Tag: ai

What does AI make rare and valuable?

MIKE1 Comment

Cal Newport asks is: What skills are rare and valuable? The answer leads to a whole book of career and life advice.

Our neck of the woods has a lot of bike riders. There’s a large retirement community, with many people who have or get, new hobbies. Pickleball, water volleyball, and golf are the three largest, but we see plenty of riders.

And many of them are e-bikes.

Purists (in the jtbd world this is supply side innovation) scoff. They might even mumble: ‘that’s not real bike riding’. But e-bikes changed how people cycle. We used to see many tandem riders, almost always couples who wanted to ‘ride together’ but didn’t ride at the same speed.

Now we see almost none.

Similarly, a friend said that a guy from his group got an e-bike. At first, like friends do, they gave him a hard time. But the bike lets the guy stay with the group. Rather than aging out, and into another group, the e-bike lets him stay with the pack.

In what ways will AI/LLM change work? Will we see people ‘ride together’? Will workers be older or will the adoption curve be steep and young people’s skills accelerate?

No one knows, much like no one predicted the e-bike adoption.

But, work will come back to Newport’s question: What is rare and valuable?

Note: I tried to run an outline through a LLM to create a blog post. None of the versions were the desired voice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

AI taking our Jobs (to be done)

MIKELeave a comment

From Ben Thompson speaking on Sharp Tech in June 2024 about the Apple Intelligence demo from WWDC.

“No, what I found striking from the Apple event was it was a vision of how this will work in normal people’s lives, and it was a clearly articulated vision. Like if Siri cannot ingest all your old text messages and tell you what someone’s address is, or if Siri can work across emails and calendars.

That was the single best demo, was the woman who needed to pick up her mom…And there was information scattered across text messages and email. It was so relatable. Like we have all been in that situation.

What time is the flight? Where was the dinner reservation? Having to sort of go across apps and just being able to find the stuff.”

Thompson references this video, where Steve Jobs notes what Apple needs to do: “and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds, it’s not to talk about bits and megahertz, it’s not to talk about why we’re better than windows.”