Happy Sunday –

Top of mind this week has been AI.

I’ll pause while you groan and think: Oh no, not another early-innings navel gaze at AI that predicts the same trends in 1000 words that ChatGPT could rattle off in 150.

No, this isn’t an outcome prediction nor a close-up examination of the technology itself (more on this someday soon). It’s a Sunday reflection on our collective preparation for the AI trend, and the opportunity it presents us as a society, given our experience with the Mobile and Social media eras of the past 15 years.

We’re at the AI trailhead—the beginning of what appears to be a paradigm-shifting technology. On the cusp, the precipice, looking at something that is ripe with potential but has yet to be put into practice. The moment we’re in reminds me of the talent-infused basketball in Space Jam that the Monsters are thirsty for and the NBA players will do anything to retrieve. AI is the talent-juiced basketball. We are all eager to experience the ball in our hands.

In the 21st century, the defining consumer technology shifts to date have been the rise of Mobile and the spread of Social platforms atop the mobile architecture. For simplicity, we’ll call them Mobile and Social. Setting aside Enterprise innovation, Mobile and Social have been the biggest transformers in our lives since the turn of the millennium. Excluding black swan events--- 9/11, Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and COVID--if we asked 100 Americans to tell us a story about the last 20+ years, most stories would involve the iPhone and Facebook as the main characters. Mobile and Social, compounded together, have redefined consumer life.

Mobile and Social redefined consumer life because they brought us abundance—information and connection abundance.

Before Mobile, we had to sit down at our desktops and pay a visit to the internet. It was a discrete activity, with time and space between visits, nestled somewhere in the nightly agenda between homework, extracurriculars, dinner, and desert. Sitting attentively at the home PC, we entered the digital amusement part on proactive terms and visited the concession stands of our choosing: the ad-flurried Hotmail inbox, a budding MySpace page, or a growing menu of songs available for download on Kazaa. Digital consumption was taking off, but we still had to proactively go choose to consume the internet on the PC after dinner.

Through mobile, digital consumption evolved from a moment-in-time, after-hours indulgence to a round-the-clock continuous consumption model. Before Mobile we went to the internet. With mobile, the internet came to us. A content IV was now slowly dripping into our arm 24/7/365. We could now eat digital ice cream—music, photos, content, wherever doses of dopamine could be found-- at all hours of the day. In the mobile world, we didn’t visit the internet during a single point in our day. The internet visited us in all moments of our day. We collapsed our sense of space and time that separated us from the internet and its smorgasbord of content.

Atop (or alongside) the rise of Mobile came our new social media architecture—digital spaces for personal self-expression centralized around an endless vertical feed of fresh new content types--friend requests, follows, likes, comments re-tweets, and re-shares. The food trough became limitless, at first linear and soon algorithmic. We were hogs who couldn’t be satiated. Too much was never enough. A waterfall of social validation, the perpetual aha! of novel insight discovery, the warm glow of comforting entertainment, the buoy of self-righteousness in response to injustice, all became immediately available with the opening of the phone or the refresh of a feed. Now, we didn’t need to feel disconnected, out-of-the-loop, alone, bored or unsure. We waded waist-deep into social content consumption, on-the-go from our pockets, as if we were swimming in the river of El Dorado, a river with a perfect temperature, a soothing current, and a sandy bottom. It perpetually felt as if the bright lights of Las Vegas were finally coming into view from the airplane on a Friday night. We lived, and loved, the constant sense of anticipation.

But Mobile and Social, and this anticipatory abundance they together brought, also caught us by surprise. They brought us a slew of unintended downside consequences.

Were these technologies supposed to gnaw at our American social fabric? Were they supposed to destabilize the collective mental health of our youth? Were they supposed to shorten our attention spans? Were they supposed to make us envious of the lives of others? Were they supposed to make us feel a sense of unease when our phones are in the other room? Were they supposed to expose us to the full data set of global injustices and moment-to-moment conflict to fundamentally elevate our cortisol levels? Were they supposed to propagate a proliferation of harmful online behavior---trolls, cancel culture, body shaming—that elevates an overall sense of cultural distrust and malaise?  An abundance of connection and knowledge was supposed to be a Michelin star social recipe. Instead, we got sick from the food.

Mobile and Social are fantastic technological shifts. The amount of good they have produced almost certainly outweighs the bad. Cynicism toward technology is trendy and a bit intellectually lazy: it is much less mental work to lament the obvious bad than to see and celebrate the less obvious good. Over the course of time, Mobile and Social will find their way into the societal Hall of Fame. Not for what they inherently are—technology is neither good nor bad, but a mirror revealing both. But for the results they have, and will continue to have, produced.

I do think Mobile and Social did catch us by surprise. Our expectations swung too far to the upside. We were thirsty for global salvation and thought technology could hurdle us toward that faraway point. We were expecting an abundance of good, without the bad. We were expecting a late night out without a hangover the next morning. We were expecting a warm Saturday in the summer sun without a hot achy sunburn to soothe on Sunday. Maybe we lacked foresight. Maybe we were optimistic. Maybe we were naïve. We’re only human after all. These are human tendencies.

In any case, we’ve experienced an abundance of good during the Mobile and Social eras that have brought negative externalities along with it. These externalities surprised us.

And so as we stand on the ridge of the mountain, looking at the fresh powder on the AI terrain below, skis pointed excitedly downhill, we have an opportunity to learn from the Mobile and Social surprises, the externalities that caught us off guard, the social divide and malaise we didn’t expect when we drew this up.

AI is simply an opportunity to do better this time around, both in terms of how we estimate risk-reward payoffs and how we fold learnings from the past into our collective future.

In our risk-reward psyche, AI presents an opportunity to proactively get ahead of downside risk and invent clever deterrent mechanisms to maximize the Good:Bad output ratio. We are imperfect. A wholesale purge of the bad is too idealistic. Short of perfection, a proactive and thoughtful examination of AI’s Good:Bad output ratio is a good goal to strive for. We miscalculated the expected Good:Bad ratio on Social and Mobile. With AI, we can keep a watchful eye on it and maximize the ratio.

In our helpful look to the past, AI also presents a ripe opportunity for us to simply learn, and learn together. More than a decade into the belly of the Mobile and Social beast, we are increasingly afforded the gift of hindsight, to both the upside and downside. As we digest insight from Mobile and Social, AI rises in parallel. The show always goes on. Innovation is unrelenting. The overlapping technology arcs---AI’s takeoff alongside Mobile and Social at cruising altitude—give us a ripe opportunity to apply our learned insights, in near-real-time, to the next big thing.  

The AI arc will likely be long. Perhaps longer than many of us will live. The road will likely be windy, with dazzling vistas and frustrating potholes, compelling use cases and frivolous ones, immense wealth creation, and wasteful capital destruction. A joy of getting older is experiencing all of these as parts of the cycle. Both the cycle of innovation and the cycle of life.

AI is unlikely to bring us societal salvation. It may not bring us to the pinnacle of a perfect society. It may not wholly rinse us of our imperfections and inefficiencies. In a thousand years from now, we might still be very much just trying to contain the seven deadly sins and avoid war.

But, through our learnings from Mobile and Social, through our principal insight that no technology is purely good (nor bad), we can be better prepared for AI than we were for Mobile and Social. We have learned. We can be ready. We are ready.

Or readier than we were before. And that is progress.

And progress is something to be excited about.