Embracing Empathy and Connection in an AI-Saturated World A Conversation with Jane Newman

In a world dominated by screens, algorithms, and the buzz of artificial intelligence, how do we reconnect with our humanity and nuture creativity, connection, critical thinking, and collaboration? This week, speaker, writer, and coach Jane Newman drops by the Adventures in Learning podcast to help us unpack the profound challenges and opportunities at the intersection of technology, AI, and humanity. 

Summary

In this episode, we explore the intricate challenges posed by technology and AI in our modern world. Jane Newman shares her journey from being inspired by her innovative father in Australia to carving out a trailblazing career in technology to recognizing the need for empathy and human connection in all aspects of our lives. 

Chapters:

0:01:03 - Rehumanizing Life in the Digital Age 

10:50 -- Helping Kids Form Human Connections

0:12:32 - Adventures in Learning and Technology 

0:22:41 - Rehumanizing Strategies

Guest Links

Jane Newman's Big Talk 

Jane Newman's Oxford Talk 

Jane's Website

Follow Jane on Instagram and LinkedIn

Connect with Us

Follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and BlueSky for updates and behind-the-scenes content.

Call to Action

Inspired by Jane's insights? Share this episode with fellow parents, caregivers, librarians, and educators to spark meaningful conversations about reclaiming humanity in a digital world. Don't forget to leave a review on your favorite podcast platform to help others discover the show!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What makes us human and what helps us to build connections? I was fortunate enough to hear this next guest speak in New York City about the perils of AI and the possibilities of a human-centric future. I am so thrilled to welcome Jane Newman, who is a speaker, a writer, and a coach. She owns the business rehumanizing, and she is here to talk to us today about how we can apply empathy and connection in a digital age. Wonder, Curiosity, Connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr. Diane, and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures in Learning.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Jane, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Diane. It's such a pleasure being here today and having the opportunity to talk to you. And it's been a while, you've been very busy, and it's it's wonderful to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Thank you. I'm so happy you're with us. You have a very powerful message that you're delivering. And I'm wondering for our listeners who maybe haven't watched your big talk or haven't seen your beautiful Oxford talk yet, and I'll drop the links to both of those in the show notes. But can you sum up what the perils are that we're facing and what your message is in terms of what we should be doing about it?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Diane, I would love to sum it up, but it is almost impossible to sum up. There is so much going on right now around the world. But I talk about technology and AI and the issues that we're facing around the world as a result of the way that it's it's being implemented and has really infiltrated our everyday lives to the point where we can't get away from it.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

So, Jane, a lot of our audience is based on teachers and educators and family members. And I know when you talk, you talk about the fact that a lot of what we're facing in terms of AI and the loneliness epidemic has come post-COVID. It's from that post-COVID society and it's impacting our young people from the Gen Alpha through Gen Z or Gen Z in particular. Can you give us a little background on that and sort of some of your take on how we can rehumanize? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

So I don't know if you know of Jonathan Hayes. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it. You got it, yes. Anxious generation. I think that really sums up where we are at the moment with young people and the effects that they have experienced. I do trace it back to COVID. I think about the isolation that they experienced at the time and how deeply traumatic that was for them, the isolation they had from each other, from other children not being able to play, and then from their teachers as well, and having to change over from real human interactions to start to use digital interactions. And so the relationship of children with people changed very much, and they became just they came to see technology as part of their daily life. And the trauma that they experienced at that time has never been treated. No one's, you know, unless there's been a particular particular individual who's had some mental health issues and has sought help for that. As a vast majority, these children who are now young adults, in the case of Gen Z, are trying to deal with their daily life, but they've never been helped to overcome that starting point during their childhood, which was so different to any other child's. I I feel very strongly for Gen Z. My own daughters are Gen Z. And I see the struggles that they go through. And there is this real sense of isolation that has come about. And I've experienced this with my own daughters, and just watching how they try very hard to build community and to maintain connections, and they have friends, they do go and do things, but it's not easy and it's not all around them. It's not the way of life that we had, you know, decades ago before technology, where you did interact with other people all the time. You didn't have a choice. That's the way the world was. And now that we have technology and it's become second nature to turn to technology for everything, and that's what the technology industry tries to get us to do. You know, this is the whole marketing push is to try and make sure that we are using technology for everything, but it's not healthy. It's in no way healthy. And I find it very interesting some of the parent groups that are springing up now in the US and in England and demanding rights for children that they shouldn't have to, well, taking away phone use in school, I think is a brilliant move. I I have to say, I was shocked when I realized kids were allowed phones in schools. That was that was quite news to me. And thinking too about technology use of social media and banning their use of that. I think there is more that we can do though. And I think there is a mis to me, it's a misguided misapprehension that we need AI so badly that even though it's damaging ourselves and our children, we have to get over that because we need AI. And I think that's fundamentally wrong.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

So is from my perspective at least, I see AI as being detrimental. It's doing the wrong things. I grew up, I think generally the same generation you did. And I was hoping if we had AI, it was going to give me Rosie the robot who was going to clean my house.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Not somebody who wanted to replace my daughter who's an actress or my friends and myself who are writers, who wants to take the creative, dare I say, human part of what we're doing away. And as an educator, what I'm seeing is an increased reliance on feeding everything into a chat bot and saying, give me a lesson. And that's not good teaching because it's not responsive to the individual children in your classroom. It's not using the knowledge that you've gained. I mean, I can see the I can see the benefit for synthesizing lots of information and cutting time there. But in terms of writing your lesson plan for you, I'm going to suggest I don't think that's a great idea. How do you overcome sort of that societal tsunami of we should be using AI for everything?

SPEAKER_00 6:52

I think it will change. I think that that tide will reverse because AI doesn't know everything. It is not intelligent. It just is able to use algorithms and the way that it puts words together and synthesizes information into very meaningful sentences and concepts, and it can tie these things together in ways that sound very human, very realistic. It's it's brilliant. It is absolutely brilliant. But it has a lot of limitations. It's not accurate. We know it's not accurate. It cannot be made accurate. The nature of the way that it is constructed means that you can ask the same question twice and get two completely different answers. That's not what we expect from a reliable source of truth. And if we can't rely on the answers we're getting, what's its value to us? So as a replacement for our encyclopedias for teachers who actually do know things and have got that experience behind them to bring into conversation, children are missing out on so much. Just to be fed some facts that have been synthesized together is not enough. We wouldn't want that in our textbooks. We wouldn't just want to feed children information from textbooks, which is sometimes correct and sometimes not, and expect them to come out with a great education at the other end.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Right. Well, and I've seen it used in multiple ways in the education platforms here in the States. And some of it is just dreadful. Like it's lazy. I've, you know, and I've seen it, I've had students who have tried to use it to create their lesson plans, and I can generally tell when that happens, and I send them back to the drawing board because it's failing to incorporate sort of those playful aspects of learning that students need, the aspects that build connection that create engaged experiences. I'm sure there is a happy medium between the two camps, but we certainly aren't close to finding it right now.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Well, I just question its value at all. My perspective on it is there is no value to something that isn't adding value. And I don't see the value that it's adding. So, how do we help kids become more connected? Well, again, going back and looking at what's happening around the world right now, which I'm really happy about because it wasn't in place when I did my talk in New York, or particularly prevalent when I did my talk in Oxford either. But there are now quite a few movements happening with young people and with their parents as well. I mentioned about the phones and trying to get them off their phones, but the children themselves are actually requesting this. I was reading today about a seven-year-old boy in a school who went to his parents and said, I don't want an iPhone, I want a Nokia. And this is reflecting, this reflected his school and the way that the other children were feeling. They didn't want iPhones, they didn't want screens, they didn't want AI because they're very aware of these detrimental effects and they don't want it. They're choosing not to have it. But for a seven-year-old, it's quite amazing. And I was speaking to a friend of mine only this week, someone I knew from the IT industry, and her son, who's 17, has also been very adamant that he doesn't want a phone. He wants to mix with his friends, and that's what he does. They don't use technology to interact, they go out, they do things. And this is what the younger generation are starting to pick up on. And I do think that that is where hope lives. That if the younger generation can see the damage that's being caused and choose not to do this, then the future looks a lot rosier than it did when I first started looking at it.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

That's wonderful, Jane. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to talk about your adventures in learning and how you got to where you are and sort of form the ideas that you have. Imagine a space where curiosity drives innovation, where empathy fuels collaboration, and where learning feels less like a task and more like an adventure. My message isn't about adding more to your plate, it's about changing how you see the plate entirely. I'm Dr. Diane Jackson Schnorr and through the power of purposeful play, I equip leaders, educators, and organizations with the tools you need to unlock creative problem solving, deepen human connection, and build resistant ecosystems of empathy and innovation. Attendees will walk away not just inspired but empowered, with immediately usable strategies to spark curiosity in teams, to lead with empathy, and to infuse learning into their everyday cultures. You'll learn how play isn't child's work, it's the secret weapon of the world's most effective leaders and change makers. This is not a feel-good talk that fades by Monday morning, it's a movement. A shift in how we engage people, solve problems, and lead meaningful change. My talks and workshops are shaped by decades of experience in education and a transformative message that connects across sectors. Whether your audience is corporate, educational, or nonprofit, they'll leave ready to rethink what's possible, both personally and professionally. Because when we learn and lead through play, we don't just change organizations, we change the world. Check it out at drdianeadventures.com. Welcome back to the Adventures in Learning Podcast. We have speaker, author, and coach Jane Newman on the show today. Jane, tell us a little bit about your adventures in learning. How did you become the person you are today? What formed your experiences and led to sort of your relationship with technology?

SPEAKER_00 12:57

Well, there are two different questions there. My experience with learning started quite young because my father was a teacher. He was a primary school teacher and a headmaster in Australia. And it was a very small Australian school. It was out in the country. It had a maximum of 30 students in the whole school. So he was a very maverick teacher, a very maverick headmaster. And he often had run-ins with the district inspector who didn't understand why his students did so well. It was bad because it made all the other schools look bad. So he was always getting inquiries as to what he was doing with his students because he didn't just follow the prescribed syllabus. He actually did a lot more than that. My father was English. He came out to Australia when he was in his early 20s. He was known as a 10-pound pom. But he was a very bright young man as a student. He got scholarships and he was well educated. And he had a passion for learning. He had a real curiosity about the natural world, about history, about geography. He loved story. He loved singing. So the classes that he ran were always full of excitement about you never knew what you were going to learn today. And that's how I grew up. What am I going to learn today? What's going to happen? It was always that kind of excitement. And so I'm always very sad when I hear children who don't look forward to school because that wasn't my experience. My experience was a very joyful one. Technology, that's a very different question. So when I was in my late years of high school, I had to choose what I was going to do. I'd gone through the sciences and I had to decide where I was going to start. And this whole new field was opening up called computer science. And I was a female, very rare at the time. There were four of us in my first year at computer science. And I was surrounded by a lot of males. That took a lot of getting used to. But I persisted with that. I had a few ups and downs. But that's how I got into IT. So I progressed from there. I worked at the university. I went into my own business for a little while, ran my own software company. And then I moved into contracting, which was a very lucrative career for a number of years. It let me travel around Australia. It let me travel to the UK. I worked various different places around the UK. And eventually came back to Australia and ended up in a national management role with a computer organization in Brisbane. And that's where I finished up. So it's been a long journey with IT, and I have worked in a number of different roles, but my specialty was always in information. And that's why I'm very passionate about the extremely poor quality of information that we now have in these systems that we're talking about today.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

And so tell us a little bit about what you've seen as that shift in information, because I think that's intriguing and interesting. And it's one of those things that we don't necessarily think about. But once you started talking, we went, oh yeah, check, check, check. I totally get it.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Yes. So I guess the computer systems that I was involved in working on throughout my career were for typically large organizations, usually government or another large company. And they were integral to the way that the company was running. So they were put in there to help facilitate and improve the way that people were doing their jobs so that they didn't have to use paper. You know, for many years, this was the great push. Let's get rid of paper. We don't need paper. Let's do things on a screen because we can capture the data and it's much more efficient, especially for customers. There was nothing worse than a customer phoning up one department, giving all their details, and then having to phone up another department and have to give them all over again. So we were trying to consolidate all that information so that it could be accessed by everyone and made use of. So those types of systems are still in existence today, and they still serve their corporate purpose. But what's changed is the type of technology that we have on our devices, which is a very different nature. It's it's it's much smaller, it's much more agile, it's much more fluid, it doesn't have the kinds of controls that sit over those larger corporate systems where you would be part of a project that had it had some kind of goals that were identified up front, and then you would be expected to deliver against those goals. There would be quality assurance to see if it meet those needs, how well did it meet them, it would be error tested. It had to reach a certain standard before it ever went live. Those sorts of controls don't exist around a lot of the small apps that we see today, where somebody has a great idea, they build it, they release it. Whether it really works or not, well, you know, if it doesn't, we'll fix it later. And that's become the kind of way things are now. So if something doesn't work, oh well, never mind, we'll just sort that out later. But as a person who wants to use these different computer systems, the issue for me when I find that things break is there's no one for me to phone up. There's no help desk. And this is true now of government organizations and big companies as well. So I can't phone up and say, What's gone wrong? Why can't you fix this? Because there's nobody there to answer the call. I get pushed through these great big long lines. And if it's online, often I only have a chat bot and you don't get to the person that you want to speak to. So it's very frustrating that every day there's something that doesn't work, something you have to fight with. And we've got to deal with that additional stress in our lives every day. And it just raises our own stress levels and exhausts us.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

It sounds like it's building barriers to communication rather than facilitating communication and connection.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Well, I don't think it's deliberate. It's just the nature of those developments is to get it out there and make money. Get it out there and make money. It's a very different driver to the types of systems that I was working on, where the impetus was to meet some corporate goal. So there was a corporate vision of what they wanted to be done. And this was the system that they wanted to put in place, and there would be a team of people who would work with the business to work out the best way of doing that and articulate those kinds of requirements very specifically and work to deliver against those requirements. So it was very rigorous. And I think that's what's changed, is that as an industry, the rigor and structure and quality has fallen away. Um I'll just come back to information though for a moment because we did talk briefly about information. And you know, originally when computer systems were built, they were built to replace or help with the limitations of human minds. So the original computer systems were computing systems, and the idea was that they could hold more information, more facts, and they could compute it more quickly and come up with a more accurate answer. So if we're talking about the number pi, for example, a computer could calculate pi to you know x number of decimal places in an instant, and people couldn't do that. So a computer was at that time expected to be more accurate, more efficient, faster, and something you could rely on. So when you put your business figures into a computer and it added them up, you expected to get the correct result. Always, every time, the same. Yeah. You wouldn't have used that system otherwise. And I think that's what has really changed with the advent of AI and the and the large language models and the fact that they don't answer correctly and they hallucinate and they make up information and they pull in different information today to what they did yesterday. And we've now become accustomed to the idea that we can use a computer system that isn't accurate.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

So we've talked a lot about information and some of the perils of AI. And what I would like to pivot to is to ask you a little bit about what you're doing to help address bits of this wicked problem. As you said, there's no one giant solution, but you are doing your part to try to tackle some of it with rehumanizing. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yes. So rehumanizing has come out of the public speaking that I've been doing, where I've been looking very much at the problems. Because when I first encountered these problems, I was so shocked and horrified. By what I was finding, and nobody else was talking about it, Diane. This is what was so amazing to me that no one else seemed to be talking about it. So I really felt I had to come out and talk about it and raise awareness. But what I've found since then is that there are other people talking about it, but it's still quite isolated. People aren't talking about it collectively and collaboratively enough. And I don't think the situation will change until we do get that big movement around the world. What's important to me is that I can make a difference in individual people's lives because to me, it's helping individuals and helping them to see a better future that's going to change the world's future. At the moment, we're each so exhausted, a lot of the younger people, as we've said, are isolated. Nobody's thinking about where we do want the future to go. We're too busy being horrified and exhausted and cut off from what's currently going on, that we're not spending time thinking about what is it that we want. So rehumanizing is for me to help individuals through doing personal coaching and through taking them through a program that will help them discover their own inner joy. That's not something we have right now. We're too busy doing what we have to do. We're too busy surviving. We're too busy trying to make the best of the current situation and deal with it. And joy is something that's very important to me. It's something that I felt a lot in my younger years. And growing up, I felt very joyful. And I feel very sad when I see young people who aren't experiencing that same joy. So I want to help the Gen Z particularly to try and rediscover the joyful feelings that maybe they missed out on a lot during COVID, as we've already talked about. And perhaps they're now in a situation where they don't actually know how to find those joyful feelings that they used to have. So my coaching is to try and help them tap into their own inner knowledge, their intuition, to ask themselves the questions about what they really want and to help them find those answers. Because I think by individuals thinking about the future, about their role in it, what kind of people they want to be as they get older, what kind of world they want to create, I think that's how we change the future. I love that. So last question for today, Jane. What brings you hope? I think what brings me hope is young people who can see that they don't want to be part of this era in which everything is done on screens. I read a statistic that in it's predicted that for people growing up today, if things stay the same, they would be spending 25 years of their life in front of their screen, their personal screen. We don't want that.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

No.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

So it brings me hope that young people are seeing this and are taking action themselves. But what will bring me even more hope is when parents also do the same because they need to be the role models for their children. They also need to get off the screens. And if the children's needs are what's going to drive that, then I think that's really positive.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Well, thank you, Jane. And hopefully our listeners will take some time today to put down their screens and go out and discover a little wonder, curiosity, and play. It has been such a delight to have you on the show, and I will include all of your contact information in the show notes. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much, Dr.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Diane. It's been such a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

You've been listening to the Adventures in Learning podcast with your host, Dr. Diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, download, and let us know what you think, and please tell a friend. If you want the full show notes and the pictures, please go to dr Dianeadventures.com. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.