Notes

Intermediate thinking between essays. Drafts and observations from inside organisations adopting AI.

  1. AI works best at the extremes

    AI works best at the extremes

    Two things happened while I listened to a podcast yesterday.

    The host said "listen to your body" — and an ad for Holland & Barrett spliced in, opening with a guided meditation, then selling supplements. Later she talked about sex and power and money. The next ad was for erectile dysfunction treatment.

    The same episode, AI-transcribed, gave me sound effects in brackets. Footsteps. A door closing. The texture of the room. Things a deaf or hard of hearing listener/reader wouldn't otherwise get.

    AI is at its best at the extremes, and somehow useless in the middle. ==Hyper-targeted manipulation on one end, real accessibility on the other.==

    The question isn't whether to use AI. It's which extreme we feed. Or maybe rather how we can get from the extremes to more of a middle ground.

  2. Using AI for inefficient tasks while preserving deep thinking

    Don't use AI to do the hard stuff for you. Use it to do the things you're inefficient at because computers are designed poorly.

    What are the things where you end up spending a lot of time just clicking boxes, copy-pasting things back and forth, or looking through piles and piles of information? Make it bring you your own thinking. Make it bring you other people's thinking. Make it lay it out for you.

    Then you get to do the putting together of puzzle pieces. You get to do the deep thinking. That's where you excel. That's where you've built your experience and your career. That's where you get a lot of joy from. I know I do.

    So how can you build systems where AI scaffolds the deep thinking process for you, but you still have to do the thinking? It might do some background research. It might surface somethings. It might pull out specific sections from an article, from something you wrote earlier, from rough notes, so you can recompose them.

    Don't fall for the promise that you don't have to do the thinking anymore.