Can AI introduce us to our best selves?
Plan Your Next# 130
👋 Good morning from Los Angeles! I'm Nate Kadlac, and this is #130 of Plan Your Next. A Sunday newsletter that connects design, creativity, and how you prepare for your next thing.
💡 What’s new?
🇲🇽 165-day Duolingo Spanish streak. I’m hoping to get to 200 days (to establish the habit) and then switch to some more conversational methods of learning. Besides iTalki, what would you recommend? I recently had a creative call with a woman who said my goal should be to write (or speak) poetry in Spanish. Consider that a more ambitious goal!
📱 I started setting screen time limits on my iPhone apps. For one, I’m addicted to one-minute blitz Chess games, averaging 15 daily. Yeah, that’s 5,629 over the past year. It’s better than watching the news, but it’s become more of a bad habit than anything. So I dug into setting downtimes for most of my apps. Here’s a quick demo of my settings.
Can AI introduce us to our best selves?
Driving slowly down Sunset Avenue to pick up my daughter from daycare in our trusty 15-year-old Subaru, I listened to a just-released 20-minute podcast conversation between two people.
It was a short conversation, and the questions weren’t particularly spiky, but it pulled me in as I crept along a cement strip that eventually runs into an ocean.
The podcast was between two people, and although they candidly made references to each other’s past, the guest had died 11 years ago.
The host, while living, was Joe Rogan. But this wasn’t Joe Rogan, and his guest wasn’t Steve Jobs.
It was a full conversation between two artificial people using intelligence fed from stories, biographies, videos, and much more than I would ever care to read. What brings everything to life are the identical voices layered on top of this intelligence that felt decades removed from the Garmin navigation computer voices we find annoying.
The world is getting nutty right now.
While my head kept reminding me this was fake, the meandering rants on Indian philosophy and LSD caught me off guard, letting my brain slip into belief for a second or two.
The company behind this is already taking votes on what interview to create next, with the top-ranking conversations between Buddha and Einstein or Elon Musk and Nikola Tesla. Although Trump interviewing himself is gaining traction. You can count my ballet for DaVinci and van Gough.
This kind of technology drives up my anxiety, but if you want to be worried about the dangers of humanity, there are more pressing matters. But if you’re an Ark Head, this may not even phase you.
Will AI look out for us?
It’s all fun and games, which is how everything serious starts.
More selfishly, I think about how my daughter will someday be able to sit and have conversations with her grandpa, who passed before she turned one.
And how going forward, we’ll be able to have entire lifetimes of conversations with people we love, even after they’re gone.
Okay, that last paragraph was fully written by AI, using writing software called LEX.
The optimist in me keeps thinking about how AI will be able to help assist us in becoming better versions of ourselves.
Imagine making better decisions from quantitative data about what we should be doing with our lives, rather than being influenced by for-profit algorithms that help us become our worst selves.
Years ago, when enrolling in college, I had zero insight into what creative pursuits were available outside of what I was interested in at the time. And my own experience was limited. If I had some contextual assistance—artificial or otherwise—that was in my best interests, I might have made different decisions.
Our life’s decisions are mainly based on past experiences. Making pivots in life come with risk, and while it’s romanticized, many of us aren’t privileged enough to take on that risk.
I would have loved for an assisted technology to know what my strengths are—or what interests me—providing choices that I couldn’t have dreamed of.
Or maybe, in the end, AI will just help us make more accurate decisions on what to watch on Netflix.
⚡️ Two creative hits for you to check out next
🎬 Director David Fincher on the art of title sequences
Interesting that the title sequence for Se7en only happened because they didn’t have enough money for the original sequence.
👨💻 What does your type say about you?
The Mehrabian rule suggests 93% of our contact with other people is non-verbal. Fonts matter, and this is a fun breakdown of the six different types of fonts that describe what they say about you.
👋 See you next Sunday
My calendar is always open to chat about your next adventure, crazy idea, or if you’re feeling creatively stuck.
My goal is to help more people give a damn about what they’re creating next, through my writing, teaching, and design. If you want to support my journey, the best ways are to make better design decisions more easily, communicate stories with better slide decks, or discover your visual style in my live workshops.
Or, if you want to sponsor this newsletter, sign up here.
Have a great week,
p.s. Words are just words, but if these words made you feel something, would you let me know by tapping on the heart below?
Fun fact: before diving into Photography, I wanted to design title sequences, and almost pursued a career in the film industry as a graphic/production designer! Can't wait to dive into the interview with David Fincher, thanks for sharing it!