I've been heads down for a while working on scaling a tangible goods venture and settling in to Seattle with my wife. The outdoors here are amazing and so far the community has been very welcoming on all fronts. All this said, there's something on my mind this afternoon as I continue to reach out to hundreds of folks through LinkedIn and via email... the impact that AI will have on language and how we, as humans, communicate. So, I thought I'd put some quick words in digital form in sort of a stream of conscious way as it's been a while since my last post.
Gmail. It's a beast. No surprise there. When they started rolling out the ability to complete sentences a long time back I started thinking about the impact that it will have on how we communicate. Part of me was thinking, this is great... I can just select a response and it's sent. Part of me went, WHOA, this is one of the first mass implementations of AI talking to itself in a way on such a massive scale that impacts our life. And here, now, I have probably used the responses, sentence and fragments suggestions over a thousand times in the past few months.
So, what does it all mean? Well, for one, I believe it will impact our ability to think creatively and strategically. Without actually having to either put pen/pencil to paper or fingers to keyboard we lose the millisecond thought of evaluating whether or not the next word is the right word to put forth. In that sense, we potentially lose some skills that help us be great communicators. On the other hand, we have the ability to process more communication than we did prior - simply from the fact of being able to reply faster with nearly the same meaning and thus have a broader reach.
I am by no means an expert in communication or AI, rather a fascinated student of both worlds that are colliding in front of us. I've been reaching out to hundreds of people over the past couple of months and have noticed responses getting more and more similar. Is it that we're adopting AI suggested language, or simply that everyone is now just hitting reply based on what's suggested.
What do you think is next? How frequently are you using the suggested responses as guidance or as your actual response to an email?