The AI Apocalypse
My AI avatar logs into Zoom to chat with your AI avatar. Sounds great – fewer meetings! But then what? What happens when AI takes over both our mundane and creative tasks?
This question has been haunting me lately.
If you’ve been following along with the Snafu newsletter, you know that I had an AI inflection point a few months ago amidst attempting to buy my first home.
Even as I was confronted by the painful bureaucracy of trying to buy a house in California, my learning accelerated far beyond anything I’d ever been able to accomplish before. It was a very Responsive.org dichotomy; a tension between traditional bureaucracy and rapid innovation.
Over the course of a few weeks, I realized that AI wasn’t just another important topic, like blockchain, social media, or the Internet. It is much bigger.
Most nights after dinner, my girlfriend and I sit in the sauna. Invariably our conversation turns to AI.
My girlfriend is a data scientist, and has taken the rise of AI for granted for many years. She believes that in the next 18 months we’ll see widespread use of Zoom AI avatars. This led into a conversation about what humans would do instead when our AI avatars take our meetings. And, as someone who talks to people for a living, I’m really not sure.
My only solace is that humans are slow to adapt.
QR codes were developed in 1994, but it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic that we got comfortable ordering food from a QR code taped to a table. And given the option, most of us still prefer a server. Even when we can chat with an AI doctor online, we’ll likely still want to be able to meet with a human doctor, in person.
As the rate of change continues to accelerate, some things are going to be slowed down by humans’ own inertia.
This brings me to a personal decision. I’m doubling down on those things that AI is going to have the most difficulty replacing.
- In-person meetings – even over the convenience of Zoom.
- Educating and selling in-person – instead of through email exchanges.
- In-person gathering – like those that happen at Responsive Conference.
Each of us is going to need to reinvent ourselves over the next decade. The most important skill is going to be adaptability and reinvention.
Today, I’m still taking a majority of my meetings on Zoom. But I’m beginning to default to in-person meetings because they’re harder to replace.
To adapt, we need to lean into work AI can’t easily replicate. But what that work is, I’m not sure.
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3 things I’ve loved this week
Article I’m revisiting
How to fast
As I write this, I’m coming out of a three-day water fast. Throughout, I’ve been referencing my article “How to fast,” which continues to serve as a great guide through the process. I haven’t made a lot of personal videos lately, but here’s a mini-documentary I made about my first five-day water-only fast.
Movie I’m thinking about
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
My girlfriend loves watching movies in theaters, so on the first day of my fast we went out and saw Mission Impossible in theaters. Sitting in a dark theater and smelling popcorn isn’t a great activity for a long fast. Nor do you really need to see this movie – too much action, not enough plot. But the theme of an all-powerful AI taking over the world felt relevant. I came home and spent several hours researching (with ChatGPT) how to survive an AI apocalypse.
Podcast I’m listening to
Conversations with Tyler: Jack Clark on AI’s Uneven Impact
I first read Tyler Cowen’s book Average is Over over a decade ago. The chapter on chess and AI is worth revisiting. I listened to a few recent interviews on his podcast Conversations with Tyler, and this one, with Anthropic founder and former head of Policy and OpenAI, is fascinating. Whereas Gen Alpha is being raised in a world of screens, my own children will come of age in a world of AI. I’m starting to wonder what that’ll look like.
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Until next week,
Robin
