Benevolent cyborgs. Not a phrase you hear often these days. With all the hand-wringing and media fear-mongering about AI and new technologies, we seem to have lost the bigger vision of how technology can improve our lives. That’s why today, I’m speaking with Dr. Cori Lathan, a techno-optimist who believes technology can be used to build empathy and connection.
Today we discuss how Star Wars and a very creative 2nd grade teacher sparked her journey into innovation and invention, how technology is being used to build empathy and connection, why empathy makes a better design team, and the future of human-machine interaction.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Technology can be a tool to help children achieve developmental milestones and build empathy.
- The media will give the negative side of AI and technology because it gets better views and clicks. But great things are happening with technology that is helping to create a beautiful future.
- Designing tech is about more than what happens behind the computer screen. It is about understanding the user experience and what it means for your end user.
“We are creating the future, someone isn’t doing it for us. We can create the future we want to see. We can choose the direction it goes.” — Dr. Cori Lathan
Episode References:
- Dr. Cori Lathan’s Book: Inventing the Future, Stories from a Techno-Optimist: https://inventthefuture.tech/
- Dr. Cori Lathan’s TEDx Talk: Innovation, Empathy, and the Future of Human-Machine Interaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnV6QDhwvhk
- The Empathy Edge Podcast: Ron Gura: How Technology Helps People Navigate Grief
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About Corinna Lathan + Founder and Former Board Chair and CEO
Dr. Corinna Lathan is a technology entrepreneur who has developed robots for kids with disabilities, virtual reality technology for the space station, and wearable sensors for training surgeons and soldiers. She is a global thought leader in the relationship between technology and human performance and believes in a future of benevolent cyborgs! Dr. Lathan is Co-Founder of AnthroTronix, Inc., a biomedical engineering company focused on brain health, which she led for 23 years as Board Chair. and CEO. She developed one of the first FDA-cleared digital health platforms winning a prestigious Gold Edison Award. She was named a Woman to Watch by Disruptive Women in Health Care, a Technology Pioneer, and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She also Chaired the Forum’s Councils on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Human Enhancement and Longevity. Dr. Lathan has been featured in Forbes, Time, and the New Yorker magazines and her work has led to such distinctions as MIT Technology Review Magazine’s “Top 100 World Innovators,” and one of Fast Company Magazines “Most Creative People in Business.” Dr. Lathan received her B.A. in Biopsychology and Mathematics from Swarthmore College, an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from M.I.T.
Connect with Dr. Cori Lathan:
AnthroTronix: http://www.atinc.com
Twitter: twitter.com/clathan
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/clathan
Instagram: instagram.com/drcoril
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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cashflow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business.
Maria Ross 01:59
Benevolent cyborgs, not a phrase you hear often these days with all the hand wringing and media fear mongering about AI and new technologies, we seem to have lost the bigger vision of how technology can actually improve our lives. That’s why today I’m speaking with Dr. Corey Latham, a techno optimist who believes that technology can be used to build empathy and connection. Cory is a technology entrepreneur who has developed robots for kids with disabilities, virtual reality technology for the space station, and wearable sensors for training surgeons and soldiers. She’s a global thought leader in the relationship between technology and human performance and believes in a future of benevolent cyborgs. Cory is co founder of Anthro tronics, a biomedical engineering company focused on brain health, which she led for 23 years as board chair and CEO. She developed one of the first FDA cleared digital health platforms, winning a prestigious gold Edison award. Her many accolades can be found in her full bio in the show notes. But among them, she was named MIT Technology Review Magazine’s Top 100 World innovators, and one of Fast Company’s most creative people in business. Corey received her BA in bio psychology and mathematics from Swarthmore College, and an MS in aeronautics and astronautics and PhD in neuroscience from MIT. And she had a life sized statue at the Smithsonian, which I did not get the chance to ask her about. Today, we discuss how Star Wars and a very creative second grade teacher sparked her journey into innovation and invention, how technology is being used to build empathy and connection, and why empathy makes a better design team. And Cory goes into what she sees for the future of human machine interaction. I loved this episode, and if you have any fears at all about technology taking over, take a listen. Let’s get connected. If you’re loving this content, don’t forget to go to the empathy edge.com and sign up for the email list to get free resources and more empathy infused success tips and find out how you can book me as a speaker. I want to hear how empathy is helping you be more successful. So please sign up now at V empathy edge.com. Oh, and follow me on Instagram, where I’m always posting all the things for you at Red slice Maria. Welcome Dr. Corey Latham to the empathy edge podcast to help us talk about all things human and machine interaction. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Cori Lathan 04:39
Thank you so much, Marie. I’m so excited to be here.
Maria Ross 04:42
So I have really been looking forward to talking to you I think we met through sort of a think tank about next generation leadership. And your work is fascinating to me. I had an opportunity to look at your TEDx talk, and hear about your work and your perspective. Have on technology and its relationship to us as humans. I’d love to hear about your story about how you got into this work. And also why you call yourself a techno optimist, which I love that phrase. Yeah, no,
Dr. Cori Lathan 05:13
it says it all, doesn’t it? You know, so my story, it’s where to start, I guess. I love starting with Star Trek. Because I feel like it kind of all started there. You know, when I was I love Star Trek as a kid. And I think what I loved most was the technology. I loved that technology enabled. I mean, even though it was fantasy, I love that technology, the fantasy of what technology could do for us, it could enable us to travel in space, it could, the replicator could make us anything we wanted. The holodeck could help us explore and imagine, you know, any adventure that we wanted, the transporter could take us anywhere, the the tricorder could heal us. So I love from early early on the vision of what technology could do to the future for the future. And actually, I had a teacher in the second grade who designed a whole curriculum around Star Trek. And for to achieve each of the officer positions, you had to do something like you had to learn how to count to 10 in three different languages to get oh, horas the communicator badge and to get the navigator badge, you had to make a map to the school and to one of your favorite places. And the first person to complete all the badges was the captain. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, final challenge was to do math problems to be to to be Spock. And I got two wrong and I was devastated. But then I found out that the other girl who I was competing against got three wrong. So I became the first captain. And I even wore in my second grade picture, which I can give you for the show notes if you want is me, my my school pictures me with my little Star Trek badge on?
Maria Ross 07:15
Oh my gosh, like, I’m getting chills hearing this. Because my son’s in fourth grade. And if only his teachers would do a curriculum like this, he would loves me so much more. Yeah, eat.
Dr. Cori Lathan 07:26
So I mean, so that was that really didn’t answer your question. But it gives you the origin story. Yeah, yeah, why I’m a techno optimist. And it honestly just went from there. I just, I never said I want to be this or I want to be that I just wanted to do stuff. I just wanted to do stuff with cool technology. And, you know, so I went on, and I kept, you know, looking for cool things to do. And a lot of it related to the space program, I ended up being an aerospace engineer. But what I discovered is that what I loved was actually the human side of it, the human technology interface. I wasn’t so much as building the spacecraft as building the, maybe the extra vehicular activity suit or the, you know, or the virtual reality training system, or, you know, how do we actually enable humans to do it. And I became a biomedical engineer. My degree is actually in neuroscience, my PhD is in neuroscience and my master’s in aerospace engineering. And then I became a professor of biomedical engineering. And again, I lost track of doing and again was, you know, I became a professor Well, I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do. I wanted to create technology. I mean, I love the students. You know, sometimes I love teaching, but I really wanted to create technology. And that’s when I realized that I really was an inventor, and I wanted to build the technology that could create the future. And that’s how I started my company, Anthro, tronics, Anthro, human tronics instrumentation, and started it in 1999. And we invented for over 20 years. And during COVID, we went virtual and sold the company, and I wrote a book about all of our inventions. So I love that sort of brings you up to date. Exactly.
Maria Ross 09:18
And we mentioned the book in the intro, but inventing the future stories from a techno optimist, which I love, and we’ll be putting a link to your book in the show notes. And I think you can. Well, there we go. Yes. For those of you who are listening, she is showing me a picture of the book cover. So let’s talk about this idea of using technology to build empathy and connection because you come at technology from a very refreshingly human centric vantage point. Even in your TED talk, you talked about the fact that the future of human machine interaction needs to have a human centered approach. And having worked in technology myself for a while, when I was working on the client side, the thing that frustrated me the most was that there were these brilliant technologists. And what they couldn’t understand was that at the end of the day, a human had to be able to use the technology they were coding or programming. And that it wasn’t enough to say, well, if it doesn’t work for them, they’re just stupid, which some programmers would say. And it’s like, no, it kind of exists to serve the people that you’re making it for. And so the ones that got it were obviously much more successful than the ones who weren’t. So tell us a little bit about your thoughts on how we can use technology to build empathy and connection. And then after that, we’re going to talk about the point I just brought up, which is, how does empathy make a better design team or a better programming team as well? Yeah, well,
Dr. Cori Lathan 10:50
just I mean, a quick a quick aside to that point. I remember, you know, back in the day, when I was both teaching and developing software, I mean, the the, the human factor saying is no, that user and the user is not you. So to your point about, you know, yeah, you really need to know your user, and it’s in service of that the user. But to back up, you know, one of the reasons why I was so excited to talk with you, Maria is I don’t hear, I don’t talk to a lot of people where empathy is part of your day to day mission. And, and I feel like it’s, and it is part of yours. And I feel like it’s been part of mine for so long. I mean, my TEDx talk was over 10 years ago now. And it was called innovation, empathy and the future of human machine interaction. So I felt like we were made for each other. Exactly. But, you know, I think the, for me, the purpose of technology has always been to bridge the gap between what we can do and what we could do if we had technology. So extend that to people to people interaction, that’s it’s the same thing, it doesn’t matter. If you’re an individual who needs a capability, though, every individual also needs the person to person capability and technology can bridge that. And it was brought home to me in such a powerful way. I think even before I started the company, I think I was still a professor, I might have been sort of in between. Because there were a couple years of overlap. We were developing robots for kids with autism. And one of the delays that kids with some kids with autism have or who are on the spectrum, are the social emotional connections. And two quick examples. One was a young girl who was having was in speech, language therapy, they, you know, they were trying to get her to express herself and learn language. And you know, they were having some success. And they started using our robot maybe to motivate her. But what we saw is that she kept hugging the robot, and building a connection with the robot more than speaking to the robot. So the speech language therapy therapist was like, Well, this is a failure. It’s not teaching her to speak, but we’re like, but the mother said, Do you see what’s going on here? This child is building is building a relationship with the robot. And guess what, at home, she started doing pretend play with her toys, which is something that very young children do, but she hadn’t done it yet, because she hadn’t been able to reach that developmental goal. So it was very powerful to see that the technology could facilitate this critical developmental goal. Another quick story, a typical, a standard goal, social emotional goal is called Joint attention. So if I say, Hey, look at that, you’re going to follow the direction of my finger, try and figure out what I’m pointing at probably figure it out, go Oh, yeah, that’s cool. Well, again, kids can have a delay in that developmental goal, and especially kids with who are on the spectrum, it’s very difficult maybe to get their attention, and then direct their attention. And we have, you know, we have video actually, that I show when I give talks of us using a robot who’s very patient, and gets the child’s attention, and then directs it for the first time, when, again, super powerful. And so that really was, was a wake up call to me that technology isn’t just to have a child achieve a developmental goal, which was kind of how I went into it. You know, I I’m an inventor. And I love working with kids, because they all have the same design specifications. They’re all trying to work toward the same goals. And going holy cow, like this is actually building human to human connection. This is building empathy for these kids and their families. So that was a big aha moment. And I think it just progressed from there where it was it was a total turnaround, in terms of how it wasn’t a total turnaround. because we were already, we were already thinking about technology as an enhancement for human capability. But I think we were thinking about that a little bit narrowly and maybe a little bit too sterile. We weren’t really thinking about it the whole in a holistic way. Yeah. So
Maria Ross 15:15
yeah, I, that is amazing. And I’m getting chills, everything you’re saying all the stories you’re sharing, but that it is this idea of, we need to highlight the stories more about the ways that technology can be used for good, and not just good to accomplish tasks, but to do exactly what you’re saying, to create those connections and to build empathy. And I think what we’re getting caught up in and you know, the media feeds off it because they love feeding off, you know, making us scared and making us angry, is that all the advancements in AI and robotics and technology, it’s going to be you know, the Terminator, it’s going to be you know, they’re going to come for us in the end. And there’s so much fear around it. And yet, when you look at the the innovators who are using technology, to create apps to you know, be companions to lonely, elderly people, or who someone I had on my podcast, a tech entrepreneur, who’s built an app called empathy, his company has actually called empathy.com, to help people during their bereavement process, and help them take care of the affairs of their loved one who’s just passed away. There’s so many ways that we can use technology to not just again, get those tasks done. But to really feel like we’re being seen, heard and understood, and to create those connections. And I feel like the media doesn’t give us those feel good stories all the time, because it doesn’t sell, you know, clicks doesn’t sell views. Yeah. So what do you think about like the law, a lot of the fear based messaging going on in the media right now, especially around AI?
Dr. Cori Lathan 16:53
It’s disappointing, because it takes away all of our agency, you know, it basically makes us victims, as opposed to, you know, the powerful agents of change and masters of our own fate, you know, when you can take that far too far as well. But it really does. It sounds like you know, I also staying with the Star Trek theme, I also talk about the board collective, and makes it sound like that we’re the Borg Collective, where we’ve given up all autonomy. But, but unfortunately, unlike the Borg who at least you get physical and mental, you know, powers, we get nothing for it. It’s just our powers taken away, and we get nothing. So. So part of what I being a techno optimist means to me, is that we are creating the future, someone isn’t doing it to us, we are creating the future. And so we can create the future we want to see. We each of us are users of technology, so we can choose how to use technology, we can we can choose the direction it goes. So I think, you know, as you said, the media is trying to sell clicks there and not. So that’s something we can do is not click Exactly. For sure. For sure. Yeah, but it absolutely. It’s disappointing, because I wish and as much attention was given to empowering people, as is in trying to make us feel disempowered, for
Maria Ross 18:16
sure. And I had a conversation with someone recently about the fact that this sort of flipped my switch, because I was a little hesitant about what you know, Where can this go, because of course, there’s always bad actors in the world. And for any technology, any tool, there’s going to be people who use it for good and people that try to use it for not so good. And I was feeling a little, I don’t know about AI, especially as an author and a speaker, what does that mean? And someone really flipped my switch by saying that, if we don’t all get involved with using the technology and populating the the learning sets, then it will only be the bad actors that are populating those learning sets and that are informing the technology moving forward. So that actually flipped for me this fear as an example of oh, do I need to do something to protect my book, my books that I’ve written, and you know, what a chat GPT is grabbing things from my books and not citing me. And I thought, You know what, it doesn’t matter. I actually want that factual information out in the world for someone else to be able to access and those people if they were interested, they’d buy my book if that interest rate not gonna buy my book anyway, so I’m not losing money because someone’s gonna get information through chat GPT but
Dr. Cori Lathan 19:28
and worst case, you permeate empathy throughout be 100%. Like
Maria Ross 19:33
a really believer your word. Yeah, exactly. And so this idea of, you know, I just, I don’t know, it just flipped my switch for me of like, we all have to get involved instead of being fearful and trying to pretend it’s not there, because otherwise bad actors will come in and take over and and use the technology in a way that is not very constructive or productive for the rest of us.
Dr. Cori Lathan 19:55
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. And I think we’ve also seen it happen And, you know, in the early days of the world wide web and the internet, there was, you know, you didn’t know where the information was coming from and there there, we don’t remember. But there were lots of people who were saying, You mean, but if I put in this this term, I could get a site from, you know, England or California, and I’m in Maryland. I mean, how, what does that mean, I can’t read something from California. I mean, it was sort of, you know, it was, that was part of it. But also, it just didn’t make any sense to anyone, that people were just throwing information and content on the web. And now, I think we realized, you know, we’ve all we’ve all learned that you have to Yes, of course, you have to be careful about the content. And there’s, but there’s a lot of content, and we need to put good content out there. And, you know, so I think we’ve we’ve been through this before, you know, with with regards to like the generative AI and chat GPT, I just spent probably an hour with my college age daughter showing her how to use it responsibly for one of her papers,
Maria Ross 21:00
saying you should make a video that
Dr. Cori Lathan 21:03
I can use Oh, yeah, no, I mean, I should I mean, oh, you know, I feel like I need to do Yeah, a post or something about it. Because to me, it’s logical. It’s just like, you go to Google, when you or when I write an article, I kind of search around and I, and I try and think about what other people have said, and there’s also some boilerplate that maybe one of the things I love Chet GPT for is I wrote an article on generative AI and mental health. And I had Chad GPT write it just to see what it would do. I didn’t really use any of the text, but I loved it. Subheadings. Yeah. So yeah, we did a blog
Maria Ross 21:40
post to experiment with it. And because I am an expert in my work, I was able to vet what it was pulling back to me, but it gave me it gave me the bones of it. And then I made it my own. Right. Yeah. And then I was able to validate the information that was there. But let’s be real, like I was a child of the 70s. And I remember researching with the encyclopedia. And I will admit that I took passages direct from the Encyclopedia, and we’ll put it in my reports. And I was citing it. I mean, most of the time, I was trying to reword it. But this is not new,
Dr. Cori Lathan 22:13
you know? No, it’s not new. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Again, back to the point about my college student using it responsibly. She’s gonna use
Maria Ross 22:19
it. Yeah. And it is it is a big time saver has to be said, yes. But the other thing, the other interesting analogy I heard recently was on NPR, someone was talking about the fact like, look, any innovation, think about fire, think about electricity. It can kill people. Or it can warm our homes, cook our food, there’s always a there’s always a positive and a negative side to a new innovation. And I thought that was just a wonderful analogy of like, nobody’s banning fire because somebody might get burned. We have learned how to use it responsibly. Yep. Yeah, yep. No, I
Dr. Cori Lathan 22:58
think you’re right. Absolutely.
Maria Ross 23:00
I love that. So let’s flip this over to what I was referencing earlier, which is that you talk a lot about empathy, making a better design team. So the people responsible for creating the innovations and inventing the solutions? How does empathy factor into their success? And how can we be more intentional about strengthening that empathy within those teams, if people are leading teams that design or innovate or program? Yeah, I
Dr. Cori Lathan 23:26
think, you know, there’s been there’s been a huge amount of, I don’t even know not, it’s not press. It’s more just just thought leadership around good design. You know, there’s the Stanford design school, there’s IDEO, there’s all of these, you know, and most of it is about a process and the process, how do you how do you have a process that, that solicits ideas from everyone where everyone gets heard that you vet, vet those things? And I think so I think first you need a good process. But what gets, if you don’t have a good process, then it doesn’t really matter what your intentions are, and whether you have empathy or not, because the process, the good design process needs to be in place. So I just want to say that first, but the second piece of it is where I see it all go wrong. Anyway, even if a good process is in place, is that lack of empathy, and especially if you’ve really made an effort to have a good diverse design team and diversity and all its flavors, you need to have some empathy in order so that everyone gets heard. And that empathy is beyond soliciting ideas from everyone and then a process for vetting them. It’s really saying, Okay, I didn’t quite understand that idea. So now I really need to put myself in your shoes and, and really understand do the work to understand where that idea is coming from. And that’s the piece that I see that gets missed a lot in business meetings. So when you’re trying to come up with solution. So it’s not just a design of things, it’s a business solution, you know, I, well, I don’t want to go into all the negative, the negative solutions that I’ve, I’ve seen happen with the lack of empathy. But I think, you know, maybe some some good solutions, for I’ll give you some, some from my early days, which had to do with designing for soldiers. So I really had no connection to the military had no understanding of the military. And when we started the company, and started actually, even before that, when I was still a professor, we started doing some instrumentation for kids with disabilities. So a child with cerebral palsy, who might have very gross motor control, so they couldn’t operate a mouse or a keyboard, because that requires fine motor control. We were putting sensors on their hands, so that they could maybe press against the desk. And that would operate, you know, a remote control car or a keyboard or a mouse. So we I had some colleagues who came to me and said, you know, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing tactical mobile robots, and they could use this technology. And I’m, like, you just said 15, different things that I don’t understand and can’t relate to, and have no idea what’s going on. So.
Maria Ross 26:23
So,
Dr. Cori Lathan 26:24
you know, one of the first things I did is I talked to one of the students in, in a Latin one of my labs, who was former military, and he ended up being one of the founders of the company. But he was a former Marine, and was now back in school. And so he came on board to start the company as to work on these projects with me. So number one was trying to find a member of our design team who really was a subject matter expert, then number two was really trying to understand. Okay, so what does that mean that this, you know, could help soldiers and how was a soldier like a child with a disability? Explain that to me, right. So we went, and we really spent some time with military, you know, opera specialists, and operators, particularly those who were operating robots for hostage rescue or explosive ordnance disposal. And what I observed is that a lot of the soldiers, for example, had to maintain what’s you know, what’s called a fight ready position, where they actually have to pull their weapon in case there’s an emergency, but they also are trying to control a robot. So we actually those same sensors that I just mentioned, where we had a child pressing against a desk, we actually had a soldier who was holding their weapon be able to have a wearable glove with sensors in it. So now they could press against the barrel of their gun in order to operate a robot. Wow. And so there was a bunch of pieces of that where I had to really think about what is the problem they’re trying to solve, and think about their safety and I and we had to develop empathy for the person we’re designing for, and to understand their problem and develop a solution. So So I think that’s just you know, just thinking about really connecting with who you know, who you’re trying to solve the problem for. And
Maria Ross 28:22
with. I love that well, and it’s also just about, you know, it’s not enough to just be really good behind your computer screen. It’s really about getting curious. And it even if you are unfamiliar with your users world, doing your best to get curious and research and investigate and ask questions. So you really can’t understand what the experience is like for them. I I’m harkening back to my management consulting days, because I was in change management. And we were sort of the people side of the technology implementation teams, because they finally realized, oh, people have to use all this technology that we’re creating for them. And so we were often brought in for representing the users in in a technology implementation. And that meant everything from communication planning, to designing and developing training on whatever the new technology was going to be. And that was where I really got experience with working across the team, with the technologists, with the programmers to understand how the new application or program worked, so that we could train users on it. But that’s where we could also be the voice of the user and say, Well, how are they going to know that they have to press Tab x and five to do that command? And they’re like, well, they’ll just figure it out. And it’s like, well, no, like, let’s try to make that a little bit more intuitive. If we hit them. Yeah. Or, you know, they thought it was just a training problem. Like anything could be solved with like, Oh, if we just tell them this is how it works, then that’s how they’ll use it in practice. And so it really was my first my first eye opening experience without calling it empathy. Where I understood the importance of empathy in technology design, and why it is so important for those programmers and those brilliant technologists to really understand what is this actually being used for? and by whom? Exactly. I love that. So as we wrap up, I do want to ask you a question. What is the future of human machine interaction? What are some of your thoughts on where that’s going and where you are hopeful? I know, you’ve talked about the term before benevolent cyborgs which I love. But tell us, you know, from an, from a techno optimist point of view, where do you see that interaction going?
Dr. Cori Lathan 30:37
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I try and paint a picture for what I think the future is going to look like, for me. This is the you know, this is the future I’m working toward as both a technology developer and a technology user and you know, and a citizen of the world. And, you know, I, on a very, on a personal level, I think I’m gonna have better than 2020 vision, for example, you know, I think that we can be enhanced in this is what I mean by a benevolent cyborg, you know, I’ve already had eye surgery once and there’s nothing to say that I won’t have it again, and, and maybe I’ll have you no superhuman vision, I’ve had a total knee replacement, so I have better knees than I had 10 years ago. And there’s nothing to say that I won’t have bionic knees. You know, as as we go forward. I think maintaining cognitive and mental health is something that we’re all working toward, and there’s, there’s medications, there’s potentially neural implants, like this is something that there’s lots of people working toward maintaining our cognitive health as we age, there’s, there’s a lot of people who are, you know, worried about that, including myself. So I think from you know, from an individual perspective, technology is going to make us better, I want to get better as I age from a community. And, and, you know, I think, as I, as I age, I’m going to be able to travel with my family and friends. And it’s going to be both physically and virtually. This is the metaverse, you know, we’re going to be able to do amazing things to the metaverse, you’re getting your heart of, yes, I’m getting my holodeck, I absolutely get it my knowledge, it’s already here. I think using you know, we generate so much data. You know, I, when I talk about sort of biomedical applications, I say I generate more data in a day than my doctor sees in a year. You know, that’s changing as doctors see more and more data, but that data is going to be used responsibly and ethically for the better ment of our community and, and our society. And and then I think finally, I see we need to use technology to drive toward an equitable society. So I think, again, that’s given more and more attention on usually from the negative side, like what it’s not doing. But that raises awareness. And it, of course, makes us think about how to identify the technology is biased. Yeah, technology is biased, and we need to recognize that bias, and then move forward in our design. So, so I, for me, that’s part of what being a techno optimist is not that I’m a Pollyanna, not that, you know, the future is going to be great no matter what, no, the future is going to be great if we make it great, but guess what we can? Oh, I
Maria Ross 33:16
love that. Let’s just end that there. What a great thought. Cory, thank you so much for your thoughts on your insights. Today, I’m going to have all the links in the show notes, including a link to your TEDx talk and your book. But for folks that are on the go, where’s a place they can find out more about you and your work?
Dr. Cori Lathan 33:30
So LinkedIn is great way to connect with me and see my my links, you know, just see a thin I have a website invent the future dot tech. That’s a great place, you know, Instagram, Dr. Coriell. But I think invent the future dot tech is going to be where the most up to date information
Maria Ross 33:48
is going to be. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Maria. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you liked what you heard you know what to do, please rate and review and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cashflow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access shownotes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria. Never forget empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
