For most of recent history, technology has been dominated by products that have answered questions beginning with how.

How do I get from where I am, to where I need to be, in a short time, without a car? Uber.

How do I listen to unlimited music, wherever I am in the world, without owning any of it? Spotify.

How do I buy groceries in the most convenient manner possible? Instacart.

Leading products make the how easier, faster, more convenient, and more accessible.

How did we get here?

Getting people to change their behaviours is hard. Getting people to adopt entirely new behaviours is much harder.

Answering questions that begin with how became the dominant trend in technology because it is easier to build a product or service that makes how you do something easier, rather than one that makes up an entirely new what for you to do.

We also gravitate towards how because what and why are often answered for us.

Whats and whys don’t change much. We aren’t going to stop needing to eat any time soon. But how we procure, purchase, deliver, cook, and consume food is always ripe for innovation.

There isn’t much innovation in what and why because these questions are often answered by deep human truths.

Why do we listen to music, order takeout, and watch documentaries? The answer is because we seek moving, pleasurable, and enlarging experiences. It is the role of technology to improve how we experience them.

As Kevin Kelly wrote in ‘What Technology Wants’

“In general, the long-term bias of technology is to increase the diversity of artifacts, methods, and techniques of creating choices.”

This is in line with cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster’s ‘Ethical Imperative’ which reads:

“Act always so as to increase the number of choices”

Increasing choices

Innovation and progress is driven by the human desire to enlarge, and increase choices, for ourselves and others.

We have invented countless ways to cook steak, even though we figured out one effective way of doing so thousands of years ago.

The reverse sear produces an evenly cooked piece of steak. A sous-vide method produces especially flavourful steak. A tartare produces a very different texture and flavour of steak.

We innovate so as to increase the number of ways to do the same thing, thus creating new choices. Increasing the number of choices available to us enriches our lives and maximizes our creative potential.

All about if

Innovation increases choices. Soon, choices will matter more than ever before.

We are nearing a pivotal moment when we will will stop innovating on how we do things and instead focus on if we should do things. Which things should we do?

That moment is much closer than we think and it will define the future of work.

Creating choices, making choices

Traditionally, the creative process has consisted of 2 core phases: ideation and execution. In the design process, we describe ideation as diverging, and execution as converging.

During the ideation phase, we come up with ideas which create choices. Which route will we take? Which idea will we flesh out? What will we built, test and launch?

During the execution phase, we decide how to accomplish our goals. We become grounded and we make choices which inherently close off other paths.

For a very long time, innovation has centred around the converge phase - execution. Periods of great innovation in the industrial revolution and Silicon Valley were pivotal in improving how we do things, as described above.

Ford redefined how we manufacture at a large scale. Facebook redefined how we connect and socialize. Netflix redefined how we consume TV shows and movies.

But that track of ‘how’ innovation is coming to an end.

Soon, artificial intelligence systems will be the ultimate answer to the question of how.

The end of how

How will anyone, of any skill level, produce a photorealistic, highly stylized, 3D model of something from their imagination? Open AI DALL-E.

How does a developer write code better, fast, and more reliably than ever before? Github Copilot.

https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1511784956946784257?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1511784956946784257%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmirror.xyz%2F0x956C23b9E573FBBab69F2D4C06eb776c1bB98113%2FAo-62vy-gDz0WZ1aZu548iq52zqVZiyjXctXPsgtpE4

https://twitter.com/github/status/1409883156333879300?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1409883156333879300%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmirror.xyz%2F0x956C23b9E573FBBab69F2D4C06eb776c1bB98113%2FAo-62vy-gDz0WZ1aZu548iq52zqVZiyjXctXPsgtpE4

Though at first AIs may require human inputs and some help choosing the best outcomes, this won’t last for long.

Soon, Open AI’s DALL-E will design better than any designer ever could. Github Copilot will code better than any developer could. Those robot pizza vending machines will probably make pizza better than any chef could.

How we design, code, and cook will reach its apex. There won’t be any more room left to improve how we do things. That chapter of history will end and innovation will take on an entirely new form. And, like the industrial revolution before it, a large part of the workforce will be displaced.

What will people do?

AI creates choices, people make choices

When AI creates unlimited choices, it will be up to us to make a lot more choices. When anything is possible, we’re going to be busy.

I believe that the future of ideation-execution will look something like this:

It may not be long before AIs get good at making choices but it will be up to us to make the right choices. Our job will be to choose the path we want to take.

Choosing paths and the ‘if’

I believe that the next era of work will be characterized by the if instead of the how. When AI makes anything possible (writing a beautiful song, cooking a delicious meal), it will be up to people to decide: if AI makes or does that, what will result? Which path should we choose?

We will pose questions to AI systems for which we don’t have the answers. How do we solve climate change? How do we cure various illnesses? How do we travel deeper into space? The AI will know what to do and it will know how to do it. We will decide if it does it. If we do it. We will decide which path to take.

So, we will become ethicists and philosophers. We will explore morals, consequences, and potential outcomes. We will ask ourselves, if we choose this path, what will result? What if we choose this one instead? Then we will make a decision. And that will be our role.

Notes

I was deeply inspired by Changing How the World Changes from Alexander Manu’s Transforming Organizations for the Subscription Economy. Manu writes about the ‘primacy of the how’ wherein the value delivery becomes the value proposition.

I was also greatly inspired by the conclusion of What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly where he describes technology’s agenda to enlarge itself and therefore choices for us.

I highly recommend both books.