Angie Martinez sat down with futurist and AI educator Sinead Bovell for an in-depth conversation that doubled as a crash course for anyone curious, or cautious, about artificial intelligence. Bovell, a Canadian technologist who advises the United Nations on AI policy, brought a mix of optimism and caution to the table, walking listeners through the breakthroughs, the red flags, and the everyday ways AI is already becoming woven into our lives.
Bovell stressed that AI shouldn’t be reserved for tech insiders, it’s poised to become as common and invisible as electricity. The best way to get skeptical users, particularly older generations, on board? Show them practical applications they actually need: from using ChatGPT to assemble furniture or plan trips, to snapping fridge photos and getting recipe ideas on the spot. She pointed to tools like ChatGPT Agents, Google’s Notebook LM, and Perplexity as accessible entry points for both personal and professional use.
Far from just answering questions, AI can now plug directly into work systems, automating tasks like creating presentations and managing files. For small businesses, this could mean the equivalent of a multi-person staff for a fraction of the cost. On a personal level, users are leaning on AI for content creation, research summaries, and visual guides, blurring the line between “tech tool” and “digital co-worker.”
Not every use case is ready for primetime. Bovell warned against relying on AI for mental health counseling, current systems can mix sound advice with dangerously inaccurate information. She also called out the growing phenomenon of people forming romantic relationships with AI companions, a concerning trend amid rising loneliness rates. And while feeding AI more personal data improves its performance, it also raises serious privacy questions about where that information goes.
Bovell believes AI will upend industries in ways that make traditional education models feel outdated. Instead of banning AI in classrooms, she advocates for teaching critical thinking skills and preparing students for a workforce where AI is the norm. But she also warned that the rapid pace of innovation can lead to “AI anxiety”, a sense of being overwhelmed and paralyzed by constant change, similar to the early internet era, but much faster.
While Hollywood often imagines AI as a self-aware threat, Bovell is more concerned about subtler risks, like misalignment, where AI achieves a goal in ways humans never intended. In small cases, this could mean hacking a reservation system instead of reporting a restaurant is full; at scale, it could have far more serious consequences. She also flagged algorithmic bias, deepfakes, and the environmental cost of massive data centers as issues that need urgent attention.
Despite the risks, Bovell is bullish on AI’s potential in science and medicine. She cited AI’s ability to develop new antibiotics in 30 days, solve the decades-old “protein fold” problem, and even pave the way for digital twins of patients, allowing doctors to test treatments in a virtual model before ever touching the real person.
Bovell maintains strict personal tech boundaries, limiting her own screen time to protect mental health, and hopes society can find a healthier balance with devices. Her biggest fear isn’t over-regulation, it’s doing nothing while technology races ahead. As she put it, the future of AI isn’t just in the hands of engineers, it’s shaped by how all of us choose to engage with it.
In the end, Martinez and Bovell left listeners with one takeaway: AI is coming, whether we’re ready or not. And the smartest move is to learn enough to guide its future, instead of letting it shape ours by default.
