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I try not to link to social media threads here, but sometimes that’s where the good stuff resides.
If you wanted to crawl into my head and do a better job of articulating my anxiety and muddy thoughts around how AI has changed (or might? (or will??)) the trajectory of my career, Kyle Hughes has done it.
Granted, it almost has to be business as usual because what other option is there? Either it won’t happen or we’ll be homeless.
Right, like do I stay in a job longer than I would have before because it feels “secure”? Do I pretend several CEOs (named and unnamed) haven’t put a giant target on my back and apply to work for their companies, hoping to eek a few more years of pay out before AI sends me off into the sunset? What’s the best course of action in an environment like this? It’s unknowable, in my opinion.
What do we tell students?
Oof, yeah, this. I have several friends with kids at the “considering college” age and I do not envy that calculus right now.
My brain plugged along for 30 years without ever having the passing thought that my value could be automated. In some ways, I physically can’t comprehend it.
Same. It’s one thing to watch a job move another country and see different humans take it on at a cheaper rate; that’s comprehensible. But to be told that you—and any other human who does what you do on the planet—simply won’t be needed in the near (maybe less than 12 months) future is just something else! And, twist: good luck finding a new career that isn’t also similarly affected.
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Around the world, there are many craftspeople who do what they do out of love. Many are not ambitious, but they love the pursuit of their craft, mastering technique and making something beautiful. They can work many years happily in the satisfaction of what they’ve made.
I’ve been thinking a lot about craft lately, so Sarah Clatterbuck’s piece caught my eye. I don’t want to ruin the close for you, but the gist is that working with inquisitive people who care not only about how things work, but why they work, and enjoy making those things goes a long way to enjoying one’s career (and improving one’s own craft).
I’ve often been lucky to work with such people, but what’s been taking up cycles in my brain lately is this: what happens to craft in a world of AI?
There is a lot of mundane in my job. A good chunk of it I would be happy to have AI take away, but some of that mundane is integral to a process where I get deep enough in the details to notice things that someone else wouldn’t have noticed. I have to because I am driven by the “how” and “why” questions of design and software engineering. And also by the empathy to consistently imagine the person who will ultimately use the thing I’m making, and what they will experience.
Even in the best scenario where AI simply lifts us out of the drudgery, I worry that something will be lost in the learning process that helped me develop what I consider to be a high level of craft in my work. What replaces that? What becomes the craft if the idea is all that is needed to execute? Is that good or bad? Or maybe something altogether new that I can’t think of?
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LA is a city that works. LA is a city that dreams. The people there—friends and family and so so many strangers—are ready to work, are ready to look out for each other, are ready to dream in a way that only LA can dream and build something better from the ashes.
Every sunset ends in darkness. But it sets up the sunrise of a new day.
What is there to say? I am safe and gratefully unaffected, physically, but I’m at a bit of a loss for words after the horrific fire events in the city this month.
I appreciate the way Dan Sinker finishes his piece. Most cities are places built on dreams, but that is maybe more true in LA than anywhere else in the world. It’s the city where its own industry brings those dreams to life. It’s a city where the winter sun slants in just the right way to cast a dreamlike quality on the most mundane task, making it beautiful. It’s a city that can’t really decide what it is architecturally or in layout and in that way is a city that makes space for everyone.
The last few weeks were indeed a darkness.
I’m breaking my self-imposed conceit for 3 Things this week because I needed more LA missives and you might too.
From Mike Davidson’s very personal “47 Years Later, the Palisades Disappeared Overnight” –
When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.
And Snap CEO/Founder, Evan Spiegel, on the company’s official blog (Snap, née Snapchat, is headquarterd in Santa Monica), “Dear Los Angeles, I Love You” –
We are not the first community to face a megafire. We will not be the last. But we will use our strength, our ingenuity, and our love to create again and anew. Our city of great artists will add a new layer of paint to this beautiful canvas we call home.
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A coworking space is not a community. A subscriber list is not a community. A hundred one-on-one coffees is not a community—that’s just a practice. Now when those coffees recur, or we begin to host meetups, or those folks begin sharing resources with each other… then we might be onto something. Just as friendship requires an ongoing investment and repeatedly showing up—so does a community.
I’m still processing the election (as I’m sure many of us are). I appreciated Carly’s call to intentionally build community. Would more dinner parties in 2024 have changed the outcome of an election? I doubt it, but I don’t think it would have hurt.
Start where you are, with what you have, with who you know. Build slowly and intentionally.
Connecting with people will be an intention for me in the coming year.
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On the same theme as my own reflection on the election, friend Naz Hamid has written a piece that’s well worth your time. A brief excerpt:
“The feeling of disbelief is a privilege.
“I’m not surprised. Disappointed and angry, yes. But not surprised. I’ve experienced racism enough times in this country and gone through a lengthy process with immigration to know what this country truly is. Ironically, the racism I’ve experienced has occurred in cities. And despite being heightened to it when traveling through smaller parts of this country, I haven’t knowingly experienced it. The racism is here, in our backyards.
“But this country is unlike any other. There are good people here, aiming to truly make the world a better place.”
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“If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system. And we change the system by making everyone involved, especially those in authority, feel urgency about changing the real-world impacts that a system has.”
Yes, yes! 🤌🏼
And this follow-on:
“In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks that I grew up around and spent the first decades of my life amongst.”
To be an unwitting systems observer (how I feel, not Anil’s term) is to be virtually incapable of seeing the way the systems around us define our lives and experience. It’s at the core of a recent article, and his experience of indifferent moderatism in the suburban core resonates significantly with my own experience growing up in the suburbs. When the systems are built for you, you tend to think of them as natural and immutable in the way a religious person might just assume their perfect deity deigned them to be so.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we build meaning in our lives and this speech by John W. Gardner nails it:
“You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.”
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Scott Belsky’s newsletter is worth the subscribe. I wanted to particularly call out his commentary on “collapsing the talent stack”. This tracks with how I also imagine AI will affect the design/product industry. We will see less niched titles doing micro tasks and more generalists. I’m not saying this is bad or good (I can make arguments in both directions), but business is going to expect increasingly-more from those of us that help craft product interfaces and feature roadmaps.
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This piece is already several month’s old, and it may not age well, but I suspect some element of the “snake eats tail” effect is unavoidable at both a technical and (more importantly) cultural level. Yes, everything is a remix, but what if the remix is increasingly limited, boring, and factually inaccurate?
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Lake Powell was always a fools errand. It hasn’t been at capacity in decades, and only rarely since its inception. It’s time to let it go and allow nature to restore the beautiful canyons and indigenous cultural sites that have long been covered.
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Heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. Please give it a read.
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Excellent reporting from Alissa Walker. It wouldn’t take much for most of us to substitute trips by any other mode for a few of our car trips, but the problem is that we think we don’t need to.
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Anxy’s Masculinity Issue is my first exposure to Anxy and it’s beautifully assembled.
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Recommended to me by my sister, this book gave me a fresh perspective on the Four Corners region of the American Southwest and the ancestors of the indigenous Puebloan peoples.