How does AI change the way we think?

1. Essences vs. sequences

In a pre-AI world, whether you were building software or teams, or writing books or marketing plans, you needed to strip the problems you were facing down to their bare elements—their essence—and work your way forward from there. In building software, you need to define your core user and the problem you want to solve; in writ

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4. Sculpting vs. gardening

If the raw material for creative work becomes sequences and intuition instead of rules , essences , and processes, how you do your work is going to look significantly different. It will look more like gardening as opposed to sculpting .

In a pre-AI world, creative work was similar to sculpting. Whether you were coding or writ

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5. Explanations vs. predictions

The search for rules and essences, the obsession with process and sculpting, is ultimately a search for explanations . Explanations are the holy grail of the West—they are what we search for in science, business, and life. Consider the questions we tend to ask any successful person: “Can you explain how you got here? Wha

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2. Rules vs. patterns

Another way to think of essences versus sequences, especially when it comes to intellectual and creative tasks, is as a shift from the search for rules to a search for patterns .

In a pre-AI world, you needed to define the rules of the game you were playing—to think from first principles and apply them to your circumstances. In a p

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3. Process vs. intuition

If you are searching for sequences instead of essences , you are doing that so that you can build up intuition in place of process .

In a pre-AI world, in order to build an application, you needed to reduce your idea to a process—a set of rules by which your software would operate to accomplish the goal you set. Sometimes this w

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