Across the board, I see the signs.

Roles are changing with artificial intelligence! You don’t need software engineers anymore! All hail the rise of the Super IC! AI means that you’ll have a product manager, engineer, and designer all in one role! Build a completely artificial friend because your emotional needs aren’t met by any of the humans in your life!

We’re falling down a rabbit hole where tech is losing the thread of human connection. Or maybe that’s just how it feels, being a few years out of the metaverse space. Which, for all of it’s ups and downs, was a lot of very passionate people who shared a love of connecting others together.

I’ve written about the fact that reality is subjective, and we each live within our own. Our brains are immensely talented generation engines, and now we can do even more with software than ever before. I love it. And I hate what it’s doing to me. I’ve never felt as professionally lonely as I do now.

I’ve got a great team. They’re all heads down working on their own projects, and sometimes we overlap for a brief moment. We cancelled our standing team meetings in December and they haven’t come back yet. Some days, I get to have a conversation with one person.

I have a great manager. I feel really supported – during the one hour that I get per week interfacing with them. But they’re spread thin too, and our asynchronous conversations have large time gaps between them. There is virtually no one on my team to give me regular, sustained, and cumulative feedback about my work.

I worry that this is a sign of what to come. Humans are social creatures, and generative AI creates this intoxicating, high-pressure gold mine of “productivity” that companies are foaming at the mouth to adopt. Why have a team to build a product, bringing together rich tapestries of experiences and realities and passions, when you can just get someone who is really good at prompt engineering to get all of those, rolled into one?

The field of product management for me has always been a fuzzy-at-best field. Product managers are a team glue of sorts, understanding how to talk to people to understand their problems, and imagine solutions that can be created. Innovation product management is a unique challenge in that you often have to paint the context of the entire future around the work that you are doing. In the past, teams would come up with a shared vision and understanding of what the world could be. Today, this work seems largely offloaded to AI. Here are 250 podcasts that we analyzed from the twenty CEOs who will most benefit from their AI strategy working! They must be right!

I spent almost a decade working in social virtual reality because I needed to understand how people come together in spaces. What makes “us”, “us”? How does an individual fit within the context of a broader unit, and balance the needs of the self against the needs of their broader community?

The workplace isn’t a family unit by any means, but it used to be a big part of my general community. I’ve been really fortunate in that I’ve been able to work on mission-centered, open-source teams throughout my career. But I worry about what will happen when the workplace becomes a bunch of individuals, each independently going out into the world and making up their own versions of reality and only then coming back together to see who they want on their team.

I miss working on things with people. It doesn’t have to be this hard.