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We talk a lot on this show about what AI can do. This one's about what it can quietly take, if you let it.

Ricardo Luiz has spent over twenty years building products at the intersection of psychology, UX and AI, and his warning is simple: the moment you outsource what to think, you've outsourced who you are. AI is good enough and fast enough that most people won't notice the handoff happening.

We get into exactly where the line sits between AI amplifying you and AI quietly making you dependent on it. Ricardo's test: if the tool disappeared tomorrow, would you panic or would you just slow down? Panic means you were never really driving.

We also get into why Anthropic named 'understanding what's happening inside the black box' a real 2026 goal, why intent is the one word Ricardo wants you to sit with before opening another AI tool and a story involving a dog, a cancer diagnosis and a vaccine formula that shouldn't have existed. Plus a study on why people trust an AI's medical answer over an actual doctor's, even when it's wrong.

And we get honest about the economics nobody wants to talk about. The tools feel cheap right now because the real cost isn't being charged yet. Ricardo's bet: give it two years and the businesses behind these tools will have to charge what they actually cost and not everyone will be able to afford what they've gotten used to.

Fair warning: this one might change how you use every AI tool you touch after it.

About Ricardo: Ricardo is a product leader focused on AI-native product development, mentorship and the cultivation of communities of practice. He's spent his career turning ambiguous problems into shipped products and individual contributors into the teams everyone wants to work on. He mentors emerging and senior PMs across geographies, hosts peer-learning circles and believes the most effective thing a senior practitioner can do is multiply other practitioners.

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uxluiz/
- UXDX: https://uxdx.com/profile/ricard-luiz/
- WUD Portugal: https://wudportugal.com/orador/ricardo-luiz/

Mentioned in this episode:

• 'The Urgency of Interpretability' - Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability
• The study on over-trust in AI-generated medical responses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15266
• Coverage of the Claude Max plan usage-limits lawsuit (Engadget): https://www.engadget.com/2194626/anthropic-hit-with-lawsuit-over-its-claude-max-usage-limits/

Season 2 ends here. Season 3 arrives in September and takes the show beyond tech; we will have doctors, chefs, scientists, artists, all asked the same closing question. Subscribe now so you're there for episode one.

Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
→ humanxintelligent.com
→ https://www.instagram.com/humanxintelligent/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/designwithmaddie/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta/

📩 Want to be a guest on Human X Intelligent? Reach out to Madalena at madalena@humanxintelligent.com

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🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about trust, transparency and human agency in AI systems, for product designers, PMs and founders building with AI.

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Hosted by Madalena Costa · Senior product designer and AI systems strategist

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You've heard the productivity pitch. AI makes you faster. AI makes you more efficient. AI makes your work better.

But what if it's also making you worse at working without it and faster than you think?

In this episode of Human × Intelligent, I go deeper into a cluster of research and stories that, taken together, paint a picture we can't afford to ignore. A study from Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT and UCLA found that just 10 minutes of AI assistance was enough to impair independent problem-solving. Researchers have shown that inaudible sounds hidden inside background music can hijack AI notetakers in your meetings without you knowing. MIT professor Max Tegmark has pointed out that AI is currently less regulated than a sandwich shop. And the movie Idiocracy, a 2006 comedy barely anyone saw, is starting to feel less like satire and more like a schedule.

This isn't a doom episode. It's an episode where I share a perspective. I walk through what the science actually says, what it means for how we work and lead and what to do about it. From the three questions you should be asking every AI vendor you work with, to the one habit that protects your cognitive independence, to what it actually means to be an irreplaceable human professional in 2026.

If you use AI at work and you do, this is the episode to sit with.

Reading list:

• AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance - arXiv
• Using AI for 10 minutes damages intellect, study shows - Euronews
• AI: the "boiling frog" effect on cognition - Futurism
• AI assistants can be hijacked by inaudible sounds - Cyber Insider
• AI is less regulated than sandwiches - Euronews
• Idiocracy: A Prophetic View of an AI-Driven Future - Aragon Research
• A Place for Human Talent in the AI Age - IMF
• Redesigning work around human skills - EY

Connect with us:
🌐 humanxintelligent.com
📸 Instagram: @designwithmaddie
📸 Instagram: @humanxintelligent
💼 linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta
💼 linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent

Support the show

🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about trust, transparency and human agency in AI systems, for product designers, PMs and founders building with AI.

🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode

🌐 humanxintelligent.com

Hosted by Madalena Costa · Senior product designer and AI systems strategist

Send us an email!

Building an AI agent has never been easier. But getting it to production? That's where most projects quietly die.

In this episode of Human X Intelligent, host Madalena Costa sits down with Joana Mesquita, Machine Learning Engineer at Swiss Post and former ML practitioner at Adidas and Feedzai, to explore what fundamentally changes when you move from deterministic software to probabilistic, generative AI systems and why so many teams are unprepared for that shift.

Joana has spent years building scalable AI systems, implementing MLOps practices and even developing tools to measure the carbon footprint of machine learning workflows. She's one of the clearest thinkers working at the intersection of AI engineering and responsible development.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why building a working prototype is easy, but building a reliable agentic system is a completely different challenge
• What fundamentally breaks when you move from deterministic to probabilistic, generative systems
• Why traditional governance models fail for agentic AI and what needs to replace them
• How to embed governance into the product itself
• Input, output, data and tool guardrails with practical examples
• Why evaluation needs to start on day one (and the data behind why it matters)
• The risks and trade-offs of using LLMs as judges and how actually to align them
• What breaks in the prototype-to-production transition: data quality, cost, latency and governance
• How to move from 'trust me, it looks good' to trust backed by evidence and measurement
• How organizations can balance innovation speed with responsible AI development
• What sustainable AI scaling actually means, including environmental impact

One idea that will stay with you: 'Stop thinking about AI products as only the model. Start thinking about them as a system that learns over time.'

Whether you're an ML engineer, a product manager or a technical leader navigating the GenAI transition, this conversation will change how you think about what it actually takes to build AI that works in the real world.

Connect with Joana Mesquita:
→ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanamesquita96/
→ Medium: https://medium.com/@joana.c.mesquita.f

Human × Intelligent is a podcast at the intersection of design, AI and human agency. Hosted by Madalena Costa.
→ humanxintelligent.com
→ https://www.instagram.com/humanxintelligent/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-x-intelligent/
→ https://www.instagram.com/designwithmaddie/
→ https://www.linkedin.com/in/madalenafigueirasdacosta/

📩 Want to be a guest on Human X Intelligent? Reach out to Madalena at madalena@humanxintelligent.com

Support the show

🎙️ Human × Intelligent - a podcast about trust, transparency and human agency in AI systems, for product designers, PMs and founders building with AI.

🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode

🌐 humanxintelligent.com

Hosted by Madalena Costa · Senior product designer and AI systems strategist