WEW13 - Robocop, Roblox and Lunchbreaks

I’m changing things up in terms of the format. Starting from this issue, I’ll no longer be posting my newsletter as blog posts on Medium as well. So if you enjoy my newsletters, please forward them to a friend and encourage them to subscribe. I’ll continue to blog but the content on williameveryweek.com will be in a format more engaging for blog readers.

In this week’s Email:

• AI - Did no one else watch Robocop?

• Management - What’s up with lunch breaks?

• Metaverse - It’s the same winner that it’s always been.

• Further Reading - Books and Articles I recommend this week

Artificial Intelligence

Lessons From Robocop (2014)

Michael Keaton’s character in Robocop (2014) is Raymond Sellars. He was supposed to be a villain. Still, watching this movie nearly a decade later, he feels more like a hero by contemporary yardsticks. He’s a successful billionaire leading a massive tech company, doing whatever it takes to increase the stock price. If the story was real, we would all be talking about his upcoming Netflix dramatization.

In the world of the movie, it’s illegal to create a robot that thinks it’s human, a pointed topic for the age of conversational A.I.s that we live in today. When confronted with this, Sellars retorts with my favorite quote from the movie.

This ties in with a recent HBR article on “digital humans,” explaining company employees that are just AI, but have been assigned identities. The article talks about specific job roles that are ripe to be replaced with wholly fictional and automated “people.”

Beyond worker displacement, there are moral questions for end-users to consider. Do I have the right to know whether or not the rep I’m chatting with is human or AI?

Management

Consistent Time Culture Doesn’t Work

I’m a New Yorker. I eat lunch at my desk while I work, and have to put conscious effort into hiding the disgust on my face when other people vouch to “get to it after lunch.”

I know I can’t expect this of everyone though. I’ve led international teams where the local culture makes it very important to observe meals with others or to stop working at certain times due to religious or governmental factors. But time culture for work exists within borders as well.

Consider as we expand into fully distributed workforces the difference between an engineer located in a suburb in South Carolina vs one living in Manhattan, the lifestyle of these two people is likely starkly different.

In a recent coffee chat I was randomly dropped into (more on that another time), I had the opportunity to talk to a talented engineer located in France. She had worked for companies in London, and it was clear that the hustle culture in London was an order of magnitude more than what she had seen before, and I promise NYC or SV would be 10x that.

I’m aligned with the goal of adding as much value as possible through new hires, but my eyes are open to the fact that especially as Americans, we view work through a specific lens. How many candidates do we miss out on because of cultural differences such as work hours or taking long lunches while we complain about not being able to find anyone for a role? Who have you interviewed that would have done a great job but turned down because they lacked American “hustle.”

Metaverse

Roblox’s Metaverse Is About To Start Building Itself

Roblox knows most of us to have no idea how to make a 3D model, but many of us are creative and want to be a part of building our digital futures. In a recent post, they announced that they are going to introduce generative AI that will allow creators to develop 3D models for in-game objects with prompts, similar to how AI images are generated today.

The article mentions that even experienced 3D artists struggle to set up objects in the right way to sell them to other users in Roblox’s store. This is a practical implementation of generative AI that is going to feed right into an already thriving marketplace in the metaverse.

If you haven’t played with Roblox yet, you should, it’s a massive world of worlds. Imagine the internet, but with an avatar to walk around with, and instead of websites you entered virtual worlds. If you have a kid, ask them to show you around. ;)

Further Reading

The Little Book of Hygge

Hygge is more than “cozy,” it’s something we don’t quite have a word for in American English. The best way I can describe it is the feeling you have when you are in a cozy cabin, decorated by a Viking, drinking coffee, and eating cake by candlelight because the power is out, but the fire is keeping you warm and there is a storm outside.

The Little Book of Hygge is a very quick but delightful read about how to create more of this feeling in your life.

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire

A friend recommended this one to me, and it’s been a great read. From understanding how influencers rise on social media, to why we care. How we feel jealous of our friends and neighbors, the purpose of scapegoats and the hierarchy we set for our values are all explored topics.

Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire is a great read to help you evaluate your drives, and to understand how to be heard in a loud online world.

Blogposts By William

• How To Upcycle Old Code and Services During a Product Pivot - William Every Week

• When Should You Self-Host CI Tools? - Better Programming

If you were forwarded this email by a friend and liked it, you can subscribe for free. If you are already subscribed and have found my newsletter helpful, forward it to a friend.