Driving to the future while looking at the rear-view mirror
We need new constraints for how we live our lives in an AI world.
This article by Ivan Zhao, CEO at Notion, talks about ideas I have read other leaders in AI space mention. Only briefly, without expanding on them. Most likely because it’s too early to define those ideas in concrete ways for people to begin to accept them.
Today, the most useful way of creating value for user using AI is by incorporating AI inside or as part of their existing workflows. The most common way is to introduce a ChatBot somewhere in the workflow, but it could just as well be a hidden layer within an existing workflow (which is an even better, less intrusive way of leveraging AI). When you consider what most users do in their workflows is repetitive and boring, it makes sense to automate it away with AI which can do it faster, better (and notoriously, without complaining and having to sleep), and in surprisingly interesting ways.
But what is the endgame? Nobody knows, with certainty. And that’s why smart people have ideas about what it could potentially be like without a clear way of defining them. For example, in the workflow case, perhaps the ultimate value will instead be in identifying how these workflows can be replaced entirely by things that AIs can do themselves autonomously, with little to no human intervention — even things that AI can build out of the blue for the time being. That’s just one example. There can be many more. As Ivan points out, the old constraints of how we work and operate have to change for the new world. How we talk to AI, how agents talk to us, what we call work, how we approach it, how do we communicate within a team built of humans and, increasingly, AI, all of that will require new constraints that have yet to be defined. All we have are ideas.