My future self just told me I suck
Psst.
What if future-AI-power-badass-Hector can help me be more accountable?
I’m a people person. Relationships: how to grow them, what they afford, and how to leverage them. What do they entail? What I’ve always been interested is how humans relate with tech.
In this relationship, the foundational issue is the gap between human intention and the ability of tech to understand it. That’s it. All the other problems are emergent: usability, discoverability, simplicity/complexity, fluidity, etc.
The biggest conundrum in technology is that it’s harder to tell a computer to do something than it is for the computer to do it. - Alan Cooper.
From inexplicable icons, to misleading menus, to pathetic experiences. A pain in the ass to get this to work- said everyone at least once in their lives.
New generations come with a wonderful super power called ignorance. And pow! They give zero fucks for what previous generations cared: OS, an app, compatibility, privacy, and what-not. “Hey Siri, Alexa, Google, play the Mexico game in the living room” … Ok got it… TV turns on, and the game is on. Game on!
This ignorance is inspiring. Ignorance driven vision is fun, refreshing, and usually points towards the right direction. It’s easy to grok, to spread and energizing- like those crackle & pop candies. Pure poison.
Enter LLMs and Generative AI. My career was built on a legacy model and I couldn’t be more excited. The ignorance is back.
It’s not difficult to get excited. Ignorance driven buzz. Suddenly, out of the blue, tech just get whatever I say. All of it. ALL OF IT. Now what? NOW WHAT. It’s easy to fall into the trap of reducing these new kinds of experiences into being human (hell they feel human). They are not, they are new kind of tool that exceeds us and can be used to redefine the solution space (remember move 37 from Alpha Go?).
Yes, it can also take our jobs, troll us, etc- Someone will solve that. I hope so. Lol.
What I’m excited about is this new solution space: If now tech fully gets what I say, how might we use that capability towards areas that don't get me?
Like my daughter? Other people? Myself? I definitely don’t get myself. In fact, for the same duration that I’ve been talking about design and tech, I’ve been talking about how my biggest barriers come from me. From unearthing my own beliefs, to becoming a good hypocrite, to being comfortable in discomfort. There’s always this voracious villain: Hector. He is always screwing up Hector. Common!
Hector knows what he should do- his long term ideals around well-being, literacy, creative, family and societal roles are there. But then the day starts with all these traps:- notifications, sweets, demands, desires, emotions, arguments.
I do the wrong thing, I say the wrong thing, I find myself scrolling for 30 mins vs chipping away at that book. What’s worst is many times I KNOW I’m doing it. I’m supposed to be accountable for myself but many times I let myself down. Oh, it's just one more time. Or, that's too far away. Seems like I’m getting paid to increase my cognitive dissonance.
What if future-AI-power-badass-Hector can help me be more accountable?
People say: don’t listen to anyone but yourself. Okay. Let’s go.