How to Use AI Ethically Without Losing Our Humanity

Interview By Brandi Fleck

AI consultant Peter Swimm explains how ethical, human-centered AI can support work and accessibility without replacing human creativity, intuition, judgment, agency, or genuine connection.

🎧 Listen 📺 Watch 📖 Read

The loudest conversations about artificial intelligence tend to ask whether AI will replace us. Peter Swimm asks a more revealing question: Would the people building this technology trust it inside their own homes?

For Peter, the future of AI is not simply about what machines can do. It is about who benefits, who absorbs the cost, who remains in control, and whether technology gives people more time to think, create, connect, and live or quietly strips those things away.

In this conversation, Peter and Brandi explore what ethical AI actually looks like beyond corporate promises. They examine AI bias, automation, creativity, data ownership, the future of work, and the distinctly human qualities that machines may be able to imitate but never truly possess.

The issue is not whether we should use AI or reject it entirely. It is whether we can build a relationship with technology that protects our humanity instead of asking us to surrender it.

---

Listen to Peter Swimm’s Interview

---

Watch Peter Swimm’s Interview

---

Table of Contents

Human-Centered AI and What We Want the World To Be

Brandi Fleck: What does being human mean to you?

Peter Swimm: I think the difference—and I deal with this in my business—what makes it human is that we work for outcomes that aren’t necessarily the most efficient ones because they represent what we want the world to be.

And so, when we do work, we do it because we either think it’s important or it fulfills something. And if the work required causes us to question why the work should be done, we have the right not to do it. And so that’s what makes us human, I think.

Brandi Fleck: That is a really unique answer. I don’t think anybody’s ever approached it like that.

Peter Swimm: And I think a lot of people—there’s a famous slide from the ’70s from IBM: “A computer cannot face consequences, so it should never make decisions.” And I think that is really, really important, especially when you start building things that are used by more than yourself.

Especially when you’re building things that are used by millions of people, anything that happens in your house is on you. And so I think that’s the first step I tell all my clients: Would you let your children use this?

If you talk to anyone in tech, they don’t want their kids on Roblox. They don’t want their kids to talk to AI because they know. And I think that’s very telling—to be working on technology that you wouldn’t trust inside your house, but you allow it to be your livelihood and all that.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Okay, everybody, today we’re welcoming Peter Swimm to the show. He’s coming to us from right outside of Seattle. He’s the founder of a company called Toilville. And Peter, I’m so excited to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Peter Swimm: Thanks for having me.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Before we dive too far in, why don’t you tell us: Who are you?

Peter Swimm: So, I am the founder of a consultancy called Toilville. Toilville is my venturing out from—I’ve been in tech for about 30 years, and I started in high school working at the library, teaching seniors and the community how to use the internet in the ’90s, when no one knew what the internet was.

The last couple of years, I’ve been working for big companies like Microsoft and Walmart, working in something called conversational AI, which is now just AI. A lot of that work has opened my eyes to the fact that very few people understand. They know the outcome they want to happen with computers, but they don’t understand the value of human-to-human contact, and they don’t know how to translate that through a machine, out the other side, so it’s the same.

And so, part of my consultancy is really talking to people, especially small-business people who’ve left big companies and big jobs because they’re sick of all the red tape, orchestration, and politics, and they want to have their own identity.

But leaving a mothership means you leave behind having teams and people to do work. And so, there are a lot of opportunities for people to use technology to automate their processes so they can spend more time, like you and I are, talking.

AI Automation for Small Business and Everyday Work

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Okay. Well, so that dives me straight into the question: What’s the point of AI, and how does it benefit us?

Peter Swimm: It depends on who’s paying the bills. I think AI has become very much a catch-all for anything involving computers, information work, and people work. People say “AI” like they’re saying “Kleenex.”

And so, because of that, it’s very hard to understand which technology is reputable and ethical and which is a startup pitch that hasn’t actually been done yet. I think the brand has been very tarnished over the last couple of years because of things like AI slop, the consolidation of media, and all of this coming together.

And so, the brand itself, I think, is very, very rightfully tarnished. But at the end of the day, it’s just: How can I use technology to expand my reach and achieve my goals without paying King Coal to literally brute-force stuff to do things?

You could take that the other way and say, “Oh, cool. I can lay people off and get free work.” And then, on the other hand, you could say, “Oh, computers are anathema, and they ruin the artisanal nature of my business, and I will never touch them.”

And so, I try to navigate the center. Let us find low-hanging fruit that you hate doing. I’m a writer. I like to write. I never have AI write my emails or communicate stuff because that is the part of the day when I relax and put my ideas together. But I understand people have procrastination, and it’s hard to start stuff. So why not have a template? You go in, change the template, and do those things.

I think there are ways to review work, not put out slop, and be more editorial. And so, part of my training is training.

On the other half, I watch my clients do things like get an email, copy and paste text into a screen, and then copy and paste that screen into another screen. And I think that’s where technology comes in. It’s like, okay, let’s just have one screen, and they all populate each other.

And that technically uses AI, but it’s definitely not generative. It’s more automation. And so, once people understand, “Oh, yeah, we’re not going to boil the earth to make a picture of someone topless or whatever horrible thing AI has been doing today. I’m just using things so, instead of the computer going, ‘404, file not found,’ it’s just three things that might be the answer.”

And so, when people approach things like that, one, it’s controllable because you’re not putting things out that embarrass you publicly, and two, you run the show, and nothing happens without your say-so.

Brandi Fleck: Okay, so there is some aspect of AI that is controllable and that’s not boiling the earth, right?

Peter Swimm: In fact, any computer you own today that claims to have Apple Intelligence or Copilot can run stuff on itself, so you avoid the data centers. They’re pretty good. It won’t be able to write a custom software application for you, but it’ll definitely understand when you’ve made a typo, gently correct it for the person you’re addressing, and do spell-check.

I talk to a lot of writers. Programmers have something called linting. Linting is when you’re programming code and you have typos—code breaks. Writers can have the same thing. It’s called style guides.

So, programmatically, we take a style guide and run it through your writing. Your autocorrect is tuned to Chicago style, or you hate em dashes, so it won’t ever use em dashes.

And so, these are the kinds of things where we’re using it to machine-process your work, but a lot of your work is—you still have to decide the sequence of words and how they come together. This is just like having your friend there to keep you in shape and make sure the email to your mom is the same quality as an email to your boss.

Brandi Fleck: Okay, so that’s not generative AI?

Peter Swimm: No. I think it’s very similar technology, but the difference is I have a folder full of my mail. I have 17,000 emails. And so, I ask it to write a draft for me based on—I start every email with “Hello,” and I end every email with “Best,” and the thing that makes an email unique is maybe three sentences.

So, let’s make a template of my thing, like you would with a mail merge, and generate that on the fly with the information from my corpus and not stolen from the writers of The New York Times for the last five years or whatever.

I think the key to that is that if you run a model on your machine, you know where it came from. But if you run the model on the cloud, they don’t tell you where they get their data from. And so, I think there is definitely a lack of consent, and there’s definitely a lack of transparency, right?

Because you think you’re writing the great American novel, and it’s 85 percent John Steinbeck. Unless you’re a professional writer, you may not even notice that.

And so, I think a lot of people using these tools think they’re being more creative because they don’t have any data showing, “Oh, this is 99 percent not my stuff.”

And so, when I talk to people and they’re like, “Okay, I have to write emails,” I’m like, “I wouldn’t,” because I think email is your competitive advantage. If you’re going to play a numbers game and carpet-bomb the entirety of LinkedIn with an email about your business, sure, you’ll get leads.

But maybe, if you only send the 20 best emails to the 20 people who are most aligned with you, using data that AI has helped you analyze, wouldn’t that be a better use of time, energy, and all the other things?

And so, the key to that, I think, is being able to measure it and understand what you’re doing. I think AI is an elevator-pitch machine. Because it’s an elevator-pitch machine, it’ll take you 80 percent of the way, and then what do you do from there?

Most professionals already know how to do the first 80 percent. It’s the last 20 percent that makes you a professional. And it doesn’t really help you to have a broken horse that you can’t train up to be a thoroughbred. And so, a lot of this is: Maybe don’t use AI at all.

Maybe, if your room is full of whiteboards and you have 30,000 sticky notes, that is how you think things through. That’s great. How you digitize that when it’s done, for posterity so you can use the space again, is something where you can look at AI and use it as a lineage tool versus a generative tool.

And so, there are a lot of different ways you can approach technology that aren’t binary use or binary don’t use, I think.

Ethical AI, Data Privacy, and Human Agency

Brandi Fleck: Okay. So what we’re really talking about here is the ethical use of AI and a human-centered way to approach it. Is that correct?

Peter Swimm: Yeah. I think ethical AI is something that’s very divisive now because it started out being one thing, which is treating humans ethically with machines governed by AI. And now it’s starting to become a thing about protecting company IP.

If you look at ethical AI at a company like Microsoft or Google, they’re in the HR division. They’re in HR because they consider the work you do their IP. And so, you need to treat their and their customers’ data with respect.

They are not materially concerned with: Is this person working 20 hours a day? Or is the machine biased against people of color from the Global South, different gender persuasions, and all that?

Because of that, the word “ethical” becomes meaningless in technology. Really, the question I ask all my people when they’re evaluating technology is: What does it do? Who’s it for? And who does it cost?

For example, Amazon has a product literally called Mechanical Turk. What Mechanical Turk is, is stuff that pretends to be a chatbot, but it’s people in call centers in the Global South.

And so, 90 percent of the time, when you talk to some bot and you think it’s a horrible bot, it’s probably a person in a contact center with no air conditioning and 60 chat windows open at a time, going through and answering things to the best of their capacity.

If I was going to talk to a person in chat, I would talk to anyone in chat who can help me. I don’t think people are particular about whether they need to be somewhere or somewhere else, but I think they have squeezed the bottom line of “the customer is always right” versus “the customer is a burden that must be maintained and contained.”

And so, I think, at the end of the day, we’re really just talking about humans and machines and where your agency is when you deal with them. If you have to go through a chatbot, how do you get to a person? And if you get to a person, how do you ensure that’s the right person who has the authority to do something related to your needs?

Brandi Fleck: Okay. I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it and to define ethics. And so, what I’m hearing you say is that it’s kind of a case-by-case basis. There isn’t a black-and-white ethical line.

Peter Swimm: I think everyone should have nonnegotiables. For example, I won’t work on tooling that benefits the military. I won’t take on a client.

That is my business and my company. I have a designer, and all the graphics on my website are made bespoke by an artist. Part of my agreement with him is a work-for-hire agreement, but he also has the final say over where the image is used.

If the company gets sold and someone wants to put the image on a bomb or something that offends him, he can say no.

I think that is a horrible business decision, right? It’s bad for me to constrain my images, but I think anyone who creates something should have some sort of say in what happens, just like parentage.

And I think that’s the way technology should work because of all the work that made the world. These guys came in, sucked it all up, and put it into a machine to answer stuff. So, the fact that you can’t look into it and see who came up with what is grossly unethical, I think.

Because it belongs to all of us. It’s our shared thing. A lot of my knowledge comes from having a free and open internet. To me, people trying to paywall it and charge me rent to access it is a rejection of the social contract that caused people to make stuff for you.

At the end of the day, I’m talking to a person who just wants to get their email to go into Salesforce. They don’t need to know all this. They don’t need to take a degree in philosophy and understand the ethical impact of where silicon comes from.

But I think when it pertains to you personally, your company, and your business, you really need to know: What is the cost of doing work? A lot of people don’t know that. And so, that’s what makes up my first couple of weeks of any engagement.

How do we know if the bot is better or worse if you don’t know whether everything you do is better or worse? A lot of it is just tightening the ship of your processes. You may find out that you don’t need any kind of automation at all because Cindy has all the information. She just needs to have the agency to share it with everyone.

You have people who are gatekeeping in your company, and they get things done. How do we expose their expertise without making them answer every question themselves? That’s a job for a chatbot, I think.

For example, I have a dentist, and my dentist has this great chatbot. All it does is, when people call, it pulls up a little baseball card with their last visit, their next visit, their name, and notes.

And so, when she picks up the phone—and she knows people by name anyway—she can say, “Hello, how’s your root canal?” Or, “Hey, I see you’re coming in next Tuesday for an appointment. What’s up?”

And that little bit, I think, helps her because she’s answering 100 phone calls a day. I think it makes the customer feel good and makes the patient feel comfortable in a stressful situation.

Those are the kinds of outcomes I think people should be looking at for technology versus making pizza delivery completely contactless.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah.

Peter Swimm: I want someone to deliver my pizza because, otherwise, why don’t I just buy pizza from the grocery store at that point?

I also want people who deliver pizzas to have money to pay for their car and their gas. So, pizza costs $35 because of that. I’m okay with that.

I don’t think we should be exploring technological solutions to social difficulties, especially from companies whose CEOs make 1,000 times more than their drivers.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. That’s really interesting, just the thought of not using technology for social solutions. But let me maybe tie that into this question: Do you see AI, whether it’s generative or an LLM or something like that, as being on a trajectory to replace social interactions and connection?

Generative AI, Creativity, and the Future of Art

Peter Swimm: The person makes the art. Conversely, I think having access to tools is a great thing. People should be able to do things and experiment with them.

But I think it’s very telling that there wasn’t any kind of viral sensation out of Sora because it wasn’t enjoyable to watch. I consider myself something of a cinephile, so I know a little bit about framing and all that stuff, and it was just slop.

I think that’s what we mean by slop. Even things that are amateur have an attempt at structure because our brains are wired for structure and narrative. Putting a bunch of things together randomly does not create a cohesive, communicative message.

Whether it’s an email, a video, or a software application, that is additive. It becomes uncomfortable and like the uncanny valley.

For a reason, generative AI by itself won’t make—there’ll never be a generative AI Beatles. There’ll never be generative AI’s Citizen Kane because that sustained idea is usually something that’s only been captured in a bottle very rarely in people. So, how are we supposed to do it in a machine?

Brandi Fleck: Well, I’ve heard people talk about how AI is just going to keep getting better and better. Eventually, could it be on the same level as human creativity?

Peter Swimm: Oh, yeah. When this was recorded last week, Sora shut down. Sora was the video-generating version of ChatGPT that produced nothing of value.

When I say nothing of value, not a single person who had this technology for the four or five months it was out made a movie on the caliber of Scorsese, Spielberg, and all that.

And so, I think what you learn in technology, and what we notice with carpentry and with any artificial thing, is that the tools don’t make the man or the woman.

I don’t think AI will ever be able to create something that is a whole new thing without—so, if you wanted to make a thing that was almost Goodfellas, or you wanted to make a movie that was almost something, sure, you can make something that was almost something, but everything is changed to Pittsburgh or whatever.

And will that make you cry? Or will that make you forget about your troubles for two hours? Maybe. People watch some dumb stuff.

The question is: Can you make something that someone would watch for two hours versus something that is an enduring testament to the human spirit?

We don’t even know what intelligence is. We have all these people saying, “Well, I think ChatGPT has a soul.” It’s just like: How do you know you have a soul?

These are questions that we’ve been asking since fire flickered in the cave. None of these guys are humanities majors, so they don’t realize that they’re saying stuff that people have been saying since Gilgamesh or throughout thousands of years of human culture.

Without that kind of background, it’s the difference, I think, between knowledge and wisdom. AI can be very knowledgeable, but can it make intuitive connections between stuff?

The human brain is probably the best computer on the planet at making random eureka-moment connections. Because of that, I don’t think anything AI makes will ever be anything better than passable or good enough.

Let it write business emails. Every business email has a formula. Let it swap out the stuff.

Keep it away from Jane Austen fan fiction or whatever you want to do because I’d rather watch a 12-year-old’s fan fiction, where they’re exploring things and figuring things out but are a person with ideas, a thought, and a voice, than a perfect imitation of J.K. Rowling or a perfect imitation of whoever.

That’s part of the interest to me when I read stories: Who’s the person who came up with this? What were they thinking when they wrote it? Because I feel this way.

Peter Swimm: Did they intend for me to feel this way? I think that’s part of the conversation when you talk about anything. Even if you go to some website for shoes, you’re like, “Who made this thing? This thing’s horrible.”

And if you just have machines making content for machines, the world suddenly becomes a very bleak place.

Brandi Fleck: It really does.

Peter Swimm: And what’s the outcome? Does ChatGPT think people have money to buy products if all the work is done by machines? Therefore, who will fund the building of models if no one’s online producing content because they have to work to pay their bills because they no longer have a high-paying job that allowed them to make content for free on the internet for 30 years?

So, say the models replace us. Good luck making new movies once you exhaust people’s appetite for the things we made. You think Marvel burnout is bad? Wait until you see five years of AI burnout.

And I tell this to my clients all the time. It’s like, okay, what is the result of you going full automation? What are you going to do with the time that you saved?

And if it isn’t becoming better at your job, then you’re looking for passive income. That’s interesting. That’s great if you want to gain more control, but I’m interested in unlocking what people like to do.

That “work at what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life” thing—that’s the American dream. And those are the kinds of people I like talking to.

I don’t like talking to people who are just like, “What is the ROI on this? I have 10 developers working on this project. What can I do with three?” Versus, “I have 10 developers on the product. How can we ship better version ones of our software?”

Those are the conversations I like to have with people. Because all the time, I work at companies and you make a plan, and we’re like, “Okay, we’ve got to be accessible and ethical and work for everyone and do everything right.”

And then you start whittling away at that because you’re running out of time and there’s a business deadline and all that. Whoop, take out the screen-reader support and take out language support for countries that aren’t in the Americas.

And all these thousand cuts add up. What if you could just keep the original deadline and not make any cuts? No one’s tried that yet, right?

The tech industry has laid off 30 percent of the population since COVID, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Arguably, it’s bad and worse.

And so, how do you stop from becoming grist for the mill? In the 2000s, I worked for a company that was one of the first companies to be on Amazon that wasn’t Amazon. Along with Toys “R” Us and a couple of other companies, they’re all gone now because Amazon learned who they were and ate their lunch.

When you started searching for them, you started seeing all the other things Amazon sold that were cheaper. And I think the AI tooling is like that now. It’s very underpriced.

Our estimate is that it’s up to 300 percent cheaper. The $200-a-month ChatGPT account costs them about $900 a month in usage if you use it at the level that they give you.

And this is like something a drug dealer does, right? It’s cheap for a while, while people are paying for it. And the minute the competition’s gone, who knows what happens?

So, I also try to counsel people: Do you own stuff at the end of the day? Are we building tooling that is yours and that you can take to a different provider if the provider is fascist, or the provider is bought out by some foreign country that you can’t operate in?

And people don’t know. They don’t know what happened to Twitter, and they don’t know what’s happening to CBS and all this consolidation of media.

And it’s a shame to leave a big company and start your own business and immediately become wedded at the hip to a company you don’t control.

AI Bias, Language Models, and Human Intelligence

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. This is all really interesting to think about. And I also want to go back to something you said when you said, “We don’t even know what intelligence is.” How are we developing artificial intelligence when we don’t know what intelligence is?

Peter Swimm: The thing about AI is that they’re language models. I apologize to all the math people listening to this because this is a gross oversimplification, but they really are probability machines.

And so, as long as you’re looking for solutions that are the most probable, which tend to be the best practice, you’re okay. But if you’re anyone who’s not in the in-group, or you’re not one of the average outcomes, you find that it’s biased against you.

And that’s when we talk about AI bias. It doesn’t necessarily mean being racist or anything. But if society is racist, it leans toward racism.

And if you don’t speak Californian English and you talk to a voice bot, it’s going to have a harder time understanding you because everything’s trained on people who work in the Bay Area, which is probably one of the cleanest accents in America, right?

I worked with a grocer, and a lot of our clientele was in the Southeast. And surprise, surprise, Southern accents don’t work well with AI models because they don’t train them on Southern people.

And that’s rich person, poor person alike. That is a regional, cultural thing.

And when you have thousands of spoken languages in the world, and the model is trained in English only and just happens to speak the other languages because they fall into the machine rather than being designed for them—and they have no way to test it—how do they know it’s good?

And I think intelligence is like that, right? Because they’re not training the models based on—they’re not having them write papers about Chomsky, Socrates, or anything else that we use to measure intelligence.

Of course, the people who evaluate these things consider themselves very intelligent. And at the end of the day, it’s just like: What is the benchmark?

All the benchmarks they have are similarity to things that they know. And Umberto Eco had this saying: “It’s impossible to make a one-to-one map of the world.”

And so, if the map of AI is one one-hundredth of the world, what scenarios are missing from that story? It’s probably out-groups, people of color, the Global South, and all kinds of things.

So, if your livelihood depends on that missing one-hundredth of the content, why would you cripple your technology and the things you know by entrusting them to AI?

At the end of the day, a lot of my clients are like, “I want to explain,” because the common conception is that it’s all human knowledge. But the internet’s not all human knowledge. It’s not even all Western knowledge.

And I always tell people, “I sound like I know a lot about AI. You know way more about your field of work than I would ever be able to know, even with the best AI in the world.”

And that is worth so much more to your company and your value than me coming in and giving you, “Okay, now everything’s run by ChatGPT, and you are now a superhuman.”

It’s just like, no, you are the star in this story. You’re the Michael Jordan, and we need to surround you with talent, not replace you with the average, ideal, median talent, which is what AI is at best. It’s just median quality.

Brandi Fleck: Okay, gotcha. What does that say about human nature?

Peter Swimm: Well, I don’t think anyone who’s ever worked at a job they hated would be surprised to know that people don’t know what working hard looks like outside of themselves.

And I think a lot of my clients don’t know what working hard looks like. At the end of the day, there’s also the sense of good enough.

I think a lot of people are independent engineers, entrepreneurs, and stuff. They like being an entrepreneur because, “I’m going to take Friday off and go watch my kid play baseball. And my business will shut down for the day, and we’ll go have lunch.”

And people who are into AI—there’s a thing called 996 culture in the Valley, which is nine to nine every day, six days a week. And it just sounds awful.

I think all the best computer people I know despise computers because they like using them, they like working around them, and most of the day they’re swearing at them.

And that kind of output can only make—it really depends on the outcome you want. I think the best outcome is a computer that carves out time for you to do stuff.

And so, if the important part of your business is looking at a whiteboard of all the day’s news and making the connections between the things in front of you, use AI to source it while you do your vision board. That’s what you do with AI.

“I want to go through all the morning newspapers, and I just want it to cut out all the articles I would cut out anyway for me. And I can just look at them and figure, ‘Business opportunity,’ or, ‘Socioeconomic event that would cause me to invest differently in the next six months.’”

I talked to a client the other day, and he was a lumber guy. He would look at weather patterns, and he quit his company because he foresaw a La Niña event coming in an area where they get their wood from, so the wood would probably be more expensive in five years.

And no one at the company cared because everyone at the company was going quarter to quarter. So, he left and made money on it, and now he’s an independent businessperson.

And so, how do you give the brain time to find those opportunities? You find them in the shower.

I was reading an article about the guy who invented heart surgery. He got the idea for the pioneering part of heart surgery at a Stephen Sondheim musical. The guy was talking about his heart breaking, and it made him have that intuitive connection.

AI would never look for an answer to a problem in a Sondheim book, but he found it. His brain made the connection.

And I think that kind of goes back to the creativity thing. I think an AI movie looks like one of those movies that references other movies, and you’ll see people watching a good movie within a bad movie.

So, everyone in the movie is watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and the movie around it is horrible, and you want to leave the theater. I think that’s the best you can expect AI to do.

Brandi Fleck: Okay. And movies are expensive. You don’t want to spend your time watching those.

Peter Swimm: Yeah, right.

Human-First AI for Productivity and Accessibility

Brandi Fleck: So, what I’m hearing you say throughout this conversation—and correct me if I’m wrong—is that the things that are innately human that AI really can’t replace, and that you don’t foresee it ever replacing, are creativity, intuition, and the human spirit.

Peter Swimm: Yeah. I think all AI can understand is: Did something happen or didn’t it happen?

All my emails are read by AI, not to be deleted from an inbox, but to see what I do with them. Everyone has had the email that sits at the bottom of their inbox that they refuse to get to. I have my system tell me if I’ve done that for too long, or if the person is important and needs to be taken care of right away, or whatever.

It’s a perception thing. I have ADHD, so it’s hard to know when to start and when your deadlines are. I need technology to keep me focused so I don’t hyperfocus on something down a rabbit hole.

For someone like me, it’s an accessibility question. For someone else, it may just be a time-boxing issue. The Pomodoro Method and all those things: “I really need an hour a day to go through my inbox because it’s out of control.”

So, how do you separate yourself from all these things that are trying to get your attention—the phone going off and all that? It’s like, okay, I put everything through one secretary as AI, and I turn off my phone for 30 minutes. I turn off doomscrolling on CNN and all the other stuff and just focus on my thing.

I think human-first and human awareness—and how we make something that optimizes for getting off the computer versus staying on the computer—are really important things that we need to start building as a society.

Brandi Fleck: Are people building things like that?

Peter Swimm: I think so. Unfortunately, the people who are most able to do them are building them, and there are a lot of people who just can’t.

Since COVID, a lot of people in call centers are doing it at home on their own computers. So, you’re on the computer, you’re working, and you don’t have a lot of time to log off and figure out how to set up the thing to be more effective and ethical for you. You’re just trying to get paid and get money.

I think a lot of it comes from a place of privilege. People who control their own time and their own systems have more life-hacker-type ability to get into stuff.

And a lot of people are just like, “Well, we have a new program this year. It’s awful, just like the old one, but more so.” They just have to deal with it because no one cares, no one asks your opinion, and the software is different, so suck it up.

I think that is also another problem that I was hopeful AI would solve. But, of course, all they’re doing is making more versions of bad things more quickly.

So, okay, the new redesign is coming out after eight months, and they’re not learning what made the old one fail. They’re just like, “We’ve got to ship a new one in June. Here’s version four, and now everything is AI-first.” We never had it working right the last time.

And no one’s asking, “What would a new program look like from the start if we had the ability to make one from scratch?”

The fact that it has always existed doesn’t mean it should always exist. A lot of what I end up doing with my clients is canceling subscriptions.

You have Figma, you have Slack, and you have Outlook. They’re all inboxes with tasks. Why does it matter if the task is an email, a phone call, a design, or software? What do you do to normalize that flow?

At my company, we don’t have Figma. My designer makes art in his art program, and my developer makes code in his code program. We have code in the middle that translates art automatically into code.

The designer will make an SVG, and he’ll upload it, and then we start the program up. We don’t have a huge process to make a thing that’s not useful to the end result.

And I think it’s better because using a program and changing the color, like you’re turning a knob on a TV, is way more intuitive than having a meeting, coming back, and having another meeting about it.

The Future of AI, Jobs, and Human Connection

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. What would you say to someone who has a lot of fear around the future of generative AI?

Peter Swimm: I think a lot of people who control who gets to make stuff will do whatever they want. CEOs are going to fire people because they want to fire people, and movie studios are going to put out garbage because they think they’ll make money.

As an employee and as a consumer, you’ve got to do the best you can because it’s capitalism. You’ve got to pay your rent, you’ve got to eat, and you’ve got to do whatever you can.

I don’t think the call is coming from inside the building to save it. I talk to a lot of juniors and people coming out of college now. I feel most of this concern for people who are just coming out of college.

They didn’t have high school because of COVID. Now they’re coming out of college, and AI has effectively killed the internship.

How are you supposed to learn how stuff really works other than by doing it?

I tell people to be very promiscuous and, I think, very mercenary because they’re very mercenary with you. I’ve seen companies lay off people who’ve been there for 30 years two months before their retirement vests.

It’s just like, yeah, do what you want because they’re doing what they want. It’s scary, but do it when you’re young and things are cheap, and hopefully you don’t have obligations and things to take care of.

And if you do, you’ve got to protect the people around you first. Don’t work late nights for someone who’s going to lay you off anyway.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. One last question before we start to wrap up. Let’s go back to this topic of human connection. How is AI impacting relationships?

Peter Swimm: One thing I find in business is that people are becoming much worse at listening.

This podcast is probably 25 or 30 minutes longer than I would talk to most clients about these things because the capacity for information is strange. We’re basically drowning in information every day, but sustained, thoughtful narratives are very hard to get across the table.

A lot of work has to happen where you need to find a language that resonates with my clients. And that, I think, is a direct result of the clickbait economy of the world and the way news works.

The world is very tumultuous, and the people who run things are people who are very good at running that machine from outrage to resignation, to outrage, to resignation. We have no time to talk about resolutions that solve things meaningfully.

And it even goes out into the workplace. I’m in my 40s, and I’ve shipped products for 25 years. I see a lot of people who don’t know how to ship a product anymore.

And by “ship a product,” I mean, okay, here’s Friday. It’s the end of the story, and now everyone has this new story to do.

That kind of uncertainty and tooling extends to all parts of life. How do you expect people to get good at things if there’s no narrative of improvement in any area?

That’s probably the hardest thing for people to understand. Everything that exists is the result of people thinking about something for a long time, making mistakes, getting things right the first time if they’re lucky, and learning how to be bad for a long time.

I keep coming to this: “I’m just not good at programming.”

“What do you like about it?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you like?”

“I like designing the systems.”

There’s a job for that. Find somewhere where they let you do more of that than the actual programming bit.

I think people need to understand that AI is kind of reducing this world conceptually. But there’s always going to be a need for every aspect of a thing.

And if you can’t find a big guy who respects you enough, find a little guy who respects you more, where you can afford the hit of not making as much money.

If you can pay your rent making signs for a flower shop, you should do it. That’s way better than picking what color gray goes in the software box.

Because, at the end of the day, they’re more likely to keep you employed than a company that’s like, “Oh, we need a tax break. Let’s cut 20 percent of people.” Close their eyes and throw the dart at the board.

It’s hard to say that. I’m a white guy, and I have more coverage than other people who don’t have the mobility that I have.

But I think the fact that I’ve never been at a company for more than three years has brought me to this point where I can run my own consultancy. I have the confidence to come in front of people who run Fortune 500 companies and just say, “I disagree,” or, “I don’t know the answer well enough to confirm what you’re telling me to do.”

And that, to me, feels a lot better than having a lot of people like me for sounding like them.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. So, more authenticity.

Peter Swimm: Yeah.

Building Ethical Technology for Real People

Brandi Fleck: I’m going to give you a chance to tell our listeners exactly where they can find your work in just a minute. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you feel is important to share?

Peter Swimm: A lot of the tooling that we use is very frustrating. So, we are actually building software for regular people.

If anyone has any questions, I talk to people all the time, even if they’re not going to be clients. I love talking to people, nonprofits, teachers, and people who have to use stuff in the classroom and have stuff forced on them.

So, feel free to reach out to us. We have a vanity URL, peoplemakeitbetter.com. If you just put in a note about what you’re asking, I’ll be sure to respond to every email.

Even though it may sound like a machine did it because I have a process, I do read, think, and respond to everything. So, let me know if you have any questions.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah, that’s really generous. And where can people find your work?

Peter Swimm: Our company website is toilville.com. And, of course, we have the vanity URL right now, peoplemakeitbetter.com. It’s all linked in the bio on our page.

And we do podcasts, and we stream on LinkedIn, Twitch, and all that stuff. So, look for us on all those channels.

Brandi Fleck: Nice. All right. Well, all of that will be in the show notes, or, if you’re watching the video, it’ll be in the description box below.

Peter, it has been a pleasure getting to know a little slice of your world today. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Peter Swimm: Thanks for having me.

Join the conversation!

Feel free to share your own experience and let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

---

Related Posts

Hi, I’m the founder of Human Amplified. I’m Brandi Fleck, a recognized communications and interviewing expert, a writer, an artist, and a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and Reiki healer. No matter how you interact with me, I help you tell and change your story so you can feel more like yourself. So welcome!

---

Find More on the Blog

No results found

Category

• Behind the Scenes
• Collection
• Health & Wellness
• Personal Development
• Relationships
• Society & Culture
• Spirituality

Topic

• ADHD
• AI
• Atlanta
• Black and BIPOC
• DIY
• FAQ
• LGBTQIA plus
• Los Angeles
• Nashville
• Seattle
• St Louis
• St. Louis
• UFOS/UAPs/ETs
• abuse
• accountability
• addiction and recovery
• adoption
• affirmations
• afterlife
• angels
• animals
• anxiety management
• art
• astrology
• atlanta
• awakening
• beauty
• behind the scenes
• being human
• body image
• body work
• boundaries
• brandi fleck
• breathwork
• bullying
• burn out
• burnout
• cancer
• career
• caretaking
• chakras
• channeled
• clarity-dive
• clarity-practice
• clarity-primer
• clean products
• coach
• codependency
• communication
• community

---

Recent Blog Posts

---

Visit the Full Podcast Audio Archive

---

Affiliate