tl;dr: I helped make a magazine! –> Download the Future of AI here

I fell in love with magazines as a young adult. In college, I contributed to the campus literary magazine, the school newspaper, and an upstart leftist zine. Those experiences, plus the time I’d spent writing for my high school’s student newspaper, convinced me that journalism would be a good career bet.

That choice was less ironic then than it seems today.

I was graduating with a degree in religion (not theology, but an even less practical major focused on modern poststructuralist thought and the ways religious thinking creeps into even very secular contexts). In the spring semester of my senior year and the summer after graduation, it became embarrassingly obvious that I had picked the wrong field of study — if I wanted to work as anything other than an ice cream scooper, that is. I had enjoyed the work I did on those school publications and considered myself a pretty decent writer, so I decided to focus on finding a job with a newspaper or magazine.

Fortunately, within a few months of graduation, I managed to land an entry-level job as an editorial assistant at a magazine about personal computers. While I hadn’t majored in computer science or even taken any computer classes (that would have been far too practical for my delicate, artsy sensibilities), I had been messing around with computers since my early teens. I relished the idea of combining my interest in writing with my love of investigating new technology.

That job proved to be one of the biggest strokes of good fortune in my life. For the next two decades, I got to be a journalist, writer, and editor covering a long string of tech revolutions: the triumph of personal computers, the rise of client-server computing in business, the explosive growth of the internet, the appearance and eventual dominance of social media, the mobile revolution, the dawn of cryptocurrency, and the rise of health tech. I spent a lot of time reviewing new gadgets and writing about their impact on our lives, society, and business. I spent even more time learning how new technologies affect the way large businesses work, and what enterprise technologies mean for our changing economy and world.

It wasn’t just the subject matter that was so exciting. I learned early on that there’s real magic in the collective work of a staff collaborating to create a magazine. What starts out as words typed into a document become much more compelling when those words have been edited and copyedited by professionals. Then there’s the excitement of seeing what you wrote in the page proofs, laid out on big 11×17 printouts, pinned to a wall, showing what your articles will look like in the magazine’s style, with professional photos alongside them. And finally, there’s the thrill of seeing the magazine appear in print, a physical object, with the faint smell of ink still clinging to it, filled with photos and charts and words, some of which you wrote — and your name in ink alongside them!

Magazines are magic not only for those who create them. For readers, a good magazine is also a kind of mini-miracle, delivering far more than expected, like a magician producing a flock of doves out of a hat. For a few dollars you can buy something that’s almost a book, with an abundance of writing, photos, and ideas from many different perspectives. A good magazine provides food for thought, news, and information. And it also helps its audience define itself as part of a collective: WIRED readers, Vogue readers, Nation readers. A good magazine always contains far more than you could ever read, as anyone who has ever subscribed to the New Yorker knows. A good magazine should feel like a great deal: An abundance for a pittance.

Although my career coincided with the broad decline of journalism as an industry and profession, technology journalism remained vibrant and somewhat insulated from the field’s overall malaise for much of my career. I couldn’t have been luckier.

Since leaving full-time journalism in 2015, I’ve worked with many companies doing exciting things in technology, helping them to refine and tell their stories in a variety of media. But I have sometimes missed the excitement of working with a team of other writers, designers, and photographers to create that magic of abundance that I always loved in a good magazine. Although I often work with teams to create major media products, they’re only rarely in the shape of a magazine.

You can imagine my excitement, then, when I had the opportunity to collaborate on a magazine for one of my clients this year. Mayfield, a prestigious Silicon Valley VC firm, was cosponsoring Imagination in Action, an event that would attract hundreds of people to Google HQ and to Stanford for a two-day festival of ideas and discussion about the potential of AI. Mayfield wanted to create a tangible asset that they could use to amplify the value of that sponsorship and help the ideas discussed at the conference reach a wider audience. I encouraged them to think of this not so much as an ebook, but as a digital magazine, and that’s what we eventually produced.

Working with three experienced journalists, a talented photographer, an amazing design team — and a visionary client — was an invigorating return to the media making work I did earlier in my career.

And, like any good magazine, this one contains a wealth of perspectives. In this magazine’s nearly 60 pages, you’ll find discussions of AI’s impact on startups, investing, scientific research, hardware, consumer experiences, enterprise business models, health care, policy, and more. Some of the world’s most respected AI researchers and game-changing entrepreneurs were onstage and are quoted in these pages.

That magazine is now available! –> Download the Future of AI here

I came away from the event, and the content work we did, more persuaded than ever about the revolutionary potential of AI — particularly when it’s deployed to augment human labor and creativity, rather than to automate or replace it. Augmentation vs automation was a recurring theme throughout the conference, and I’ve found it to be a useful lens for examining AI technologies since then.

And, to be honest, I was uplifted by the sheer enthusiasm and creativity of so many of the speakers and attendees. There is a lot of amazing work being done in AI, and this magazine provides just a taste.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed helping to make it.

Much gratitude to Karen Lee at Mayfield, Terhi Ignatius at 60 North, photographer Imani Sires, and writers Antoinette Siu, Daniel Terdiman, and Greg Sandoval. I’m so proud of the work we did on this.