"If you aren’t learning, you aren’t living" - Futurist Jim Carroll
The tsunami of developments with artificial intelligence is accelerating. Trying to keep up has become a full-time job.
If you didn't hear, OpenAI became enmeshed with Jonny Ives's company - he's the guy who designed the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods, a true design genius. The talk is that they will develop a variety of AI devices that don't involve screens or keyboards. Open up your imagination - wide. Then there are the announcements a few days ago by Google - involving real-time translation and heads-up display-based glasses with Warby Parker, among other things, These are only a few of what's been going on - it seems that almost every day, there is some amazing new leap in capability and function.
That's why every day, I'm spending time learning to do new things with all the tools at my disposal. Here's my latest little endeavour - using AI to generate a cool poster background image, having it write a Python program to generate a series of slide images from it, and then having AI write another program to combine it into a PDF that I can share on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
Why would I do that? Workflow - simply put, the ability to do in 1/10th of the time things that I might otherwise be doing for a post or a project. Not only that, but it's the idea of constantly exploring new possibilities and opportunities that I can share with clients.
So what's involved with this little project? I've now set myself up with a simple little script I can run to generate slides at will. I use AI to generate a cool background image with a blank space, like this:
In another image, I simply define the area where I want the text to appear.
Then I feed it some text in a pre-defined, structured style:
I then run the program and get a nifty little slide deck. For example, this one on Creativity: You can grab the full PDF here.
I've got another one on the "Innovation Killers here, with a different background.
I've also been working on my post for tomorrow, which features a different type of setup.
This might not seem like much, but the point of all this is simply by learning one new thing, I've developed a fascinating new skill. Add that to daily lessons on many other things, and I see myself in the business of developing new skills and insights every day. Over time, those compound into the fact that I've become something different than I was before.
And that's the point - as I keep emphasizing in my keynotes, you might not lose your job to an AI, but you could very well lose your job to someone who is using AI more effectively than you do. I often share this from the stage in the form of that well-known meme.
Regardless of the merits of whether it's good or bad, it's here to stay, and it's up to you to master what you can do with it. If
If you'd like more details on my scripts and workflow for this fun little project, contact me.
Futurist Jim Carroll is a big fan of the idea of productive time-wasting to learn new skills.