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

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

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.

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.

Human beings will also do better in chaotic environments where what the problem is, what our goals are, and how people are thinking about things keeps changing. This quote made me think a lot about working at Meta:

"In addition, there are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve for purely practical reasons. It isn’t becaus

• 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 "Danger Zone"


• The

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 other worse, teams of people who actually get to know each other in person can often create the strongest results. Colvin went on to cite a bunch of work that showed how people collaborated worse when remote, which again, must be concerning for leaders of distributed teams.


• Colvin also explored how doctors were being trained to provide a more emp