TurboTax, AI and Jobs, The Future of Creativity, and Time Travel
Weekly Roundup of News in Technology, UX and AI
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Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
💵 TurboTax
💼 AI and Jobs
👨🌾 The Future of Creativity
📍 Humane AI Pin
🗺️ Getting Lost
⌚ Time Travel
Podcast
The Rise of Video and the Future of Virtual Communication
Video has become ubiquitous in our communication. From virtual meetings and virtual doctor visits, to social media, virtual events, and live commerce, we expect video everywhere. But the technology that makes this happen isn’t easy, and needs and expectations are changing rapidly. So what does the future hold for our virtual communications? How have we solved these challenges in the past and how will we continue to solve them? How do we think about the UX of virtual communication and video? What should you do if you want to get into design and what communities should you join or create? We explore these questions and many others in this episode.
News and Useful Reads
TurboTax is part of the problem
As product people and technologists, we often talk about TurboTax as an amazing product that takes a bad experience—filing taxes—and makes it better. As we approach tax day in the United States, this is just an annual reminder that TurboTax is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It has a vested interest in keeping taxes complicated so it can sell all of us software, and Intuit (the maker of TurboTax) lobbies lawmakers to keep the tax code difficult to navigate, as the article discusses.
TurboTax isn’t a good product. Intuit has intentionally made the problem of taxes worse and then sold us the solution. That’s evil.
No One Actually Knows How AI Will Affect Jobs
This is exactly where I have landed. No one knows. And no one can know. Technology always has disrupted. For some, it has been a benefit. For others, it has been a detriment. Overall, we don’t know how things will shake out.
Forget artificial intelligence breaking free of human control and taking over the world. A far more pressing concern is how today’s generative AI tools will transform the labor market. Some experts envisage a world of increased productivity and job satisfaction; others, a landscape of mass unemployment and social upheaval.
Capability Blindness and the Future of Creativity
This era of creativity is going to look more like gardening. A gardener doesn’t grow plants directly. Instead, she sets up the conditions for the garden to grow. She takes care of the soil, the water, and the sunlight—and lets the plants do their thing.
So too with AI. As more of our time is spent being model managers, we won’t be directly making as much creative work. That’s like pulling up a plant to help it grow. Instead, we’ll be creating optimal conditions and letting the models do their work.
Humane AI Pin review: not even close
If you’re wondering if the AI Pin is any good, you can wonder no more. Unsurprisingly, the very early product seems to miss the mark. But I still like the idea that our phones aren’t the best solution for many of the jobs we ask them to do. So exploring other options is a fun experiment.
As the overall state of AI improves, the AI Pin will probably get better, and I’m bullish on AI’s long-term ability to do a lot of fiddly things on our behalf. But there are too many basic things it can’t do, too many things it doesn’t do well enough, and too many things it does well but only sometimes that I’m hard-pressed to name a single thing it’s genuinely good at.
Other Interesting Finds
Why do some people always get lost?
If you’ve ever noticed that some people have a better sense of direction than others, it is actually true. And apparently there is research to back it up. It’s something that I’ve seen in my life. My wife generally has a better sense of direction than I do, and I suspect it comes from her growing up in an area where she had to be more aware of direction than I did.
Instead, the biggest contributor to people’s performance was what geneticists call the “nonshared environment” — that is, the unique experiences each person accumulates as their life unfolds. Good navigators, it appears, are mostly made, not born.
Is time travel really possible? Here’s what physics says
Time travel is a frequent topic in our house for some reason…
But what about in the real world? Could we ever build a time machine and travel into the distant past, or forward to see our great-great-great-grandchildren? Answering this question requires understanding how time actually works – something physicists are far from certain about. So far, what we can say with confidence is that travelling into the future is achievable, but travelling into the past is either wildly difficult or absolutely impossible.