AI pushes us to do what we actually get paid to do: make decisions.
Craft used to drive our hours or even days. Get the pen lines just right. Source the Letraset. Get your instrument in tune. Sweat the details, because the details are everything.
Now, I can choose from 1,000 typefaces, and they’re all optically correct. Autotune has transformed commercial music, and the new AI grammar tools make it trivially easy to make edits or find errors.
The part of us that’s focused on getting it done so we can move on to the next thing accepts the defaults and settles for what the algorithm offers.
That ignores the real work. Taking ownership of the decision.
This or that. The system tees them up. We decide (or answer with “none of the above.”)
Reclaiming agency pushes us away from, “I’m just doing my job,” and into, “I made that.”
PS I made this art in a few moments with AI, but I’d like to be clear that every word I publish, in every book or blog post, is written from scratch, by me. No team, no AI. If that changes, I’ll let you know.
It could be that the constraints that led to the default are long gone.
They might be perpetuating bad choices, injustice or sub-optimal outputs.
The best way to fix something is to look at what we assume is the ‘right’ starting spot.
In persistent systems, it might be difficult to change the default setting, but knowing what it is and how it got there is a great place to begin.
PS on this topic, in two weeks people are going to give out a bazillion dollars worth of cheap chocolate for Halloween. Please don’t buy cheap chocolate.
Different kinds of people prefer pop tarts to pizza, or prefer expensive wine to beer, or prefer amusement parks to bowling.
Except everyone is the same and everyone is different.
What’s actually useful is to realize that in this moment, under these conditions, this person and people who have this person’s preferences, will often choose a certain path.
When groups of people with a shared preference or attitude choose to do something, we see markets and cultural trends.
But these people aren’t different kinds. They’re simply people responding or reacting to what’s on offer. This means that people can have different responses based on different offers and different conditions. We’re not stuck forever, simply grooved into certain patterns.
It could have been way better. It could have been far worse. It’s easy to imagine that outcomes are inevitable, but they’re not.
Was it your fault, or was it luck (good or bad)?
If our story of the past is filled with second guesses, shame or blame, it can carry forward. Or perhaps we’ve over-sold ourselves on just how talented, hardworking and insightful we are, when in fact, we sort of got lucky.
When we rewrite our narrative of the past, we end up creating a different future.
We have more control over that narrative than we give ourselves credit for.
Forty years ago in engineering class, it wasn’t unusual to talk about GIGO or FUBAR. These weren’t technical terms, they were mild complaints that signaled insider status and cultural cohesion.
In a closed profession, like airplane pilots, the insider jargon lasts for generations.
Now, though, everyone in the world is no more than a handshake away from a computer. You either have one in your pocket or know someone who does. Everyone has access to a recording studio, grammar checker, drawing easel, publishing platform, typesetting tool, stats engine and AI front-end as a result.
A TikTok production team doesn’t have a key grip.
The jargon that was a symbol of insider-ness evolves far faster when becoming an insider only takes a bit of effort.
The original members of a circle find themselves missing the jargon. It’s hard to have insiders when there are no longer outsiders.
I spent time this week with two authors who are showing up to share their lives, their insights, and their generosity in the form of books. A good book will change the reader, but it makes an even bigger impact on the author.
Here’s a classic episode of Akimbo. Book publishing has changed more in the last ten years than in the previous 500, and we’re living in a moment where the benefits of writing a book are huge and the costs are surprisingly low.
Most people develop voiceboxes and limbs and facial expressions that make any of these usable. Computers, over the decades, have had to have them engineered.
In 1983, Dan Lovy built a parser for the adventure games I was marketing at Spinnaker. Suddenly, you could type instructions into the game instead of relying on the more emotional but crude joystick for input. So, “pick up the dragon’s pearl” was something the game could understand.
There’s a restaurant in the Bronx where the waiter asks, “what do you want?” There’s no menu. If you imagine something in a certain range, they’ll make it. This is stressful, because we’re used to the paradigm of multiple choice in this setting.
A smart doctor doesn’t ask, “what’s wrong?” Instead, she takes a few minutes to notice, converse and connect, because our fear of mortality gets in the way of a truthful analysis.
As the worlds of tech and humanity merge, it’s worth thinking hard about the right way to engage with a device. When a car invites you to talk with it, the car designer is betting our lives that the car will actually respond to the vagaries of speech in a specific way. Perhaps a steering wheel is a better user interface.
(And it’s not just a car–sometimes we fail to communicate with each other in a useful and specific way that matches the work to be done…)
Failing to acknowledge a favor or a courtesy is a triple mistake, and it’s becoming more common. ChatGPT is now promoting the idea that it can write a thank you note for you, and a text is a lot easier than a handwritten note, and yet, the level of ‘thank you’ seems to be falling.
It’s not that people don’t have the time to offer an honest ‘thank you’. It’s that they don’t want to acknowledge the obligation or connection.
Minimizing a favor is an easy way to stay focused on the noise in our own heads, as opposed to realizing that we’re surrounded by other people.
Hustle culture has discovered that ‘asking for a favor’ often triggers a positive response. This effort on the part of the other person happens because the favor-giver is seeking connection. When the recipient minimizes the favor or fails to say thank you, they create distance, not connection.
The fact that an expression of gratitude requires so little effort makes it even more striking.
To pick a tiny example, if someone lets you into the flow of traffic, a small nod or hand wave costs nothing. But sometimes it feels easier to assert that it was yours to take, as opposed to a kind gesture that you received.
Our failure to take a moment to acknowledge the favor also makes it harder for the next person. If connection isn’t on offer, why not be selfish?
Civility fades in the face of entitlement.
The magic of an honest expression of gratitude is that the person saying thank you might benefit from it as much as the recipient.
October 10, 2023
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