[musings] water flowing underground

How did I get here? Where did this come from?  Why am I the person to undertake this?

In 2017 I began to design a product that would introduce a new digital assistant to the consumer electronics market, focused on the family and home experience.  I was the VP of Design in an AI-focused consumer technology startup from the founder of Android.  Late in that year I also took paternity leave to welcome my second child into his waking world.

Creating digital assistants and devices for the family necessitates an observational and interactive intimacy that I was still trying to wrap my head around practically and ethically.  Addressing these issues while observing the growth of a new baby set off a million questions in my head.

My personal background underpin my eclectic observations and inclinations.

I am a Silicon Valley native, an engineer and designer who builds consumer tech on both sides of the Pacific.  I grew up an academically motivated white guy attending Asian-majority schools.  I spent my nights and weekends devoutly attending an Evangelical church.  I’ve spent a lifetime bouncing between Asian and West Coast WASP cultures.  I’ve similarly been bouncing between the empirical materialism of my Stanford engineering degrees and the spiritual searches for meaning of my religious upbringing and instincts.  In all of these things I have tried to be rigorously thoughtful and integrative.

So now I’m a guy who sits between (Design & Engineering) (Designed in California & Made in Taiwan) (Science & Religion) and tries to make sense of them.  “Meaning generative design” was the title of my masters thesis.

So in 2017 I was a guy who was trying to figure out how to shape the user’s experience of AI in a personal, family context while honoring our very real humanity, inclusive of cultural variety, moral variation, and spiritual breadth.

So I am in a position to recognize the personal agency for shaping these things.  For shaping the totems that carry AI into the home.  For forming the behaviors of the intelligence, its names and actions.  For governing the intrusiveness or remove of the AI presence.  For considering the cascade of ramifications for the family.

Few people get asked to shape an AI experience from scratch, nor in the context of half a decade of their existence.  I am not a pundit, I am a designer who holds his responsibilities very carefully.  But I am also all the other things: scientist engineer, spiritual seeker, father, late adopter, voracious learner.  

So now, after that company has pivoted I am ready to discuss my proto-thoughts with the public, because I think the issues I’m wrestling with are big enough that we need a more social engagement, both within the tech industry and at large.  To be clear, these are practicalities not theories, people like me (and not like me) are the ones building the character of the digital intelligence we increasingly find normative, even reliable.  The process is human and should be subject to reflection and discourse.

But the questions remained, and I have been wrestling with them as my primary occupation for some time.