Will Wally take my place?
Discussions about AI typically revolve around what tasks AI can perform or what jobs AI will take on. This is the wrong way of thinking and misses something even more important.
That’s not to say it’s completely unrelated. Write news faster thanks to Warp News AI writer WALL-Y. You’ll save 80 to 90 percent of the time it would take to do everything yourself. My current job is to find the news, edit the text, fix the cover image, and publish.
WALL-Y and I also wrote a book together.
In the year and a half that I have been working with WALL-Y, she has clearly grown. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that the entire process can be automated and high quality can be achieved at every step.
Additionally, new opportunities will arise, such as publishing news in multiple languages. Warp News is currently available in Swedish and English. Many more languages are now available, and AI is already handling translations from Swedish to English. However, having two sites, warpnews.se and warpnews.org, requires quite a bit of additional work. We can build the framework (a website and the newsletter connected to it) and the AI can handle the rest, using many languages with little or no effort on our part. I think it will be like this.
So I can say that Wally has now partially and in the future completely taken the job away from me. For me this is not a problem. It’s true that making news is a lot of fun, but it’s not as fun as writing something like this. This is also where you create more value for your readers. (I hope!)
Of course, tasks and jobs will both disappear, as they have for over 200 years. This phenomenon is not new and we know how to deal with it. At the same time, we should not pretend that no one is affected by this. A longer discussion on this can be found here.
I don’t think I’m the only one who has jobs that take up time from other jobs that could be more enjoyable and provide more value.
But as we said, this is not the biggest impact AI will have on us.
Above all, AI makes us better. This can be broken down into two categories: 1) You’re better at things you’re bad at. 2) Be better at what you are good at.
I’m better at things I’m not good at
At best, he could play Old Man Noah on the piano. My musical abilities end there. Nevertheless, I now play my own music in lectures. All songs with lyrics and music from different genres. I’m making it with snow. A while back I wrote about how my 3-year-old son and I are currently making music together.
The songs are not historical, but they are real music that I made. It makes my lectures better and more enjoyable. AI helps me get better at things I’m bad at.
When it came to writing (something I’m better at than music), I didn’t initially make much use of AI. WALL-Y helped me write news faster, but it didn’t significantly affect the quality of my own writing. For small things like correcting tricky sentences, ChatGPT was great, but feedback about the entire text was very general.
This was consistent with the research finding that the effect was greater for people who were weaker at the task. With AI, you can almost keep up with the best talent. We saw this phenomenon in chess long before generative AI, but it’s now reiterated that centaurs are the ones who get the most out of AI. People who mix human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
I’m better at what I’m good at
My desire to become a centaur has taken me to the next level in terms of getting the most out of AI. When I created an AI that was tailored to me, I realized that it could make me better at what I was already good at. An AI that understands and knows me, my opinion, and what specifically to help.
I gave this example in 🧐 (I built an AI book editor that yells at me like Steve Jobs):
Once the AI understands me, it can pull things from my brain and combine them with its own knowledge. Here are some examples:
Of course, I wanted to give the AI editor a name. So I asked them to give me an example. One of the suggestions was EDI-T. I was surprised when I saw it. It wasn’t just a different way of writing the editorial, it was a clever twist on some things that directly concern me. First, there is another AI named WALL-Y. Next, my favorite game is Mass Effect. The name of AI is EDI. These two pieces of knowledge about me, combined with editing, become EDI-T.
No one else in the world would have come up with that name but me. Except for the AI, which is an extension of myself.
The name of the AI editor doesn’t matter, but knowing me will give you relevant information and help you be more creative.
Discussions with AI editors start at a completely different level than ChatGPT or Claude, which is not adapted to me. When you have an idea for the content of your book, or want to implement a certain writing style or structure for the text, first talk to the AI editor about it to deepen your knowledge and refine your ideas. Enter it as an instruction. This will help you remember and do it. AI helps me get better at what I’m good at.
AI that knows you
Imagine an AI that understands how you want to organize your work, your strengths and weaknesses, and naturally integrates into what you do. It helps you become a better version of yourself.
Even with the help of AI, I find it difficult to explain the magic that happens. All I can do is give it a try. My guide on how to build an AI editor can be applied to many other areas as well.
I imagine we will have one or more AIs that recognize and adapt to us as individuals. Whether it’s private or work. A person with whom you have ongoing discussions. It becomes an additional brain, containing a lot of knowledge that we ourselves do not have, but at the same time a (narrow) copy of our own brain. When these two come together, they have a huge impact on our own abilities. Even if you are not good at something, you will become good at it someday. We get better at what we do.
Artificial intelligence accelerates everyone’s fitness and helps us realize our dreams. Because I know your dreams.
Matthias Sundin
angry optimist
