Ethical AI: Wisdom For The Age Of Technology With Faisal Hoque

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the discussion surrounding Ethical AI—ensuring artificial intelligence is developed and used responsibly and fairly—is more critical than ever. Join us for a compelling conversation with Faisal Hoque, a distinguished best-selling author, innovation leader, and transformation expert. Faisal shares his remarkable journey, tracing his path from humble beginnings in Bangladesh to becoming a global voice on the intersection of technology and humanity. We'll explore the pivotal "flash points" that shaped his career, delve into his deep understanding of Eastern philosophy, and discuss his urgent call for a more ethical approach to AI. Faisal also introduces his insightful "Open and Care" framework from his book, "Transcend," providing a practical guide for integrating philosophy, technology, and business to create a sustainable and humane future. This episode offers a thoughtful and nuanced perspective on navigating the complexities of AI and our shared responsibility in shaping its development.

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Ethical AI: Wisdom For The Age Of Technology With Faisal Hoque

Meet Faisal: From Bangladesh to Global Thought Leader

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Faisal Hoque. Faisal is the founder of SHADOKA and NextChapter and serves as the Transformation and Innovation Partner at CACI, an $8 billion company focused on US National Security. He is a number one Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and his new book Transcend: Unlocking Humanity in the Age of AI has been named by The Next Big Idea Club as a must-read.

For decades, he has been developing commercial business and technology systems, and helping the senior leaders at the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, PepsiCo, MasterCard, and IBM. He is a highly sought-after innovation and transformation partner for both public and private sectors and is recognized as one of the world's leading management thinkers and technologists.

He's a three-time winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and Fast 500 awards, and his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Business Insider, Fast Company, and the list goes on. When he's not out, changing the world, he's cooking and hanging with his family and his German Shepherd. It is truly an honor to welcome you to The Virtual Campfire.

Thanks for having me, Tony. I've been looking forward to it.

Me too. I have admired your work throughout the years. You are an engine of transformation. You’ve written tons of amazing books, including this latest one, which I'm blown away that this is out in the world. I’m looking forward to sharing it with the audience. Most of all, I'm looking forward to sharing your journey to getting to where you are and making such an impact. We're going to spend some time talking about that.

Sounds good.

I'm going to turn it over to you in a minute. I'd like for you to share what I like to call flashpoints. These are the points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. You can share what you’re called to share. As you're sharing, let's pause along the way and see what themes are showing up. I'll turn it over to you and you can take it from there.

From Janitor To Entrepreneur: Faisal’s Early Lessons

Every person has many chapters in their life. You often don't end up where you thought you would. I have had many of those things over the years. I was born in Bangladesh and came to the US when I was seventeen years old. My first job was as a graveyard shift janitor. My first lesson from that job was from the supervisor. This black gentleman kept telling me to be one with the floor. Focus on one thing and forget about everything else.

Every person has many chapters in their life and where you start, you often don't end up where you thought you would.

That lesson didn’t grab me right away. Many years later and today, that was my first intro to mindfulness. It stayed on with me like you would not believe. That was one, and then the next thing was as I started my career, I was high-flying because I was taking over the software product in my senior year, a very typical tech entrepreneurial trajectory, starting my company. By the time, I got to my second company, I got fired by my own investors because I was not agreeing with their direction. I was right, unfortunately. The company faded away and I lost a lot of hard work and investments into it.

It was another lesson that reflected upon what kind of leader I want to be, and what kind of entrepreneur I want to be. It shifted my focus more toward I want to be impact-driven versus the typical business growth-driven. After about 15 or 20 years, I have quite the journey after that. I created several companies. A couple of them became very successful and a couple of them didn't do very well. Nevertheless, I got exposed to a wide variety of customers across the globe and learned a lot from all sorts of people, the private sector people, public sector people, the CEOs, the investors, the engineers, the venture capitalists, marketing, you name it. I've learned from anybody and everybody, and a whole variety of thought leaders.

I wrote my first book as a very timid writer, not knowing, what and where it would go and whatnot. It was published by Cambridge University Press. It was a very dry book, very much focused on the nuts and bolts of how you look at business and technology, and how you prepare for the digital age. This was during one browser was coming out. This was in the 2000 time frame. After I wrote that, I created a research institute. We cranked up our new books along with running my commercial entities.

Over time, I discovered that I have this deep undercurrent affinity towards philosophy and more specifically, Eastern philosophy. I went back to my roots. I grew up with a lot of Sanskrit and all the literature deeply steeped into Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Sufism, Hindus, and all the variety of experiences that all religious tenets. About 10 or almost 15 years ago, I took a trip to Japan and spent some time in different monasteries because my dear friend and mentor was the chairman and CEO of Toshiba USA. I recruited him on one of my boards. We became great friends.

Philosophical Awakening: Eastern Wisdom & A Transformative Trip

He took me to Japan and I spent a lot of time one-on-one with him, but also this journey that completely changed me. I wrote a book right after that call. Everything connects. Talking about the interconnectedness of everything that we do, everybody that's on the planet, and how that drives creativity and innovation. As a result, we have the opportunity to create and add value, whatever value we define or deem as value, and it's unique for everybody. We all have the opportunity to add value.

I wrote that book and that changed my entire life and outlook, and then I wanted to give back to my country, what I call my country now, because it has given me so much. I started working with the government, which I've been doing for the last eight-plus years in various capacities, teaming up with my partners at CACI. That exposed me to a wide variety of things that I didn't know or was not aware of both from a geopolitical point of view but also from a global security and US security point of view.

Then the pandemic hit. My son at that time was eighteen and went to freshman year in college at Hofstra, which is close by. He got sick and turned out he had a very rare blood cancer called multiple myeloma. He's doing fine now. He's 22. You talked about moments. The reason I'm sharing these stories is that these are the critical moments that changed my outlook on what I want to do, and how I want to go about it.

I picked up my pen again and I've been writing for a few years. After I wrote, Everything Connects, I cranked 3 or 4 books. I wrote Lift, I wrote Reinvent, and now Transcend. All the book’s proceeds go to cancer research because of that personal connection I have. That's my story. I stay motivated. I stay positive. When life knocks you down, you get up and you move on. That's not unique to me. I think that is the human history. That is the human story. I recognize that there is joy in adversity. There's joy in loss. There's joy when you're struggling. You don't realize it when you're going through it, but if you reflect back, you can create something positive out of the negative.

There is joy in adversity and loss. When you're struggling, you don't realize it, but when you reflect back, you can create something positive out of the negative.

Unpacking the Journey: Joy in Struggle & Reinvention

It's interesting you mentioned these. First of all, there are so many things I want to unpack about what you shared, but I'll start with what you said about how joy and struggle and things that are tough live side by side oftentimes. In many ways, we have to be able to live in that duality of where things are. The struggles are the birth of joy and that's okay.

It allows you to reinvent yourself.

Before we got on with you, I was writing a post about peaks and valleys, the challenges, and the birth of many things that come from that. I want to spend some time looking at the journey a little more with the microscope. Maybe go back to the humble beginnings and then meteoric rise into many different things, the lessons that you've learned about yourself, and also embracing many of those dual paths, and this idea that Eastern philosophies can live side by side in the technology world. The idea that you even had this decision to be an entrepreneur is a bold one on its own, and then be able to get back up when you get knocked down. I love for you to share some of the inner journey that you went on through the dualities, and also the challenges of dealing with the setbacks.

My entrepreneurship started when I decided to come to the US. I come from a middle-class family. My father is a retired engineer who worked for the government. My mother was an educator and a homemaker. It's a middle-class family. We're not posh but neither we were poor. Coming to the US was my sole decision because my father wanted me to be a civil engineer very much like him. He wanted me to go to engineering school, which I didn't want to do.

I had to save up money to come to the US and look for scholarships. If you think about classic entrepreneurship, you come up with an idea, you raise money, you pitch your investors, and then you force a path forward. That was like that. I started selling stereo equipment to make money. I was like 14, 15, or 16 years old. I used to go to the US Information Center which had a library. I went to an American missionary high school. My entire middle school and high school were all the same school, Saint Joseph.

That's the genesis of my entrepreneurial spirit. I came to the US. By the time I paid my first semester's tuition, even with the partial scholarship, I had $700 left to survive the rest of my life. This is the ‘90s, actually the late ‘80s. It wasn't as expensive but $700 doesn't take you very far. That's where my entrepreneurial spirit came in. By the time, I was a senior and I started to think about what I wanted to do with my life, I got tired of being broke all the time.

I started building software products. This was when the client-server was coming out, DOS was being introduced and PCs were coming out in the market. I wrote software that takes data from the mainframe and displays it in those environments. That was my product. It was a messaging software for systems. I sent out this demo and I ended up getting 7 to 8 job offers. It was the 1998 time frame or around that, or maybe even earlier, 1992 and 1993.

It was big back then. The economy was not doing good at that time either, but because I had this different way of approaching things and I built a product, I had no problem. I started my career and got a job with Dun and Bradstreet. Right after that, I started my first company which was quite successful. I wanted to scale it, but GE Capital came in and said, “Why don't you bring your technology and we will launch our first eCommerce business?” I launched GE’s first B2B eCommerce business, and it went on from there.

I was rising high and then I left GE and started my next company with lots of funding. I learned quite a lot of things about how to think differently, and how to build something tangible that people can touch and feel and relate to. Also, when I got fired from my own company, in hindsight, plays a role and how leadership matters, not just being talented. That doesn't always cut the mustard. A lot of lessons went into self-discovery, who you are and what you want to do and having the spirit.

Many of these are out of necessity. I wasn't thinking about entrepreneurship as a means to be rich. Although it gave me a nice living along the way, it was more about how I would survive. I cannot take the traditional path if I want to do the things I want to do. Non-traditional path, timing, forecasting the market, staying ahead of the market, and lessons in what not to do as a leader are the nuances that gave me the foundation to pursue my next level of aspirations, projects, or whatever you want to call it.

The AI Era Arrives: A New Cycle & Unprecedented Change

There's something about what you're sharing and you said a lot of things that got me thinking about where we are now. There's a cycle of sorts and the timing of where you were at that moment, the up-and-coming years for you. We're now on a different cycle. There may be some things that are similar about this cycle. I mean AI and where we are at.

When the browser was coming out and the infrastructure for the internet was placed, that was a major moment in human history because it took the information age to complete connectedness. We could all connect with each other on our phones. Since then, we've been seeing this incremental change in technology, business, and social culture because of social media, how we work, and then the pandemic hit. That had another level of change.

Now, if you look at AI, which has been percolating behind the scenes for the last 50 to 100 years, along with computing. This idea of automation and intelligent predictive modeling has been around for a while. If you look at things like the way you get manipulated to buy certain things, using GPS, or how a plane can be put on autopilot. There are elements of AI that were being percolated along the way. It just has surfaced at the forefront because of the Generative AI and the natural language element of it. All of a sudden, in the last 2 to 3 years, we feel like it's here.

It's going to be exponential because up until now, we have never had an emergence of a being, be it digital, synthetic, or whatever that can be 1,000 times smarter than human beings. There are ramifications for all that in the sense that there are a lot of positives, but there are also a lot of negatives. It's going to redefine every single one of us in terms of what we do with ourselves, what we do for work, how we live, how we interact, what we do with our time, etc.

This is the biggest flashpoint I can ever imagine. It's the moment that's going to change us and it is changing us. Not all flashpoints happen instantaneously. Sometimes they are slow burn. I think we're in that moment where we have to figure out how we want to navigate after this point.

The adoption of this is going to be a lot faster than what a lot of people think for a number of reasons. One is that it's a business opportunity because you can do a lot more with a lot less. The businesses would be forced-motivated to adopt this technology, otherwise they're going to be left behind. That's one. The second is that unlike when the internet was percolating, I'm using that as a point not farther back than that, people were a lot more tech-savvy.

There's a generational gap that's happening in the sense that a lot of the people now in their 30s or even 40s didn't know anything. Before, you had a landline and you had to wait three days to make a call. The current workforce grew up with a lot of these technologies. The adoption curve is not going to be as slow as it was in the past. The combination of this business opportunity and adoption curve. Regardless of its implication in terms of ethics, legislative limitations, and whatnot, I think we're going to move forward. I hope we move forward with our eyes open, and we don't create destructive situations along the way in the name of innovation.

I've always lived with optimism. I’m an optimist by nature and I think you need radical optimism if you want to leverage these up-and-coming technologies. I'm also deeply concerned and care about what happens to humanity if we don't put some thoughtfulness, guardrails, and legislative framework to deal with what's coming because it's nothing like we have ever seen before.

Faisal’s Writing Journey: Concern For Humanity & Inspiration

One of the things that I value about what you're sharing and the way you show up is that you're someone who I would think is a multi-dimensional thinker. You've been in different worlds. As you said, you have this sense of knowing philosophy well and have steeped yourself in that world, but you're also very well-informed in the technology world. That's where I want to take you. The idea of you writing books, I know sometimes people are like, “I can write a book.” What is that about? How did you enter that world of writing books?

I am at technology and I will always be a technology. I build and sell technology products. In recent years, I have had this love-hate relationship with technology. I see the good in technology, but I also see the bad in technology. I don't think we have ever been such a divisive society as we are now because of technology and what we do to each other, utilizing technology with information, disinformation, propaganda, and whatnot. That's disheartening.

Also, we used to talk about the digital divide because certain people don't have access to technology, and certain people do. You don't have to go to other parts of the world. You can look at certain parts of New York or Alabama. You can see what the digital divide has done, the generational gaps in terms of progression versus non-progression.

I think AI is going to be even more dramatic, as democratic as it is in terms of access, but we are not all part of building this new infrastructure. A handful of large tech companies have the resources that they can build it. Not everybody can raise $400 billion and go at it. I'm concerned about that. There's a correlation in terms of my writing. When I wrote my first book, this is also when I got fired from my first company. My argument at that time was that we have to focus on a responsible business model and not just chase the technology. If we don't do that, we're going to create problems.

That was my argument in my first book called e-Enterprise. I said that if we don't focus, we're going to have a bubble. Sure enough, a year later, we had the internet bubble. This concern about humanity is what inspires me to write, the concern as an individual, as an organization, and as part of a global society, which is governed by different governments and whatnot.

If you read any of my writing, it has that same thing over and over again. I can't help myself. It always comes back to those things. When you talk about resiliency, as an example, you have to develop resiliency as an individual, but you also have to develop resiliency as an organization, and you have to develop resiliency as a nation. The common theme of humanity business and technology is my genre. Each of the books looked at it from different angles.

 You have to develop resiliency as an individual. But we also have to develop resiliency as an organization and as a nation.

If you look at Everything Connects, it looks in a very humanistic and self-reflective way. It talks about how you connect with yourself. As a result, you discover your authentic self, create value, and drive innovation. If you look at Transcend and in between Lift, Reinvent, and Transcend, I started thinking about it when I was writing Reinvent because Reinventt was all about transforming an organization in the digital age and how the leadership mindset impacts how you want to transform.

When I was writing about it, that's also when I was getting involved with AI, which was 3 or 4 years ago now. I started thinking that AI is going to be such a monumental change factor for good and for bad. Whatever will happen to us is going to be dictated by our collective act and consciousness over the next 3 to 10 years. As an example, for convenience's sake, if we keep outsourcing ourselves to this, we're going to be giving up our freedom, love for ourselves, and love for what we want to do with our human agency. Do we want to do that? If we do that, what happens?

The very definition of humanity is about freedom and love. If we outsource that, then what happens to us? That's on the individual level. Take it on an organizational or governmental level, just because we can, should we be replacing all our human workforce with software-driven AI, but also the manifestation of AI in humanoid robots that now can do what an order taker in a Taco Bell can do, or flipping burgers because those jobs were done by anti-level workforce. What happens to them?

You have to start thinking about whether we are becoming destructors or regenerative as businesses and leaders that can regenerate human society. What is most important? Is it the most important that we can transcend humanity, or we transcend the businesses so that it doesn't require humanity? Who are the businesses for? We're going to have to deal with a whole series of very complicated questions in terms of economy and human value.

You can then look at something like Maslow’s where you talk about the idea of self-actualization. If it's all outsourced, how do we self-actualize our full potential? What's the role of government in all this? It’s unlike any other destructive technology, like nuclear energy. Nuclear energy doesn't have the power to regenerate itself and think for itself to create destructive things. It's regulated and only a few people have access to it. That's not the case with AI. It has democratic access. This technology can think for itself. It will be thinking for itself. It can regenerate itself. How do we deal with that in terms of protecting humanity? These are very big questions that we're all going to be dealing with, whether we like it or don't like it.

Ethical AI & Our Collective Responsibility: A Deeper Dive

You're tapping into something. I know you also talk about this idea of how the ethical nature of all this is important. We need to make sure that whoever is deciding our future is not motivated for the wrong reasons. For example, not to put businesses as the evil motivators, but we want to make sure that their motivation isn't just to drive more money in the door, but to make sure that we all think about where we are headed as people.

Sometimes we can't always think that the presidents and the leaders of our countries are the best people to put our trust in to drive us. We have to make sure that we have a coalition of multiple interests involved, that the motivations are checked and double-checked, and that we ensure that there is a body that we can trust that is going to think very big picture about all of the different levels of interests. Would you agree?

100%. The human spirit lives in collective consciousness. What we do for humanity is not driven by 1 or 2 people because we're the people who decide what kind of leadership we want. We're the people who decide what technology should we be using. We're the people who collectively develop what that technology is. I think it's a collective responsibility. There's no way that one person should be deciding what should be the future of humanity. That is not acceptable.

Your definition of humanity may not be the same as my definition of humanity. What we can do is we can create a livable framework. If you can look at a government, capitalism is a framework. The US Constitution is a framework. These are doctrines of frameworks. We may not agree with every aspect of it, but we respect it. We should be respecting it and should be living within that framework. That's what keeps us together.

For AI, we have to get in a hurry to establish the same level of framework before it's too late. If we don't, we're going to create all sorts of problems that we never anticipated. Maybe it's already too late then. Some of the biggest thinkers and the creators of AI are saying that it's already maybe too late. You can look at Geoffrey Hinton who got the Nobel Prize in physics and is considered one of the forefathers of AI. He was working at Google. He said that he stopped working on this stuff because he thought it was too dangerous. Other people think very similarly.

I’m feeling a little bit nervous, but also that it's time for us to wake up and start to think of this as the time to be more vocal about let's make something happen here.

It's a collective responsibility. Some people say it's all bad. That's not also true. There is a lot of good stuff there. A separate group of people think it’s just like any other technology and it's not going to happen in the next two years. That is not true because as you can see already, if I wanted to do stuff like writing an email, creating a presentation, or taking care of my calendar, I can already do that in a fraction of the time. I can generate an image in a fraction of the time.

The other day, I was playing with Google's Gemini. They have that NotebookLM that takes an article and converts that into a podcast-style analysis. It took me two seconds. These are all happening right now. I saw NVIDIA's announcement of System 2 which now manifests virtual AI into a physical AI in a humanoid robot. It's all happening. Yum! Brand decided that they wanted to utilize those humanoid robots in Taco Bell. These are not any more fictitious use cases. They are very real use cases.

"Transcend" Unveiled: Open & Care Framework for the AI Age

The future has arrived and we’re just waking up to that. There are so many things that I want to cover with you. I feel like time is going to run up on us. I want to give you an opportunity to share anything else from your latest book Transcend, which is so good and I would love to be able to share anything you think people need to know about the book that you haven't already tapped into through our conversation.

The book is a combination of philosophy, humanity, technology, and business. We take a very middle-path approach using this Buddhist notion that not all is bad and not all is good. We introduced a framework called Open and Care. Open is for how you pursue possibilities with AI, and then Care is how you care enough about humanity so that you can put an actual governance structure. That's the two frameworks.

The other thing we talked about in the book that is different is we use this Buddhist philosophy of detach and devote. Meaning, what do you want to devote yourself to get the best out of it? What do you want to detach yourself to avoid all the things that we just covered? That's the central message. It is deeply philosophical, but it is also very practical because we've broken down the framework into small methodologies throughout the book in terms of how you create an innovation portfolio, how you create a career portfolio, and how governments create a citizen-centric portfolio to serve the people they are supposed to serve? How do you do all that while having a guardrail, both legislative and technical guardrails to make sure that you're not going off the rail?

That's wonderful. This is a very timely book. I also love the way you blend this multidimensionality or this ability to bring things that people can apply, and this idea of knowing that it's related to the technology, but also knowing that it's grounded in that Eastern wisdom. There's something so beautiful about that. We need more people who can connect with that. The wizard has always been there. We just need to be able to become more aware of how it can be applied in our daily lives.

Thank you for that and for saying so many kind things. We all have to stop thinking that way because we can take things into isolation. It's all interconnected. In this interconnected planet of ours and interconnected humanity of ours, whatever we do in one part has a ripple effect. We cannot think in isolation.

It's all interconnected. In this interconnected planet of ours and humanity, whatever we do in one part has a ripple effect.

We're coming to our last question of the day. This is what I always enjoy because it leads to these beautiful breadcrumbs for where you come from and how you think. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

I read a wide variety of books, but I think the 2 or 3 books that are also on my website that impacted me is a book called Sadhana which was written by Tagore who is a Bengali poet. He's a Nobel Laureate. That has a deep impact because it's very much a journey to self-realization. There's another book called The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It's by a Buddhist monk. In the same vein, Peter Drucker's books on entrepreneurship and management had a huge impact on my thinking, and The Courage to Create by Rollo May had a huge impact. Thinking, Fast and Slow. These are some of my favorite books. I also like As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, the British self-help guru from way back when self-help was not even a topic. You look at Maslow's Hierarchy and those sorts of things that we are all familiar with that have a tremendous impact.

It's funny how you mentioned James Allen's book. It's such a super thin book but it's very impactful for what it is. It is one that you have to read a couple of times.

It's a very thin book. You have to read it several times like, “What?”

You shared a treasure trove of amazing books. They are impactful and these are things that people should be putting on their bookshelves and tapping into for some wisdom that will take us forward into the next decade and the next century, and continue to be able to integrate into our thinking. I think that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for being on the show. This has been amazing.

Thanks for having me. Those are great conversations. I feel like we're having a conversation at the coffee bar or something. Thank you.

A conversation by a virtual campfire. Before I let you go, I want to make sure that people know where they can find you. What's the best place to learn more about?

LinkedIn is where I post daily. I have a book coming out. There are more than daily posts and a lot of resharing. It's all for free. As I said, my books are for charities, so you can find them anywhere, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or whatever. Transcend comes out on April 8th. My website FaisalHoque.com has a plethora of information, including the reading list that you just asked for and the companies that I worked with. You can find me there.

Thank you again. Thanks to our audience for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving inspired and ready to approach where we're headed with a little more groundedness, with all of the sage wisdom we've received. Thank you so much.

Important Links

• Faisal Hoque
• Faisal Hoque on LinkedIn
• SHADOKA
• NextChapter
• CACI
• Transcend: Unlocking Humanity in the Age of AI
• Lift
• Reinvent
• Everything Connects
• e-Enterprise
• Sadhana
• The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
• The Courage to Create
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• As a Man Thinketh

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