How to build your dream life with AI? | Ngozi Elobuike | TEDxTUDublin

In March of 2023, I was sleeping on my

sister's

couch. I know it was comfy. It was nice

but not the best bed.

By six months later, I was named top 50

people to watch by the Irish Times.

And the journey of that is what we'll

both go on today. But I think the real

crux of it is that I needed a companion.

When I was on my sister's couch, it was

my office. It was my bed, but it was

also my incubation lab. And that

companion was AI. So let's take it to

the start. How does someone like me end

up living between the Emerald Isle

France, and the US? Originally, I'm from

Stockton, California, which is right

next to wine country. And when I was

young, my parents decided to move from

Iwolo Oay in Eiago to California in

order to create the life of their

dreams. It wasn't perfect. It had a

number of different challenges, but what

it revealed to me was how important

migration is, how it shapes the way that

people exist in the world. After that, I

ditched California, decided to go all

the way to the other side of the

country, and I ended up studying biology

at Howard University, followed by moving

all the way to London, eventually to

Dublin, and now I live in France

getting my MBA.

All of this required that I understand

the new digital landscape that we exist

in. What is this landscape? What does it

do? How do we operate in it? Well, let's

look at web

one. Web one was the readonly internet.

I mean, I don't know if anybody had

dialup, but it's that computer that

screeches and then it breathes heavy and

it turns on. And then after that, we all

ended up on the participative social

web. That's web two. I I don't know who

still has Facebook, uh, Instagram, and

everything in between. Tik Tok if you're

a jenzier like me. And now we've entered

into some of the most interesting

territory. Web 3. This is the web that

has the ability to read, to write, to

articulate itself, and to challenge what

we know as intelligence. I think many

people are scared of this really dark

underbelly, unsure what it means to

navigate and traverse this

territory, but the saying goes, the

creator economy will be fueled by those

who decide to become a jack of all

trades. And the saying goes as well

jack of all trades is a master of none

but that's not complete. In fact, it's

jack of all trades is a master of none

which is way better than a master of

one. So, I'm

Jill. And the first thing that I thought

to myself was, how do I take my

background as a scientist and apply it?

What does a scientist do? They think

about life as an experiment. You have

dependent variables and you have

independent variables. You have things

that you can control in your settings.

And as people like to say, man makes

plans and God laughs. There's so many

things we can't

control. In articulating life as a

scientist, you begin to think to

yourself, what are the independent

variables that if I plug in have the

ability to transform my life? AI is an

independent variable. If we're thinking

farther in science, it actually has the

ability to act as an enzyme. It has the

ability to lower the activation energy

needed to complete a task. Let's look at

the example of perplexity AI. This is

like a chat search on steroids, so they

say. You're able to ask it a question.

Hey, I have no idea how to start my own

business.

create me a business plan and it

populates responses as

necessary. So when we begin to see our

life as an experiment with layers of

things we have to we can understand we

have to then think what is it that's

actually barring me from making

appropriate changes and that's when I

take off my science hat and put on my

hat as a

sociologist. Sociologists ask

themselves, "What is it that is

preventing me from having a rich and

robust thriving life?" If you turn to

those who believe in the network theory

they'll say, "In fact, what is robbing

you from dignity is not your inability

to access money. It's not your inability

to access power. Really, it's the

poverty, the network poverty, the

network impoverishment that you're

facing.

How good is your social network? With

social media, we have a extensive

network of weak ties, parasocial

relationships, people that we think that

we know, right? I know everybody has

that celebrity that they watch. You you

know what's going on next to their life.

It's like TV. These aren't real

relationships or relationships as

they're categorically defined, but they

have the ability to transform your life.

This is where AI comes in. Again, in the

absence of a advisory board that has the

ability to advise you on your business

or the next step, how does AI slot in?

Instead of asking your friend who may be

a naysayer, hey, I'm thinking about

starting this new idea venture, consider

asking AI, prompt chat GPC and say, I

have an idea for ex. Give me advice as

if you were Oprah. or insert the person

that you're aspiring to be. This allows

you to gain insight on things that you

typically wouldn't have access to. You

build a portfolio of advisors that have

the ability to drive you to the next

stage.

The next stage once we decide if it's

resource poverty that we're

experiencing, if it's time poverty that

we're experiencing or if it's the fact

that we're fearful and unable to make

decisions is to think of ourselves like

consultants. I used to be a consultant

uh and when I put down my consulting

hat, I realized that had actually

learned how to transform my life. What

consulting teaches you is to think about

life as an experiment, but to think

along the lines of ROI, return of

investment, MVP, minimally viable

product, and USP, unique selling

point. Do you know what you spend your

time on? If I looked at you and said

"Okay, today like what have you been up

to?" me, I'd be I'd say scroll on my my

phone for four hours and then I kind of

looked over my speech and then I you

know the paro principle says 20% of what

we do yields 80% of the results in our

life and unless you're able to do a time

audit then you will never really know

what it is makes that makes up the

majority of your

time. So once you understand that, you

build an MVP, a minimally viable product

centered on the problem that you've

identified in the first

step. If you want to test whether or not

your audience will be interested in a

new wine that you h that you're

presenting to them, the first step is

not to create a wine. The first step is

to make a product mockup to see if the

design that you've envisioned is

something that your audience has an

appetite for and do AB testing to see if

version one or version B works better.

How do you do that without the tools?

PDORA AI is an example of how you create

mockups. I think when we move past the

point where we have a minimally viable

product, we put it out, we use our

friends as test guinea pigs, we have

what is next, an idea, an idea that

provides us an example uh of how to test

a market. Market opportunities are

really important and there's a strong

opportunity to use tools to see if this

opport this ex to see if what you've

designed is viable for a

market. So, we're going into the last

step which is to think like my favorite

category of people to think like an

entrepreneur. Sparring is training.

You will not cut your teeth in your

bedroom with your idea on a piece of

paper, refusing to take action on

it. Sparring is training, and you go to

war with your AI. You ask it to

challenge your ideas, to find gaps in

things you didn't identify before, and

to help you figure out what it is that

will be the first point to

failure. Again, there are many things

that you can use to gain insights.

Appify is a good example of a web

scraper. You can look at all of your

competitors, you know, all the other

people that are building in your

venture. Plug this in their Instagram

accounts into Appify. It scrapes the

data, figures out which ones of which of

their posts are most

popular, what has the most likes and

comments, and then you can take that

insight and analyze it as data to give

you insights in how to build next and

how your venture compares with

it. There's something really amazing

happening. There's so many different

tools, it's really hard to keep keep up.

And all this fragmentation is leading

people to think how do I consolidate

these tools? That's where concurge AI

comes in. It consolidates all these

tools together and helps you instead of

going to chatbt, gamma, autoai, etc.

etc., bring them all together and create

an ecosystem.

The last thing I'll say about an

entrepreneur, except that they are are

some of the most admirable people I've

ever met, is that they understand the

tool of continuous improvement. Growth

hacking is what startup entrepreneurs

created as a term back in

2010. What is growth hacking? Imagine if

you got not 1% better every day, but 10%

better every day. And I don't want to

move into a space in which we're all

operating like robots, but I do want us

to be really thoughtful about the lives

that we

lead. One of the great philosophers

says, great philosophers say, it's not

that we have a short life, but rather

that we waste it. And what growth

hacking does is think about what are the

steps to take your idea to execution. If

I want to launch a product, how will my

user gain access to the product? Well

where will they buy it

from? Then after they've bought it, how

do do they deliver me feedback? And

point A to B can be improved, but point

B to C can also be improved. And if you

think about a system of continuous

improvement, you thoroughly analyze each

step in your user journey and think

about how they can gain greater access

to your product or

service. The last thing I have to say is

more of a philosophical question.

We didn't really get to talk much

about

ethics, about what happens when you

build a second brain on AI systems, when

agentic AI begins to blur the lines of

what's happening in the digital world

and what's happening in the analog

world. You know, I say often, oh, I want

to build my second brain with ChachiPT.

Does that mean I become the AI? Does

that mean the AI compels me to develop

it? Does that mean that human

intelligence, intellectual property is

compromised? I think everybody has the

ability to come up with the decision for

themselves. But what I do know is that

technology for me must dignify my human

experience.

Unless we have a global blackout, god

forbid, we will always become reliant

and increasingly more reliant on

technology. Will we ever live autonomous

lives again? Will we ever be able to

leave our phones for a month and live

without

electricity? Perhaps not. But what can

we

do? If we look at Henry Ford and we look

at the first industrial

revolution, we understand that there was

something happening, you had five people

in an assembly line and all of a sudden

a machine pulls up to the assembly line

and it's seated at the end and all five

people look to their left and see the

machine turn on and think, "Ah, it's

fine." And as soon as it turns on, they

see the machine is working at 10x their

speed. And just as they predicted, the

scarlet letters come in of layoffs. And

these five people invariably become

replaced by a

machine. But then, as time has

it, the machine arm sputters and

dies. All of a sudden, one person comes

back through that

door. It's a familiar place for them

because they used to be on the assembly

line. And instead of being afraid of the

technology, they began to understand it.

And they were the ones to correct the

issues in that

machine. That was the legacy of then

when people worried that the computer

would completely demolish the book

industry.

This is the legacy of now where people

are really considering what does it mean

to study law and medicine in the in

times where the computer that we have

access to now might functionally erase

these jobs. How do we

futureproof our systems, future proof

our lives and design something that

dignifies the future a bit

better? These are really existential

questions and the next time you open up

chatbt and ask it to make you a workout

or ask it to give you advice on the

arguments you've been having with your

boyfriend. Not that I do that. Oh

or ask you ask it to give you insight

about a trend that you've been seeing

but don't really understand. Think about

the implications for the

future. Think about if it's helping you

design the life that you want and if

it's dignifying the dream that you've

discovered. And above all, build a

system that takes you from

ideiation to

prototyping to testing and implementing

as soon as you

can. Sparring is training if you guys

didn't hear before. And it's time to put

yourself in the seat of the person who

walks back in to fix the broken arm.

Thank you so much and have a beautiful

day.