Early tech exploration
Early tech exploration
142: Why it's important to f*ck around and find out
Happy Sunday. I’m spending this weekend in Seattle visiting family and close friends. It’s been nearly two years since made it back to the Emerald City and was greeted with rain, resulting in cozy nights at home with the family. I wouldn’t want it any other way. This month I’ll be in New York City for UXDX, where I’ll be participating in a speaking panel about Product Teams and AI. It got me thinking about emerging tech and why it's important for designers, builders, and entrepreneurs to look at these things with a curious mindset.
Confession: I wrote a version of this article 18 months ago during the height of web3 and crypto. I decided to dust it off and re-write it with the lens of AI. The prospective trends come and go, but what persists is the importance of early-tech adoption and exploration.
I remember living in Brooklyn in 2013 when I first saw the first person I saw wearing Google Glass in the wild. Glassholes never became fully adopted, and I'm glad. However, Google Glass crawled so other Augmented Reality devices could run; probably with the launch of Apple's answer many years later.
Play and explore to understand the implications
As new technology emerges, there is often an early adopter phase where people are tinkering. The technologies seem more like a solution looking for a problem and it takes time to normalize a bit. Roughly stated, it can seem really useless. Chris Dixon famously wrote that the next big thing will start out looking like a toy, and I find that sentiment to be very accurate. This makes it more important to play and explore. I encourage all of us to beyond skimming headlines of how AI is going to doom the world or usher in a golden age. It’s important to find out for yourself by investing in tinkering and playing.
As you play you’re able to think critically about the technology. The next big thing may feel like a toy, and sometimes toys can become a weapon. Then again, some things that were tactical and designed as a weapon becomes normalized in our everyday things. This phase is pure speculation to understand the implications of what this could become.
If you don't explore it, someone else will
I really am fascinated with blockchain technologies. The concept of cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is also something I believed could be an agent for good. Though I still believe this, much of it feels gross to me because of the number of grifters, scammers, and other people being exploitative about the technology. Unfortunately, when there is an emerging technology, people will find a way to make money on it and take advantage of people. The last few years had a crypto boom, and now it seems like crypto winter is here to stay.
What happened with crypto and NFTs is the reason I encourage people to explore early tech. If we don’t do it, someone less credible will. Exploring doesn’t mean being bullish or adopting it. It can also mean talking about the negative implications to help us devise how to move the technology forward. It’s less about “we need to ban this” and more, “If this technology was released to the entire world, what are the principles we must uphold a positive impact on humanity and not hard our existence?”
Ignore the noise
As mentioned above, there is a lot of noise of people flocking to emerging tech. This is best portrayed by thought leaders on Twitter and LinkedIn, posting threads about how the new tech will be a game changer. They offer a crash course on something they've been playing around with for weeks. Within the noise, there are a lot of curious people building a community around such things. I recommend developing your own point of view instead of reading what people perceive. There is no point of view more important than your own.
Inventing new directions
What we think the next big thing is often turns out not to be. Remember when chatbots were all the craze in the mid-2010s? The trends also boomerang back. The Google Glass I saw at Gorilla Coffee in Park Slope in 2013 was the first and only public sighting of the device for me. As the much-rumored Apple XR hardware is announced, it could bring mass adoption like the iPhone; making the original Google Glass the Motorola DynaTAC (AKA the giant Zack Morris phone from Saved by the Bell)—archaic but a predecessor to modernizing technology.
As designers, builders, and entrepreneurs, curiosity is key. Kevin Bethune told me that it’s important to have an open aperture on things, and I feel this way deeply about emerging tech. Have an open aperture on emerging tech. Play around with it to understand the implications. It very well could be a gimmick or fad, or perhaps it’s something that can change the world.
Tweet of the week
Hype links
It was my friend Amanda's birthday yesterday. You can help her celebrate by purchasing a piece of her ceramics (if you’re in San Francisco):
Incredible work by Devin Jacoviello and Nick Jones on the new Stripe Press landing page for Poor Charlie’s Almanack