A decade working in the AI/ML product world hasn’t prepared me for what’s happening. Back in 2018 while in personalization at Spotify, I spoke at an AI event sponsored by GlassWing Ventures along with Tim Berners-Lee, Chelsea Clinton and Swizz Beats (I slipped him my son’s rap mixtape). My remarks largely centered on the “black box” issue in ML and I played a segment of Sunspring, a scifi screenplay written by Benjamin, an LTSM neural net precursor to the transformers of our world.
From my perspective, we’re now in that storied place where things that have been moving very slowly have suddenly started moving really fast. Code, content, companies and entire categories are being created at a pace I can no longer match. I am at once creatively liberated and consistently humbled.
The technology that enabled me to launch BeTogether also scrambled the patterns of company creation. I’m taking my startup private, so to speak.
Building for the addicted and traumatized, the infirm and developmentally delayed informs what will emerge here. With all the power now at our fingertips, it’s tempting to design systems that endlessly optimize for outcomes. But the work with underserved populations continues to remind me that the greatest opportunities for innovation emerge from friction, not the absence of it.
Ingrained Friction will explore the raw, real, unexpected and creative friction of adaptive design.
Bench notes are ideas forming, feedback shaping what’s coming.