Episode Details

“The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed”

Science fiction is inspiring, frightening, and often the best lens into the future. Many ideas about the future are b******t —just like this quote being misattributed to the ever-amazing William Gibson— but even the wildest idea shares truths worth discussing.

This week’s newsletter is an exercise in imagining how AI will transform the way that we work. The future will impact us differently because some already live with a future-centred mindset, while others prefer to shift their thinking daily.

One such future-centred thinker is John Whalen, the author of Design for How People Think and the Founder of Brilliant Experience. He shifted from being an AI skeptic to an advocate because he sees a tidal wave of change coming to how product teams operate.

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In the episode, we discuss how he’s implemented AI into his workflows and how he can now accomplish projects in one week that used to take seven weeks to complete. He makes a compelling case for why every team should use AI-moderation and synthetic users to enhance product outcomes.

But most importantly, he’s become an AI advocate because, over his three-decade career, introducing new tools has always been met with doubts and resistance. Ultimately, businesses force the adoption of tools that deliver a clear ROI.

There’s still much to debate about AI. Reports like this one from Microsoft continue to show that AI isn’t ready to replace humans at key tasks. Another 2024 study found that ChatGPT delivered inconsistent results on a key qualitative research task, compared to humans. The most important thing about this study wasn’t that humans outperformed LLMs; it was the significant performance improvement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4.0.

AI is getting much better at tasks that seemed unimaginable to automate.

We’re hearing the same shocking stories across design, development, research, marketing, and sales. Undoubtedly, AI will be able to automate most of our work within a few years.

Will that mean we’ll be replaced? Yes and no. Just like the industrial age and globalization destroyed artisans, AI will significantly reduce the headcount of “artisanal” product people and the rest of the work will be an assembly line of tool operators.

Automation will significantly change many people’s lives in ways that may be painful and enduring. But for the economy as a whole, more jobs will be created, and those jobs will look different from those today.

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