Most of us can only observe AI. Last week, I talked with the guys who actually make the stuff: Zig Wu, Senior Director, Workplace Strategy & Occupancy Planning at OpenAI, and Andres Avalos, Chief Product Officer for the hybrid workplace platform Office Space. Here are my thoughts.
Code is Poetry
WordPress once had a great tagline, Code is poetry. Working, as I do, with both coders and copywriters, I’d say we both have a lot in common.
While I don’t know if Wu or Avalos are coders, it was clear how attuned they were to the patterns of business and the power of their respective imprints. Most of all, however, they understood the importance of identity.
As the agency business consolidates into a single holding company, I fear that agencies without distinct identities will struggle to create them for their clients. Software companies lack this angst. They best express their relevance in terms that are more poetic than product-driven. Jobs reached for an Apple, Brin penned "don't be evil," and so on.
Our new masters of the workplace (if you believe AI holds the keys) seem focused on a similar type of quest. Avalos hails from IBM’s Watson. In a fast-paced and fatuous industry, IBM has stayed true to an identity still expressed in a single word: “think.” That imprint remains alive in his approach to things. To me, at least, it’s the art of the calculated risk.
That calculus is constantly weighing the output and the input, the technological and the human. I don’t see him severing ties with either side. It’s just not his identity.
Wu sends off similar vibes.
Listening to him, I picked up that AI in the workplace goes beyond creating a seamless experience with hotdesking and the like. As home became the workplace during COVID, work now needs to feel like home to get people not just back to work, but into it. While these are just my impressions of his vision, they left an imprint.
Dancing with myself
It is easy to feel alone when thinking about AI, especially for a writer, photographer, or filmmaker. When I have these thoughts, I pick up a copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, which is a little like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for Physics.
Zukav uses the metaphor of dancing to explain how physicists, particularly in the realm of quantum mechanics, don't have a straightforward, classical view of reality. Instead, their understanding is fluid, always evolving, and subject to change, much like a dance.
One of the most radical ideas in quantum mechanics is that the observer affects the observed reality. Zukav connects this idea to Eastern philosophy , particularly Taoism and Buddhism, where reality is also seen as interconnected and dependent on perception.
I am neither a Scientist nor a Buddhist, but if it's true that an observer affects the observed reality, then the practitioner has even more impact. That is why I talk to the participants, not just the observers of Artificial Intelligence, so that my own perceptions are less distorted.
I met two Masters last week. Because they are, in effect, AI as we know it, they are ones forging not just its innovations, but an identity in flux. That leaves ample room to define their mission at the beginning of the dance.