Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and inspiration-harvesting—all grounded in sources we love and trust. Just as calculators shifted math from rote computation to conceptual exploration, AI can nudge creative work toward the things humans are uniquely good at: thinking and feeling deeply.
To do our best creative thinking, we need tools that seamlessly support both modes. We should be able to capture ideas effortlessly in the moment, then organize them with purpose when the time is right. This balance between seamless capture and intentionality is essential for supporting creativity.
Similarly, whenever I’m writing something and get stuck, I like to return to my private "phrases" collection, a home for sentences I find particularly resonant.
Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising agency, famously told a story about an office building where people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. Instead of spending $1 million to make the elevators 5 percent faster, they solved the problem by spending around $100 to add mirrors so people could look at themselves whi... See more
The first step in any creative journey is collecting sparks of inspiration—the ideas, quotes, images, and links you love and don't want to forget.
But here’s the thing: When you find something that resonates, its use is not always immediately apparent. A line in a song might be the seed for your next coding project or inspire the title for the book ... See more
I believe there are two plausible scenarios for the future of knowledge work. There’s one in which as machines become more human-like in their capabilities, we paradoxically become more machine-like in our pursuit of productivity, focused on efficiency and keeping busy above all else. But there’s another where we lean into ways of working that are ... See more