Welcome to Snafu, a newsletter about resilience.
My AI avatar logs into Zoom to chat with your AI avatar. Sounds great – fewer meetings! But then what? What happens when AI takes over both our mundane and creative tasks?
From Mission Impossible and water fasting to navigating an AI apocalypse—here’s what’s been haunting me this week.
If you’re enjoying Snafu, it would mean the world to me if you would share it! Was it sent to you? Subscribe here.
The AI Apocalypse
My AI avatar logs into Zoom to chat with your AI avatar. Sounds great – fewer meetings! But then what? What happens when AI takes over both our mundane and creative tasks?
This question has been haunting me lately.
If you’ve been following along with the Snafu newsletter, you know that I had an AI inflection point a few months ago amidst attempting to buy my first home.
Even as I was confronted by the painful bureaucracy of trying to buy a house in California, my learning accelerated far beyond anything I’d ever been able to accomplish before. It was a very Responsive.org dichotomy; a tension between traditional bureaucracy and rapid innovation.
Over the course of a few weeks, I realized that AI wasn’t just another important topic, like blockchain, social media, or the Internet. It is much bigger.
Most nights after dinner, my girlfriend and I sit in the sauna. Invariably our conversation turns to AI.
My girlfriend is a data scientist, and has taken the rise of AI for granted for many years. She believes that in the next 18 months we’ll see widespread use of Zoom AI avatars. This led into a conversation about what humans would do instead when our AI avatars take our meetings. And, as someone who talks to people for a living, I’m really not sure.
My only solace is that humans are slow to adapt.
QR codes were developed in 1994, but it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic that we got comfortable ordering food from a QR code taped to a table. And given the option, most of us still prefer a server. Even when we can chat with an AI doctor online, we’ll likely still want to be able to meet with a human doctor, in person.
As the rate of change continues to accelerate, some things are going to be slowed down by humans’ own inertia.
This brings me to a personal decision. I’m doubling down on those things that AI is going to have the most difficulty replacing.
- In-person meetings – even over the convenience of Zoom.
- Educating and selling in-person – instead of through email exchanges.
- In-person gathering – like those that happen at Responsive Conference.
Each of us is going to need to reinvent ourselves over the next decade. The most important skill is going to be adaptability and reinvention.
Today, I’m still taking a majority of my meetings on Zoom. But I’m beginning to default to in-person meetings because they’re harder to replace.
To adapt, we need to lean into work AI can’t easily replicate. But what that work is, I’m not sure.