AI + Me = Emotional Rollercoaster
Emotional rollercoaster. That's me + AI.
Since starting Lemonade Stand I've had the opportunity to go way deeper with AI - personal experiments, professional experiments, building AI products, doing due diligence on AI investments.
In the last six months I've used AI to:
Plan trips
Take notes
Outline pitch decks
Do secondary research
Design brand identities
Write and edit
Sketch tattoos
Train for a trail race
Calculate taxes and equity dilution scenarios
Build a daily FX calculator in Google Sheets with my son
Create an image of a squad of jaguars with laser eyes freeing all the animals from the San Antonio Zoo
I go on a wild emotional roller coaster every time. It looks something like this:
About to do something. Remember that AI exists, and pop open the right tool. Congratulate myself for being so smart.
Do the thing. Feel a sense of wonder and downright magic. Jaguars with lasers, WOW!
Go back to feeling smart and smug and loving the magic of technology.
Then later... feeling a vague sense of discomfort, sometimes even sadness.
AI is a productivity beast, but I can't help but feel ambivalent about the total emotional experience.
Perhaps it is because I am now an old man, stuck in the old ways.
Perhaps it is because it holds echoes for me of the early days of social media. Something new and wonderous - the ability to connect nearly every human on the planet - but a vague sense that maybe we were collectively losing something too.
But I think it's mostly because I found emotional reward - joy, pride, uniqueness, etc - in doing some of the things that I am now effectively outsourcing and automating.
I'm paying closer attention to what AI experiences work for me emotionally, which ones don't, and why.
I suspect this will be one of the hardest and most important parts about AI product management - understanding how AI products impact the user's emotional experience. My empty sadness at outsourcing something that brought me joy will be another person's jubilation at never having to do something they hate ever again.
The winners will find ways to distinguish the experience based on the user's emotional reaction to the functional benefit the AI product is providing.
