Adrianna TanI spent the last 2 weeks on the east coast. I had a bit of a life and career epiphany there.
1. I was in a meeting with the chief digital officers of two of the biggest museums in the world. Someone had a table of ‘skills you need as a CIO / CTO / CPO’. It told me something quite clear I’ve known for a while. I am not interested in being an executive, anywhere.
2. I feel that I’ve reached the end of the road in my product career. It’s just not that interesting to me anymore. For the past 10+ years I’ve done this at startups, government, nonprofit. I’m very good at what I do but it no longer brings me joy.
3. When I was speaking at IAPP at the AI Governance conference in Boston last week, I thought: I’ve found a way to be heard and to speak for marginalized voices in the AI conversation. I told a room full of execs: maybe you don’t care about racism, specifically, but imagine the New York Times test: your company rolled out a chatbot, without safety guardrails and without thought, without asking if it’s even the right tool, and it says a bunch of racist things. That impacts you in a meaningful way even if maybe you don’t personally care or see the value in caring. (Depressing but I’ve learned how to speak to a specific audience)
4. I’m thinking of opportunities and grad school, and I think the next decade of my working life will be spent in the questions: what happens to people when computers happen to them? How do we know when the machine got something wrong and what can we do about it?
5. I was asked to speak on the panel because I actually have some real world experience in measuring and writing about 4. That’s on top of the normal product work I’ve done. I’m now trying to figure out how to meaningfully grasp at these threads.
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)
Roy Ridin' With Biden #BLM 🇺🇸
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the