Toastmasters, a global organization about communication excellence, is celebrating 100 years. Toastmasters has global presence, with over 200,000 members and counting. I served as president of one toastmaster club for two terms. I remain active in two Toastmaster clubs including the AI club, the first toastmaster club with an AI themes. It is fitting to combine communication excellence and the latest AI technology as Generative AI storms into our lives, like no other technology before. Below is the speech script of my 7-minutes speech about AI challenges and how everyone can become an AI ambassador to have more people participating in the AI future.
I have been an active Toastmaster member and served as president of a Toasterster club for two-terms
We wake up with water, electricity and the internet. What if I decide not to use any of them? From where I live, the nearest body of water is over 5 miles. I would walk without Google Maps, no electric car, in the dark, to fill up buckets of water I need for the day. It would take over 4 hours for the round-trip. Technology has made our lives better. We have taken for granted people use helpful technology all the time.
To my AI club fellows, I would like to share the obstacles facing AI adoption. By being aware of it, we can concretely set plans to address these obstacles.
I’m leading an initiative focused on upskilling and enabling AI, particularly GenAI, at all levels, to as many as possible for the company . Every single day, I am humbled “people are not rethinking how their work and life can be improved with AI technology”. The reality is, technology adoption requires intentional effort to bring people along. Why is that? There are technical obstacles and psychological resistances.
Starting with the technical challenges,
- We live in places with cutting edge technology. Do you know just about 65% of the global population are online (w/i internet). AI depends both on electricity and the internet. That means around 3 billion who do not have reliable internet, likely cannot benefit from AI.
- AI is intimidatingly complex. Some techies unconsciously throw out jargon. Terms like LLM, gpu, tpu, langchain, multimodal, neural network, encoder, decoder, transformer, hallucinations…just scared people away.
- Concerns about data privacy, biased input and security are real. Can you trust technology? When to trust , when not to trust AI?
We develop strong opinions and emotions about things too. Every new technology challenges our comfort zone and injects the fear of the unknown, fear of mistakes and fear of losses.
Many people fear errors or lack of control when using AI for tasks traditionally done by humans. It is natural we are uncomfortable with machines generating creative content or making decisions in their personal lives.
- Elon Musk said “We will have for the first time something that is smarter than the smartest human. There will come a point where no job is needed.“. He may have spoken his mind. How would you react about AI replacing human jobs and YOUR jobs?
- When Singapore Prime Minister Lee was recently interviewed by Bloomberg, he said “There are a lot of things in AI that we don’t know. We don’t know where it is going. The researchers do not know where it is going.”. How could you manage the unknown?
You belong to this ai club toastmasters. I think you can do something. You can start with one thing. Here are some suggestions.
- Listen to others’ concerns in adopting the technology.
- Share how AI has benefited you
- Invite their curiosity to learn more.
Thomas Edison brought electric light to part of Manhattan in 1882. Even 4 decades later, only half of all homes in the US had electric power. Many Americans still lit their homes with gas lights and candles.
I invite you to stay aware of these Ai technical and psychological obstacles, it is as easy as starting with one thing. Take the time to listen to concerns, share how AI works well for you and invite curiosity from others. If you all do at least one thing, AI can be in more hands. We don’t need to wait 50 years.
Are you willing?
Thank you.
oliviatamccue 
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