Exploring the pros and cons of AI: Anjan Sundaram

Alum Anjan Sundaram addresses some of the questions we all have about AI and humanity.

In the spirit of embracing AI, we had ChatGPT write the following introductory paragraph:

In this interview, we speak with Anjan Sundaram, a former Business Analyst at McKinsey who is now a journalist, author, and television presenter. Anjan shares his insights on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on humans, particularly in terms of how algorithms and technology are abstracting who we are. He reflects on his experiences producing a documentary series called "Coded World," in which he explored the impact of AI on humans and discovered how AI is changing our understanding of ourselves. Anjan believes that AI holds the potential to teach us about ourselves in ways we haven't imagined, but it also poses significant challenges that require us to reinvent ourselves and rethink how we work and engage with the world.

Watch the interview with Anjan by clicking "Watch the clip" under the image for each section. For those who prefer to read the interview, below is a transcript that has been edited for length and clarity.

Anjan Sundaram and Coded World

My name is Anjan Sundaram. I was a Business Analyst at McKinsey from 2007 to 2009 in the San Francisco Office. I now work as a journalist and an author, and I also present TV shows, one of which was called "Coded World," about artificial intelligence and how it's changing humans.

Before I was a journalist, I was a mathematician at Yale. I've come back to my interest in mathematics, algorithms and computing in my journalism. In researching artificial intelligence, a couple of years ago I presented and produced a documentary series called "Coded World," in which I explored the impact of algorithms and technology on humans and how computing and artificial intelligence are actually changing who we are. I think what's interesting about artificial intelligence is how much excitement and fear it generates. And what I learned from presenting and researching "Coded World" was that algorithms and mathematics are now abstracting who we are.

In making the show, I experienced and engaged with artificial intelligence that could read brain signals that I wasn't aware of myself. And in those moments, I began to wonder whether the code knew me better than I knew myself. I think artificial intelligence, in that way, can explore the world and a spectrum of signals that is inaccessible to us and a world that is broader than the world we know.

The singularity

One way of understanding the singularity is to see it as a point at which artificial intelligence goes beyond our cognitive capacities as human beings. And therefore, the singularity incites a lot of fear among many laypeople and some artificial intelligence specialists as well.

When thinking about the singularity and whether we should be afraid, I like to think of a conversation I had with a Chinese AI researcher who said to me, “You're just asking the wrong questions, if you're asking if we should be afraid. The process of creating artificial intelligence is the process of knowing ourselves, and why should we ever be afraid of knowing ourselves?"

I think I see artificial intelligence and this creative process as actually the continuation of a mathematical creation process that has been at play for thousands of years. When I interact with my mathematician and computing colleagues, I see them as engaged in a process of trying to understand that mathematical reality, understand its perfection, and trying to recreate it in technological terms.

Pros and cons: Predicting AI’s impact

I think AI holds the potential to teach us about ourselves in ways that we haven't even imagined. It forces us to rethink who we are, reinvent ourselves, to reimagine our world. And I think some computational scientists are even thinking about AI as leading us on a path where we transcend our bodies, and attain a kind of immortality, where productivity and economic growth are generated mostly by AI, leaving humans to pursue more creative endeavors.

I think AI has huge positive potential in terms of freeing us of the tasks that we currently need to do in order to survive. The negative impacts will be multiple, unfortunately, along that path of growth. But I see it as the need to reinvent ourselves, to really think about what we're going to be forced to rethink, how we educate the next generation, how we think of jobs, and what those jobs are. They're going to be far more creative. I believe it's going to also change the current economic structures in which we work. And so I think it's going to create a sea change in the next decades in terms of how we work, and how we engage ourselves. And, on the bright side, how we explore who we are.

Digital versions of ourselves

I think what's interesting about AI is that it might lead to a version of ourselves which already exists. There are digital versions of ourselves in Google servers and Amazon servers, digital versions of ourselves that try to approximate who we are in a virtual form. I think those virtual versions of us are going to get more and more powerful, and are going to get more and more accurate. I think we might reach a point where our physical existence would matter less than our virtual existence.

The downside of this for me is that we might enter a world where we value the virtual so greatly that we begin not to address important physical challenges such as climate change. We might see climate change as so difficult to address that we might just escape to a virtual world. We're seeing many technologists begin to advocate this in terms of setting up civilizations on Mars or thinking of uploading our consciousnesses or versions of ourselves, digital versions of ourselves, to clouds, and thereby attaining some kind of immortality. I think these these escapes are very seductive, and they carry a great risk in that we don't secure a habitable planet for the next generation, for our children and their children.

Privacy implications of AI

I think as the virtual becomes much more important, possibly more important than the physical world we inhabit, it's going to become imperative that each of us understands how to manage, manipulate, and protect our virtual identities. The digital world, fortunately or unfortunately, was created mostly by private companies, which still hold far greater power over our personal information than many governments do.

Governments have still not reached a point where they can control how private companies manage and exploit or use our private information. I think as individuals, we're going to need to work much harder to maybe to learn how to code, and create collectives or unions that work on our behalf to redress that imbalance of power. We're still at the early stages of this, and I think it's going to take a while before privacy concerns can be really addressed.

Some governments are trying, but you saw how the GDPR regulations in the European Union were installed; it was really troublesome. Nobody reads the the long disclaimers that are flashing on your screen. You just click 'accept' because it's too complicated. And that's just an example of how governments haven't understood how users navigate the digital world.

From AI to Authorship

I have a new book out in April. It's called "Breakup: a Marriage in Wartime." It's the third in a trilogy that I've written of memoirs of journalism in Central Africa.

After I left the Firm in 2009, I went to live in Rwanda, and I stayed in Central Africa for roughly a decade. "Breakup" focuses on my journey through a war in the Central African Republic. It's perhaps the most isolated major war in the world. It's as large a war as Syria, comparable to Ukraine, but it rarely makes the front pages. I found it important as a journalist to go and travel into that war and report on some of the crimes that were being committed there.

The book is incredibly personal in that it tells a story of how my reporting affected my family and my personal life in a way that journalists often aren't encouraged to write about or to speak about. Often, journalists are encouraged to be “objective” in a certain sense -- to write about the world and leave themselves out of the story. But I think it's incredibly important to understand how people on the frontlines of human rights reporting around the world, be it journalists, activists, or human rights workers, how it takes a toll on their personal lives and the cost at which they pursue that kind of work.

In writing my own story, I feel like I'm speaking for a whole swathe of people – some of whom I met: very courageous people, priests in the war, a nun who made herself a human shield in order to protect 3,000 people who took shelter in her church. A priest who traveled into a war zone where all the cell phone antennae had been destroyed in order to report on some of the crimes that had been committed in that war zone. These are people who are working in incredibly dangerous conditions with very little recognition. My book tells their stories of courage alongside the cost of doing this kind of work that I and many others like me face.

Takeaways from McKinsey

McKinsey taught me so much about how to confront difficult problems, how to structure them, and how to break them up into manageable pieces. I still use many of the note-taking, interview, and synthesis tools that I learned at the Firm. They're so applicable to journalism, to writing, and to any creative endeavor.

I'm incredibly grateful to have spent a couple of years at the Firm. The tools, the training that the Firm offers, especially to Business Analysts, which is what I was in San Francisco, is invaluable, is just great training not only for the private sector, but really for any difficult endeavor.

I'm still in touch with so many friends from my time at the Firm, who've gone on to take on difficult challenges across the board, in medicine, in journalism, in the media, in the private sector. And all of them have told me how formative the experience, even a couple of years at McKinsey, has been. I think it's just a great training ground.

Exploring the pros and cons of AI: Anjan Sundaram

Anjan Sundaram and Coded World

The singularity

Pros and cons: Predicting AI’s impact

Digital versions of ourselves

Privacy implications of AI

From AI to Authorship

Takeaways from McKinsey

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