It’s just technology

AI looks bad from the outside. A lot of people have already made up their minds.

But at the end of the day it’s technology. And technology is something you can learn.

I stopped arguing about whether it was good or bad and started figuring out how it actually works. Now it does things I couldn’t do on my own.

Mostly the boring things.

I needed logos for a presentation recently. Thirty-something companies. I sent it to my agent and had a zip file back three minutes later. On my own that takes a long time, and honestly I would have been interrupted halfway through and forgotten to finish it.

It pulls what I learn out of YouTube transcripts and puts it somewhere I’ll actually read again. It runs a job every night that tells me what’s coming up and what I said I’d do, so I’m not opening my calendar to check. It lets me talk instead of type. And it remembers things so I don’t have to — they go into a markdown file and stay there.

None of that is why I got into this field. All of it used to eat the day.

Most people are resentful of the technology, and don’t understand why it’s being looked at to replace certain aspects of the work.

But much like the Industrial Revolution, it’s about automating the backbreaking, administrative, unenjoyable parts of the job. Not taking away human judgment, which should always be front and center guiding the work.

Jensen Huang said it best: “The more AI we use, somehow the more people we have to hire.”

That’s from the CEO of Nvidia.

So what did I get back? Time with my family. Time with the people I love. And more of me left for the work that actually needs a person in the chair.

That’s the true value.

And here’s where I’d start:

• Begin with what you resent. Most people open a chat window and ask what it can do, and get demos back. Write down the things in your week you keep putting off. Start there.
• Treat it like a human personal assistant. Give it the context, the materials, and a clear picture of what finished looks like. If you can’t explain the task to someone capable who’s new, you don’t know the task well enough yet.
• Give it reach. Most of the value is in something that can touch your real work — your files, your calendar, your inbox — rather than a window you paste into.
• Let it run without you. Anything that repeats on a schedule is worth setting up once.

And check its work. It’s confidently wrong sometimes, and your name is on whatever goes out the door.

It’s the same as any tool you’ve ever gotten good at.