Living the Magic
How we can use AI to make work meaningful, even joyous
How many times in your life have you experienced technology as magical? Can you count those moments on one hand? Two? A few of mine:
Getting a tape recorder at age 6. I would tell stories I made up on the spot and play it back, eyes wide, feeling ever more ‘real.’
Introducing digital cameras to kids in rural areas of Oaxaca, Mexico, so they could document their Zapotec culture for a local community museum in 2004. This time, I experienced magic through their eyes.
Instructing OpenAI’s DaVinci-002 model to match feelings to needs as per my Clean Communication framework in July 2022—experience this moment with me.
Testing out Full-Self-Driving on my Tesla yesterday, which, as you see in this video, was an experience in trust and surrender, with my hand on the wheel.
What are your magical moments? I would love to hear them.
Now, the number of disappointments with technology is too long to list, and, frankly, too well known. Plug-and-play that plugs but does not play. A promise of ease that takes a lot of fight to discover, if we ever do. All of this contributes to a culture of defeat: of course, it won’t work.
But what if this time it does? How can we open to a world where technology empowers us to achieve what we never thought possible? Alongside this surrender, how do we build ethically to retain our humanity?
Lurking in the background of this conversation is all the technology that “just works,” such as:
flipping on a light switch
making an international phone call
taking an airplane across an ocean
For the discoveries made before we were born, we missed the magic. But with AI, it’s as if we’re grappling with the discovery of fire and deciding how to engage. Fire can burn. Fire can sustain us. Except this time we’re the builders. Just as we tamed fire, we can tame the machine and make it work for us. We have to.
Last week, I presented at Singularity University’s AI program, where I met the author of Taming the Machine, among others, and spent the week exploring these themes:
While the pace of innovation is exponential, we tend to think linearly
The future of AI is with humans in the loop
During my daily calls with users, as they show me how they’re getting their work done, it’s clear that so many of us spend our days bogged down in mind-numbing tasks. While the outcomes matter, the path to get there is as convoluted as a Rube Goldberg machine, without the whimsy. We can do better. We have to.
As Cal Newport details in his latest book, Slow Productivity, we substitute busyness for productivity and lack standards for how we work. As a result, many organizations are stuck in inefficient, ineffective processes that, as Newport says, lead to burnout instead of a sense of accomplishment.
Since the audience at Singularity was comprised of global executives, I focused on our responsibility to care for our people, asking us to reflect on the current state of employee engagement:
The gap between best-practice organizations and everyone else is an almost $9 trillion opportunity; not being engaged at work or being actively disengaged leads to poorer outcomes both for humans and their companies.
So, how can we reach those 70% heights? A great place to start: partner with AI to improve the way we work. Our users are finding work-life balance for the first time in their lives and feeling like superheroes at their desks. It’s nothing short of joyous.
We know that AI can support us with rote, repetitive tasks and the truth is, most of us have tasks like that, day in and day out, regardless of seniority. Augmenting our work with AI cleaves off a layer of toil that lets the light shine in.
“Using Storytell helps me achieve a work-life balance that I haven’t had in any other company”
-Cheryl Solis, founding technical writer at Stellate
I want everyone to feel as free as Cheryl does—fulfilled at work, with time to enjoy her wild and precious life.