One thing is clear from this month’s odyssey in my Odyssey, which has taken me from Cocoa Beach to Boulder CO to the Grand Canyon, Moab, Zion, Half-Moon Bay, Muir Woods, Yosemite, and the Tetons: Diversity is nature’s most explicit and dynamic strategy. Diversity is so ubiquitous that it played an implicit supporting role in every breathtaking scene.
Most of the AI stories I see in pop culture are about Monumental AI, either the enormous potential upside, or more frequently the perils of massive unemployment and ultimately global destruction. Personally, I’m much more concerned about the incremental loss of uniqueness, spread over billions of interactions, creating efficiencies of scale resulting in channels of sameness, to the point of streamlining human experience into well-worn trails and the best instagrammable moments. Witness the persistent queue of people waiting to gander at the Mona Lisa or Starry Night for a quick selfie with an impressive icon for personal branding. Does that guy or girl even like the Mona Lisa? Is that even a factor in this phenomenon?
I was in several countries in Asia and Europe this year, and in nearly every city, at every major site, there were teenage girls taking selfies, wearing the same facial expression that the Kardashian selfies popularized way back when. Instead of their own personally relevant, beautiful, organic, self-expressive smiles, they wore the well-rehearsed smile of a popular stranger. There’s nothing wrong with that, we certainly don’t need a lot of odd ducks like me wandering around. But extrapolate this phenomenon to the widespread use of AI as a recommendation engine, and the varieties of experience begin to disappear from the picture. With Gen AI tools, popularity and success are self-fulfilling network effects, at the expense of other lesser-known options, making those less frequent options inaccessible due to algorithmic convergence.
The AI Humanifesto includes Diversity as one of its main 5 principles for human rights in the age of AI. This is not limited to diversity of skin color or ethnicity, but rather all forms of diversity, including different ways of thinking, working, playing, creating, relating, recharging, etc. (v1 of the AI Humanifesto is coming this fall!)
As product researchers and designers, it’s our responsibility to keep Diversity of experience front and center in the early days of AI exploration. When beginning a new AI project, here are a couple of questions you can ask to understand how Diversity will be supported or squashed:
Example question 1: If our product is wildly successful, will our customers have more varied or more limited life experiences?
Example question 2: Who is likely to feel “left out” or cheated or marginalized when using our product?
Cre8 Field Journal, 30 Sept 2024 (see https://lnkd.in/erEDW2-t for more)
