Daniel Santos

Since the 1950s, discussions about AI have largely revolved around a big, tantalizing question: What can machines do, and where might they hit a wall? Will they ever truly think, understand, or maybe even become conscious? Could they reach the so-called “heights of human intelligence”? And then there’s that shadowy question looming in the

But there’s a deeper, unasked question that lingers in the background, one introduced by the unconventional thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti in the early 1980s: “If the machine can take over everything man can do, and do it still better than us, then what is a human being, what are you?”

By now most people have heard the advice about PowerPoint: Keep it simple; don’t use a slide deck as a substitute for notes (by, say, listing the bullet points you’ll discuss—those are best put on note cards); and don’t repeat out loud words that are on the slide. Not only is reciting slides a variation of the teleprompter problem—“Oh, no, she’s

Writing fiction often contains an element of self-hypnosis, of flying in the dark.

Given that the human brain is wired to learn and retain information through stories, turning your quest for progress into a story is an effective way to get noticed and be understood. The story spine will help you create and tell this story well.

If the opposite of your strategy is a bad strategy, then your strategy is not a good strategy. Arguably, you’re just avoiding stupidity.