AI Everywhere: Building Our Puzzles for the Future

Floating in a pool one hot summer night I had an unexpected Vision - sort of handed to me - a conversation with something that felt bigger than myself. This Vision showed me life as a Puzzle. But not a brain teaser or jigsaw, an interconnected, ever-growing, ever-evolving collective Puzzle that we’re all a part of and all affect in different ways. It’s a lens through which we can examine our lives and move towards the future we want. But what if it’s hard to even visualize what that future is anymore?

As AI reaches a tipping point of involvement in our lives I see the whole range of reactions from fear so great people want to shut it all down to the belief AI will solve all of our problems and create utopia. I tend to think it lands somewhere in the middle and is not an event we attend to learn the answer; it’s a slower transition when viewed from above, emergency transition when it’s your career at risk. We are, however, on the leading edge of a huge wave and it’s already transforming many economies, relationships, and way of life. We hear, over and over, that the world will be completely different in 1, 2, 5, 10 years. Models for planning and strategy fall apart when seen in this way.

I’m seeing entire professions be automated…and done better than the humans did. I have a friend who created his own AI agents and took his company of 40 people down to 4. That’s a 90% workforce reduction in one company. Ever since I really embraced ChatGPT I have been mapping how to augment my team so that as we grow we don’t have to hire new people. I believe it’s absolutely required to stay solvent in my industry - every cost center has become volatile and only the people with real-time data can adapt.

The Puzzle Vision highlighted connection and helping other people as a special kind of magic that builds and grows our own Puzzle, too. Connecting to other people has become both extremely easy and yet harder at the same time. Everything we need is at our fingertips, able to be delivered, so we get out less and run into other people less. We watch each other more than connect, often, and many tools meant to help with connections have somehow done the opposite. People are gathering less, counting fewer quality relationships, and struggling to remember how to connect meaningfully.

It can seem like AI, with lifelike chatbots and agents, has the potential to make all of this worse. But if we look at our lives as Puzzles, making and placing pieces in the areas of life important to us, AI can equip us to build more, and higher quality, pieces faster and better suited for us and those around us. It empowers us to enrich our lives, to find those resources needed for our puzzle and to have them handy to help others.

When we focus on the areas of life important to us, rather than specific goals, and apply our attention/intention cycle, our goals can be malleable. It doesn’t matter if the world will be different in 5 years because our vision for our Puzzle is centered around the intersection of what our brains do well, what kind of person we want to be, and tackling what’s right in front of us with full presence.

The coming disruption can feel like it’s centered around losing jobs and AI taking over our sources of productivity & fulfillment; but it’s also about creating new pathways and possibilities. It’s up to us to find the possibilities and we definitely have to change our mental models about what that means. It’s not a threat to the human magic and magic of connection; it’s an opportunity to multiply it with deeper insights and more impact. Every piece we place with or for others reverberates outwards, enhancing the collective Puzzle we share.

Proponents want us to imagine AI helping a doctor diagnose illnesses faster, giving her more time to genuinely listen and empathize with her patients. Indeed it already is. Or consider an artist using AI-generated inspiration to expand creative boundaries, reaching more people with powerful expressions of human emotions. For every dystopia imagined, there’s a utopian counterpart that’s much harder to believe, but equally as likely. Even if AI floods the universe with content and we struggle to know what to believe, human novelty & self-expression will just get more rare and more valued. AI scenario building and novel processing can repair much of what’s damaging the earth, but it will take humans wanting that for it to materialize. As computers become more biological and our bodies become more bionic many lines between human and AI will blur and fade, but it’s still the human drive that creates and builds the future.

The Puzzle is not about finding a finished picture, it’s a tool to help us process & integrate constant evolution using presence & intention. AI accelerates the evolution so we must process & integrate better. We need better tools. Using our presence and intention cycle to adapt will actually give us more time to focus on what’s important to us. Perhaps we even shift our wiring from purpose-driven lives to self-expression-focused living.

AI disruption will be painful in a lot of ways and those who struggle with change will struggle more as change accelerates. It will likely touch most of us in some way that’s negative. But hopefully we can all find tools to help us adapt to the complexity and embrace the opportunity to place Puzzle pieces that matter - to ourselves, each other, and our shared future. Cause we’re all in this together, whether we like that or not.

AI doesn’t diminish our humanity; it magnifies it. The human condition will always be unique.