if anyone can do anything → We’re talking about an era in which you can practically build whatever you can think of, in a blink of an eye, digitally or psychically. Creator economy and social media, in the last ~20 years, radically propagated the idea of individualism, being the one and being always right in our judgments. So, the transition will start with apps which is the end product form we came up with following smartphones, yearning for our attention. We’ll see, as we did with the pump.fun craze, a plethora of new apps, made proudly by individuals. In the ensuing concentration era, a hierarchy will possibly emerge and some of them will take the premium mind space, like using the Elon app or Sam app will be the trend. Yet, after all, being able to create anything does not necessarily mean everyone would start working on doing stuff as it is now widely promoted to garner more attention and capital into building the means which open the gates for this particular future vision. We perhaps won’t see people doing more stuff, overachieving their predecessors. For a small subset of people, this might be the case, but eventually, we’ll end up creating masses who are more impatient, and more intolerant as a result of the abilities we’ve gained, the ability to do anything we want, ostensibly. Imagine yourself knowing that somewhere in the world, there is a solution to your problems. And some people are capable of solving their problems whenever they want magically. Yet, you’re not one of them, though having similar problems. How would it make you feel? Being incapable, and feeling incompetent will probably open up bigger wounds in our thinking, in valuing ourselves, and it’ll divide us more radically.

noise cancelling → Similar to the dystopian Times Square depictions, the volume of visual content will go off the roof and we’ll be living under a constant bombardment of content, feeling the FOMO at a new high as a consequence of the increased content quality seemingly everywhere. Conceivably, the anxiety of getting better versions of ourselves will peak and we’ll find ourselves in an incessant race of absorbing more and more. Cutting through the noise will be the premium service we’ll be looking for, through our personal assistants and service providers, and we’ll intrinsically expect personalized and tailored content for our needs at every touchpoint. Yet, this won’t be enough as the overall quality of everything we consume skyrockets. In the back alleys, in the digital or physical world, we’ll also start looking for some taste, human error, or a personal touch to feel ourselves normal, to feel a link to our past selves. Handmade curation and mistakes from human flaws will catch our eye as it has never before. Because this time we won’t despise but crave it. To feel special or normal -which is the new “special”- we will quietly seek imperfections.

AGI or not, it’s done → Is AGI coming? Can LLMs make the leap and reason? Can it go wilder than the average person with the data it’s trained on, which is coming from the average? Can it build anything unseen before? Or, does it even matter? I actually do not have any feud with the ongoing debate around whether LLM-based models achieve what appears to be our ultimate goal, AGI. I do not care about it a lot. I can understand why it grabs the attention, talking about an unknown that we can humanly envision makes people talk. But, another discussion we should be focusing on around the implications of the technology we do have now. Whether or not LLM models progress any further, the imminent results of incorporating such tools into our lives will be profound, and, as with the most tectonic shifts we’ve seen in human history, seemingly only a few tries to prepare masses about the potential effects. For many, the line between super intelligence and pretty-standard-intelligence is irrelevant. Because for many of us, the question is can we spot the difference between something undone and greatly done? Would it not be sufficient, to have something just wilder than the average?

in experience business → No matter what happens in the future, experiential urges and needs will stay relevant, and augmented with new-age tech, we’ll roughly be spending the same amount of time, if not more, feeling the need for tasting/smelling/sharing/playing. Not career advice but there seems to be a prevalent underestimation of how AI replace humans in the workplace as many do not have a clue about the average quality of aggregate effort. Most of the products and services, therefore enterprises, work with abysmal efficiency and productivity levels. The working average is extremely low, and yet we’re where we are despite this. Now, soon coupled with the advancements in robotics, swathes of jobs will be replaced, in a few years, almost instantly. This shift will also be fuelled by the fact that even though the expected productivity increase could be negligible, companies will go for it as their profit-seeking behaviour will push them to do so at the expense of letting human operators go. Even just one or two points increase in overall productivity will justify for many enterprises to let go of their workforce. And, once a domino falls, it’ll also create ripple effects with FOMO for enterprises, and the following pieces will go down faster. So, if your job is about producing outputs at a certain level and is a result of carefully following a set of actions in order, as with many many jobs, you’ll feel the pressure no matter which vertical you are operating in. If what you put forward slightly changes in shape and form each time, like a meal, a portrait or a performance of some sort, you’ll probably have a longer runway for your career.

designing the context → Though the last twenty-some years propelled the common perception of conflating UX with screens and apps, we’re finally headed towards using “voice” as the main medium of commanding software products. As a UX concern, there will be new challenges to overcome, and UX designers, leaning more towards understanding hardware solutions this time, will probably spend more time designing the optimum interaction context than the medium itself for users. Designing the right context and environment for interaction will surpass interaction design itself. In the Eastern markets, people are more adept at using voice as a commanding input for quite some time, and all of us have more friends sending voice memos today. The change in interaction behaviour will be modelled based on these subsegments. But in conversing with AI-based tools, voice control will perhaps take a new form, particularly designers concentrating on the condensation of meaning into a smaller size than whole sentences.

thank you AI → As we’re headed towards a proliferation of content in any medium, by showing what can be done, wilder than the average, could it be like an awakening call for artists and consumers? Maybe, after a period of content-flation, people will concur that “Here is something, looking better, for a fraction of the cost, so I should demand better things from human operators.” It could be a warning, especially for those who operate on just-enough-to-make-profit levels as they start to see the competition getting fiercer. After the initial adoption period, which will be bloody so-to-speak, the cards could be reshuffled and good may become better.