Something You Should Know
Cool Things You Can Do With AI & Surprising Insight in Chance, Probability & Risk
Thu, 06 Mar 2025
There is a word you probably use that means something entirely different than what you think. In fact, it means the opposite of what you think. Yet, this opposite meaning has become so pervasive, even dictionaries now say that the wrong meaning is now okay. Listen and I will tell you what the word is and what it really means. https://www.jalopnik.com/dear-hollywood-please-knock-it-off-with-the-overdrive-5926885/ Artificial Intelligence can seem intimidating to some. Yet it is actually quite simple to use and it can do amazing things to make your life better. It can teach you a skill, plan your dinner, plan a trip, be a brainstorming partner and counsel you to help with a problem. These are just a few of the things you’ll discover how to do from listening to my guest, Celia Quillan. She is an expert in artificial intelligence and has been featured in Time, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Today show. She is the creator of the popular TikTok and Instagram channel @SmartWorkAI and she is author of the book, AI for Life: 100+ Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence to Make Your Life Easier, More Productive…and More Fun! (https://amzn.to/3QGCYy0) We often use phrases like, “There’s a good chance…” or “It’s likely that….” But without knowing HOW good a chance or HOW likely something is, the phrases don’t mean much. To help get a true understanding of chance, probability and luck is David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge and author of the book The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (https://amzn.to/41sXdEu). You probably feel safe taking a shower in your own bathroom. But dangers are lurking – some you might never have thought of. Listen as I explain how to reduce the risk of taking a shower. https://www.menshealth.com/health/g19544438/shower-safety/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off QUINCE: Indulge in affordable luxury! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the surprising meaning of a common word?
So there is a word in the English language, a fairly common word, that actually means the opposite of what you think it means. Hi, welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. When you hear the word overdrive, you think you know what it means. When you hear the phrase like kick it into overdrive, most people think it means something along the lines of warp speed or maximum power.
And it means just the opposite. It's an automotive term that refers to a gear ratio higher than one to one. So after a certain speed is reached, that speed can be maintained with a minimum of engine effort and wear. So, in your car, overdrive gives you a more relaxed, efficient ride.
The reverse definition has become so ingrained in people's mind that it is now an acceptable definition according to most dictionaries. And then there was the movie Maximum Overdrive, which helped continue the word's misuse. But technically, when you say, punch that baby into overdrive, what you're really saying is punch that baby into a leisurely cruising mode.
It sounds a lot less cool now that you know what it means. And that is something you should know. I will admit that I haven't dipped my toe too deep into the artificial intelligence waters. I've played around with ChatGPT and I've read a few articles and we've had guests on here talk about what AI is. But when I saw this book written by my next guest, I don't know, something clicked.
I realized I wasn't really understanding all of what AI could do for me in my life. And maybe more importantly, how to use it in a way that it really gives me what I want and uses more of its potential. As you listen for the next several minutes, I think you'll really start to understand some of the very cool things AI can do to make your life better and how easy it is to navigate.
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Chapter 2: What can AI do for your everyday life?
My guest is Celia Quillen. She is an expert in artificial intelligence and has been featured in Time, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and on the Today Show. She's the creator of the popular TikTok and Instagram channel at SmartWorkAI. And she's author of the book AI for Life, 100-plus ways to use artificial intelligence to make your life easier, more productive, and more fun.
Hi, Celia. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
So I have a sense, because this is what I thought for a long time, I have this sense that people think of AI as kind of a really fancy search engine. Like you go to ChatGPT, you type in something, and you get results back, much like you would do with Google, even though, as you're about to explain, it isn't really a search engine. But don't you think that's what a lot of people think it is?
Absolutely. I think many people think of it as a search engine, which, especially in the early days, might have been a detriment to them because at the time, many of these tools could not browse the web for you and do that search. Now they can. But I do think that that is kind of the first and foremost thing that people think of them as.
yeah see that's what i thought and i've you know i've done that i've typed in things and gotten answers but then i looked in your book and thought and saw that you can do so much more and so what much more can you do if you could give me like a little shopping list of things that ai can do that people may not realize i don't want to go deep i just want to go wide
Brainstorming, it's excellent at coming up with new ideas and helping you creatively come up with new suggestions for how to accomplish tasks or how to name something. It can help you create and generate effectively anything that is text-based.
So if you needed to create a quick guide to a place that you're traveling, instead of searching one thing, you can search many things at once effectively by having it create a guide. You could have it craft a shopping list according to your groceries that you have to accomplish for the week.
You could turn it into your personal secretary, articulating out all the things you have to keep in mind and remember and have it jot it down and summarize it in a nice, concise way for you to refer back to later. There is no limit to how it can help you, really. Anything that is text-based, it effectively acts as an intern, as a super advanced intern that can do anything for you.
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Chapter 3: How does AI differ from search engines?
Microsoft Copilot works in sync with your Microsoft 365 suite so that you can now communicate with those PDFs. Other examples, as we mentioned earlier, web browsing. So all of these different tools, with the exception of Claude that I mentioned earlier, can now actually go and browse the web, generate a response summarizing what it finds, and then link back out to the source that it got that from.
So all of these tools have subtle differences, but by and large, I try and encourage people to, you know, if you have one that you like, and especially if it's free and you're just getting started, experiment, play around with it.
In no time, if some competitor launches a new feature, it probably won't be long until they launch their own version of the same thing because these tools are evolving so quickly and they're all trying to stay competitive with each other.
If I were to ask an AI tool like ChatGPT, give me a snappier title for this or give me a, like, how does it know what snappier means or does it?
So it doesn't really know anything, I guess is the one way to put it. It's not actually intelligent, but it is artificially so. So snappier, you know, kind of how a thesaurus works really. Snappier is associated with other words like catchy, zingy, you know, all these other things.
And in its training data, it's associated, you know, snappy characters in a text it might've been trained off of, right? Maybe a character is described as snappy in their dialogue at some point in time. It starts to associate those words with different kinds of output.
So it's hard to explain it exactly, but it does have a very advanced way of understanding human language patterns and human language context and meaning. So if you ask it to be snappier, it will probably develop a response back to you that is more concise, maybe a little bit sassy. Maybe it has a rhyme to it, depending on what else is in your prompt.
But it because it has become like an expert of mimicking human language patterns, it effectively is very good at understanding the meanings of words that you use. Now, if you use the gibberish word that had never existed before and said, can you make it more smorgasbord?
It would have no idea what you meant, but it might come up with something that's, you know, similarly silly sounding as smorgasbord.
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Chapter 4: Can AI tools be used interchangeably?
these tools are progressively getting better and better and trained on more data sets, which are making them less likely to what we call hallucinate. Mathematics, they used to be terrible at predicting the best answer to a mathematical question. Now, the more advanced models, especially those that are,
are called deep reasoning models where they kind of, when they generate a response to you, it takes a little bit longer because it's actually running through its response through itself over and over again to see if it's really getting to the best answer. Those will be more likely to be correct.
Now, when it comes to general questions about things that are likely, there's likely a lot of information about it on the internet, for example, therefore it's likely trained on a lot of that data. Like why is the sky blue? it's probably going to give a pretty solid answer to that.
If you ask it about a very niche disease that just appeared in the world that hasn't been heavily researched, it's probably going to give you an answer, but it may not be correct. The best thing I tell people to do is that when you use these tools as a jumping off point, because they can get you really far, and then do a quick Google search, see if there's a secondary source that backs that up.
You'll find that a lot of the time, it is totally right. It's wrong enough of the time that you should always do that extra step of fact-checking.
If I Google, if I just search in a search engine, the best baked lasagna recipe there is, I'll get back results of 10 million lasagna recipes, none of which may or may not be the best. If I ask AI to give me the best, does it somehow put in a judgment that this one or these four are the best, or will I just get 10 million baked lasagna recipes?
You will get one lasagna recipe back. It will not necessarily be the best lasagna. Best is, you know, arbitrary. But you will get a recipe back that is most likely to result in a lasagna. That's the best way I can put it. So if you truly want to have the vetted, you know, best ranked lasagna, lots of great ratings, Google might still be the best way to go.
But if you're looking to just get started, I want to try and cook something quick. I do this all the time. How do I? Give me a quick recipe. I have chicken, asparagus. Parmesan and tomato sauce in my fridge. What can I make with this? It will generate back a recipe that will result in something tasty. It may not be the best thing you've ever made, but it will get you there.
And that is again, because it's taking in all of the data it has of all the lasagna recipes that are in its training data, which is likely a massive amount because they are effectively trained on the whole variety of things on the internet.
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Chapter 5: What are some creative uses of AI?
Chapter 6: How reliable are AI-generated answers?
And would you want to know what you're going to get for Christmas? And even... And, of course, they say no. And even, would you like to know when you're going to die? Which, of course, I can't tell them, but very few people actually say they would like to know. Some do, but very few. And so I always think of uncertainty as a relationship between ourselves and the outside world.
Somebody's called it the conscious awareness of ignorance, which I really like. Because it really puts that in something we own, you know, our personal ignorance. And that can vary so much from person to person.
And so why doesn't the conversation end there? Some things are uncertain. You'll never know until you know. And have a nice day. That's it.
Well, I'm a statistician, so I've spent my entire career in a way analyzing uncertainty, using data and evidence to try to reduce our uncertainty and even try to quantify our uncertainty to actually get a handle on what we don't know. And I really strongly believe that we should, when possible, try to put our uncertainty into numbers.
I mean, we all use words like could, perhaps, likely and everything in our everyday language. But actually, those can be very dangerous. And I always refer back to 1961 when Kennedy became president and found out about the CIA bombings. planned invasion of the Bay of Pigs at Cuba to topple Castro's government with 1500 Cuban exiles.
And he commissioned the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do an intelligence report on that. And they thought it was not a very good idea at all and thought that it was about 30 to 70 chance of success. In other words, 70 percent chance of failure. But in the report that went to Kennedy, the numbers got taken out and it got replaced by, bizarrely, the term a fair chance of success.
And they meant not very good. But I don't think that's how anybody else would interpret it. Of course, that's not the only reason he approved the raid, which, of course, was a complete fiasco. But people have learned from that. And now in intelligence, people really try to put numbers on their judgments.
In the UK, if you're in MI5 or MI6 and you use the term likely, you mean between 55% and 75% probability. And if anyone assesses a 30% chance of success, they have to use the word unlikely to communicate that number. So there's a sort of lookup table between words and numbers.
Somewhere in this discussion has to come human nature because numbers don't tell you everything. For example, it is much safer to fly than it is to drive in a car. But a lot of people don't live that. They know it intellectually, but flying scares them to death. And so the probabilities don't mean much because they ignore them.
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Chapter 7: How are AI tools rapidly evolving?
Do you sense people are overly worried about risk or do we have it kind of right?
Oh, that's very difficult. There's huge variation. You must know in the people, you know, you'll know some people who are very cautious, rather anxious, always concerned, you know, one in a million chance. Well, there's always the one and things like that. And others who are more gung-ho and go for it and kind of ignore, you know, are not too sensitive, you know, are bold, possibly even reckless.
And so there's enormous variation in our reaction to it. I think what's more important, and that's how individuals are, people are different. When it comes to sort of societies, when people are making judgments on behalf of us, about what risks society is prepared to take, then I think, you know, it is interesting just how much cautious some
you know, some policies are compared with others just because actually people are really concerned about, for example, nuclear power or nuclear waste. And so vast amounts of money is spent to possibly have negligible effect in reducing the risk as the risk is so small in the first place. And so, you know, I think when it comes to societal decisions, we should be expecting people to take
I wouldn't say a rational, but a balanced approach to actually looking at the important things and not, I personally feel, not following people's anxieties.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because I think of myself as a fairly cautious person, but I also know, as I look back on my life, things have a way of working out for the most part. I mean, I have not been the victim of any huge disaster. And, you know, we just had the fires here in California. We have friends that lost their home, but they'll be okay. I mean, it will eventually...
There will be a path to recovery and things work out.
This is the important thing which I always emphasize, which is resilience. And the point is that, you know, we can't stop everything. Stuff happens. We can't stop everything bad happening to us and we're going to die anyway. So the crucial thing is resilience, which is being able to deal with stuff as it comes along of, you know, recover as best as you can.
And it's resilience to things you never even thought of. I mean, you can protect yourself to some extent against things you have thought of. But in the end, what one needs is reserves, both I think mental and monetary if possible, but certainly mental reserves to deal with unexpected things.
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