Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
The answer to the question, “How will AI affect my job?” might be better stated: “Does AI look like it is going to do the most highly skilled parts of my job or the low-skill parts?” If it’s the former, your pay and business value will fall. If it’s the latter where AI can do the mundane parts of your job for you, then you might get paid more (and it might get more fun).
Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone in physical or emotional pain—that’s sympathy. Rather, it is mentally putting yourself in the suffering person’s shoes to feel their pain. It’s the difference between “Get well soon” and “I can imagine how much discomfort you must be feeling right now.”
Empathy can “make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives,” because sometimes an act of love involves doing something that causes pain rather than relieving it, such as confronting an awful truth.
Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic
Who gets cheap flights and hotel upgrades? AI will decide. - Washington Post
Is It Still Disney Magic if It’s AI? – Wall Street Journal
Anthropic’s Claude AI became a terrible business owner in experiment that got 'weird' - TechCrunch
AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’ – Wall Street Journal
Managers let AI assess raises, promotions, even layoffs, survey finds - Axios
Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI - Bloomberg
Small businesses are using AI, but not spending much - Axios
‘It destroys the purpose of humanity’: Customers are saying no to AI - Washington Post
Consumers have less trust in offerings labeled as being powered by artificial intelligence – Wall Street Journal
Anthropic launches its first big disruption to the finance industry - Axios
How to Navigate an AI Bull Market – Wall Street Journal
The Three Layers of ROI for AI Agents – Henry Pray
How AI could create the first one-person unicorn – Economist
Ad Agencies’ Low Growth Will Drag On as They Adjust to Era of AI, Barclays Says – Wall Street Journal
Small business AI adoption jumps to 68% as owners plan significant workforce growth in 2025 – Fox Business
Nearly a third of K–12 teachers say they used the technology at least weekly last school year. Sally Hubbard, a sixth-grade math-and-science teacher in Sacramento, California, told me that AI saves her an average of five to 10 hours each week by helping her create assignments and supplement curricula. “If I spend all of that time creating, grading, researching,” she said, “then I don’t have as much energy to show up in person and make connections with kids.” Lila Shroff writing in The Atlantic
In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip. -Daniel L. Reardon
MIT study: Surprisingly, rewriting prompts using generative AI led to worse performance. The team found that the automatic rewrites often added extra details or changed the meaning of what users were trying to say, leading the AI to produce the wrong kind of image. It shows how AI systems can break down when designers make assumptions about how people will use them. -MIT
Good listening takes practice; it’s actually a discipline. It doesn’t come easily or naturally. Listening means more than just hearing what a person says. A counselor I know expressed the difference like this: “hearing captures the words a person speaks; listening captures the meaning and the feeling beneath those words.” Listening is the mental step by which we become more aware of the other person than we are of ourselves. The best definition of listening I ever came across is that given by Norman H. Wright, who said, “Listening is not thinking about what you are going to say when the other person has stopped talking.’
“Say, ‘Lord, I don’t know if you’re there. If you’re there, write something on my heart.’ And He will.” -Arthur Brooks
A good AI prompt should include:
Sample content
Specific guidance on tone, length, structure, word count, etc.
An example:
Write a 1,000-word article on estate planning, targeting mid-aged professionals in the southeast US. The tone should be informative but approachable. Use plain language and a clear structure so it’s easily scannable. Include actionable tips and examples. Our firm focuses on public service professionals, such as teachers and firefighters, so please use language, scenarios, and tips that are relevant to this audience.
Keep providing feedback until the output meets your requirements.
More at JD Supra
In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. -Jeff Bezos
The data suggests that prompting is more about communication than coding. The best prompters weren’t software engineers. They were people who knew how to express ideas clearly in everyday language, not necessarily in code. -MIT Study
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – AI typically refers to computers that imitate the human thinking process, so they that are able to make some decisions on their own without the need of human intervention. The defining feature of artificial intelligence is that the behavior is learned from data rather from being explicitly programmed. AI can effectively mimic and mix established patterns in creative ways. However, it does not perform as well at breaking expectations and conventional forms to create entirely new things.
More AI definitions here
Your self-evaluations are important because they influence most areas of your behavior, defining the limits of what you will attempt. You avoid an activity if your self-concept predicts you will perform so badly as to humiliate yourself. For instance, if your self-concept includes the belief that you would be a poor ice skater, you might never try it, and will indeed remain a poor ice skater. Often people excuse themselves with “That’s just the way I am.” By using this excuse, they deny themselves opportunities for personal growth.
Sharon and Gordon Bower, Asserting Yourself
A clarifying question: does AI look like it is going to do the most highly skilled part of your job or the low-skill rump that you’ve not been able to get rid of? The answer to that question may help to predict whether your job is about to get more fun or more annoying — and whether your salary is likely to rise, or fall as your expert work is devalued. -Tim Harford
The artist looks not on what a stone has been or is, but on what he is going to bring out of it—the living figure. -E. Stanley Jones
Google DeepMind unveils an AI-powered model that creates interactive 3D worlds in real time - Google DeepMind
Parkland Shooting Victim Recreated as AI for Jim Acosta Interview.- The Guardian
AI can now beat polygraph tests to tell when you're lying – 311 Institute
The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die - Washington Post
AI Comes Up with Bizarre Physics Experiments. But They Work. – Quanta Magazine
Missionaries using tech to contact Amazon's Indigenous people – The Week
An AI-Generated Protein Helps T Cells Kill Cancer – The-Scientist
AI helps traditional Japanese fish-killing method get a robotic upgrade – Semafor
Google and OpenAI are vying for top AI mathlete – Axios
AI comes to California’s electric grid – Union-Tribune
AI is helping patients fight insurance company denials – NBC News
Dubai to debut restaurant operated by an AI chef – Reuters
Drones, AI and Robot Pickers: Meet the Fully Autonomous Farm – Wall Street Journal
ChatGPT Tells Pregnant Woman To 'Call an Ambulance'—Saves Their Lives - Newsweek
Large language models are proficient in solving and creating emotional intelligence tests – Nature
How A.I. Is Transforming Wedding Planning – New York Times
ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation – Scientific American
Welcome to Your Job Interview. Your Interviewer Is A.I. – New York Times
LooksMapping, an A.I.-powered website, rates not the food, but the attractiveness of the diners. – New York Times
AI tool diagnoses nine types of dementia with 88% accuracy using a single PET scan – MIT Tech Review
AI Can Keep Truck Drivers Awake - Wall Street Journal
Finding viable sperm in infertile men can take days. AI did it in hours. - Washington Post
Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad? - New York Times
Two days after Jeff Fargo’s mother died, he lay in bed, crying, at home in Nevada and opened his laptop to ChatGPT. Her friends had asked about an obituary, so for nearly an hour he typed about her life. “I just … emptied my soul into the prompt,” said Fargo, 55. “I was mentally not in a place where I could give my mom what she deserved. And this did it for me.” - Washington Post
“Everybody is fighting for your attention, so your only real defense is to make it so that those stimuli don’t come in the door,” says Boston University cognitive neuroscientist David Somers. The idea that your technology should alert you when it thinks you should pay attention is relatively new, and, frankly, it’s a big step backward. You’re letting the bushes rustle nonstop, and telling yourself there’s a tiger over there.
“It’s so important that we define where we want to go as opposed to letting technology drive us and we’re just hanging on for dear life,” says author Amy Blankson, who works in the field of positive psychology, specifically on maximizing happiness.
Still, everyone gets a buzz from this high-octane news environment. Literally. Every notification, every tweet, every beep and buzz releases dopamine and other neurochemicals, providing a moment’s elation. As with any drug, your brain gets used to it. Perhaps even craves it.
Reclaim control of what you read.
Emily Dreyfuss, Wired
Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. -Arthur C. Brooks
Lord, protect me from your followers! (unknown)
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