Message from a listener

 Guest: And one more compliment, uh, yesterday and today I was, uh, listening to this podcast, and the podcast transported me to Bengaluru. Uh, the mention of the w- uh, places like Jakkur, Devanahalli, Chikballapur. Actually, I was, uh, imagining myself, uh, driving on the roads of Bengaluru. And, uh, suddenly there was a moment when I wa- saw some mall which I, uh, see daily during my drive.

Arey, main toh Pune main hoon. I'm not in Bangalore. So I was so immersed because, uh, the voice of Mr. Vishwanath, uh, and this light background score what you had put, uh, and the way he was explaining, uh, it got total- it got me totally immersed, uh, into the podcast. So that's, uh, a great success, uh, of your podcast

Season Finale Welcome

Dinesh: 

 that was Sandeep, uh, who always messages, sends, uh, some sort of a reply to, to,to the, episodes that we release

 Sandeep also has a podcast called Evolution. Maybe we'll share the link in the description note and, and you should check that out also

Arjun: Thank you. Thank you, Sandeep

 It's great to hear messages from people who listen and, and wanna share feedback, and it's always great to hear things that w-we have taken up and, and put our hearts to it. I wanna thank everybody who has shared messages with us.

Today is the season closure episode of the "Inflection Point" series, and we will take some time to reflect back on what we have learned and what's in store for us, as we move on to the next season of "Innocence Theory."

As always, we'd like to invite more people to share thoughts, feedback to us. It'll help us keep improving and growing as, as a team. Um, let's get into the episode.

10 Year Relevance Reflection

Arjun: All right, Dinesh

Dinesh: Hmm.

Arjun: Inflection point series. Now, I wanna do this, as a few thought exercises. One is if we were to see ourselves 10 years from now Some of the topics that we heard on the Inflection Point series How relevant do you think it would have been for you 10 years from now?

Dinesh: I don't know. the way things are moving, I'm not sure, like, whether it'll be relevant in, like, six months from now. So 10 years is too long,

Arjun: Too long

Dinesh: too long, yeah

 So I think, uh, some of these topics like ethics and things like that will have a decent shelf life. 

Arjun: See, think of mindsets, ethics mindsets.

Dinesh: hmm

Arjun: We spoke about, water, right? We spoke about building sustainable products, in five years, what are those things that,that would have felt that it,made an impact?

Dinesh: I think impact is sort of a little loaded word.

uh, a-- The problems that at least we spoke about, I think they will remain in some form. not going to go away. So they'll be there in some form. And hopefully, some of these conversations and the efforts that we put in this side would have shaped it in some way so that it's in slightly better form in the future than it is right now

AI Art And Music Impact

Arjun: What are some of the topics that were dear to you in the last series?

Dinesh: I, I think the AI and music, AI art, that is something that, got me thinking quite a bit. ever since this whole, uh, ChatGPT and, generative AI, generative images, generative art came into picture, it's, it's been a bit of a

I'm not able to even find the right words to express it. So yeah, okay, let me put it like this. during COVID, I took a lot of time to learn to sketch trees

 Um, and then I also, uh, was, uh, working my way to learning to draw these concept arts, which are these beautiful paintings which are used as, mood boards for game design and, um, you know, um, those kind of, uh, work. And I, I always, admired concept artists' concept art because it was like creating a,a scene that didn't exist, and it was so dramatic, it was so cinematic. then it also feeds into this, uh, universe somebody's trying to create in the form of a game or in a movie or anime, whatever it is, right? so that is something that appealed to me truly and,and I wanted to get good at, concept art. I wouldn't say like I got really good at it, but I did put some effort and I got to draw the proportions, the sketching and, you know, that they're showing the depth in the painting.

 And all of this is digital in nature.

 But suddenly right now, There are so many images that are getting generated on, on this, concept art, they're all great-looking images. they look fantastic, right? but somewhere, I have sort of given up the idea of wanting to learn concept art anymore. Which does it also mean that I've s-sort of stopped appreciating the art itself because I'm choosing not to learn, so I'm, sort of disconnected a little

Arjun: hmm

Dinesh: Yeah. So my query or rather my question was around how do you engage with, AI-generated arts anymore, right? how do you feel connected to them? it's still in some way it's there. but yeah, that episode was, was, was a needed conversation to have

Arjun: Yeah. So the way I feel s-see that is whatever happened in AI for music is the V1 of this huge change towards music as a art form. It's the first version of it. So what would eventually happen is, as more and more artists understand that AI can be used to generate art and music, instead of it being the artifact, it'll become one of the instruments So imagine going to a live show where music is improv made with the audience. It's a different experience altogether Right? Somebody who's in a momentary situation feeling a certain set of emotions can now on the spot create the kind of music that really sits together in that moment, rather than having to go through the elaborate process of making music.

it now serves certain different forms and functions, and that imagination of all the forms and functions will now become V2, V3, V4 of this inflection point, is how I see it

Dinesh: Yeah. Yeah. What about you? What are some of the, uh, episodes that, uh,what were some, areas that we spoke about either you had a chance to think about it later or reflect on them, um, processed it differently?

Ethics And Coping At Work

Arjun: I felt the idea that it is not personal, it's just business, is still continuing to hit me in many ways because people who are now facing or rather seeing the effect of rapid changes, technology, other changes in the world, are having to meet challenges in their own logic of functioning.

What is ethical? What is not ethical? what used to be personal is now business. Like getting laid off from companies is one, one challenge to deal with in this, in this time and period. When you're laid off from business, or, when you're laid off from companies and you gotta find jobs in a very tough job market and having to figure out how to live a life with inflated pricing, everything becomes a compounding challenge.

And at that point in time, it's so much easier to appreciate what it's not personal, it's just business, much easier, and it's much easier to appreciate what is ethical and everything together.

Dinesh: which means you've sort of come to terms with it now. it's like a nice coping mechanism and it's packaged well

Arjun: It's a nice strategy for coping. Not even a mechanism that works well. It feels like it's a hopeful strategy for coping, and everybody's trying to cope. But as they say, hope is not a strategy yet

all of these are, strategies that give the hope of coping well

 The- these are not well-established therapeutic ways of

Dinesh: They don't have therapeutic merit

Arjun: Yeah. They don't have therapeutic merits at all So the other thing that I've, I've learned across this is, I think this is a period of interesting problems if you look at it. And the potential for having to take an interesting problem and give a, a interesting point of view to problems is the opportunity in this time, as I see it 

Yield Mode And Uncertainty

Arjun: in the season for Inflection Point series, we did one episode for mindsets, and in that we said learning is, is probably the constant skill, the ability to relearn and unlearn and, and learn if I have to extrapolate that, the idea that uncertainty is going to be constant and the idea that certainty need not feel safe or even feel certain is a important mindset to carry at this point in time.

 So for me, that also translated well through these episodes in the sense that instead of being fixated on a good end state of solutions, it's probably okay to take a few step back. It's like yielding to AI. When you write a good prompt and the prompt yields a great application when it try-tries to make a good generative art or something, you don't tell it every specific thing.

You just tell it few things and you let AI do the magic. It's the art of letting go. It's almost AI is teaching you a little bit of spirituality in the process

Dinesh: Not, not everything is under total control. There's this

Arjun: is a-- Yeah, so I have this word called yield mode where,

Dinesh: Yeah

Arjun: uh, so I've been collecting a bunch of words. So one word is yield mode. This yield mode is the point at which you decide to yield to all external forces, including AI, so that your intent is now advanced, it is the art of finding that yielding point is where you, see results and success

Dinesh: It's almost like farming. Sounds like farming. Like you've sowed the seeds and then you need to likewait for the right opportune moment. not stretch it for long also, and then go for it

Arjun: Yeah, exactly. And in all of this process, I do want to state it for the record, it feels like we are telling AI and everything what to do. But in the process, I feel AI is telling us what we are, and it's time to pay attention to a little bit of that. How unsettled we are with uncertainty, how unsettled we are with having lack of control, how unsettled we are with everything around us and rapid changes. And, yeah, it's an important aspect to consider learning about ourselves

Dinesh: But it, but it's also not fair on,It's not fair to expect as a society as a whole to be agile learners, right? some people just want to learn a little bit and then go about their stuff, make a living. Yeah. But it looks like there's no room for those, situations, or at least there's that, that, uh, that space is limited now.

Not everybody in their job can be like that

Arjun: Exactly. That's true. It feels like people who decide to learn slow will have to wait for the next bus

Dinesh: Or, or the bus might not show up

Arjun: Bus might not show up

Dinesh: All right what's the next section that you have?

Abstraction And Mindsets

Arjun: We spoke a bit about mindsets, right? in the episode, we covered a few things, and I think we spoke in that episode around abstraction. Has any, any part of that episode appeal differently after we have done it for you

Dinesh: there was a point of discussion around trust and abstraction if I have to, take the line of thought from there

I think lying or lie is also an abstraction

Like you can choose to, uh, uh Maybe not lie. Maybe lie is probably not the word

Arjun: You're talking about concealing

Dinesh: Yeah, concealing is one component, but, it's in that space, right? You, accentuate some information play certain information low, and then you present a story. it is abstraction in some sense, right? If it's tailored for a particular purpose

Arjun: Abstraction is the bag in which something carries. The different kinds of bag. if you only carry a potato, you carry it in a plastic cover. That plastic cover can be put in a different bag. It can be gone, gone into something else. From the external world, they might see the bag, right?

And hence it is looked at for what it all could be, and hence the inferences may be incorrect or different. But the bag is a great abstraction of what it contains within it

Dinesh: Yeah. So for your question that you asked me that whether have I processed it differently? this is something that, occurred to me. I think because of, uh, AI and, and large language models being able to communicate, one thing that has happened is that, uh, how some stories need to be told for a, a certain section.

like how knowledge, moves from one domain to the other, right? that movement of knowledge was, Uh, it, it had some challenges before AI, which is that who-whoever is producing that knowledge will only s-share it in a certain way, and then the other person will have to make sense of that and then break it down to the parts that he needs it.

But I think now we are in a place where, knowledge across disciplines can flow, with a lot more ease because it can be abstracted to the space that it needs to go

Arjun: Correct. And I see this point as the disciplines that were classified in the beginning were incorrectly cut off, in the sense that the, the borderline between what is one discipline and an-another was a highly cla-- It's like big cuts. it had its rationale behind it, so there's no question of why it's cut that way.

But it certainly feels incorrect to only think of it as that's the only way to look at stuff. which brings into the point of systems thinking much more relevant right now, because you're not looking at one discipline as the entry point. You're looking for the something that could have been cut differently all the time, which means that what you're dealing with always seems to have the probability that it is connected with something else 

Dinesh: that suddenly opens up a lot of opportunity, right? that idea that now we can, bring disciplines together with a lot more ease than before And in some, in some places only one person can do it also. You don't even need that army of, people in the beginning, right?

Arjun: E-exactly. And that's the big, shift in the job market that is likely happening. Because let's say there's an AI agent. That single AI agent can talk about the weather, can talk about astrology, can talk about design, can talk about technology together because they're all inference models, right? So you don't need specific disciplinary a-additions right now, which means the point of entry has shifted, which means you don't need so many people to do the initial workshop, which means those jobs will be displaced.

But then what follows is a big displaced job title market completely, right? And, and once the job titles are displaced, after you've gotten to some level of synthesis, the first level, then you're clueless because at that point in time you still need people to divide and conquer because our way of getting things done is dividing and conquering So we need some titles back

Dinesh: But then it's too late. we sent them home 

Arjun: too late. We have sent them home and they have now founded new companies

Dinesh: Who, who are all starting and reaching the level one

Arjun: Level one again. Exactly

Systems Thinking Post AI

Dinesh: systems thinking before AI, uh, and after AI. I, I think these are two different, uh, uh-- There's merit to looking at systems thinking post-AI, I guess

Arjun: from which point of view?

Dinesh: systems thinking as a idea,centers around, being sensitive to what is already there, and see the connections that are at play. Uh, find some of those connections, which has a lot of leverage, so that when you, make a change there or make an intervention there, there is a lot of momentum to the direction that you want, want us to move, right?

So that is sort of the approach. but I think right now, systems thinking as a space can be applied to not only these, uh, large problems. there is merit to even applying it, at probably at a smaller scale as well. and the reason I say that is now you can actually create a network or like, say, for example, you want to move from point A to point B.

how do we move a system from where we are right now to a better state in the future. Right now, uh, with AI, we can move from point A to point B. we can design a path which has a lot more, um, influence on the relationships.

Before we had to go from A to B, with, with a lot of challenges and limitations that, that workflow, uh,now we are in a s- a space to reimagine that workflow where there's a lot of resistance that can be cut, and you can design the workflow in a way where most of the connections you have a large degree of influence on them

I wanna really look at that, pristinely in, in, in all of those words. The idea that systems thinking can be looked at differently from before AI and after my view on that is that there is a sense of acceleration of events that help imagination faster. In other words, what has AI done is what used to be a process, it is able to condense time and accelerate towards presenting information which would have otherwise taken a lot more time. Which means, as a conversation, you are able to talk about stuff much faster than ever before. You want to go from point A to point B, you're able to plan that in 10 seconds. You're able to find the problems around the plan in, in one minute. You're able to imagine all of the expenses, all of the things, costing, resourcing, everything needed to get that plan going in, in under three minutes.

Arjun: whatever documentation needed in, in the ne-next 10 minutes. So you're actually moving the needle faster. But what is not in the process is how you as a human, along the point A to point B transition, would have felt every point in time in the original step, thereby making your next step would have been very different. When you did it manually, the sweat, blood, and the time that it took for you to get from point A to point B would have made you feel every step would need different, different steps. Right now, it's in the comfort of a seated position that you're able to do all of this. Which means your ability to imagine has now become accelerated and we are able to multi-imagine right now faster. Your point B can be B one, B two, B three, B four, B five, before you even step foot one step from point A Right?Now, If the systems thinking practices can now appreciate acceleration, and provide certain other knobs that re-infuse the feelings, the human element, the ethics, the value systems in that process that reverse control how much acceleration is required to get to B, right?

Imagining B is not B.that clarity needs to come through. I made Bangalore free of traffic immediately on paper. I made a dashboard for it, let's say, right? And it's very easy to find Instagram reels saying the government of Bangalore should have made this long time back, right? But that doesn't make Ban-Bangalore without the traffic problem. The ability to provide re-agency to the people involved in it and control that acc-- The systems thinking practices should be able to control these acceleration knobs. And I think that's a different problem statement altogether To be able to say to someone it's time to go slow when everybody wants to go fast is a persuasion problem by itself

Grants And Project Highlights

Arjun: any closing thoughts on the season three?

Dinesh: we need to acknowledge that, uh, we received a grant for this season from Swissnex, the K2A grant. so yeah, a big thanks to Swissnex and Consulate of Switzerland for, uh, for supporting us, in this season and a lot of our other activities as well.

do you want to brief on some of the other initiatives that we are doing?

Arjun: Yeah. So this season has, has been, particularly productive for us thanks to Swissnex and, the support received, uh, from all of the people there, as well as some of our guests who have been part of our show this time. Uh, we've had some, very incredible, guests coming in and speaking on various topics.

So first of all, I second Dinesh and thank you for being with us. we were able to carry the work from here into otherother areas as well. One of the things that we did was, present our work, and come up with, a solution through the snake bite episode that we released in season four, through the million death study and the conversations with Sumanth and, Shubhra.

we presented a digital prototype solution at the Sustainability Week, as well as the Impact Symposium in Northeastern University. we later culminated that work into a research paper which got sent to the World Biodiversity Forum, and we are extremely delighted to share that our work has been, selected to be presented at the conference in Davos, Switzerland in, in the month of June 2026.

So we'll be presenting at the World Biodiversity Forum 2026 this year. in addition to this, Dinesh had several initiatives through the work done in the podcast, through the transdisciplinary studio at his university. So Dinesh, do you wanna speak a little bit about that?

Dinesh: yeah, we had a systems thinking studio where about 113 students participated in teams, about 20, 26 teams, and, four areas of, social challenges like migration, digital wellbeing, financial scams, and human-animal encounter, specifically snakebite this time. there are a lot of interesting, uh, things that have come out of that studio exercise. the work has been recognized, by people, uh,people who are working on the ground in these fields. there are certain other events that are following up with that. I think we'll keep them posted once they get started.

Yeah, but on a whole, a really good, experience of how systems thinking can be done at an academic, setting.

Arjun: So I think that's a great segue to what's likely to happen next for us, We've had some conversations about this, and what is it that Innocence Innocence Theory is likely to do as next season? Do you wanna reveal the season title for the next season?

Dinesh: yeah. Why not? Yeah, we can speak about it

Arjun: So what's it gonna be called, Dinesh?

Dinesh: it's going to be called The Space Between Science and Imagination

Arjun: I think we need applause here a little bit, like applause effects.

 Yeah, we are excited for the upcoming series. The space between science and imagination has been particularly captivating and very inspiring for me when we first thought about, uh, doing something like this. We've got more episodes, more guests, more people coming on board with us. We hope to bring good episodes to all of, all of our listeners.

Next Season What To Expect

Dinesh: So if you have to like quickly, interject, what do you mean by the space between science and imagination? what am I supposed to imagine there?

Arjun: I think we're gonna explore the idea of imagination with and without AI, with and without the tools of systems thinking. how to bring agency to imagination? What are the different tenets around it? What does, research mean right now? What does being grounded in scientific validation mean right now?

How to leverage AI for scientific research? How can you become independent scientists of your own nature, much better than what we all tried to use Google Search before? How can we leverage technology and the idea of, systems thinking for that? What are some, some practices we can adopt? And what does that space lie where you are backed by science, and you're able to imagine solves for some of the problems that concern immediately to you and around you.

I think these are all questions that we can try to,explore in the upcoming season.

Dinesh: we'll also be bringing in a lot of science fiction, draw parallels, make sense out of, some of those, stories in science fiction as well. So I think it'll be a very interesting, season to follow

Final Thanks And Wrap

Arjun: And that's a wrap people on season five Inflection Point series. Dinesh, thank you. Thank you for the episodes. Thank you for, uh, season five.

Thanks to Abhinav who's behind the scene and has been putting us through very difficult tests every time we get on record. A big thanks to Abhinav for having, single-handedly led the production for all of these episodes.

A lot of effort has gone onto getting this to you. So thank you Abhinav if you're listening. If you happen to listen to our podcast, we know we thanked you now

Dinesh: All right Okay. And see you then. 

right, bye