Unhurried thoughts on AI and meaning

In July and August I had a very long and unexpectedly intense bout with COVID, so the guest experts I had lined up will have to wait for future editions. Thus, this 25th edition is more personal than the usual focus.

Accidental Hermit

Being as sick as I was and having to quarantine for essentially a month turned out to be a wonderful gift.?

I was traveling when I got COVID, so I was not at home for the quarantine. I was stripped of all my own accoutrements, not interacting with the outside world. Ironically, I had signed up for a “Day Alone with God” meditation retreat. God countered, “How about 10 days alone with me instead?”

The first day of convalescence a friend was praying for me and had an image of me in a snow globe, a blizzard of snowflakes swirling around me: little daily distractions, FOMO, apps on my phone, demands from work, unfulfilled promises. She asked me to imagine that globe being gently set down, then taking time to let all the little flakes settle, so that I could see clearly again.

It’s amazing how grounding it can be when you have the luxury of time and space. With nothing being asked of me except to recuperate in solitude, I could take as long as I wanted to dwell on a thought, or to be distracted and then revisit a thought, or just be silent without any pressure to have a thought. I could even binge-watch a string of Glen Powell rom-coms and not feel bad about taking time away from content with more gravitas - I had 200+ hours and there was wiggle room for fluff.?

The gift of time had an effect on my psyche, similar to what happened to my taste buds when I stopped eating sugar for a few weeks and everything tasted better, brighter, more vivid. I didn’t end up having an appetite for fluff (despite the rom-com tangent) when I could finally slake my craving for meaning and direction, coming off of a diet of reactive activity and feeling like I was on a hamster wheel.?

Finding Calm in the Eye of the Storm

I did some hard and rewarding things that can only be done when sitting still. It started with accepting and acknowledging that I am burned out at my job. This led to a whole different perspective on who I am and what I want to be about.

To be in tech right now is soul-grinding.?The imperative to answer to shareholders, increase profit margins, demonstrate innovation, and be the first at something/anything, is producing hastiness and hysteria. We call it seizing opportunity and leaping ahead, but it feels more like we’re storm-chasers (yes, I watched Twisters in my Glen Powell phase). We’re all seeing this hype with AI today.

Stepping away from my day-to-day work gave me a chance to sit in the eye of the tornado and watch the upheaval around me from a calmer stance. It seems to me that no matter what a company’s stated mission and values are, what many of us are being asked to execute for our jobs looks more like checking boxes for accountants or investors, and less like providing needed goods and services for our fellow human beings.

We have slowly gotten to a place where it feels like an act of resistance for an employee to get back to first principles and work to deliver what customers actually want and need. And despite the lip service about bringing your whole self to work and self-care, employees are actually getting more overworked and asked to be even more productive, because we supposedly have the tools now to be super-human.

Which got me thinking about the promise that AI is going to make us love our jobs and have more time for life-stuff that we enjoy.

We can’t AI our way to significance

Much of the work I was setting aside in quarantine was AI-related. I love the promise of AI and the wonder and fascination of designing systems that augment natural human development. But stepping out of the hustle and watching it from my own time loop, I could see the fallacy of thinking that AI is making us more productive.

My problem is not with what AI can do and learn, it’s with what humans are doing with it. Some of the behavior I’ve observed makes me think we’ve reduced ourselves to the level of inanimate AI, going back to the same models and recycling information but not truly producing new, relevant, and needed outcomes to be better humans or communities.?

We need to get better at creating our own prompts. I’m talking about taking time for self-reflection and setting intentions.?

In areas like disease research or climate change modeling, where the datasets to analyze and the correlations that need to be made are too big for humans to achieve as quickly and thoroughly as we need, AI is absolutely a treasure. These are areas where human researchers have ambitious goals, clear desired outcomes. They also have the passion to work with AI to tinker, adjust, and train AI towards those aims.

Other sectors, like marketing or sales, make me dismayed. Two factors create the perfect conditions for a storm of meaningless sound and fury: First, it’s now possible to churn out web pages and data sheets and customer email journeys faster and more prolifically with AI. Second, tech companies have all moved to very performance-based cultures. The absurd result in my experience is that we’re being asked to produce more content because we should be able to do that, with AI writing and generating images and automatically meeting brand template specifications and SEO guidelines. But no one questions the quality or intention of this new barrage of information. We get celebrated for checking more boxes and putting out more stuff, as if by our many words we will be heard.

If we get to the point where AI is also making the buying decisions and slogging through all the content from AI marketers and sellers, this will be great - the AI can just keep generating more pipeline, and we can all pat ourselves on the back for automating capitalism. I don’t think this is where we want to go though - especially since the Re:Energize audience knows how ill-prepared the grid would be to support that future scenario.

Alas, I’m not modeling climate change scenarios, I’m in marketing and sales. This coming week I’m helping to execute Dreamforce, one of the biggest global customer conferences on cloud, digital and CRM technology, and our whole focus is on humans working with AI. It will require some deeply rooted values and moment-by-moment mindfulness to help my utility customers sift through the AI-abetted noise. I want my customers to get what they need to do great things, like build a more resilient grid, or stay ahead of wildfires and tornadoes, or shift to clean generation quickly and at enough scale to support the purported > 7x growth in demand from data centers for AI. We have a meditation area called Plum Village, and you might find me there focusing on my breath and tapping into something deep and enduring that won’t get uprooted by the storm.?

My coverage of solutions or products are meant to expand awareness and should not be construed as endorsements. The views expressed in my newsletter and posts represent my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer, Salesforce.

Side Trails

• I am always looking for examples of thoughtful execution of AI in our industry, and I enjoyed the care and the pauses for wonder taken in this conversation between Avangrid's Mark Waclawiak and GridX's Brad Langley about the nuts and bolts of creating a firm data foundation for AI at a utility company. The With Great Power podcast never fails to uplift.
• When people get weird about AI, I like to go back to reading the wonderful fiction and essays of Ted Chiang. This essay in the New Yorker about why AI isn't going to make art is typical of Ted's wise and sensible point of view, reserving our awe for the complexities of human nature and not for the things we engineer.
• I have to steady myself to stay clear-headed in all the marketing hype I swim in, but I will say that at Salesforce we are trying to have a useful point of view on AI implementation. The Ask More of AI newsletter edition on autonomous AI agents helps get beyond click-bait to more substantive considerations. I don't know if autonomous agents will give us back any time unless we are intentional about what we want to do with our time in the first place.
• In quarantine I read (or listened to the audiobook of) The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. This pretty much captures my soul journey alone in my snow globe. Just the chapter on the history of our relationship with time was worth thinking about.