131: How to Be Human in the Age of Generative AI

What humans will likely still do best is empathize with other humans, which enables us to persuade, inspire, entertain, and engender trust.

Generative AI combines the encoding of vast corpuses of text and images—which act as training data—and a series of machine learning algorithms to turn text prompts into incredibly creative, intelligent, and useful visual and text responses.

I would rank this among the 3 most transformative pieces of technology I've encountered in my lifeti

While I'm sympathetic to many already struggling creators who will find fewer commissions and opportunities, I also think the genie is out of the lamp on this one. While there are probably some legal, technological, and social mechanisms to slow the use of these tools—I've heard of calls to boycott AI generated art—we cannot stop their w

His core takeaways were:

• Human desire is infinite so there will always be some work people can do. The question is will the work be meaningful and high value or denigrating and low value


• What humans will likely still do best is empathize with other humans, which enables us to persuade, inspire, entertain, and engender trust.


• People still want other pe

Third, I'm trying to learn more about how these Generative AI systems work more deeply and uncover their creative potential. You've seen my explorations with Midjourney through the cover images of many of the last few newsletters, including this one.

Human labor will be in the "Safe Zone" in the social, unstructured environments where it will be hard to train an AI to train pets, offer physical therapy, and style someone's hair and face. Meanwhile, structured, asocial work is most easily replaced, such as fast food cooks, garment factory workers, and cashiers, he calls this the "

"In addition, there are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve for purely practical reasons. It isn’t because computers couldn’t eventually solve them. It’s because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are."

— Geoff Colvin,  Human

Human desire is infinite so there will always be some work people can do. The question is will the work be meaningful and high value or denigrating and low value

Kai Fu Lee, a longtime AI researcher, former CEO of Google China, and technology investor, has developed a 2x2 matrix for how humans should expect to interact with AI in his 2018 book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.

He defines two spectra: structured vs unstructured environments and asocial vs social environments.