We are entering an age in which intelligence can be bought on demand. With bodies shaped by the hunter-gatherer era and ideas inherited from the industrial one, we now hold a new kind of power: to build order in a world of ever-increasing entropy, and to rearrange our own lives.
As more and more becomes possible, what deserves our one finite life? Which of the rules we take for granted need a second look? How should we think about work, wealth and time? And how can AI help us waste less on internal friction, turn ideas into reality, and be happier?
Live with AI starts from these everyday questions and, combining an understanding of AI with first-hand practice, explores how we could live, and how we truly want to.
For everyday ChatGPT and Claude users. There are two kinds of effort involved in using AI: their job is what model makers are already improving, so tricks that compensate for model weaknesses lose value as models improve; our job is saying what we want clearly. Expression, judgment, and understanding how machines work are skills honed before AI arrived, and they are now worth even more. Let them do their job, and we do ours.
In the fall of 2022, I told her the compiler couldn’t understand free-form expression. Then ChatGPT arrived. A look at how programming paradigms evolved from 1.0 (humans write rules) to 2.0 (machines find rules in data) to 3.0 (you state the rules in natural language).