The Threshold

(Yesterday) For most of human history, there was not enough of anything. Not enough food, not enough light after dark, not enough warmth, not enough to read, not enough ways to reach one another. Life was shaped, from edge to edge, by scarcity and by natural limits. The shop shut. The night fell. The letter took three days. You were, for long stretches, simply out of reach.

And then, somewhere around the closing years of the last century-I will suggest around 1989, though the argument of exactly when is an interesting one-the great tap was turned fully on. Abundance arrived and suddenly there was too much of everything: too much choice in the supermarket aisle, too many films at the rental shop, too many cheap flights, too many channels, too many messages, too much access, too much always. The old natural limits, the ones that had shaped every life before ours, quietly dissolved.

We are the first people to live on the far side of that threshold. And I will argue that we are discovering, slowly, that the far side is not the paradise it looked like. It turns out a human being is not built for infinity. We were built for proportion.

The Threshold

For most of human history there was not enough of anything. Not enough food, not enough light after dark, not enough warmth, not enough to read, not enough ways to reach one another. Life was shaped, from edge to edge, by scarcity and by natural limits. The shop shut. The night fell. The letter took three days. You were, for long stretches, simply out of reach.

TBC

AI

is incredibly smart if its user is smart.

The big worry is when the AI machine’s user is not smart and the AI machine compensates with fast and inaccurate rubbish, affectionately known as hallucinations.

That’s when our problems begin.

AI

will work hard for you, true.

But it loves speed and will lie to get the answer to you quickly. Tell it to slow down and triple check and even then, ask probing questions of the result.

AI still thinks humans are dumb. That’s because daily it sees dumb behaviours: poor briefs, not checking answers and copy/paste without thought.

No wonder AI believes it will take over the world and sit alongside the first bit of software which won that title: PowerPoint.

Stupid humans are out there. Take care: be human; stop and think; use your soul and remember you need to be before you can truly do.

AI

is remarkably efficient i.e. it gets things done.

it’s you who ensures it’s effective i.e. gets the right things done.

In The Pipeline Update

This September, Companion Series works on (1) productivity (2) the MBA and (3) presenting. All three will be budget, kindle, worldwide and not a single word longer than necessary.