AI Explorations in a Changing World -Year One
The last year has felt like a whirlwind (personally, professionally, and technologically). In what may feel familiar to many readers, I went from working on a variety of products in big tech to unemployment to trying to find a job, to learning all I could about LLMs, to landing a job working on surgical robots while also teaching part time and working on a host of other random projects simultaneously. I couldn’t have projected that trajectory if I tried. Looking to the future, I won’t even try to predict where I will be in a year, but I am very excited for the rapid pace of innovation.
Similarly, the speed by which AI is evolving is stunning (but not unsurprising given the money and compute being poured in daily). I remember some of my first experiences with products that are now daily staples… ChatGPT, Arc, Perplexity and more. As I now put together materials every week to teach my course, the New Age of AI in Design, I’m forced to catch up a million different AI newsletters, LinkedIn posts, scientific and computer science papers and anything else relevant that makes its way to me. It’s a never ending quest to stay on top of all the information… and I know I’ll never quite digest everything I want to consume… and that’s ok. For those that that haven’t started down the AI road… the time is now! Don’t wait, seriously. Every day you wait, it’s going to be just a bit harder to get on that train. Never impossible, just harder. But there’s more to the story…
I’ve been reflecting on more than just the last year, but also my creative process (ideation), my knowledge intake process (learning), and knowledge sharing process (teaching). Since I first used ChatGPT I thought about it (and related offerings) from a few dimensions that have since been popularized to some degree:
- A trusty CoPilot, a friend even that I can bounce wacky ideas off of, without too much judgement — together we have the power to create, infinitely and endlessly.
- A vehicle to expand my mind, my creativity, even the way I think.
- An interesting commentary on all of humanity, for better or worse, somewhere in it’s data it has some of the best and worst bits of us.
Interestingly, during this process and as a result of increased usage and digging into the AI-sphere I’ve become fascinated by knowledge making and transfer (epistemology), the nature of being (ontology) and usage of language + symbols (semiotics). I’ve gone down more than my fair share or rabbit holes, learning, watching others, and experimenting myself with these wacky tools to see what I could and can create.
When I talk with friends, colleagues, and students, I try to glean how they use they new AI tools, and the reality is they have amazing dreams for how they wish to use tools, but many simply don’t have the time, knowledge or background to use them for more than semi-simple conversations or API calls (myself included sometimes as well). It’s all too easy to forget we are still at the outset of the Change Adoption Curve.
However, I’m starting to view tools that are AI-based or contain AI technology (e.g. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Krea, Spline, etc.) as creative agents that can help me develop each of my defined skills into “superpowers”; together we can supercharge the completion of tasks, and reach into new realms that neither of us could currently do by ourselves.
While learning how to prompt effectively is learning a new logic and language of its own, it can pay dividends, as these tools improve everyday and soon you’ll really only be limited by your imagination. Additionally, I can use these tools to cater much more effectively to the way I learn, building completely custom dialogues that seamlessly teach me complex concepts with ease. I love the ability to effectively learn anything in a fraction of the time. These AI tools don’t quite work for everything yet… but that is more of a function of my inability to correctly describe what I want or a limit on APIs, which is also a part of the learning journey for me and corporations in and of itself.
So where does this leave me? Where does it leave you? Humanity? I see a very interesting shift coming… building on the ideas of one of my favorite academics, Clifford Geertz, if “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” — we’re moving to a new age where we aren’t suspended in just webs of our own, but also the webs of what GenAI creates and co-creates with us. I look forward to making meaning in this new world and reflecting on what I’m sure will be a vastly changed world… in the not too distant future.
