In times where AI is creating significant change, upheaval, and buzz—from changing jobs to impacting the stock market as seen with DeepSeek's first public open source model release this week—I wanted to use mythology to help understand what we are experiencing. Every time there is a new AI breakthrough, the world is understandably abuzz with excitement, fear, and speculation. In a world focused on technical breakthroughs, it's the perfect time to ask ourselves what all of this means for humans, and specifically for this Substack, what it means for the products we build and for the Product discipline itself. It's a big topic, and this week's guest had so many great examples that I highly recommend watching the video to get all the layers.
I don't think there is any Product person who understands myths and mythology better than the brilliant and philosophical John Stokvis, a Product leader who has built products at Twitter, Groupon, and Indiegogo. I asked him what myth he felt best described how AI is disrupting our world and industry. His answer surprised me, bringing new angles to a myth I thought I knew well:
"Pandora's box - the story of opening up the box and all the horrors of the world coming out of it. And then left behind is hope.
So there's this idea contained in the story that both Pandora and the jar are made of the same material, [clay], which is fascinating when you think about AI. That seems like a really important detail. It's literally us. It's trained on all of the world's words and images. It's contained in there. So this idea that it is some oracle or super intelligence... Maybe it's actually just all of us. It's made of our stuff. And when we open it up, all of the horrors of the world come out, but also the hope is contained in there as well.
So it's really about understanding that this thing we're working with now is just us. It's just humans in a different form."
(Author note: if you watch the video, you’ll understand the context that the actual translation is “jar,” not “box”.)
This really struck me, because AI truly is the best and worst of us, and similar to John, I also like to believe there is a seed of hope within all of the chaos. Those working in tech today lived through the internet's disruption of our lives and have seen both the gifts and curses it left in its wake. One of the consequences is that we're seeing industry changes shift in unexpected ways, with entire sectors being impacted week by week. Living in a world where the internet and AI are shaping things together, I asked John his thoughts on the disruption and what will survive.
"It feels like we're in this psychic earthquake where everything foundational is shaking and crumbling and we're looking around like 'what is stable?' And the answer is nothing because everything was built up over hundreds of years. Everything around us, from the way we organize society to the way we communicate information, is built on the premise of information being dispersed through something built out of the printing press - books, newspapers, film, TV, and radio. These are all iterations of that idea that if you control the printing press, you can endlessly replicate stuff. And power comes from having the ability to distribute it. The farther you distribute it, the more expensive it gets…..
But the internet is fundamentally different because time and space don't matter - you can effectively reach someone in Bangladesh as easily as someone next door. Anyone can do that faster, easier, cheaper. The cost of distribution is effectively zero. So all of these institutions that are built on distribution costing something don't make sense anymore. They have to crumble or be reorganized or evolve in a different way. But we'll come up with some new ways of [organizing and distributing] based on the assumptions of now that the internet exists, now that this technology allows for easy distribution and anyone can connect with anyone anywhere at any time."
(Author note: John would want me to mention that the original concept about institutions being built around the printing press belongs to Ben Thompson of Stratechery, but it's incredibly relevant, and John did a brilliant job explaining it.)
It leaves us wondering what our world will look like as AI continues to mature. While I can't predict the future, with o3 from OpenAI being released this year and impressive entrants to the market like DeepSeek, I know we can expect our roles as product managers to evolve. Long-term, that may mean fewer product roles with completely different titles. Short-term, I'm seeing product people diving headfirst into prototyping and early product development. John is a fan of Cursor and has been using it to test his own product ideas.
"I'm reading BlueSky and Twitter threads. And I'm like, I want to be able to [turn that thread into an easy to read] essay here and I want to write about it. I want to grab the essay, but try to highlight it all and then click copy and paste. I get all the other junk. I get the date stamps and the, and the ad names. So I thought, it'd be nice to have a button that I could just click that says copy thread.
And I was like, let's just see if I can do this. And it took me like, 35 minutes to build a Chrome extension, just like telling it what to do the way, the way I would have told an engineer, like, okay, I want it to look like this and I want to have this color and I want it to be able to do this."
I was curious what John thought about what changes AI and AI product tools mean for the future of product, especially as these tools become more capable and powerful.
"I prefer this idea of a metaphor an artist where you think about artists Van Gogh or Hokusai or these amazing artists throughout history who both were incredibly skilled. They were executing, they had the talent, but then they also had something to say.
And you compare them to the folks who had talent, other impressionists, other woodblock printers who were good, but they just didn't have much to say.
And then you think about the people who did have something to say, but they weren't born into the right family or they just were too busy surviving to develop oil painting skills. You don't hear from them at all, but they had the ideas.
And so what art did the world miss out on simply because the barrier to entry to expressing those ideas was too high?
And that's what generative AI will do. In general, but in the workplace is that the people who have ideas now to execute them, the barriers are lower. It's not zero, but it's much, much lower. And so there's going to be a lot of crap, of course, but there's going to be more good ideas that come out that just could never have gotten over that threshold.
I do agree. I do think we will have companies that will do what they tried to do with certain design and research teams where they're "oh, we don't need as many of them." And I think they might see "oh, we don't need as many engineers or we don't need as many PMs." But I don't know if they can completely get rid of them."
And John also pointed out, there could be a period of companies experimenting to figure out how many people they actually need to build successful products:
"There's going to be a lot of upheaval and trial and error of what does that team look like? How big are certain departments? But I think it will be hard given how many people are trained in certain areas to get those skills at that level that to have those people be creative, even if the execution barriers are lower, you can't just replace them with other people who maybe haven't - they don't have that creative muscle as strong in certain areas to just say 'oh, we don't need any designers and we don't need any engineers. We don't need any PMs.'"
Additionally, he thinks new companies born in this new era of AI with people who are open to experimenting and being creative with what this could mean will thrive:
"New companies will form built on those assumptions and they'll probably be stronger and faster and nimbler than the ones that are trying to kind of port themselves over into this new world."
If AI is well explained by the Pandora's box myth—in that Pandora was made from the same material as the box, and AI is made from the same material as us—how much can it replace us? Or are its monsters and seeds of hope its own separate creation? Time will quickly tell if there truly is a seed of hope for the future of Product, even if it requires the discipline to bloom into something very different from how we know it today.
There are even more myths, metaphors, and worthwhile ideas in the video. It was such a pleasure having this conversation with John, and I want you to experience the full conversation as well. Thank you, John, for making the time to have this conversation for my Substack!
Stay curious.
Anne
P.S.: I’m a fractional product leader and consultant, and I have some availability to partner with a new client to build great products. If you’re looking for a AI savvy product leader who can amplify themselves with AI, I’ll have availability soon.
P.S.S.: The fifth live rendition of Jumpstart Your AI Career on Pearson/O’Reilly will be February 24. Register here.
P.S.S.S.: I also coach PMs how to 10x themselves using AI in the highest leverage ways, while feeling more empowered and less stressed. I also do corporate workshops on this as well. If you’re interested in working together, please reach out.
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