Be careful which Guides you follow. Your Guides’ power of perception determines your destination. 

Good Guides share their most impactful learnings with you. Sometimes you pay for it, but that’s ok, the advice of a helpful guide can dramatically compress the time it takes to learn what you need for the next steps in your trajectory. 

Bad Guides are everywhere. A simple sign of a bad guide is that they throw poop at people they’re jealous of, which is of course is a very natural response, it’s what chimpanzees do. But if your guide throws poop, it’s not a strength, it’s a sign of a deep, deep insecurity, no matter how popular they are on the surface of things.

I was noodling about Guides after a hike I took this summer in Vanoise National Park in France. I got very, very lost. For hours. Lots of faux guides gave me advice. But then a very knowledgeable hiker said “Suis moi!” and led me a very long way back to where my camper van was.

Camaraderie among our speakers hit an all time HIGH this year in Asia, Europe and North America. I thought about why this might be, and it struck me that the common trait that broke down the barriers for them: they are all Explorers. Beyond their expertise, they also have reached a stage in their careers when they’re ready to return to the tribe and share their explorations to help other people find their way as they go forward into the current malaise, a sticky wicket no matter what career stage you are in. 

I think that’s the kind of Guides we need in the greater UX/Product Design community, to help us through these challenging times, and to help us adapt to the realities of the next massive upside bubble, beginning when interest rates hit the tipping point, and AI-driven product innovation goes into HYPER-drive. Our community will be ready, thanks to our wonderful Guides.

Choose your Guides carefully. 

Paul

28oct2024, Cocoa Beach FL

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25Oct24: Ubuntu is a concept from Africa that emphasizes the interconnectedness of all people and the importance of community, compassion, and mutual respect. Every atrocity featured in the news today began with a lack of respect and honor. Ubuntu reflects the belief that our well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others. 

Ubuntu aligns closely with the CRE8 vision, which emphasizes humanity-centered AI product design. By focusing on interconnectedness and the well-being of all, CRE8 seeks to harness technology, particularly AI, in ways that benefit society as a whole. This reflects Ubuntu’s spirit of shared humanity, aiming to create AI solutions that empower individuals and communities, fostering mutual growth and understanding. CRE8, much like Ubuntu, is about building a future where technology serves humanity in a meaningful, inclusive, and compassionate way.

Learning from past innovations: Industrialization via factories often prioritized profit and efficiency over the well-being of the communities in which they operated. Many factories led to harsh working conditions and environmental degradation, neglecting the broader impact on humans living in economically-challenged communities. 

AI proliferation is likely to have as big an impact as the shift from agriculture to industry (if the singularity doesn’t result in human extinction first, some would say).

#cre8 #prohuman #ai #productdesign

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With thoughtful design and consideration of both potential and perils, AI can help bring balance to our lives, our work, and broader social inequities. Or it can lead to extremes of wealth, poverty, and unrest. For the former to come true, there needs to be a pro-human voice at this new table, and the human drivers in charge (not coincidentally, the very wealthiest people on earth) must have a point at which they say “enough.” Enough wealth, enough vanquishing, enough luxury, it’s time to share these incredible benefits with humanity. A winner-take-all regulatory environment will lead to a perpetuation and exacerbation of increasing wealth disparity, which at some point will lead to the kind of unrest that will ultimately restore equilibrium to the system. I’m all for rewarding innovators, but it must be brought into balance with the greater good of our species.

Balance is a core concept in the AI Humanifesto that the STRAT community has been formulating for the past 3 years, and which we will release at the “Cre8: The UX of AI” conference in San Francisco in April 2025. Sign up for updates here: https://www.cre8conf.com

#cre8 #humanitycentered #innovation #conference #sanfrancisco

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The photo is a rocket launch today. Launching any rocket is a big vision, but this rocket is special. It’s going to JUPITER! 4,000 people worked on this rocket. It took many years of steps, sacrifices, collaborators, and tradeoffs. But whoomp, there it is, on it’s way and reaching Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2030.

The Cre8 AI Product Innovation festival in San Francisco in April 2025 will give a number of AI product creators the spotlight to share their visions, their steps, and their results. Stay tuned for dates and tickets: https://www.cre8conf.com

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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)

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The Joshua tree is a powerful living illustration of resilience and thriving in harsh conditions. I spent the evening there making photographs of the trees, rock formations, and stars, like the one shown here. 

Growing in the arid Mojave Desert, it adapts to extreme heat, cold, and drought with deep roots and bushy, fibrous reaching branches. Its ability to flourish where most plants would die is a poignant symbol of the reality that our environmental challenges can result in strength, and that perseverance in adversity not only helps us survive but enables us to grow in ways we never imagined. Like the Joshua tree, we can find our greatest growth and beauty when we adapt and push forward in difficult environments.

Our community is in shambles after the huge hiring orgy before the pandemic, and the subsequent cascading down the macroeconomic slope that has left many of us under- or un-employed. But this is temporary. As the long tail impact of the pandemic works its way through the global economy, keep in mind that we are the profession positioned to bring the human-centered lens to AI product design, which is entering the wildcat, land grab, gold rush, effusive exploration of what is possible with this latest seismic innovation tsunami that will be released when interest rates hit the tipping point. 

Instead of giving up on UX, I am devoting a lot of energy to understanding how to prepare UX teams for the rather steep learning curve that is required to impact the direction of AI product design, to the same degree that we impacted e-commerce in the early 2000’s. I’m hoping to complete a workshop I am working on to help UX teams transition to a place of influence among the data scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are moving forward with AI at breakneck speed. Let’s work together to ensure that UX will be well-positioned as architects, rather than relegated to decoration and ease of use. More on that in a different journal entry.

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As I drive from Moab to Zion to the Grand Canyon, the story writ large across all of these breathtaking vistas is the visible record of erosion. It’s clear that this area once was filled by an ocean, at other times was a desert, and still other times had a river running through it. The erosion is graphically represented in beautiful lines and coloration of the rock layers throughout history.

One concept that arose frequently at STRAT 2024 was the erosion of human capabilities as we rely more and more on AI. Of course it’s just beginning, so it’s not clear from this early stage that one day humans will lose the ability to see using our own eyes vs. enhanced computer vision with recording capabilities. But on a smaller scale, the ability to find your way to destinations without GPS, or how to write a letter, or how to do research on a topic… and myriad other activities that will be augmented or replaced by AI. This is an implicit choice that I think the “AI Humanifesto,” our community-authored onesheet on Human Rights in the Age of AI, should make explicit. We should decide which skills we will allow to atrophy, and which skills we will keep and possibly improve with the use of AI.

[All photos used in the Cre8 Field Journal are original unless stated otherwise. More photos at

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I spent the last few days with some amazing, wonderful, brilliant people in Boulder, Colorado. I invited a number of people to share their perspectives from the stage, people who I felt like would be excellent guides for our community as we try to understand where this new technology is taking us and how each of us can best be involved in creating pro-human AI products.

As I make my way towards Moab, Zion, the Grand Canyon for inspiration from nature, and then Los Angeles and San Francisco to prepare for next year’s events on AI product design innovation, I will be considering their words and their direction. I will also be considering the intensive brainstorming on the AI Humanifesto.

For me, one of the most important words that came up several times over the past few days was Balance, how to balance the advantages and the explorations into AI with the needs of humanity, human thriving, and self-optimization. I think that nature holds some clues as to what that balance could look like if AI is to serve us well rather than vice versa. I will be posting some of the photos and thoughts along those lines over the next few days.

Before I move on I want to give a big thank you and shout-out to the people who made the last few days so incredible:

Brandon Harwood

Calvin Robertson

Casey Hudetz

Daria Kempka

Erik Nelson

Gavin Lew

Greg Nudelman

Kathryn Campbell

Megan McLean

Mike Oren

Ranjeet Tayi

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I think AI will become as pervasive as computing itself, leading to an inflection point in human evolution. But it won’t necessarily be a positive change for all humans. Just like factories benefitted their owners and the customers of the mass-produced products, they also historically led to a miserable existence for many of the people working in them. AI could be worse, possibly leading to a new global extinction event. More insidious is the likelihood that people with resources motivated by greed will use AI to trap other people using their needs and behaviors to give them what they want while also causing them to engage in behaviors that will be destructive to their quality of life.

My hope is that this field journal will shine a light on pro-human AI product innovations, and by doing that, will give designers, researchers, developers, entrepreneurs and many others a spark of awareness of positive use cases, which will then replicate and spread in a positive virtuous cycle.

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