I’ve been thinking about AI and humanity for a while. Here are three things I think about how we humans can use AI to enhance our lives.
Writing a weekly blog post is a joy. No matter what, I must sit down and write – the discipline is essential, the writing is my happy place.
But it can also be a source of anxiety. No matter how organised I am about making a content calendar, there will always come a Friday when I just don’t have any idea what to write about.
This week, thanks to a big dose of internet serendipity, that was not the case. I read a LinkedIn post and two email newsletters, all carrying ideas that connected with each other. All of them resonated with ideas that had been wandering around my brain, looking for a place to sit and order a cold beer.
This may seem to meander a bit, but I do get to the point in the end. The central theme is one that underpins this blog series (The Sensible Woman’s Guide to AI and Content Creation), which I also highlight on the newsletter sign-up page:
What do you get in the newsletter (which comes out every second Friday)? Pointers to really good resources, along with practical examples of how to work with AI to write and edit and do research. There’s also advice about ethics and safety and bringing your whole human self to the process of working with AI. (Emphasis mine)
What did the goddess of the internet bring me?
The first thing that crossed my path was this LinkedIn post by Ethan Mollick (see my post on why you should get his newsletter here). It’s short enough to quote in full:
Many of the most important ‘prompt engineering’ skills are just management skills: clearly understanding the task to be done and what information is needed to do it; explaining the task to the AI; giving useful feedback to improve outputs; & generalizing lessons learned into a process.
Exactly, I thought – that is such a useful analogy, and one that I think a lot of people don’t employ. They don’t do the thinking work that a good manager does, breaking a task down and then working out how best to get that done, and by whom.
Fundamentally, I think, this is the mindset we need to have when dealing with Gen AI: it’s a tool to be used, over which we can exert our human skills and thought processes.
The second thing the goddess brought me
A newsletter by Oliver Burkeman, truly one of the best writers about life as it should be lived: The concept at the heart of a sane and meaningful life is something he calls aliveness – the state of being fully present in your experiences, where life feels vibrant and good.
Which brings him to AI – and his annoyance at how it is being discussed:
One thing that’s missing from those discussions is any consideration of aliveness. Yet I think it might be the key to understanding how to think and feel about AI, how to respond to it, how to integrate it into our lives or not – and how to ensure, as technology marches on, that we don’t lose sight of what really matters for a meaningfully productive life.
He says that our aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses: “We’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools.”
Burkeman acknowledges that people who need to keep food on the table might have to give up their dreams of aliveness, and placate the machines instead.
But he also believes that “aliveness is so central to meaningful human experience that there’ll always be a market for those who can cultivate it, embed it in what they create, foster it in institutions and organisations, and bring people together to experience it”.
Even if the direst predictions about AI disruption come true, he says, navigating by aliveness will still be the right choice because that’s what makes life worth living:
So you might not get to avoid major upheavals or painful sacrifices thanks to technological and economic shifts. But you’ll endure them, if you must, not out of blind panic, but in the context of navigating toward more aliveness for yourself and those you care about.
He says that proactively and thoughtfully choosing to integrate AI tools into your work (because there’s plenty going on that’s exciting) means you’re not doing so in the default assumption that they’re automatically a good thing. “Instead you’ll be doing so in the spirit of the Amish, who ask first whether a specific technology seems likely to serve their highest values, and only embrace it if it does.” (Emphasis mine)
The third thing the goddess of the internet brought me
In the latest edition of her What do we do now that we’re here newsletter, Rosie Spinks talks about the experience of parenting an almost three-year-old, and watching “the slow, incremental, and seemingly infinite process of a human brain taking shape”. This process, she says, is miraculous, much more so than the way large language models like ChatGPT “offer the sum total of written human knowledge, produced on-demand in seconds, with no emotion, morality, or context attached”.
And then she writes:
When people tell me about the cool ways they are incorporating Chat-GPT into their personal creative practice – the prompts, the iterating, and the idea generation – I smile and nod. Why do they want to do that? I wonder, genuinely confused. I now feel like a mystical witch woman who prefers to have her ideas and sentences visit her, as if by magic.
Spinks is “feeling increasingly left behind by the culture’s direction of travel. But simultaneously, I feel more and more at home in that feeling. As it all accelerates, I feel my urge to keep up dissolve. When I allow myself to take in the worst predictions about where AI’s ascent (or descent?) will take us, I become more and more convinced that being left behind is the most sane course of action.”
She writes that the reason she thinks life is worth living is because of its limitations, imperfections, constraints. “You can’t optimize it. You can’t escape it. But you can create ritual and find meaning in the act of showing up for it.”
Where does that leave us, as humans making use of AI?
There are three things I take from all of this:
1. We can and should relate to AI from the point of view of the tool-user, the craftsperson, the maker and creator.
2. We can and should play with AI, so that we can learn which parts of it can help us live better lives, which parts can bring us more aliveness. But we don’t have to try all the shiny new tools, all the time. This is not a competition.
3. We can and should remember that this is a “direction of travel” in our culture, one that is being promoted by people who possibly don’t have our best interests at heart. We should be using all our critical faculties to see how this plays out – and that means working with and understanding these tools, rather than refusing to look at them at all.
This gets to the heart of what I want to be doing with AI – using it in ways that help me live in the way that expresses my values. It’s what I hope this blog series can help you do too.
Main picture: yang 曼琪, Unsplash
This post was kindly edited by Anne Taylor, my partner in a new AI training venture.
Other things I have written
Renee’s four golden rules of artificial intelligence – So much hype, so much uncertainty, so much information about artificial intelligence. Here are some guiding principles…
Navigating AI hype: Five newsletters that will help – Everywhere you look, there’s an article about artificial intelligence. Here’s a list of the people I follow to help in navigating AI hype.
How to write a good prompt for AI – A common complaint about AI is that it just doesn’t give good answers. That’s because you are asking questions. Instead, here’s my guide to how to write a good prompt.
Why that new toy is not as shiny as you think it is – How a simple mid-year review turned into weeks of uncertainty, courtesy of shiny new object syndrome…
The who, why and how of making a content calendar – If you are marketing yourself or your business by writing regular pieces of content, you need a content calendar.
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