Stephen Downes

I do think we have to think of generative AI this way: as a bicycle of the mind. Just like computers were when they came out. "It is a personal amplifier, not a generic one. It's my bicycle, and I'm the one riding it, going further because of the amplification. I still have to pedal! The bicycle goes in the direction I choose! But I'm going further and more efficiently than I could on foot." I've spent a good part of my day puttering with Claude on my RSS reader. Not because the world needs another RSS reader, but because I want one tailored to my own tastes. And it's fun to putter with code, especially if I don't have to type it all out. There's still a ton of things I want to do with this - I'm in a LinkedIn discussion about whether an AI could create for me a personal community newspaper. That sort of thing. Any how, the main advice from this post is: get in there and try it out. "We've automated away the easy part - the typing - and some of the thinking. But you can never automate away the talking and decision-making." Your kills and experience "probably matter in ways you don't know." Find out what matters. Via Matt Weagle.