You wake up.
Your brain isn’t quite awake yet,
but social media already seems to be having a very productive morning.
“Here’s what you can do with AI.”
“If you don’t know this trick, you’re missing out.”
“This made me ten times more productive.”
There they are again, all lined up for the day.
You think, wow, that sounds useful.
So you try it.
And, usually, it doesn’t work quite that well.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong.
Maybe it really does work for the person who posted it.
But I suspect the simpler answer is this:
Nobody really knows yet.
We don’t really know the best way to use AI.
We don’t know exactly how to ask it for things.
We don’t know what to hand over to it,
and what we should keep doing ourselves.
It feels less like someone has discovered “the right way,”
and more like all of us are still wandering around, looking for it.
Which is why it gets a little tiring
when someone announces a new correct answer every morning.
I understand the need for impressions.
Big claims travel better.
That’s probably just how it works.
Still, the people making those claims always seem so cheerful.
“Everything has changed!”
“There’s no going back!”
“If you don’t learn this now, you’ll be left behind!”
And I find myself thinking:
Maybe the world doesn’t need to change quite so many times before breakfast.
I don’t know whether “noisy minority” is the right phrase.
Probably not.
What I want to know these days is something much less impressive.
For example: You ask AI to do something.
And the screen says:
“Thinking…”
For ten seconds. Maybe thirty.
What is a human being supposed to do then?
Roll your shoulders.
Look out the window.
Drink some water.
Close your eyes.
Think about something completely unrelated.
Instead of teaching me how to make AI faster, I’d like someone to teach me how to recover while AI is thinking.
I would read that article.
Immediately.
If AI is going to give us a little more time, maybe we don’t have to fill that time with something else.
Maybe becoming more convenient
doesn’t have to mean being able to do more things.
Maybe it could mean something smaller than that.
And better.
Maybe convenience is having a little more time in which nothing needs to happen.