Turning the Tables on AI

In my experience, the most useful approaches to AI are:

1. Ask clearly bounded questions, where you can easily inspect the results.


2. Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Instead, challenge it to broaden your options.


3. Take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t have feelings, and use its honesty to get useful feedback.

Use the tools if you must. But a better use of your extra energy — such as it is — is to live the gap between human and AI. Can an AI gather, synthesize, calculate, and even speculate faster than we can? Yes. Can it do all those things better than we can? Maybe. Can it be more interesting, unexpected, artful, or meaningful? Well that’s just a matte... See more

I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate. I believe the real game changers are going to have very little to do with plain content generation. L

... See more

A lot of the focus on AI use, especially in the corporate world, has been stuck in what I call the “automation mindset” - viewing AI primarily as a tool for speeding up existing workflows like email management and meeting transcription. This perspective made sense for earlier AI models, but it's like evaluating a smartphone solely on its ability to... See more