On Wednesday I was running along and listening to this this excellent podcast with Adam Grant: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/worklife-with-adam-grant/id1346314086?i=1000633895279
It’s called The Problem with Optimising our Lives, and it made me think about the people I work with every day; The Barbie Movie, and personalisation of customer experience.
The podcast dives into the merits (or not) of seeking optimisation in all the decisions we make. Is always aiming for the best a dumb idea? I love it for the recognition that luck plays a huge part in key life events, and the introduction of ‘good enough’ as great outcome, not a compromise. Should you seek to be a satisficer, rather than an optimiser? Would it make you happier?
Who didn’t listen to Gloria’s monologue in The Barbie Movie and cry at both the injustice and reality of what she said? It made me think of the impossibility of trying to optimise for everything in life. It made me think of the people I work with. The environment we work in, and the constant drive to optimise for everything.
Every decision. Every meeting. Every request. They are all reasonable. We take them all on. We try to optimise for all of them. And we fail. Isn’t there a place for conversations about what is achievable and what good enough looks like. Honest conversations about what to drop and what to focus on.
And so, to my hidden motive to talk about AI! It’s a technology that offers limitless scope for optimisation. We can use AI to get even better. Optimising every decision, every process, every interaction. Is that a good thing, or bad thing? More on this and Ella Fitzgerald here: https://lnkd.in/eF-Y6yr4
I like the idea of the randomness in life. The weird ideas and the role of luck. The tails on the distribution curve. It’s called an hallucination in the world of AI. “A response generated by an AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact”. I’m wondering where the line is between an hallucination and “good enough”. I wonder what we might lose if we can optimise for everything.
This week when I’m running, I am going to be working out how I can change my behaviour to make satisficers of those I work with. In the hope that this makes work less stressful for everyone. I apologise in advance
For now, I’d love suggestions on the best AI to help me out. I need to know if my pet Unicorn has to eat rainbows or would glitter be ‘good enough’.