeing was in public spaces. And that usually means that it's a policy innovation versus a lot of things that we had seen, which were company innovations or even individuals acting upon themselves. And those things were just a lot harder to see.

So it did turn out that yeah, all the travel things that I did, was, if I had to go back, I'd say it's probably more future trends and policy for cities versus anything else that I was seeing. But it was just a good reminder that there's so much layered in a particular city that you might not get to see just going about your day.

Raakhee (11:39)
I hadn't thought of it that way. But yes, so I loved so many of the things you spoke about I think the one thing and we did an episode on this In a gosh was many many months ago It was the one which is kind of look up at the skies and I don't know if you recall this but it was that moment we were talking and Lana was like

my gosh, all these things in the air, like we're to look up and you know, like what are you even looking at? Right. And I think like I definitely had chills when she said that because it hit me for the first time. I was like, my gosh, you're right. Like we talk about all of this, but like - our skies and needless to say what we have seen in aviation in the last year or something, right. Air traffic - not keeping it together clearly. ⁓ And then knowing that all these things are coming, these air taxis

And so these companies we spoke about, like Archer Aviation and stuff, and, know, they were just launching again. It's like you said, the speed at which we're going to really look around and be like, whoa, this world's really different than what it was two years ago or before.

I think I'll share ⁓ another one and then you know, we can kind of close out today, it's a conversation that I loved loved loved It was speaking to Sabrina Howard

who, you know, she is really brilliant. She was with the Institute for the Future and really works in cultural trends and that. we spoke about something that was just different and it was about friendship. was such, there was such gems in that conversation. And yeah, she left me with, you know, two, I think, really important points. And one was that we think friendship is supposed to be easy, right? None of the other relationships in our life are. We put in effort with our marriage.

We know we have to, put in effort with our parents. But we kind of take friendships a little bit for and granted, or we don't justify that why is this so hard? Why do I have to work through tough conversations and that sort of thing, right? And so we simply let friendships fade.

right, and kind of dissipate. And now we have this loneliness crisis in the world. And I think it was interesting because, you know, she brought that back again to saying, we've centered our entire societal model around romantic relationships. And that's great, but...

that's also not the norm anymore, right? Where a lot of people are just choosing for that not to be the case. But if that's not the case, then how do we maintain other relationships and how should we think about that?

even the episode, and it's the one it's called Love Robots and LLCs, right? And we spoke about the family and the social robot. this was, think, Lana shared this one the embryos coming from the DNA of three people. And I mean, that's wild and that's legal in the UK. It's happening now. ⁓ And then I just recently saw that China is working on a humanoid

gestation robot. So it'll be a human baby, but the technology will be there to kind of house it. Like how interesting all these dynamics around family. I think this was a really good recap, Sue, between the things that kind of caught our attention and the world we're living in now.

⁓ Yeah, any closing thoughts, anything else you wanted to share?

Sue (14:49)
Yeah, I think exactly to your point, I mean, the relational and human side of it is ever more important because of all the advances with AI and with tech that we're seeing, they kind of go hand in hand, which is why I really liked that you and Lana had tackled all those issues in these past months. But yeah, I'm looking forward to the fall. We've got a couple other themes coming up, so really excited to dig back in.

Raakhee (15:14)
Well, it's great to have you back in. Yeah, I think it was so good to have your perspective and lens on the episodes and what resonated with you as well. But thank you so much for being here. Let us know what

stuck out with you from our recent episodes. What is a favorite of yours? What's something you disagree with? What, yeah, what are you excited about or what are you afraid of? It's so good to have these conversations as we all navigate this new world. So please do share with us and as always, thank you for the likes and the subscribes. We truly appreciate it. And we will catch you again next week. Thanks for now. Bye.