What Comes After AI?

“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”

For those of you who have watched the brilliant AMC series Halt and Catch Fire, let's do a thought experiment (if you haven't watched it, stop whatever you are doing and fire up AMC Plus, then come back a changed person). What would the characters be doing during the great AI explosion of the last few years? Joe would be in full Sam Altman mode, hopping on podcasts and keynote stages and selling everyone on the coming revolution. Donna would be focused on building out more practical applications that didn't have as much flash but ultimately made more impact. And Cameron would be taking Zuck's nine figure offer and gleefully committing corporate sabotage.

But what all of them would understand is this -- whatever they're building right now is just a means to an end, not the end. Computers were a novelty when they first came out, and now they're just another device we manage. Ditto smartphones. The internet is now just baked into our daily lives and the vast majority of the way we interact with it is passive, not active. It runs almost every aspect of our lives, whether we want it to or not.

And AI is going to get there as well. I always laugh when people tell me they refuse to use AI, because unless you go fully off the grid, it's baked in to so much of what we do. You might choose not to open ChatGPT and type in a prompt, and that's totally your right, but the technology is based into so many systems you use every day without you even knowing it.

So the question then becomes -- what is AI for? How are we using it to solve real problems and make lives better, not just have a shiny object that results in massive fundraising rounds? What is the thing that AI is leading us towards?

Because eventually AI is just going to run in the background. It won't be glamorous or sexy or the thing that inspires kids to flood San Francisco -- it will just be there, something we expect to work. It will solve problems before we even know they exist.

For instance, I get a ton of spam calls and texts, and no one seems to know how to stop them. This seems like something AI could do pretty easily, and hopefully in five years, it'll just stop these texts and calls before they even reach my phone. Ditto medical billing errors, credit card fraud, etc. The systems will just fix everything before it even reaches me. It will automatically rebook me on a flight if there is a delay and assign me a hotel room if needed. No more waiting in line. It will scan my prescription, find it at a store, and deliver it to me if desired -- no calling around, no haggling with an insurance company.

The thing that AI will get us to, hopefully, is a world where we waste less time. It's not about displacing workers -- it's about making jobs better and easier, so we can focus on the human things we're actually good at. In ten years, the only people who can say they're not using AI are those living fully off the grid, and that's exactly what we should be working towards.

AI Won't Replace Emotional Work -- But It Can Help Make You Better At It

The World Economic Forum jobs report is out and there is a lot of food for thought wrapped up in these numbers. As always, there's a level of guessing involved in making these predictions, but as someone who has contributed to many WEF reports, the guessers are usually pretty expert. Not shockingly, it found that the most "on rails" work (dealing with numbers and data) was going to be done by AI, while the least "on rails" work (dealing with human emotions and relationships) will still be done by humans, because most humans are definitely off the rails. And like Cathy Hackl found in her work around AI relationships, a GPT partner is great in that they are always on and never mean, but they can't cuddle you on the sofa either.

So the shift we're going to see is a move towards valuing human skills like listening, empathy, and creativity. And transparently, those are skills many people struggle with. They're certainly not taught to many people in any organized way -- while students have to prove they have reading, writing and math skills to advance in school (theoretically, anyway), there is not really coursework on active listening and managing others. And these will be the currency of the future, so we need to start thinking about how we upskill everyone now.

Paradoxically, AI can part of the solution. For the last few years I've been working on projects where learners use AI-powered human avatars to practice communication, and the results have been astonishing. The best part is that these simulations can be created with simple prompts and built and shared at scale. Human trainers are great, but they have time and location constraints, not to mention an inability to create very specific and difficult scenarios. One person I was working with last year was having a hard time managing someone on his team whose English proficiency was limited, was living in her car because of an eviction, and raising two kids solo. That's a hard headspace for a trainer to embody, but an AI-powered avatar was able to ingest all that and come up with something pretty realistic. The manager was able to practice that hard conversation several times, so when it came to the real chat he was comfortable and prepared and could offer empathy and real solutions.

This isn't just for work. I know people using AI to practice talking to partners and friends and parents about hard topics, and it generally works out for the best. You should absolutely NOT break up with your boyfriend using a ChatGPT generated text, but you absolutely should do some role plays and ask for feedback before you sit down to talk it out in person.

AI has limitless potential, and is going to change the way we live and work. If we can harness it for good and use it to make each other kinder, that's a net win.

There's a Simple Solution to the USA's Labor Shortages -- And No One Is Talking About It

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story titled: Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs. The TL;DR is that the pool of blue-collar workers who are able and willing to perform tasks on a factory floor in the United States is shrinking. Boomers are retiring and young people don't want to work these jobs; immigrants are choosing to leave the US or go elsewhere. The factories that both political parties have promised to save and keep open might close anyway, because they simply can't find people to work the lines.

Factory work can be extremely complex and require a lot of training, and many replacement workers are simply not able to just jump right in. If factories are going to stay open, we need a way to upskill workers, ASAP. There is plenty of labor in the market, including formerly incarcerated folks, folks struggling with addiction, and people who might want to make a career change. But they all need to train quickly and at scale. Luckily, as I wrote in my snap post about the article, there is technology that can do exactly that.

AI and XR will make the upskilling revolution happen if companies are willing to make the investment. The audience these factories are trying to reach is composed of plenty of gamers who would be thrilled to spend time in a headset. AI can make the content creation much quicker -- there are several platforms coming to market that allow users to create a 3D scenario using prompts, as well as some off the shelf training to fill in gaps.

There are endless stats about how XR training works well -- it produces a 75% increase in learning quality and retention and 70% performance improvement. Additionally, it works well for factories because the work can be dangerous and the equipment can be expensive. If a trainee makes a mistake in real life, they could be injured or worse; in XR, they just restart the simulation and go again.

The real win would be training legacy and retiring workers to create this content themselves. It's not as hard as you think -- I've taught hundreds of non-technical people how to build this content, and once they know the steps, they're home free.

No matter what happens with tariffs, the factory worker shortage will have profound impacts on our economy. By investing in this type of training at scale, we can turn things around.

AI and XR can solve the skills gap

The New York Times interview with Tom Homan yesterday is definitely worth a listen, and one statistic really stood out to me. Hotels and restaurants are already facing worker shortages, and as people leave the US, those are likely to grow, right as we head into the summer tourist season. Those industries need to bring on new people and upskill fast.

Of course, XR and AI can help solve this. AI powered training can be created with simple prompts, and using the training in a headset leads to greater retention and shorter time to proficiency. This training can also be deployed quickly and at scale, and it can potentially lead to traditionally underutilized populations entering the workforce. For instance, people with disabilities are often underemployed, but this type of training, alongside some reasonable accommodations, could bring them into the workforce.

There is also a huge population of graduating students looking for work, and while they might not stay in the service industry, they can upskill quickly and earn some money and fill some gaps. Unhoused people can also be given work opportunities and trained fast, which could help them begin a recovery journey.

Getting this training out the door requires some initial investments in headsets and content creation, but all of that can be done fast and the benefits will cover the costs and then some. If businesses want to make it through this time period, they'll start investing now.

We Are the Robots: The Next Wave of Human Machine Interaction, In a Headset

I'm just wrapping up three weeks of great things, from meeting with some excellent government officials to speaking at the World Economic Forum AI Governance Summit to a great panel and some wonderful conversations at AWE. As I mull over everything, one thing stands out -- a conversation I had with a very smart person about human-powered machines.

Despite enjoying a Waymo ride in San Francisco (and not taking one in LA, for obvious reasons), we're still a long way away from fully autonomous vehicles going mainstream. Waymo is only in a handful of cities and only on certain roads; even as it expands to new markets, it's going to be a long road (hah) to full adoption. I occasionally see delivery robots in parts of LA and the Bay Area, but they certainly haven't been widely adopted. And humans continue to do all sorts of dangerous, monotonous, and generally un-fun tasks.

We're nowhere near totally autonomous robots for many things, but we're a lot closer to what I believe will be the next wave of work -- human powered robots. Wearing an XR headset for a 360 view, humans can control these robots, steering them through a variety of tasks, some harder than others. This is the win-win scenario; humans continue to be employed and add value while their working conditions improve.

In New York City, food delivery drivers zip around on unsafe scooters and due to tight delivery times, often have to ride in bike lines at high speeds or cut corners. This is not safe for anyone, nor it is particularly enjoyable work. These folks work grueling hours, often in terrible conditions, in order to make a survival wage. Now imagine if rather than biking through a rainstorm, a human in a headset in a nice warm room anywhere in the world could power a robot through the streets. The robot could be built with parameters around speed to make it safer, and if it does get hit by a bus, that's a shame for the person who was waiting for sushi, but nowhere near the tragedy of a human being hurt or killed.

Additionally, this means that people can work from anywhere and still make a living. The conditions for law wage workers in major cities are generally terrible; this would give folks the freedom to live in a lower cost market or even in their home country. When people migrate for economic reasons, they often do it against their will, and leave behind families and communities. This would allow people to remain in their communities if they wanted and bring benefits and economic resources to those communities.

The next wave of human/machine interaction will have profound impacts for the labor market, generally for the better. It's up to those working in the XR space and the robotics space to come together and collaborate on something that improves life for everyone.