Innovation, Inclusivity & Impact

What local experts think about technology’s role & effect on our society

Writing by Gia Miller

Photography by Justin Negard

We asked Perplexity and ChatGPT to write these bios, which are modified below due to space constraints in our print publication. We combined the best of each AI’s creation and read them aloud to the experts at the beginning of the roundtable. They were mostly impressed. Click here to read the full versions.

Herbie Calves, The Inventor

The CEO of Fresh Health, a venture capital-backed health tech start-up. Herbie was recognized on the Forbes 2018 CMO Next list and has a proven track record of developing high-performing teams and driving measurable success in various organizational settings.

Rob Kissner, The AI Guru  

A professor at Iona University, a program manager for GaelVentures and the designer-in-residence for the Hynes Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Rob also designed and delivered City Labs, an innovative projects that pairs students with local municipalities to create solutions.

Yulia Ovchinnikova, The Connector

The founder of OpenHub Project, which is an initiative aimed at empowering individuals and businesses through technology. Yulia focuses on bringing people together around technology, fostering meaningful connections, and enabling startups.

Swaroop Reddy, The Pessimist

As the CIO of Omnicom’s Precision Marketing Group, Swaroop leads internal and external transformation programs that leverage technology to innovate services and experiences. Swaroop is also a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder/the head of product & technology for Adler.

Karen “Kat” Schrier, Ph.D., The Empath

A professor and the founding director of the Games & Emerging Media program at Marist College and the director of the Play Innovation Lab. As a world-renowned expert in game design and emerging media, Kat also consults as a game designer for the World Health Organization.

From product development and video game creation to coding and AI, the world of technology is diverse. Each niche has its own innovators, conferences and aspirations, yet they all face some of the same challenges. We wondered what would happen if we brought representatives from different areas together to discuss technology’s impact on our society. Luckily, they were curious too.

We met at Katonah’s Muscoot Tavern (the irony of a tech discussion in a 100-year-old restaurant wasn’t lost on anyone) and spoke for almost two hours. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, which has been slightly edited for clarity. You can read more of the discussion and watch the video on our website.

We asked Perplexity and ChatGPT to write these bios, which are modified below due to space constraints in our print publication. We combined the best of each AI’s creation and read them aloud to the experts at the beginning of the roundtable. They were mostly impressed. Click here to read the full versions.

The icebreaker

We warmed the group up with a rapid-fire word association game.

Clippy: Microsoft Word.

Digital detox: Necessary. Kids.

Emoji: Hate. Expressive.

Bitcoin: Overvalued. Waste of time. Don’t understand. 

Chatbot: Confusing. Fascinating. Amazing.

Zoom: Tiring. Necessary.

Crowdfunding: Harder than it seems. Marketing. Yesterday. A lot.

Netscape: Nostalgic. Yesterday.

Rage quitting: My kids do it a lot. Never heard of it. Unavoidable. The pandemic.

The Cybertruck: Hideous. Cool. Just weird. Baseline.

Doomscrolling: Unhealthy. What is that? Many, many hours. Did it last night, but I shouldn’t have done it.

Meme: My kids. Fun. I love it. I think it’s great.

Transhumanism: Complex. I don’t know what that is. Me neither. (We explained.) Sounds like a great invention for the military. Cyborg.

Tamagotchi: Empathy. Distracting. I don’t know.

404 error: (Laughter) Rage quit! Comes up too often. Inevitable.

Have you tried turning it off and on again? (Laughter) I did that today, but it did not fix the problem. Accept it. It’s standard with computers.

Please define technology.

Rob: You’re coming out swinging with this question!

Swaroop: I would define technology completely generically as: any creation of humans in an environment that is designed to accomplish a task.

Rob: It’s a tool to do something.

Yulia: A tool developed by humans.

Kat: And it doesn’t have to be digital—it could be a pencil or a chair.

Rob: It could be a method. It could be a process.

Kat: It could be all different kinds of things.

Herbie: I like what you said, ‘by people to help people.’ That’s how I’ve always looked at it; it’s something that’s going to make things better.

Swaroop: Or destroy people.

Herbie: Or destroy people if not used well, right?

Swaroop: Yeah.

In what ways do you see technology bridging gaps or creating new divides in society?

Rob: Well, technology is designed as a tool to perform a task that makes our lives easier, but with any technological innovation, there’s always some segment of society that pushes back. We see that time and time again, from any historical innovation to now with AI.

Herbie: Are they pushing back on it, or is it about having accessibility to it?

Rob: Right, accessibility. That’s the other part of it.

Kat: And accessibility could mean getting the technology, but it could also be how you can access it in terms of your bandwidth, your internet or the devices you have.

Herbie: I was just thinking about our product, which won an accessibility award for people with with disabilities. They can’t literally floss or take care of their oral health in the same way, and now they can push a button. But at the same time, it’s an expensive product. So for all of those consumers out there who are the optimizers, our early adopters, they are buying personalized vitamins, have meal kits, a special massage therapist…

Swaroop: The cybertruck.

Herbie: Exactly. These optimizers can afford to spend on these things and do it. They are improving their healthspan and reducing inflammation throughout the body, because they can afford it. But then we need to think about how you make something like that accessible to all people over time. Insurance is something we’re looking at.

What about bringing people together?

Yulia: Technology enhances everything, and there is so much joy and fun in bringing people together with technology. They’ll say, ‘I know this,’ ‘I love that,’ or ‘I learned how to do this.’ So, bringing people together is essential because, otherwise, we don’t have that exchange of ideas.

Rob:  One thought that comes to mind is the software, the consumer technology. These are tools that are designed to allow us to perform tasks quicker, faster, easier. Something I do for fun, in addition to teaching at Iona, is I teach a lot of continuing ed classes to older adults. And part of the divide that opens up is the tool is designed to make our lives easier, but for people that don’t have the right skills, it actually makes their lives much more complicated. There is a rescaling that needs to happen, particularly with the older population, but it could be anybody that may not have access or may not speak the language. And that can be really frustrating. It’s very counterproductive to start to integrate apps and tools into your daily life. But it’s fun to work with those people and help them get over those frustrations and have fun with it.

Yulia: Yeah, and accessibility can also be affordability. It can be extended to physical reach.  

Rob:  It can also be connectivity or internet access? Right?

Kat: Or, for example, take an immersive video game. People find it much more accessible if they’ve played other 3d immersive games, versus people who have not. So that’s an access issue also.

Yulia: Sometimes, it can be that these situations are upside down. When you are missing something, for example, you’re missing a visual passageway to technology, you’re privilege, knowledge, skills and access to technology is not enough. So it can be upside down.

Swaroop: I think one of the challenges that I hear in all the themes is that with every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction of some form. I remember talking to my nieces about a month ago about traveling, and I explained to them that secrets don’t exist anymore. Google Maps democratizes everything, but it destroys secrets. There’s no secret great spot that only you know about. It has 100 reviews and it’s completely accessible, but it’s not just a phone number—the secrets are gone. That magic is gone. When I was on the board of education in the Briarcliff Manor school district, we had a lot of conversations about how we should evolve education when ChatGPT can answer all the questions, but the educational standards have not evolved to allow us to do that yet. So there’s always a reaction; we’re going to sacrifice something for everything we do. What we gained is a bit better, but you can look back on how much we lost. It’s nostalgic.

Kat: I’ve noticed that some of my fellow professors are really worried about that. But I address it head on and tell the students they can use ChatGPT to figure out this essay, and then read through it and critique it and look for all the problems and misconceptions. I’m trying to teach them how to use it more particularly, rather than just just say, ‘don’t use it.’ What’s interesting is that half of the students didn’t want to use ChatGPT because they felt like it was unethical. So I had to create an alternative assignment for them.

What’s the most exciting or promising technological development you’ve encountered recently?

Rob: For me, because I’m teaching entrepreneurship to undergrads, it’s generative AI. We use that every single day with our students. It’s a tool that makes our jobs easier, faster and more efficient. For example, if they want to get feedback about their product or service from different customer segments, we use [Microsoft] Copilot. We’ll get all the necessary information we need, and then we’ll use AI to generate initial survey questions that we will then edit. So instead of having to waste many, many class periods on that, we can get them out in the market testing their product much faster.

Swaroop: Virtualization technologies like Teams and Zoom. Fundamentally, companies are still struggling to fix the culture gap between what they think is valuable versus what is. For example, there could be a mom in Albany, New York, who is fascinating at what she does, but because there isn’t an office anywhere near her, I wouldn’t normally hire her. But now, she can have a full-time job working for one of the largest corporations in the world. The opportunities abound just by the fact that remote work is truly a thing because of these technologies, and I am a little sad that it hasn’t caught on more.

Yulia: Connectivity is very important. Without connectivity, our students would need to commute for one hour, using public transportation, just to get into the classroom to learn. And connectivity also allows them to complete their work so they can get a degree and into well-paying jobs.

Kat: For me, it’s all about the people. If people don’t adopt the technology and people don’t use it and embrace it, it doesn’t matter. For example, I make educational games that can be used in the classroom, and I’ve advocated for them for the past two decades, but their adoption is limited. Schools are still a little scared, and people are still a little scared. But when the pandemic happened and suddenly everybody was far apart, the adoption of educational games really ramped up. I’m hoping that people become more open to embracing these other ways of learning and these other ways of connecting with each other. Because right now, I’m still waiting for that open embrace from schools and from parents.

Herbie: The biggest thing I’ve seen is the personalization and how quickly we can do manufacturing as well. I think it is pretty fundamental. It’s been there for a while, so it’s not new, but to see it in action is actually pretty astonishing—to see how quickly you can iterate and develop something.

Rob: I have one more thought. The ubiquity of Slack, Discord and similar platforms allows people that would normally be isolated to connect with their culture and interests all over the world. And I think that’s a pretty exciting innovation. You can easily find a group of people who are into something really obscure wherever they are. It’s existed for a while, but I think it’s easier than ever now, and it builds these communities that I think have a lot of value.

How can technology be leveraged to promote inclusivity and diversity?

Kat: Let me try to sum up my entire career here! I’ll just give you some examples. I’m working with people at the Lagos Business School in Nigeria to create a series of virtual reality games that teach people how to understand discrimination in Nigeria. So, it could be used for bias reduction and social impact. I’m also working with people to create games around basic emergency care and mass casualty management and really understanding how we can share those skills with different doctors, nurses and clinical staff around the world. Clear social impact right there. And then, even games you might not think are promoting inclusivity could be used for inclusivity, depending on how we talk about it. Even popular games like Overwatch, Fortnight, Among Us or Minecraft could be used in the classroom by educators to think about inclusivity. People create their own characters to share experiences and identity, which supports that sense of belonging. People are making games specifically about inclusion, but there are a few games out there that can support it as well.

Rob: These days, more than ever, there’s accessibility in games. We have an esports team at Iona, and there’s a lot of effort from the occupational therapy department to make the esports team accessible. It’s amazing. There are students who are passionate about video games and interested in being on the esports team but would normally not be a part of that.

Swaroop: We are built to have biases against things we haven’t experienced based on what we’ve heard and seen. So, one thing technology’s done—I always look at the pessimistic side—that’s been terrible for us is it’s made a wall between us and other humans. It doesn’t allow us to challenge preexisting biases. Mike Howard could be anyone. He could be a black guy in the south or a white guy in Germany; he could be anyone. But with technology, you’re going to project whatever you think this person is and interact with them that way. And it’s never going to allow you to challenge your thoughts.

Furthermore, psychology states that we’re nothing more than what we say and write. What are you other than that? Random, freakish emotions, right? But you can’t see that behind the keyboard in an email or text message. And frickin’ Chat GPT comes in, writing everything for you, so now, all of us become this baseline, lowest common denominator human that challenges nothing in our existing preconceptions. My biggest worry for our children is, mainly, how we’re going to create personality, growth of arts and inclusion in a world that technology is battling on every front, accidentally; it’s making things too easy.

Herbie: Right. (Addresses Rob) You were talking about these groups, but at the same time it’s like-minded thinking.

Swaroop: It’s also an echo chamber, right?

Herbie: I don’t like that phrase, but it becomes that.

Rob: And there’s lots of confirmation bias with this kind of stuff.

Swaroop: Innovation links directly to what they call social physics—the production of echo chambers. So how do you reduce those echo chambers? All things are leading to a lack of language, no challenging of biases, increased echo chambers—we’re all going to become racist. (Everyone laughs.)

Herbie: On the flip side (turning back to Rob), you were saying it’s about building virtual teams. I’ve got a team of people that aren’t just from the Bay Area, where there’s a very certain type of tech person and income. We have people from the Carolinas and New York—I’m sitting here in Westchester. So, it’s a pretty diverse group—racially, income, backgrounds.

Swaroop: But that’s no fun to talk about, because it’s not negative. (Everyone laughs.)

Swaroop: But you do make a great point. There is a flip side to it all.

Yulia: To recap, we’re talking about inclusion in technology, and boys used to be automatically included in technology in this country, so that’s why Girls Who Code became such a big thing here. The way boys were educated and treated, and the toys and games were developed for boys only. So first you exclude people, then you try to include them. Technology gives us a way to try to address it, so you don’t need to belong to the majority anymore. Now you can find your own group. It brings people together based on mutual interest; it allows you to find people who are similar-minded, where they were not visible before.

Kat: A well designed experience can help you confront your biases. But it’s all about the way it’s designed because it could enhance biases. You’re talking about enhancing groupthink and just sticking with your own, but it also can help you reflect on that, critique that and then reach out and maybe bridge that gap, connect and build friendships with people that aren’t like you.

I’m thinking of this little independent game called The Way, where you play together to solve problems and missions. It’s all anonymous, but you’re working together. And at the end of the game, you’re finally in the same room. You’ve already gone through this whole quest together, and at that point, you feel like you are friends. It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, your race, your background, your gender identity—it’s about working together and playing together. Maybe we could take some of that knowledge about what works in games and apply it to our society in all different ways. Imagine how we could create a more inclusive society—whether it’s government, schools or workplaces—we should take this understanding of what works in games to make people feel like they belong and apply it to all of the different spheres.

How do you keep your skills current?

Swaroop: Always have a startup.

Rob: I just talk to everybody about what I’m doing and what they’re doing. I’m constantly learning new things from talking to people and keeping an ear to the ground about the people who are leading the field and what they’re doing. And I always have a project to work on. If there’s a new technology, whether it’s a startup or just a personal project, you have to do something with it to understand how to use it.

Herbie: Learning. Learning from partners on the team, through new hires, and so many people bringing so many new ideas.

Yulia: I run communities, so people bring it up. They get excited about it and say, ‘Look what I learned! Look, what I found!’ Sharing is caring. And I always have speakers who present things that are really cool, new or updated. Plus, people just share their skills and knowledge for free in the technology sector—they say, ‘I’m excited about this,’ or ‘That’s a problem I was able to solve.’ And that’s actually very viral because when they talk about solutions, that’s how we innovate.

Kat: I love all these answers; they’re all great. But one thing I do is seek out people from marginalized backgrounds to specifically learn from them, whether it’s my students or people from around the world, because I don’t want to get stuck in my bubble. I love going to conferences. I love listening to tech leaders and taking courses—all of that is great. But I also want to listen to people who are rising up. I talk to all different kinds of people with very different perspectives than mine, because that’s going to help me understand the technology and how to use it with all different kinds of populations.

Yulia: Technology, by default, is way more transparent than any other industry. Just taking the open source idea and fact that people want to share something they built, just to make it spread, just to see how it can be updated and done better.

What is a potential negative impact of technology?

Kat: What I’m worried about right now is toxicity in online games. I’m looking at, specifically, hate-based harassment based on your own personal identity. It’s something I care about, but also, how do you solve it? It’s a really complex question, but I think the number one thing is creating a kinder, more caring culture online with the use of moderated communities. And let’s not recreate the wheel. Let’s see what works in restorative justice and other kinds of communities and apply that to online communities.

Yulia: Privacy. We became way more transparent; we became more vulnerable and visible; we became more accessible by bots, by all this spam. Our personal data gets leaked and exposed; our bank accounts get exposed. And, actually, we don’t know how to behave. We’re not trained; we’re not prepared. The hackers are always one step ahead.

How do we fix it? 

Yulia: Your personal data has to be protected, and it has to be done by each person. But we have to educate people first and equip them with the tools.

Rob: When you look at access to the internet and social media, it’s amazing that people from all over the world can connect with each other. Anybody with an internet connection can have a voice, share knowledge and entertain. The problem with that is that some people don’t deserve to have a voice. They’re selling snake oil and using these platforms to take advantage of people because they’re great at marketing. That’s very toxic and dangerous. I don’t know what the solution is to that, because it’s sort of inherent with platforms. But I find that very troubling.

Herbie: Mine is related to that. I don’t even know if it’s technology as much as technology enables it, but it’s that we’re not all working off the same sets of facts anymore. Just because it’s published online or just because somebody sent it out on a platform, people think that it’s a fact. But it’s not; it’s an opinion.

Swaroop: Right, and then people take the advice. Now, my main worry is a loss of jobs—loss of minimum wage jobs—any job that doesn’t require physical labor, like the cashiers, the grocery store attendants, the shop clerks. If all those jobs go, America is destroyed.

Is there a way to prevent this?

Swaroop: Education. And there’s zero investment in that.

How do we address and/or fix the digital divide in our country, and what do we have to gain by everyone having access?  

Herbie: I think we gain a diversity of thought. We’ve talked about giving people access to opportunities that they may not even know existed, access to other people through Zoom and other technology to reach and get advice and learn from others. So how do we get there? I think it has to be subsidized in order to get there, just like we got there with the existing technologies of libraries and roads.  

Rob: One of the risks with enabling people to have access to technology– to connectivity, apps, devices, whatever– is that it’s great, but they also need to be taught how to use it. I think just throwing devices at people and giving them internet access is not enough. We also need some education and training and ethics and guidelines on how to use that.  

Kat: A lot of people think it’s only older adults that don’t have the skills, but even Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and millennials don’t. I’ve taught them basic digital skills, and even things like editing a photo or video or creating a pamphlet was scary to them. They’re really good at using it for social media, but they find everything else very intimidating. We think of them as being very technologically advanced, but they are actually just as scared as everybody else. 

Another example is the game that I created for The WHO. Right now, it’s being used in the river states in Nigeria, because of a Lassa virus outbreak. The game helps people reduce the spread of an outbreak, and it demonstrates how access affects everybody. If everybody has access to this game that reduces epidemics and pandemics, then it increases education for all and increases our overall knowledge of the world. It’s not just about you and I, it’s about everybody being able to partake in this so that it keeps everyone safe, not just the people in the rural areas. 

Swaroop: I think COVID was an interesting example where there were so many schools in America that spent the last two years in gridlock. But we had a one-on-one program where every kid had a frickin’ MacBook. Not every school district can afford that, even some schools in Westchester. It showed how huge that divide was among households, schools and children. Now, given that important topic, I’ll add on to what Kat said, which is what we’re talking about is democratizing information. The beauty of it, too, is you’re not really democratizing information, we’re using free access to all information without bias of your path, outside of what you’ve been trained. Take it or lose it. It’s a beautiful thing that people can research how to plan for retirement, which is one of the most unknown subjects in America. So I’m a big believer in democratizing information and knowledge, and promoting it as we do it an unbiased path.

What advice do you have for students who are looking to enter your specific area of technology or for adults who are looking to do a career change?  

Yulia: Start with your basics: access to the internet, access to a computer, access to skills, and then you have to learn how to use your computer. You need to learn the basic skills, and you have to learn how to educate yourself, given all the tools available.

 Rob: I didn’t plan on ending up in education; I landed here through a very, very nonlinear path. So my advice is to be a lifelong learner, and don’t be afraid to take a nonlinear path, just do a lot of stuff that builds a lot of life experience. Because that makes you a great teacher, it makes you a great entrepreneur, it just makes you great at life.  

Swaroop: What I love about my field is that it is truly a meritocracy. We don’t care what college you went to or even if you went to college. If you can do it and you’re smart, you’re in.

Kat: I respect that you probably got into it thinking it’s meritocracy, but as a woman, I would say it’s definitely not. I’ve been in those shoes, and I’ve been asked questions all different ways. Are you really a game designer? Do you really know anything about coding? Do you really know how to do whatever? There are so many more steps that I have to take to prove myself because I’m not a man. So my advice is to network as much as possible because you’re gonna have to create a network of people to get into gaming or technology or programming. It’s all about people understanding who you are and what you can offer. 

Herbie: I agree with bits of all of this. Networking, having a growth mindset, and, like you said (looks at Rob), signing up for lifelong learning. And then, even more principled than that, to be successful, you have to follow these rules, always do what’s right, always do your best and show you care. Right. And if you do those things, you’ll be happy. So if you define success by being happy, you’ll be happy and making an impact.

What tech product do you wish you could create? I encourage you to think crazy and outlandish. It can be useful or it can be your wildest dreams.

Yulia: I have two ideas. I like to travel, so I would invent a portal to travel faster. Yes, yes. And you’re on tour, you’re late to this meeting? Yes. means to travel to these and I believe 

Herbie: Think about what that would do for carbon reduction with cars and airplanes.

Yulia:  Right. And the second thing would be that when you see something terrifying happening, you could try different ways to solve it using virtual reality. So, you could say, ‘Wait a second, I don’t want that outcome. Let me change something here and see what happens.’ 

Swaroop: I would create a slow transition to an AI government.  

Herbie: It’s funny you say that, because what I’m thinking is that I wish there was some technology that can just really help better educate and inform people about the truth. 

Kat: I would want to create an experience where we really fully embrace and understand what it was like to be someone else. And if I could create that and help people gain empathy for others, that would be amazing.

Rob:  I’m at a loss. I’m not sure. Everybody’s saying such awesome things. I was thinking something really stupid, like something that will equalize the volume across all streaming services, or unlimited battery life. I would love an electric motorcycle that has a range longer than 100 miles. I’m thinking small, low hanging fruit.

Let’s end by having a little fun: What emoji best describes your key takeaway?

Herbie:                 

Swaroop: I think emojis are the devolution of human emotion.

Okay. We’re going to assign you an emoji. You get the

Yulia:

Kat:

Rob: I’m still stuck on coming up with a good technology. I’m stuck on that previous question, and, I think I have my technology innovation, I would love the ability to take a thought or an emotion and express that through another medium, like color, shape or music. I’d like to create a way to transduce an internal feeling without having to do anything new to express those internal feelings.

This article was published in the September/October 2024 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.