COOL ROBOT! CAN IT GO DOWN THE STAIRS?
My dad didn’t know any bedtime stories. He put me to bed with medical journals about obscure diseases and tales of the great Raymond Loewy. Somehow, it was the Loewy stories that kept me up. Raymond Loewy, the "father of industrial design," pioneered streamlining. His designs include trains, the Greyhound Bus, Air Force One and the Coke bottle.
His philosophy, MAYA, stood for "Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable." The idea is to push your target audience to be curious about something new, but not so far that it feels creepy or alien. It's why we laugh at Zoom fails and the evil robot in RoboCop that can’t walk down the stairs…
We're human; we will always try to apply logic to situations even when they don’t require it.
In 2024, as AI becomes less of a toy and more of tool, I’ll think about MAYA. About the importance of pushing ideas forward while keeping them grounded in all the undefinable ways that connect us as humans.
Midjourney is mind blowing. But when we see a guy with eyes for ears we are ALWAYS going to laugh. AI might be able to fix the eyes thing. But it will never understand why we laugh.
TAKEAWAY
As AI becomes less of a toy and more of tool, we need to keep pushing ideas grounded in all the undefinable ways that connect us as humans.
