⁠Do You Know Yourself Well Enough to Let AI Make Decisions for You? - with Nicholas Skytland Former NASA chief technologist

Nicholas Skytland (0:00)

I'm actually really concerned that we are abdicating our responsibility to AI, and the great temptation will be to do that. Easier it becomes to use AI to outsource our judgment. Like it's hard to parent if you don't know what you believe and what you value.

And I think it's the same thing with AI. Like unless you know what you believe and what you value, it's really hard to shape it. Hey, I'm Nick Skytland, and I spent 25 years at NASA, running a bunch of hackathons, leading open innovation. And today, I'm taking that same methodology, and I'm helping kids unleash their creativity, but at 10 times the speed because of AI. So today, I can't wait to dive into the science of the hackathon and the art of faith in this conversation.

Jeremy Utley (0:46)

OK, Nick, we got to start. So you and I met at dinner. Our friend of the pod, mutual friend, Eric Swanson, introduced us. And we had dinner in Colorado.

And you told me about something very cool you're doing at schools. But it started in your work at NASA. Would you just riff on your experience running hackathons from them? And one thing I will say, I think a hackathon is an exceptional mechanism for organizations to drive innovation and creativity and give permission and all that stuff. Wade Foster, who's the CEO of Zapier, who's been on the show, uses hackathons. I think he does them every three to four months just to keep Zapier nimble. So the idea of hackathons has been brought up on the show before. You, I would say, I don't know if you would say it, are a hackathon expert. So tell us how you came by your hackathon expertise, and then we can get into what you're doing with kids later.

Nicholas Skytland (1:34)

Yeah. Well, I think if you do anything for long enough, you just kind of by default become an expert, or at least close to an expert on it. So we've done a lot of hackathons over the days, so we can talk about that. I will say really quick, if Eric's listening, I think Eric Swanson's connected to everybody in the world.

That's true. Only a few degrees of freedom there, like less than the average human.

So I'm thankful we had a chance to meet Jeremy at dinner, and that was great, and looking forward to just talking about all this. I will say that I was very fortunate to spend a career at NASA. I spent 25 years there as a chief technologist there, and before even that role, it was really clear to us that space exploration, the future of space exploration, would really require us to think outside of our walls, right? You know, a lot of really smart people work at NASA, but there's also a lot of even more people that are very, very smart outside of NASA. So we started to ask ourselves a question of, how can we tap into this collective intelligence that is in the world? I remember being in South Africa and talking to this astrophysicist about just some of the things we were working on in space. I'm like, how? You're brilliant. We need your ideas. And he's like, yeah, well, I'm in South Africa. I don't have a connection to NASA. And so that's what really birthed this idea of open innovation at NASA and our approach to it. And the hackathon mechanism became really powerful for us. We were able to just augment our workforce for 48 hours. We could do what it would take NASA to do in a year if we just open up our borders and allowed citizens from all over the world to participate in space exploration. So it has been about 13 years now since we launched the first big hackathon at NASA. And it is still going today as one of the world's largest innovation events. You have 50,000 people from 200 plus countries around the world participating every October and contributing to space exploration. And that really is amazing and open up a lot of possibility for what could come next.

Jeremy Utley (3:45)

Now, you say a year of research compressed into 48 hours. I don't think you would make that claim without like some kind of measurement. How do you know you get a year of research effort in 48 hours?

Nicholas Skytland (3:59)

Well, that's a great question, Jeremy, because so I work at NASA, and so people wanted data and both our lawyers wanted data and the engineering managers above me at the time wanted data of essentially what's the ROI? Why shouldn't NASA do any of this in the first place? Like why should we collaborate with systems around the world? And so we measured it a number of different ways. One way you can think about measuring the return on investment for an innovation event like this is just like how long would it take our own internal say software development teams to generate a solution that was generated in 48 hours?