This post was originally published on this site.
Will WALL-Y replace me?
The discussion about AI usually revolves around what tasks AI can perform, or which jobs AI will take. This is misguided thinking and makes us miss something even more important.
I’m not saying it’s completely irrelevant. Warp News AI writer, WALL-Y, helps me write news much faster. I save somewhere around 80-90 percent of the time it would take if I did everything myself. My work now lies in finding the news, editing the text, fixing a cover image, and publishing.
During the nearly year and a half I’ve worked with WALL-Y, she has clearly improved. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the entire process could become automated, with high quality in all stages.
Moreover, it will create new opportunities, such as publishing news in multiple languages. Now Warp News is available in Swedish and English. It would be possible to have more languages already today, and AI already handles the translation from Swedish to English. But it requires quite a bit of extra work to have two sites, warpnews.se and warpnews.org. I envision that we will build the framework – the websites and connected newsletters – and that AI can handle the rest, thus enabling a large number of languages with little to no effort from us.
One could then say that WALL-Y has now partially, and in the future completely, taken a task from me. For me, this is not a problem. Certainly, it’s quite fun to produce the news, but not as fun as writing texts like this. This is also where I produce higher value for you readers. (I hope!)
Of course, both tasks and jobs will disappear, just as they have for over 200 years. The phenomenon is not new, and we know how to handle it. At the same time, we shouldn’t pretend that no one will be affected by this. A longer discussion on this can be found here.
I’m sure I’m not unique in having tasks that take time away from other things one could produce, which are both more fun and provide higher value.
But as said, this is not the biggest effect AI will have on us.
Above all, AI will make us better. This can be divided into two categories: 1) Better at what I’m bad at. 2) Better at what I’m good at.
Better at what I’m bad at
At best, I can plunk out Old Man Noah on a piano. That’s where my musical ability ends. Despite this, I now play self-produced music in my lectures. Entire songs with lyrics and music, in a variety of genres. I make these in Suno. I wrote a while ago about how my three-year-old son and I now make music together.
The songs won’t go down in history, but it’s real music, created by me. It makes my lectures better and more fun. AI helps me get better at something I’m bad at.
When it comes to writing (something I’m better at than music), I initially didn’t have much use for AI. WALL-Y helped me write news faster, but the quality of my own writing wasn’t significantly affected. Small things, like fixing a tricky sentence, ChatGPT was brilliant at, but feedback on an entire text was quite generic.
This was consistent with studies showing that the effect was greatest for those who were worse at a task. If they used AI, they could almost catch up with the people who were best. Long before generative AI, we saw this phenomenon in chess, and now repeatedly that it’s the centaurs who get the most out of AI. Those who mix human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
Better at what I’m good at
It was my aspiration to be a centaur that took me to the next level when it comes to getting the most out of using AI. It was when I created an AI adapted to me that I realized how it can also make me better at what I’m already good at. An AI that understands and knows me specifically, my opinions, and what it should help me specifically with.
I gave an example of this in 🧐 I have built an AI book editor (that yells at me like Steve Jobs):
When the AI understands me, it can bring out things from my brain and combine them with the AI’s own knowledge. Here are some examples.
Of course, I wanted the AI editor to have a name. So I asked it to come up with examples. One of the suggestions was EDI-T. When I saw it, I was amazed. It wasn’t just a different way of writing edit, but a clever twist on some things directly related to me. Firstly, that I have another AI named WALL-Y. Secondly, that my favorite game is Mass Effect, where an AI is named EDI. These two pieces of knowledge about me combined with edit, becomes EDI-T.
No one else in the whole world but me could have come up with that name. Except for an AI that is an extension of myself.
What the AI editor is called doesn’t matter, but it shows how by knowing me, it can bring out relevant information and make me more creative.
The discussions with my AI editor start at a completely different level than with ChatGPT or Claude that isn’t adapted to me. When I come up with ideas about content in the book, or want to implement a certain way of writing or structuring the text, I first talk to the AI editor about it, which deepens my knowledge and refines the idea. Then I input it as an instruction. Then it helps me remember and implement it. AI helps me get better at what I’m good at.
An AI that knows you
Imagine an AI that knows how you want to organize your work, your strengths and weaknesses, and that is naturally integrated into what you do. It helps you become a better version of yourself.
Despite AI help, I find it difficult to describe the magic that occurs. I can only urge you to try it. My guide on how to build an AI editor can be applied to many other areas.
I envision that we will have one or more AIs that know and are adapted to us as individuals. Both privately and at work. Someone you have an ongoing discussion with. It becomes an extra brain that contains a lot of knowledge we don’t have ourselves, but at the same time is a (narrower) copy of our own brain. When these two unite, it has a great effect on our own ability. Things we’re bad at, we’ll become good at. Things we’re good at, we’ll become even better at.
Artificial intelligence accelerates everyone’s aptitudes – and helps us achieve our dreams. Because it knows your dreams.
Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist