Why Women Need to Embrace AI: The First in a Series

A few days ago, a keynote speaker and futurist shared a reel put together by one of his speaking agencies, advertising their current slate of AI speakers. Pretty standard fare, but as I watched, I noticed that there was only one woman in the entire video. As sad as this is, it doesn't come as a complete surprise -- while the numbers vary, a wide range of reporting puts the numbers of women using AI on a regular basis far behind men. According to the Economist, women use ChatGPT between 16 and 20 percentage points less than their male peers, even when they are employed in the same jobs or read the same subject.

This is a huge issue for many reasons, including the fact that AI will touch basically every career to some extent in the next few years and that women can uniquely benefit from adopting AI. Over the course of the next several issues, I'll dive deep into why women should be using AI more, and what AI products and services can and should be built to support women.

A note on some terms and assumptions: in many cases, these benefits will be discussed in the context of women who have the primary caregiving responsibility. This is not to say single dads, same sex couples, and single folks cannot benefit from many of these applications; this is only to say that, even in 2025, women still shoulder the burdens of a lot of household management and caregiving. This is also not meant to devalue that work; merely to offer options and alternatives for those who want them. If planning costumes for school spirit days or managing appointments is your jam, do you!

In the spirit of offering alternatives, I want to dive into the first place AI can benefit women -- helping them make decisions about whether to stay in the paid workforce once they become parents. In the United States, many families are faced with extremely high childcare costs, and many women look at their current salaries versus the cost of childcare and decide to leave the paid labor force.

Unfortunately, this decision is often based on incomplete and asymmetric information. For instance, just because your salary is X at age 30, that doesn't mean it will stay at that number forever. Likewise, if you work for a place with retirement benefits or 401k matching, that money is often not factored into the equation. There is also the issue of losing out on promotions and visibility in your industry, which of course varies from job to job.

Imagine if an AI app existed where someone could plug in all their current information and it would run a deep analysis of all the data about promotions, salary growth over time, and retirement savings, and come up with a cost for every year someone was out of the labor force. That cost could then be weighed against childcare costs and other relevant factors. People could go into the process of making this decision with all the facts and make it with a clear head.

And plenty of women (and some men) would still decide that leaving the paid labor force is what they want, for whatever reasons, and that's totally legitimate. But at least they would be making an informed choice armed with all the data, and be able to prepare for whatever the financial implications of the decision are. This type of transparency could also lead employers to provide better benefits for parents as a competitive advantage, so that they can recruit and retain talent.

This is just one example of how the smart use of AI can benefit women. In the coming weeks, I'll be writing about household labor, emotional labor, how AI can benefit parents, and how AI can help women negotiate better. If there are other topics you're curious about, let me know. This will also turn into a longer article and a keynote, so if you want to do your part and book more female AI speakers, let me know.

One Year On, Some Thoughts on the Vision Pro

It's been a year and a day since I went to an Apple store in Portland, and walked out, according to my mom, looking the happiest she's seen me since I got the Barbie Dream House for Christmas when I was five. But 366 days later, am I just as excited? The answer is mostly yes.

First, the downsides. Since its initial release, the Vision Pro headset hasn't been updated, and it remains very heavy and harder to wear for long periods of time than other headsets. I was excited to use it to watch movies and TV on flights and had to abandon that idea quickly, as it was just too uncomfortable for me. It is fantastic for watching while laying down, which I do occasionally after a long week when I want to unlock a new level of ultimate dirtbag mode.

The amount of original content for the headset has been limited, and I have heard rumors that Apple has cut funding for new content as Apple TV+ has struggled with budgets and viewership. Maybe this will change now that we are all obsessed with Severance? The content is has released has been a mixed bag, with most of it feeling like a camera test than a narrative -- that said, it is improving quickly. The Weeknd video in particular was fantastic, and even the short film Submerged, which was lacking in story, had some very cool moments. I'm not sure I want to see yet another short doc that doubles as a director's dream vacation, but I'm not necessarily mad at it.

Now on to the good stuff. I spent the last summer filming content and came away with a ton of learnings, as well as some really special family videos. This is truly the secret sauce for reaching a mainstream audience -- when I showed my folks how easy it was to use and film their grandkids, they went crazy. I believe that in the next few years, this will be the killer app that pushes this towards mass adoption.

I also like it for work calls, especially as the quality of the personas has improved. My persona photo's stylish blowout and nice makeup is always on, and now I can get home from the gym five minutes before a call, towel off, and hop on looking like a polished pro when in real life I look like a maniac. It also cuts down on how distracted I am during calls, as it's harder to multitask in headset.

Overall, I'm glad I bought it and while I don't use it daily, I'd say I use it five days a week for various things. I can't say I recommend it for an average user yet, but in a few years it'll be ready for primetime.

Hey, I'm Finally Writing a New Book! Here's a Preview.

Over the last year or so, I've been noodling with a book proposal, a way for me to finally link together all the conversations and arguments I've had over the past several years about the future of technology and why things feel so bad right now. Basically, the old way is dying, the new way is being created, and we're stuck in limbo -- but things won't be like this forever. As long as we move forward with curiosity, openness, and a will to make web3 work for good, we can create something better. This book will provide context on why things seem to take so long, and will spell out a vision for the future that sees everything as connected as we move from the meta-present to the meta-verse to the meta-physical.

You'll be hearing a lot about this book as 2025 progresses -- I'm still hammering out final details with regards to publishing and an exact date, but it'll probably be mid-fall. For now, stay tuned and enjoy this excerpt from the introduction.

Despite all my energy, not to mention lots of research about how AI will impact businesses in the future and why VR is better for training than almost any other medium, uptake has been slow. Not a day goes by that I don’t notice something that could be done better or smarter using emerging technologies, but people don’t seem to grasp this. 

Put it this way: the Innovator’s Dilemma, the late Clayton Christensen’s groundbreaking book on why most companies that refuse to innovate wind up dying, came out my senior year of high school (I didn’t read it then as I was too busy pretending to read Infinite Jest). I am now in middle age, and several of my peers have children in high school. None of this is new, and yet companies make the same mistakes, over and over and over again. 

It’s not entirely their fault. For one thing, a reward system focused entirely on quarterly and yearly earnings doesn’t encourage taking big, long term bets. Meta, for instance, has been excoriated for “losing money” on virtual reality, even though they are investing long term in research and development. Most CEOs are so overpaid and wealthy at this point that they can steer a car right off a cliff and still walk away with a fat exit package; as for the day-to-day workers, no one seems to care what happens to them. 

Early adopters and innovators are also far more open to punishment by the market than those who lag behind. It’s a national news story every time a Waymo car is in an accident; meanwhile, drunk, stoned, and distracted drivers are free to cause havoc and death on the roads and it barely merits a mention at the tail end of the local newscast. If an AI agent returns an incorrect result, it is proof that the entire technology stack is a joke; at the same time, elected officials all over the world can lie and misinform from their offices and plenty of people simply accept it as true. If someone gets an upset stomach from a shoddily produced VR piece, that means they’ll never put on a headset again; a poorly made 2D video is likely forgotten in five minutes or less. 

Despite all this, these new technologies are coming, and those who don’t embrace them will eventually be left behind. Will there be edge cases who can stubbornly refuse and hold out? Sure; as I found out when, on vacation in Uruguay, the town I was in eschewed parking meters for a mysterious dude in a vest who took an unspecified amount of money to watch a car. There will always be patronage gigs, and there will always be, as David Graeber described them, “bullshit jobs” – governments will decide that spending money on make-work to keep people busy is better than giving them government support and dealing with idle hands. 

For the vast majority of people not lucky to be paid to hang out in a lawn chair all day collecting pesos, understanding, using, and implementing web3 technology will be critical to their future employment and survival. And beyond just work, this mode of communication and viewing the world will shape how we communicate, interact, and live day to day. We are at the edge of a major breakthrough, one that will change everything – but don’t expect it to happen overnight. Rather, expect a slow, steady upward slope, and then a hockey stick. The world you thought you knew will gradually start to shift, and unless you’re paying attention, it will pass you by. 

In 2025, Remember: There Is No Finish Line in Technology

I spent most the the holiday break working on the outline for my forthcoming book, "The Spatial Race." January 1 was my first official writing day, and in only a short period of time, I've managed to cover a decent amount of ground and circle back around to a profound idea -- in tech, as in running, there really is no finish line.

As a distance runner, this seems almost counter-intuitive. Of course there is a finish line -- you do the miles or the time, you cross it, and someone gives you a medal and a snack. But the issue is that for many runners, that finish line is only the start. More than once, I've finished a race, eaten my banana, gotten in the car or on the train to go home, and opened my phone and registered for another race. There's always something else to run. The finish line is only when you cannot physically move anymore.

In technology, everyone seems to want a finish line, despite the fact that it simply doesn't exist. Bloggers LOVE to say tech has failed because it wasn't adopted fast enough, or it made mistakes, or didn't solve their exact problem. Waymo gets in an accident and people talk about banning it; a human driver mows down a massive crowd on Bourbon Street and only a few days later the street has been hosed down and reopened and no one has said anything about outlawing cars. ChatGPT returns an incorrect result and people call for Sam Altman's head; turn on any cable news show and someone will cheerfully spread lies while the panel nods along.

That's because we seem to have this huge desire for things to be done and finished and set, despite that never being the case. It took sixteen years from the introduction of the Macintosh for over half of households to have computers. And over those years, and the 25 following, computers evolved and changed and grew. The same can be said for phones, or headsets, or chatbots, or any other device.

And when exactly is a technology considered finished? Many of us are used to Zoom calls, but my friend who just bought a new house is wasting an entire day driving to her bank because they only do in person closings for...reasons? I guess they just shut down during Covid? So is video calling dead because a certain group of dinosaurs won't use it? What exactly is the benchmark here?

This is a roundabout way of saying that in 2025, I hope we all resolve to forget the idea of linear timelines and starts and ends in technology. I taped a podcast recently where the host called Google Glass a failure -- but versions of that exact technology are being released to great fanfare now. Sales of the Vision Pro have been slow initially -- but who knows what the device will become in the future. AI is getting better and smarter every day and will continue to evolve.

Transparently, I'm as guilty of this as anyone, at least in my own life. I've always tended to disregard what was in front of me for the next thing, dutifully climbing the mountain and racking up the honors and awards in hopes of some nebulous future state. But this year, I resolve to be more present and not worry so much about where the next thing will get me -- I'd rather stop looking for the finish line and just enjoy the run.

And With That, the 2024 Season Comes to a Close

Well, that was a (mostly) fun one.

Sure, I'd be happier if everyone was working from a Vision Pro and if the Meta Orion glasses were stocking ready for the holidays, rather than a few years away. And I'd be elated if all the companies building these headsets would commit in a real, sustainable way to funding content creators, rather than launching and killing funds. But 2024 did see several tentpole moments in the XR space, with the Vision Pro coming to market earlier this year, Pico releasing quality headsets in the fall; Meta announcing Orion at Connect; and Google and Samsung closing the year with a new headset launch. The fact that all these companies continue to invest in new hardware at least is a sign that they are taking the market seriously and believe that it has room for growth.

On the AI front, there were insane advances, but the market got super frothy (not everything is an AI company, folks) and there's still a huge delta between what AI can actually do and what people think it can do. I will say I'm using ChatGPT as a search engine at this point, pretty much entirely replacing Google, but there's still a long way to go. It's useful for brainstorming and first drafts and iterating on creative work, but you still need someone to know how to prompt the machine and come up with the ideas in the first place. Still, it's coming, and it's up to us to make sure that we use it to benefit humanity and create better and safer working conditions.

For me personally, 2024 was pretty excellent. Every year I create a spreadsheet of goals and objectives and make sure my actions and how I spend my time aligns around those. I'm certainly not perfect (Netflix happens, as does having to smile and nod and tolerate people who are not acting in highest and best) but overall I've managed to stay on target. I'll miss a few (yet another year where I don't magically turn into Alison Roman in the kitchen), but generally I'm pretty happy with things.

A few highlights:

JFK Memento went on an INSANE award streak, racking up 26 awards and nominations this year! It won Best Art or Film at the Auggies, Best Heritage Experience at the European XR Awards for at Stereopsia, Best in the World at the QLD XR Festival, and of course, was a finalist for an Emmy. So proud to have been an executive producer on this piece and what a ride it was!

Another piece I executive produced, Masters of Light, won the Crystal Owl for Best Single-Player Game at the European XR Awards and was nominated for the Unity Awards for the Best Social Impact Project.

Working with Virti, I led workshops and directed VR pieces for Amazon, Houston Methodist, GLP Learning, Intermountain Health, Frontier Communications, and the Calgary Flames, among others. I also spoke at several conferences, including SXSW, the Scandinavian Creative AI Summit, Learning Technologies, and Augmented World Expo.

I continued teaching with CalTech, New Mexico State University, and the Fast Future Executive, and co-authored a chapter in the Fast Future Blur book, which was released on Wiley this spring.

In non-work related goals, I ran five marathons and one ultra-marathon, visited eight new countries, read 87 books, saw lots of art and ate at a ton of great restaurants. I spent lots of time with friends enjoying everything the New York has to offer.

So what's on tap for 2025? Hopefully, more of the same -- I'm always looking for projects to advise and produce and new clients for Virti to help. I'm also looking for speaking gigs, teaching opportunities, and I think might be the year I finally turn that book proposal I've been noodling on forever into something real.

I'd love to hear what your highlights were, personally, professionally, and in terms of headsets, immersive content, and bots. Happy holidays, happy new year, and here's to an exciting 2025!

Can AI Help Us Finally Focus?

Back in the day, many people followed the same career trajectory -- finish formal schooling, get a job at a company, and move up through the ranks, eventually retiring with a gold watch and pension. But nowadays, with the exception of a few industries, our career paths include zigs and zags and detours and upskilling and reskilling and even switching industries. And for many of us, there are no guides to how to get ahead and get to a place of security.

What this looks like, at least for some of us, is trying to do everything. I feel like I've thrown so much spaghetti at various walls that I could feed a major Italian city for a week, and while some of it has stuck, plenty of it hasn't -- and that leaves me frustrated and tired and on the verge of burnout at times. The other major issue is that many industries operate on a scarcity model, and people gatekeep information about how they rose through the ranks and just give vague advice to new folks.

The system is clearly broken, and all of the spreadsheets to organize our goals can't save us. But can AI? Imagine if you could feed five profiles into an AI and have it spit back a step by step look where you are falling short and give you a guide to catching up. Want a certain role or opportunity? AI could tell you not just where to look but exactly who to target.

Right now, many of us are operating on a "spray and pray" model. We try to do everything and reach everyone just to give ourselves a sense of forward movement. But when you really look at it, most of it adds up to nothing but busywork. Not to mention the amount of busywork most of us are already doing that takes us out of our zones of genius -- and this goes double for many women, who have to not just do all their work-related busywork but also remember Aunt Sue's birthday and little Timmy's dentist appointment.

But can smart new models solve this? An AI could scrape my calendar and put together a list of possible cards and gifts for Aunt Sue -- all I have to do is hit "accept" and type a quick personalized message. AI could control my schedule and just send me a calendar note to make sure to take the kids to the dentist -- and AI could also monitor if my partner is splitting the work with me.

And rather than having fifty meetings, forty-nine of which go nowhere, AI can help me target exactly who to speak with, and how to reach them. Buyers won't be spammed with useless offers and sellers will have more success.

We live in an age of information overload, and what we really need to simplify and strip things down. If AI can help us laser in, that will leave us all better off.

Are Human Powered Robots The Solution We've Been Searching For?

Every time someone presents a humanoid robot prototype, one of the first comments is almost always something to the effect of "it's just a robot powered by a human in a VR headset!" But while this is normally presented as a "gotcha!" the concept is actually extremely powerful, and could solve a whole host of problems while creating new jobs at scale.

Here in the US, for example, copious amounts of digital ink has been spilled about the issues many young men are having gaining and keeping employment. Traditionally "male" jobs have been outsourced, and for reasons far too complicated to enumerate here, men have not gone to work in female-coded fields. So what is left is a swathe of the population left adrift and angry. But if there's anything that is a common thread among many of them, it's that many of them are tech-savvy and especially interested in video games. Hence, a solution.

These new robots, powered by humans, can create jobs that can be done anywhere -- a huge boon for people in rural areas with limited job opportunities. The user could power a robot delivery vehicle, for instance -- there are already food delivery robots in LA, and they could be scaled to any dense urban area. The robots could be programmed to only go a certain speed and stay on sidewalks (unlike IRL delivery drivers in NYC) and if a robot gets hit by a bus, it's a little bit of a bummer, but obviously nowhere near as awful as a human getting hit.

Robots can clean houses and office buildings as well -- humans who had those jobs can now work from a comfy chair in a home or office space, as opposed to putting stress and strain on their actual bodies. Robots can pick shelves in warehouses and pack and load trucks, all powered by people.

This model can even be the full realization of gig work -- a college student with a few hours in between classes can pop on a headset and make some deliveries and a few extra bucks. The current labor shortage we face will be solved because these tasks can be done by someone anywhere in the world, allowing people in underserved countries to earn a living and rise into the middle class.

We are a ways off from this becoming a reality, but it could be here sooner than you think. And as weird as it might be at first, eventually we'll all be working alongside human powered robots.

What the Oprah AI Special Got Right

In 1995, Bill Gates went on the David Letterman show to explain the concept of the internet and spin out this vision as to why it would shape the future. It's a fascinating and funny clip to rewatch almost thirty years on, but what is truly amazing is just how much Gates got right, even when the vast majority of the tech was so nascent it seemed to exist in the realm of science fiction.

I thought about this clip when I watched Gates on the Oprah Winfrey special about AI that aired last week. I have no doubt we will watch the show in ten years and it will feel like a quaint time capsule, capturing a time before a shift happened, when no one was quite sure what exactly was going on. Standing on stark contrast to the Jon Stewart story on AI that I ripped apart a few months ago, the Oprah piece was fair, balanced, and nuanced -- there was no fearmongering, but there were smart and legitimate questions about the need for regulation and oversight.

In the first interview, Sam Altman stated that AI is "the future of the internet," and he's right. This technology is already powering and will continue to power the way we live our digital lives, and done correctly, will make them better. We can offload administrative work that's not the best use of our time (I have to file expenses later today and am frankly dreading it); we can get smarter and better results, and we can co-create content. AI won't be a bogeyman; it will just be the thing that helps you write a meeting summary more quickly so you can get on with your day.

AI misinformation and scams were also raised as topics, but there are two points to consider. In an age when a vice-presidential candidate can make up racist stories out of whole cloth and share them on social media, it seems a bit rich to freak out about AI. After all, we can just spread the lies ourselves. And on the subject of AI spam calls, Congress and phone companies could fix that easily - but the telemarketing lobby has poured millions into making sure that doesn't happen. Eventually there will be enough of an incentive to solve this problem, but inaction isn't the fault of AI, it's the fault of people who choose not to act.

My biggest takeaway from all this is that for those of us who believe in this technology, we need to start telling better stories. I spoke at the Scandinavian Creative AI Summit last week, and was totally blown away by Nick Law's presentation on how the pendulum in tech has swung so far towards the technical and almost entirely away from creative. This was the secret sauce of Apple back in the day, and OpenAI and other platforms should pay attention. AI powered tools for law enforcement could be seen as scary -- or they could make our cities safer and raise enough revenue to keep libraries and community centers open. It's all down to how we talk about it.

Ten years from now, when my AI has finished all my boring work and I've spent time doing what I like, it'll be fun to knock off for the day, pop on my leisure headset, and give this a re-watch.