Happy Tuesday! We’re back. Don’t make a big deal out of it, will you.
One idea, one lesson, one question.
Idea: AI can do everything, except make you interesting
My friend Joe is a proper writer. He writes every day, gets paid for it, wins awards for it. You know the type.
He’s also the person I know who hates AI the most.
He has told me that the only time he uses AI is to filter. If an AI generates an idea that he was considering, he instantly rejects it, because “if AI can come up with it, it’s not good enough”.
For him, he’s right. Most of what we see AI do is churn out writing, and LLMs are built to produce the average. Slop, if you prefer. To a 10/10 writer, average isn’t helpful, useful or welcome. It’s insulting!
Whilst I never use AI to generate ideas, or write my first drafts, I’m not Joe. I use AI every day, for most things. Most of us aren’t 10/10 at anything, so AI can make us better at lots of things we do.
I call myself a “proud generalist” - a real life Jack of all trades. Using AI for writing would drag Joe down from a 10/10 to a 7/10, but if used correctly, AI lifts me from a 6 or 7/10 to a 8 or 9 at a dozen things, and from a 0 or 1/10 to a 5 or 6 for a dozen more.
In other words, AI is amazing for generalists, and rubbish for specialists.
Before the start of this year, I had never built an app or developed a product, and hadn’t even considered the remotest concept of some of the path’s I am now taking steps down. Because of the AI tools I have at my disposal, I have gone from a 0/10 coder to being able to turn my ideas into real, functioning, compelling apps. I have been able to produce research on topics that have opened doors to some of the most productive and interesting conversations I’ve ever had.
These research might not be 10/10, and the apps are certainly of a lower standard than if they were produced by a real developer, but they exist now, and that’s entirely because of AI.
As someone who has lots of ideas, my life has been changed through the ability to turn my 7/10 attributes into 9/10s and my 0/10s into 5s. For someone with more ideas than skill, that is huge.
It’s also not enough.
AI can do everything, except make me interesting.
One of the apps I’ve built might be the biggest technological breakthrough of the decade. You’ll never know, because nobody has seen it. If I put it online tomorrow, nobody would give a shit. That wouldn’t be because it’s bad, it would be because nobody noticed.
For our entire lives, the gap between having an idea and making it real was the broadest one to breach. The winners were the ones who could close that gap. AI has now closed it for almost everyone.
Ideas are plentiful, AI has collapsed the time and cost to build those ideas into reality, but no matter how cool or interesting the products your now building are, the only way to ensure success is to make sure it gets distributed. Those who control the channels are the ones who win.
The bottleneck has moved downstream, to distribution. Ideas are cheap and building is cheap. Attention isn’t. The channel is now worth more than the product.
And attention goes to people who are interesting. That’s the one thing you can’t prompt your way into.
Lesson: Boredom is failure
The usual view is that the opposite of success is failure. I think it’s boredom. Failure at least means you tried. Boredom means you didn’t.
What would change if you stopped trying to succeed and just tried not to be bored? Would that be an easier path to fulfilment? Maybe you’d take more risk, start new things and end up more interesting. Which, if the above idea is right, might be the path to success anyway…
Question: If AI takes my job, am I going to have to pretend to like art?
The most optimistic case for our AI future is that the machines take over all of our menial work and tasks, freeing us up for more enriching things. I visited the Guggenheim museum last week, and came away thinking we already have too much time on our hands.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the art was very imposing and impressive. A lot of it was pretentious, and a bit weird. I kept asking myself, who has decided that I should like this?
So in a world where none of us have any real work to do, will we all be drowning in art we are going to have to pretend we like?
Thanks for reading, see you next week.
Jack ✌🏻❤️