No part of this article was written by an AI, just a flawed human…
This is the first year I’ve worried I will lose my job to a machine. My solution? Work while you can. I know that sounds kind of obvious, but it’s really the only thing I can think to do.
In 2022 we witnessed assistive AIs become more competent at performing tasks like drawing, compiling research or even writing code. As a result, I predict that the things we do uniquely well as humans won’t be our technical skills but our ability to think creatively, grapple with philosophical and ethical questions, and simplify complex ideas.
Hopefully, we will live in future where these smart machines remove our daily drudgery and simply help us rediscover what makes us uniquely great. Perhaps we will start working and thinking less like automatons and more like … well … people.
In an attempt to hedge my bets against AI, many of my insights this year focus on the types of human vocation I believe an AI will always struggle with.
From being more creative, managing information overload, the dangers of programming fairness into systems, finding purpose in one’s work, and how to stop the grand innovation slowdown we have been experiencing since 1970.
I hope you find something inspiring here today, and remember to enjoy your work while you can … because change is a comin’.
Building a system that generates ideas
- Remember, the concept of “having new ideas” is still a relatively new concept, historically speaking.
“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” — Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist and all-around genius
- One of the benefits of, say, going to a yoga class or church is that it’s impossible to work while you’re there. Presence, I find, is better protected by obligations than intentions, and that helps when creating an environment to cultivate ideas.
- When we’re curious, we tend to question the world around us more. This can be as easy as looking at our surroundings and asking ourselves, “What must have been true in the world for this thing to exist?”
- The best way to come up with better ideas is to deliberately re-expose yourself to notes and ideas you’ve previously captured, and no better time exists for this than Lunchtime.
- As Mark Twain said, “I have never let school get in the way of my education.” We can’t always rely on others to feed us new perspectives on the world, so seek them out.
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Using notes to better organise my thoughts for work happiness
- I find that when we read intending to find something that resonates, the experience becomes more intentional. Our minds are always on the hunt for insights, and we can’t help but resonate with content on a deeper level.
- Even though it’s exhausting, once the insights are saved, it feels worth it and becomes part of our working memory over time. This allows me to connect the dots between different pieces of information more efficiently and clearly see the big picture.
- The people who took the extra time to plan for failure were up to three times more likely to achieve their daily goals, and, not insignificantly, they were substantially happier at the end of each day!
- “We learn from reflection on experience, not from experience itself.” — John Dewey, Philosopher
- Before adding any note one of the most important questions I ask myself is: — Is It Surprising? If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?
- A great life hack I’ve learned is that I could cognitively offload most things by simply writing them down. Usually, I do this by journaling before bed, making a schedule, or creating a to-do list for the day ahead. This way, I can clear my mind of everything I need to do and focus on enjoying my free time or getting a good night’s sleep.
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It's futile building things that are completely fair
- The risk is that in trying to enshrine fairness into services, we always risk enforcing new biases upon people in the future by making them see the world as we do today. Our tools impose rules on us as though all people are the same, and the context won’t change.
- Long-term solutions don’t account for how the self changes over time.
- An algorithm that is fair along one standard will inevitably be unfair along another standard. Although no mathematical definition of algorithmic fairness fully encapsulates the philosophical notion of fairness or justice
- Historical opinions risk becoming ghosts in the machine that haunt generations to come.
- We should strive to never solve a long-term problem without first building platforms that help us understand their nuance and complexity.
- We are all required — tech users, critics, and product teams — to ask ‘what if’ and ‘why not’ about the possibility of technologies designed to support a long-term spirit of questioning. Until we do so, the riskiest person in control of our work will always be us.
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Overcoming the overwhelming amount of information we consume
- By condensing everything I value into two summary emails
daily , I no longer feel the need to constantly be engaged. I can focus on other tasks and enjoy my downtime without worry of missing out. - A study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content daily, five times higher than in 1986. But instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms (and depresses) us.
- Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something.
- Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society wide poverty of attention.
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Mortality should be our great motivator
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” — Steve Jobs
- Taken literally, even Steve Jobs’s efforts to “put a dent in the universe” ultimately failed: 10,000 years from now, no one’s going to know what an iPhone was.
- Human civilization can be seen in many ways as the reflexive response to our awareness of our own mortality.
- When we accept that death is a tool that gives our lives and work meaning, the things we choose to do with our time here begin to become more meaningful. The fact that someone took the day off and decided to spend it with you doing something fun suddenly makes it all the more special.
- Humans seem to really love a sense of looming fate; how else could five star chrome extensions exist that remind us of how long have left to live?
“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience. It should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.” —
Albert Camus
- That six-page proposal your boss asked for by Monday is saving us from existential crisis, and we didn’t even get them a thank you card.
- The great thing about building legacy and immortality projects is their ability to help us build a life full of fulfilment while hopefully making other people’s lives better along the way.
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Soft skills are essential for navigating ambiguity
- We don’t always need to understand all the complexities of a user’s problem. Sometimes we just need to build the tools, features and ways of working that enable us to do things independently.
- Our greatest challenge as product people is understanding a user’s intent when even the user doesn’t know what they want.
- Practising the “art” of product management is more valuable than the “science”: communicating, empathy, leading without authority, having difficult conversations, storytelling, making decisions when you don’t have all the information, dealing with ambiguity, inspiring others, and connecting deeply with users.
- Finding peace with the ambiguity of product work means discovering ways to
reduce uncertainty . The best way to achieve this is by focusing on skills that facilitate robust working methods and ensure strong teamwork.
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We need to get better at recognising truly complex problems
- Product people tend to presume, rather than openly investigate, the problems we set out to tackle; reaching for solutions before questions have been fully asked.
- We are drawn to develop solutions based on our dominant assumptions, but in the absence of that, we do the next worst thing: trying to decipher the ‘truth’ of a problem by looking for its mythical average.
- Our problem is that in trying to fix things, we start viewing society in terms of networks of harm. Therefore it becomes easier to view solutions to allour problems in terms of data networks, surveillance coverage, and interactions among distributed people and devices that must be regulated.
- In many ways, search products like many product develop processes are a sum of destructions. You need to predict a little bit at a time and then verify.
- Our role in product is to connect a love of the problem with the available technology.
- We need to be technical enough to understand the vocabulary of engineers, but not so much that our vocabulary restricts our vision.
“Nothing important comes with instructions. Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything” — George Bernard Shaw
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Small things matter, but don’t take your eye off the bigger picture
- Regarding the
Pareto principle (80/20 Rule) — our question should become: what opportunities do we miss by ignoring that other 80%? - To usher in a more mature tech paradigm, we need to start seeing products not just as solutions but as instruments that teach us how to see the world more fully
- By focusing on longer-term product impact, we didn’t get distracted by arbitrary goals like optimising search relevancy. Instead, we concentrated more on the holistic user experience and prioritised features that built trust, such as explaining result relevancy or assisting users with choosing better keywords … otherwise I doubt we would have achieved our double-digit growth and engagement success.
“Your life is the sum of what you focus on. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ” Henry David Thoreau.
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We are not innovating fast enough
- Transitioning from 1970 to 2020, besides computing and genetic engineering, one can’t help but notice a lack of revolutionary breakthroughs compared with previous decades.
- The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number
required in the early 1970s. In fact, research teams have nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that growth continues today. - Tackling things like climate change requires more exponential technology, not less.
- Reversing a trend of technological stagnation begins with first acknowledging the stagnation and ends with believing change is possible.
- The current response to the burden of knowledge is to develop increasingly specialized fields with increasingly specialised experts to occupy them. I wouldn’t be surprised if its this trend for building narrower domains of knowledge becomes one of the biggest contributors for decreasing technological innovation.
- Instead of focusing on one discipline at a time, we need to focus on patterns that can be applied from one knowledge domain to another.
- We need to learn to be unsatisfied with predictable incremental progress.
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AI will become super memory companions
- AI agents may not be able to make us super-intelligent, but they could pass knowledge on to us from the lessons of history — a sort of super-history.
- AIs, in Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser’s view, will soon “possess a historical consciousness far superior to ours,” allowing them to “make better, faster, and more varied history than we ever did,” with the result that we’ll leave the business of history writing to them.
- AI will always be limited by only what it knows — a machine is unlikely to start an airline when no airlines exist.
- Only the right kind of machine, one that is embodied and active in the world would have human level intelligence in its reach.
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Search changes the way we think and see the world
- Search changes our perception of the world and our ability to live within it … it changes text, changes reading, how we understand and even what it means to be literate.
- The ubiquity of the search engine has given rise to a widespread anxiety that search has become a mentality, a mode of reading and learning that is supplanting the old modes is, we are told, changing our brains, shortening our attention spans and eroding our capacity for memory.
- What we would later learn is many users don’t actually know what they are searching for. Users were effectively using search to try and make sense of information chaos and develop a vocabulary to better articulate their query.
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We need to start prioritising individual creativity over groups
“invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity.” — Joel Mokyr
- Genius starts with individual brilliance. A singular vision can lead to innovation, but it takes teamwork to make creativity happen.
- Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarised the science: “Serendipitous thought, the kind that makes critical breakthroughs and solves challenging problems, does not occur in groups.”
- Let’s do better by providing a more nuanced picture of innovation in which solitary exploration by “geniuses” and collaboration both play critical roles.
“Most geniuses especially those who lead others prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities, but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” — Andy Benoit
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Happy new year EVERYONE!