WEW18 - What the AI Revolution Means for Talent

I have a few big announcements before we get to the content. Today is the official launch of my personal site https://williamanderson.io/ , please check it out, and I am very open to feedback.

Starting this week, there is a paid upgrade for the WEW newsletter as well. This comes with a number of benefits including extra content, worksheets, and skipping paywalls to my blog posts. If you have found my insights useful, please consider clicking the link to upgrade at the end of this email. Moving forward the ❖ symbol will donate premium-only content.

In this week’s Email:

✧ Artificial Intelligence - Emergent Apps are the competitor you didn’t see coming
✧ Product Management - When is perseverance misguided?
✧ Trust & Safety - Should we pause AI Development? Yes.
✧ Further Reading - Books and Articles I recommend this week
❖ Talent - What do AI-assisted coding tools mean for the hiring and jobs markets?
❖ Blogposts - Access to full-length blog posts without the paywall

Artificial Intelligence

Emergent Apps

A decade ago I was hired by a startup founder to build a recipe app. You manually entered everything in your fridge and needed to keep that up to date. In exchange, the website would select which of the recipes it knew of that you could cook.

This week I cooked all my meals as curated by AI. I simply gave it the list of the ingredients I had on hand and it planned a meal with those ingredients and gave me all the instructions.

“Smart fridge” apps have been a hard-to-solve problem for a long time, but none have really taken off. Suddenly however I have access to one that is talented, can make its own recipes, can update the inventory based on what I use or select, and can even take feedback. A friend of mine asked it to redesign a menu item to have an Indian flavor profile but be the same core dishes as before.

I’ve started to call this type of interface/interaction an “emergent app.” Emergent Apps are applications or features that were never designed or intended by the app creators. GPT4 is a large language model, it wasn’t built to be a smart fridge, yet it does that better than any other app on the market. As LLMs gain mass adoption this poses a major threat to startups whose core offerings will be accidentally surpassed.

Product Management

Misguided Perseverance

The Lean Startup introduces the idea of “misguided perseverance.” Which is an idea that has been sticking with me lately. At this point, most of us are familiar with agile practices and accidentally follow much of what the book recommends even if we haven’t read it. But few of us live the values that it teaches.

We often get caught up in the belief that we know what we are doing. Numbers DO lie. It’s so easy to justify statistics or find ways to massage data to tell the stories that we want. As a leader, you have a vision and you know you are talented, if only this next thing went out, or if you could get the team to work faster the product will turn around. You're probably wrong.

One of the best decisions you can make on something that’s failing or wasting time and effort is to stop it. Similarly, The Innovator’s Dilemma also talks about this how large companies undergoing profit-focused change often cut down just too essential offerings with the highest revenue.

I’m giving you permission, backed by myself and multiple respected experts to stop what you are doing and take a look at what you need to stop building or what product or feature you need to cut. Perseverance is only good if you are going in the right direction, otherwise, you are just misguided or lost.

Trust & Safety

Tech Leaders Call For a Pause on AI

I’m 0% worried about AI taking over humanity and us becoming proverbial cattle to our robot overlords. But I am incredibly worried about structural unemployment, a greater wealth gap, and sub-par services for the poor.

This week several tech leaders called for a pause on the development of AI beyond GPT-4. I’m all in on this. Despite the fact that GPT has become a part of my hour-to-hour life, it led to me letting go of my personal assistant and the reduction in many other jobs as well.

Structural Unemployment is caused by the economy no longer needing the skill that a person has. As self-checkout decimates cashier roles and advances in machinery remove many physical labor positions, AI will remove thought and knowledge labor, but not for everyone.

Early adopters, some already rich and others soon to be, will benefit greatly as an increasing amount of individuals are displaced from their jobs. We still need to move towards this future. The advancement of technology is unavoidable, but we can only move towards it if we have systems in place to support a country where a majority of people are not gainfully employed. The advancement of AI isn’t a problem for technology, it’s a technological breakthrough that is highlighting the weakness and poor planning of the government to take care of its people. We need to get ready to support a different world before that world gets ahead of us.

Further Reading

Books

The New Roaring Twenties - I’m not quite done with this yet, but getting close. It’s one of the best reads I’ve had in a long time. The New Roaring Twenties speaks directly to our current landscape of AI, blockchain, and finance. I’ve been particularly influenced by thinking around the concepts of “structural unemployment” and the future of the “gig economy” for thought workers. Between the 29 books I’ve completed reading this year and the 8 in progress this is the one I would most recommend.

❖ Full Access Blogposts, Worksheets, and Paid Content ❖

Subscribe to Stegosaur to read the rest.