What happens to Mugatroid? Hey, Sam.
Hey, Lynn. I have a question for you.
Yeah, sure. So I've been thinking a lot
about AI and productivity and what that all means.
And I've come across some RCTs, some more recent than others,
really looking at this question, like, does generative AI
specifically increase productivity in, say, knowledge
work, the types of work that you and I do maybe with consulting
where we need to really think through a problem, generate
solutions and come to some sort of recommendation.
And the results out there like really are pretty promising.
There are some dramatic effects of increasing productivity from
these AI tools. And so my question for you is
really more about your personal experience, like if you were to
like compare your life with AI now to not like way pre AI, but
like maybe in the early days sort of Sam without AI versus
Sam with AI. What do you think?
Are you more productive with AI? You're asking whether I have
like 10X my productivity in the last few years?
That's what the LinkedIn lunatics would tell you for
sure, yeah. It's an interesting question and
you know there's 2 answers to this.
I think 1 is that I definitely feel more productive in some
ways, like I'm able to generate more value within the consulting
projects that I'm involved with. At the same time, I've had this
feeling for the last couple of weeks where basically I'm just
feeling like I'm behind with everything, especially after
some travels and some other things.
I'm feeling like I'm trying to get so much stuff done and I'm
still feeling like I'm catching up on so much.
So in some ways, my perceived productivity is not really high.
Like I feel like I'm still behind the curve of where I
would want to be. But again, if I would zoom out
and I would look at, OK, what am I doing?
How does that compare to what I was doing like 2 years ago or a
year ago or whenever? I definitely would say that I've
become much more able at quote UN quote, generating value
within my role. Yeah.
Do you feel like that problem of always trying to catch up and
feel like you're in control of your time in your life?
Like is that exacerbated by AI? Do you feel like that's worse
that feeling? I think in general, I'm someone
who's like relatively optimistic about like, you know, this can
be done, this can be possible and so on and so forth.
And in some ways you could say that like, that is not always a
good thing. You know, it's a good thing to
be resourceful and to be optimistic in some regards, but
it can also be a little bit of risking biting off more than you
can chew. And you could almost say that
like I almost had a some of a tendency that's been made worse
now because now I do think that I'm even more likely to probably
be like, OK, this is probably something I don't really have
time for, but something that would have been more like to say
no to before. I'm now kind of like, yeah, OK,
let's do it. So you have this illusion of
ease basically that makes you say yes to more things that, you
know, maybe previously you would have realized no, this is going
to take a lot of effort and time.
I can't possibly commit to that. That's interesting.
I'm reluctant to admit that I can relate to all of what you're
saying, even though when I zoom out, I kind of think of myself
as being a little farther along on this journey of accepting
life's finitude and being at peace with the fact that there
is so much that I'll never be able to accomplish in my life
that I, like, really should just focus on the smaller proportion
of things that matter. This is something that I'm very
much actively working on and have been working on for years.
I got to a point where it was just really, really bad.
And I felt extremely burnt out. And actually, this is where our
guest, Oliver Berkman, really like, unbeknownst to him, came
in and sort of like pulled me out of the sea and helped me
realize like, no, no, you are a human.
Like this is OK. And how did that happen?
Like how did he pull you out? Oh, I read his book 4000 Weeks
1st and really helped me come to terms with many of these very
cruel realities. And we'll get into this so much
more in our conversation with him.
But understand, like, you're not going to be able to control life
and you need to just accept you're not going to feel on top
of things ever. You're not going to be on top of
things ever. So you may as well just deal
with what you've got and enjoy the moment now, because you're
not gonna get to a point where you've set up this perfect
system for organizing your life and your work.
You're never gonna have all of your research articles
organized, and that's OK. Except that and work within
these constraints in this reality.
Yes, I assume everything worked out and life is perfect.
Oh my gosh, I wish I could say that this was the case.
No, I started sharing my new perspective with everyone I knew
and, you know, recommended 4000 weeks to literally, I'm sure I
was so obnoxious, right? Like everyone I talked to, I was
like, have you read this book? I still do it.
But no, I fell off the wagon and didn't make any grand changes in
my life until Oliver's next book came around, his more recent
Meditations for Mortals. And this was like really what I
needed. And I like to sort of think of
this from a behavioral design perspective because the first
book was more like introducing the philosophy and more of like
information. But information doesn't change
behavior as we know. And then next book, follow up is
like very practical, almost like a workbook.
Oh, he would be so insulted if he heard me call it a workbook.
But it's like, focus on one thing every day for a month and
like, really start implementing into your daily life this
practice of like putting the philosophy into action.
So that was what I needed. And now I am much closer to a
place where I could say I have some acceptance of never having
the control over my life that I am used to imagine I needed.
That's awesome though. And what would you say is the
one meditation like the one thing for you as a mortal that
has been valuable for you? So the one that I've latched
onto the most, which doesn't sound nearly as profound when
you actually say it out loud, but it's just this idea that you
can do whatever you want. You just have to face the
consequences. And it's, I have felt in so many
times in my life that there are just all of these very
artificial constraints around our days that make us think that
we have to do particular things when we are really choosing to
do those things. I have to complete some work
assignment. Well, actually, I don't have to
do anything. I can not do that.
I can ask for an extension. I can just cancel everything all
together and go on vacation. You just have to accept the
consequences. You know, this actually brings
to mind a very random but I think quite well known payroll
science study from back in the day.
I'm not sure if this is replicated, but you remember the
one where they basically had some form of daycare or
kindergarten and they institute as a form of monetary fine or
penalty for parents? Yeah.
So like if a parent came and picked up their kid late, they
will get a fine. And it had like, the unintended
consequence of basically for people, it was less of a cost to
pay to be late than the social cost of coming late and feeling
bad about it. So basically, it led to the kids
being left at kindergarten longer.
And in some ways it's kind of like a very similar mechanism in
place. Like in that sense, those
parents felt bad for not picking up their kids at a certain time.
They feel like they had to. But then when they there was a
monetary cost to it, they could basically choose like, OK, I
could do it now or I can pay this cost.
OK, I will choose them to pay the cost.
Yeah. And I think Oliver Berkman would
say these are really just two types of costs, right?
You have the social cost of maybe somebody's feelings are
going to be hurt, but maybe you don't have to bear that burden.
Maybe it's like not yours to take on.
And then you have the financial cost of, OK, if you're late, you
have to pay this actual fine. And you can decide.
You can do your cost benefit analysis and decide which
consequences are actually worth taking on.
And I think for me, I've come to realize that the consequences
are generally not so high. And there are a lot of
consequences that you can, you know, without being a jerk.
Obviously, there are a lot more consequences that you should be
willing to take on in order to do the thing that actually is
meaningful for you. OK, before we're now getting to
the episode, I have to ask, is there anything specifically for
you that's been something that you are willing to, Yeah, to
accept the consequences of a certain thing?
And you're like, back up these grand proclamations with an
actual example. I would say there's a really
quite big one, which is that my family and I have decided to
move to Switzerland for a year. And that's a pretty big deal
that most people that I talk to tell me I could not ever do
that. That would not be possible for
our family. And in my head, I say to myself,
not to them, well, you could do it.
You would just have to face the consequences.
You would have to do all the work that it takes to, you know,
move your life around in order to make it happen.
And for some that may be a little bit too bold, but I feel
extremely excited and freed by this prospect and the
opportunity that I've sort of given myself by deciding that I
am just going to do it and face the consequences.
Honestly, I love that. That is really beautiful and
inspiring, actually. So should we talk about Oliver?
Yeah, Oliver is a different kind of guest for us, which is always
very fun. He's a journalist and an author.
Highly, highly, highly recommend all of his books.
He had a column in the Guardian for a very long time and really
focused on productivity for many, many years and kind of
moved from that into focusing more on well-being and living a
more fulfilled life. And so fascinating to see how
these topics intersect and sometimes are at odds with each
other, sometimes complimenting each other.
Maybe more related than you might think.
Yeah. And I honestly will say that
this might be our most important episode of the season in some
ways because life changing it life changing.
I think it's no hyperbole there. But I think it's really
important that in the midst of all of the hyper on AI, this
kind of conversation that Oliver brings is crucial because it
helps understand really what are we trying to do here and how do
we think about this? And how do we actually find a
place for AI that leads to, you know, we talked a little bit
about how it brings value to life, but really, you know, what
is the future of work? What is the future of humanity
look like? And how do we want that to look
like? And I think this episode might
provide you with some different ways to think about that.
And we're really excited to share it and get it started.
So here is Oliver. Happens.
To Murgatroyd. Wow, Oliver, welcome to the
show. Thanks very much for inviting
me. Yeah, we're super excited to
have you here. So this is rare that I get to
say this, but it's probably not hyperbole to say that your work
has truly, deeply changed my life.
So first, like my outlook on life and then actually bleeding
into my behavior, It took a little bit of work for it to
actually get from intention to action.
But I think there's kind of a cliche version of your work that
most people would be familiar with, which is just this idea of
that, you know, life is short, make the most of it.
And it's tempting to kind of reduce it to that or even to
say, like, you write and teach about time management, but
that's not really it either. Part of what makes your work so
special, for me at least, is really making concrete the 4000
weeks of life that we have and kind of seeing that as a counter
and also making it applicable to the actual problems that we
face. And, and for me at least, this
idea that we are struggling chasing to stay, quote UN quote,
on top of everything. This not only feels very hard
and you know, we make ourselves miserable in this attempt to
stay on top of the mountain, but actually it's not just hard, it
is impossible. Once you kind of embrace that
impossibility of it, there's something freeing about that.
And I, I know that you didn't write any of your books for
Thousand Weeks or Meditations for Mortals with AI or
behavioral design in mind. But Sam and I, we have been over
time making all kinds of connections between these
topics. And we thought we could, I don't
know, just hash out some of our thoughts and maybe consider this
like a working session. I'd, I'd love that.
I have all sorts of thoughts about the relevance of AI, but
whether they're on point or not is another question.
And thank you for all your kind words about my stuff.
Maybe one thing that's worth saying in terms of how I think
about the sort of cliched version versus what I'm hoping
to say is like one response you can have when you start thinking
about how short life is or just how short time is on a daily
basis, right? Not necessarily these grand
questions. One response you can have is
like, well, then I better treat it like it's incredibly precious
and cram as much as I can into every available space.
And if I waste a moment of it, that's terrible.
And I've got to be doing extraordinary impressive things
with my work time and my leisure time.
And like, that's not only not the point I want to make, it's
almost like the whole thing that I'm setting myself up against
the way of seeing this. It's meant so much to me.
And I am completely a work in progress myself when it comes to
sort of living it, of course. But is that if you actually
really think more deeply about our limitations, our finitude,
and you let it sort of sink under your skin a bit, it's sort
of relaxing and empowering at once.
It isn't this kind of rather stressful feeling of like, Oh
no, that means I've got to really be like hyper vigilant in
every moment. I need to go skydiving today.
Right. It's good news, it's de
stressing news, but it's actually also empowering and
action oriented news. I guess the other poll that I'm
trying to avoid here, as well as the one that says like, stress
yourself out trying to eke every moment of value from your time,
is the one that says there's no point doing anything.
Just sit on the couch and eat potato chips.
And I don't think it's either of those.
I hope because this is what I'm would like life to be able to be
like, is that it can be like peaceful and also active.
Yeah, I have a really random connection to to your work.
I don't know if you've heard of Lonely Island.
Does that ring a bell for you? The music group coming out of
Southern Night Live where they make this silly, stupid songs
about various things. Yeah, that does ring a bell.
Only a think one there. They took this concept of Yolo
and you're kind of speaking just like some people think about
Yolo as you only live once, you should really do everything you
can to maximize this short time. We have, you know, parachuting,
partying, whatever that means. And then they did a form of
satire rather than that, like basically singing about opposite
things. OK, you only live once.
You have to really take care of this life.
You, you should wear a seat belt and helmet and all of these
things to protect yourself and, you know, this precious life.
And I think it's, it's those kind of two kind of rock and a
hard place that I think a lot of people find themselves with
where it's like, OK on one. Then you're feeling this
pressure to maximize something and at the same time not losing
it. It's really that Nexus of the
human experience. I think that you have cultivated
a really interesting opportunity for people to use take a breath
and be like, OK, well, what can I do?
What can I control? Yeah, no, that that makes sense.
I guess what both those that rock and that hard place have in
common is that their attempts to feel in control, aren't they?
There's an attempt to feel in control.
That's very obvious in the case of living a an extremely safe
and cautious life. Nothing wrong with being
cautious in general, but if you think it's going to cause you to
not die, that is a misunderstanding of the human
condition. And then on the other hand,
actually that sort of attempt to extract the maximum experiential
value out of life implicitly so that you could sort of sit on
your deathbed and say I succeeded or I might have
failed. You know, that is also a desire
to feel in control. I think of a subtler kind, and I
think the point I'm coming back to again and again is that it's
really worth experimenting with. Not trying to squelch those
parts of us that want to feel and control, but just learning
to loosen our grip on that a bit.
One of the primary things that you see when some new AI tool
comes out is like the value add is oh, it will 10X20X your
productivity. Here are the, you know, extreme
efficiency gains that you're going to see from using this
tool. Tell me all the things that are
wrong with that. I don't see any reason yet.
Maybe there are some. I don't see any reason why extra
efficiency that comes from AI is an exception to the rule about
what happens when you get more efficient and optimized that
I've written about quite extensively now.
All things being equal, if you free up time and bandwidth in
your work through efficiency savings, then the result is that
new capacity fills with even more things to do.
There's a sort of you're getting better and faster at making your
way through a supply of tasks or demands or obligations that is
effectively infinite. So you don't get through it at
all. You just do more of them more
quickly. The classic example, you know,
if you just get much quicker at answering e-mail, the thing that
happens is that you reply to more people more quickly and
then they reply to you and then you have to reply to those
replies. And before you know, you're
doing more e-mail with your life.
It's a terrible cycle. Right, not everyone can, but if
you can get away in your job with being a little bit LAX when
it comes to e-mail, that's the way to get to a more peaceful
relationship with it. So in other words, you can't
optimize yourself to this position of control and Peace of
Mind and serenity. It's going to have the opposite
effect. Doesn't mean that every
efficiency saving is a bad thing, and maybe there are ways
in which AI can change the content of the job more in favor
of the things that are fulfilling about that job.
But, you know, that's one of many possible outcomes here,
including the elimination of the jobs.
Yeah. So you can imagine a positive
change to the job and you can imagine a negative change to the
job. And many versions of this, the
positive version could be, this is an example that's used with
AI medical scribes. So this is basically when a
doctor and a patient are in a room and the AI scribe is taking
notes of their conversation and then can generate an automated
summary of that and assist the physician in writing up their
notes for that patient later. And you know, right now the
physician burnout is a huge problem.
Easing up on documentation seems like a purely good thing.
However, rather than using this freed up time for the physician
to like, enjoy their evenings at home alone without working or
have more quality time with a patient, instead what they're
now burdened with is actually seeing more patient.
Yeah, and this is not a new thing with AI, right?
It's the idea that the reward for good time management is more
work. This is sort of sardonically
known as the Kaiser reward among people in the Kaiser Permanente
healthcare system. Because like, if you see more
patients more effectively, your reward will be you have to see
even more patients. And that's just ultimately
capitalism. I mean, that's just the
pressures. The natural movement of the
economic system that we exist in is not going to say to those
doctors like you, take it easy with your spare time and if we
need more patients to be seen, we'll hire some more doctors.
That's not what would happen. But there's this alternative
utopia, I think that is talked about sometimes, maybe not in
reality, but like we now can just relax.
Like the machines are doing all of the work and we can just lie
on the beach and we don't have to worry about this anymore.
We know maybe there's some sort of universal basic income.
And my reaction to this is, well, you know, like many of us
could actually do that now, but we, for whatever reason, choose
to work, we enjoy working. And part of me fears that with
the rise of these AI tools that are creating all of these
efficiencies, that actually is making the work that we enjoy
less enjoyable. So that you sort of become this
taskmaster of sorts or a tool master perhaps, and all you're
doing is kind of saying like, OK, you go setting the goals for
this tool and that tool and not actually doing the fun critical
thinking. It's a great point.
And of course, you know, this is the AI version of a time
honoured complaint that if you get good at a job, you get
kicked upwards into being a manager of that job instead of
doing the job that you came into it to do because you found it so
interesting. I have a friend who sort of
voluntarily demoted himself in a high school setting away from a
management position because he realized that, like, what he
wants to do is teach. And yeah, I can easily see that
we all become managers of AIS and nothing more than, you know,
there may be people for whom that is a passion, but there'll
be lots of us for whom it isn't. In my working definition, I've
called this automation drift. 2 examples that I've actually come
across personally recently is so one person who was a writer and
another person was a coder. The writer have seen this
amazing AI tools allowing them to take these lengthy process of
writing to like just sparking the idea and having the AI write
a lot of stuff automatically for this person.
And they find themselves that like, wow, I can write so much
more. But actually what they do now is
not writing anywhere. They used editing and So what
they used to enjoy doing was the writing part and they hated
editing. But thanks to these tools that
basically ended up outsourcing the writing part today, yeah,
like automating that part and just became, you know, editors
doing the stuff they hate and then the coder, same story.
Like they enjoy actually the coding tasks, like they enjoy
writing code and now they just have to debug.
And you could say what more quote UN quote value adding
they've output maybe has increased, but it basically like
drifted to this point where just doing the least enjoyable part
of the task that they usually do.
Yeah, this is all absolutely fascinating to me.
And obviously as a writer, it's something that I'm thinking
about all the time. I don't have the ability to
foretell which human work is going to sort of remain.
I mean, these predictions about how we're going to not need to
do anything, we can just lie around and do nothing have been
made for many decades now. Of course what happens is that
there's something valuable about human work in a lot of contexts,
specifically that it is humans interacting with humans.
So there's this issue that comes up a lot in these arguments just
in sort of social media online spaces.
I don't mean in sort of more specialist context where
somebody will say, like, oh, AI could never write a novel as
beautiful as a novel by Jane Austen.
And then someone else will come in and say, oh, you're so naive.
It's ridiculous. Of course it will.
It's days or weeks away and maybe it's already done it.
You know, Sam Altman come with his, you know, AI generated
short story. And I'm sitting there feeling
like, am I getting crazy here? Because a central part of what
gives a novel written by a human its value is not that it reached
a certain level of technical skill that an AI could surely
emulate, but that it was written by a conscious emoting
sensibility. And I am a conscious emoting
sensibility too. And in that connection, there is
a relationship which they can't be unless you want to argue that
the LLMS are sentient, which is a pretty radical position to
take. And even then, you'd have to
argue that they were sentient in some sort of vaguely similar to
us way. So, you know, this especially
comes up in context of writing, comes up when people talking
about therapy as a sort of leading use case for AII don't
necessarily say that can be useless.
But it's like, if what therapy is intimately connected with the
idea of having another person hold you in their mind, which,
you know, in the traditional versions of therapy, it really
is, Well, then there can't be therapy with an AI, right?
Because it's conscious beings connecting to each other.
That doesn't mean the market's going to reward any of this, of
course, right? Maybe people don't care about
that their therapist doesn't exist.
But I think it's important to keep focused on the sense in
which there isn't a relationship in all these contexts.
Taking the counter argument to this is that, well, if it passes
the Turing test around, like if you read the story and it hits
you emotionally where you're like, wow, this is such a
meaningful story and then realize it was written by AI,
doesn't really matter. You know, you had that
experience, you had the same emotion.
Doesn't matter if Jane Austen or Jane Boston, and I'm trying to
come up with some bot name for Jane.
Yeah, it's an interesting counterpoint.
And there seems to be a range in my intuitions anyway.
Like I can't pretend that I care if I find out that the technical
instructions for how to use my new dishwasher were written in
that way. But you know, if, well, this is
sort of related to an example I have used in something I wrote
before. Like if at the end of this call
I was to discover that in fact you had not really been there,
but it would have been a sort of brilliant cloned simulation
based on sort of scouring all your previous output and
podcasts and things like the idea that nothing would really
have been lost there is completely crazy to me, right?
It would make no sense to say, well, I had an interesting time
and I had some thought provoking ideas which I have had.
But like, that's not enough. What's happening is that some
people are connecting to each other, and on some level it's
based on my assumption that, you know, what's going on inside
your minds is broadly similar to the kind of thing that's going
on inside my mind, rather than that there's nobody there.
One thing that I think I had that experience around like what
you described, like way before I interacted, Yeah, it was
actually when I realized that most non fiction books
specifically, or maybe not most, but a lot of them are ghost
written. So you have some person who's on
the picture of the book as like this thought leader, but the
publisher. In all political books.
Yeah, All Political has kind of pulled the strings with like,
OK, we've signed you on to be the cover of this thing because
you have a good kind of profile and we have some ghost writers
that can help you like make it nice and neat and get your
message across the audience. They don't really need to know
that. And so I'm curious to hear
what's your take on this context, because I think this
comes up a lot when it comes to AI, where we can have this
discussion and we can kind of say AI is bad in some ways.
But then you look at the human counterfactual sometimes, you
know, like, well, is ghost writing that much better, for
example? Yeah, that's fascinating.
And I think ghost writing sometimes isn't that much
better. I think there is a real art to
really good ghostwriting, which is probably more than just
ghostwriting. It's actually sort of
interviewing and drawing out of subject.
I forget his name, but the guy who's the writer of the book
called Life, it's called Life by Keith Richards.
Like that's a brilliant book. And that's only because a real
skill is used. And probably the biggest skill
is this relational one, right, of like hours of chatting with
Keith Richards, the Elton John 1, driven by former colleague of
mine, Guardian, and I think is another one of those.
But yeah, absolutely, there are contexts where once you discover
that's what happened, you basically feel like scammed.
And that wasn't the experience and you thought that you were
hearing something. And I've definitely had
journalistic colleagues who've interviewed celebrities on the
occasion of the publication of their autobiography, where it's
unclear if the celebrity has read their own autobiography.
Oh no. I'll name their names.
So yeah, something there is lost because again, I think again and
again, and I feel more and more convinced of this with every
passing month really. Like the thing that matters is
always relational in some way. And yes, if something is
ghostwritten in a way that feels like it violates a relationship,
then something is deeply lost. And I think in the other
examples we've been discussing about discussing like where
isn't a problem are those contexts where there's no sort
of expectation, you don't feel that you're in a relationship
with another sensibility in the dishwasher instructions.
The fact that this could get a lot worse with AI doesn't mean
it's not already a problem. So another thing that is already
or was already a pre AI problem that seems to be very much
exacerbated by AI is information overload.
So there's just, you know, a million things you could do, a
million things that you could read out there.
Reading is my particular problem.
So I tend to kind of focus on that, you know, my to read list
of like thousands of tabs, like links that I've saved everywhere
now, both with AI generated content, where content is just
created much more quickly. But also with, you know, for
example, recommender systems that can serve you up content
more efficiently and perhaps creating a better match with the
kinds of things that you like to read or watch or consume in
whatever way that it is. How should we deal with this
version of AI intruding our lives in the information
consumption area? The problem it feels worse than
it ever was because even before I had because we are just
connected to so many pieces of writing, so many other forms of
content, but they find us in a way that they previously
wouldn't. And I've written about this
funny moment in the earlier history of social Internet when
it was sincerely believed by some kind of leading people that
this problem would go away because the filters would get
better and better, right? So you take this kind of huge,
you know, all these haystacks and you just have a way of just
picking out the needles that really mattered to you.
And you could forget all the rest.
But I quote in the book, I quote Nicholas Carr, the technology
critic, pointing out that the exact opposite has happened.
If the supply of incoming information is effectively
infinite, then when filters get better, all that happens is this
kind of massive amount of pure distilled stuff that you want,
right? The problem is, he puts it is
not finding a needle in a haystack, but how to deal with
haystack sized piles of needles. And I'm finding this with sub
stack notes at the moment, like if an algorithm is broadly
benign is at least it seems to be at this stage in the
commercial history of sub stack, what's going to happen?
The more it learns about me is the more I'm just deluged with
things where I think like, oh, I really need to read that.
So the filter has got a lot better.
And the result is the overload has got worse.
In terms of what to do about this, I mean, this is 1 version
of the same sort of move that I'm always recommending, which
is that one has to sort of gradually reorient from thinking
of these supplies of information as things you're supposed to get
through, get on top of, deal with and think of them as things
that we exist in the midst of and get to pick from.
So the metaphor I use at that point in that book is, you know,
seeing your to read piles as a river rather than a bucket,
right? Not something that fills up and
then it's your job to empty it, but it's something that just
sort of flows past you and you pluck things from it that seem
sort of interesting and you let the others go.
I'm enough of a kind of person who would like to get on top of
everything and process everything that I find this
hard, but I've now pretty much got to the point with the sort
of read it later app that I use. It's called Matter.
Everyone downloading this being like this is going to be a
solution. So yeah, I'm not paid for by
them. It's a very pleasant for me,
sort of user experience. But like, it isn't pleasant if
what you do when you go to your queue is think, Oh my gosh, like
there's 70 things here and I got to get through them.
Only 70. Oh yeah, whatever, 700 and I
have just about got to the point with that now where actually
that's changed. What I now think when I open up
that queue is like, look at this amazing abundance of stuff that
I get to sort of play in for a while.
And maybe I'll try to give it an hour of my time every few days
or every day and that'll be that.
And sure, if I read something and take some notes on it and
then I think like I've done that, I will archive it.
But a lot of those things just stick around and I'm biased
towards the more recent ones, which is appropriate because
they reflect the things I'm more interested in now.
And like, there's no problem there, except the one in my head
that says if there is a digital queue of items is in existence
somewhere, it's my job to make it go away.
Yeah, very hard to do that. Yeah, I've felt so naive so many
times. Let's say Twitter, and I started
to collect bookmarks and I realized, OK, these are building
up and I'm not really reading them.
And then I download something like Pocket or what you
described, and I start saving them there.
And then I started on LinkedIn and I started like, oh, I can
save some stuff here as well. And for some reason, my brain
has this hope that like, well, this time it's going to work.
Like this time I'm going to get through it all and like, just
give myself a clean slate. Like, now I'm going to, like,
actually be able to stay on top of it.
And I think, yeah, that kind of what you describe of the river.
And, yeah, as a Swedish person, I see That's like a smorgasbord
of sort of like that I've collected.
Yeah. Perfect.
The other part of it I sometimes think, is that I'm almost saving
things for later in order to never return to them as well,
right? There's almost like I'm sitting
there writing something and then I end up reading some little
thread somewhere or a post somewhere that maybe it triggers
something in my mind. I think that's interesting.
Then comes the thought, like I have got to absorb this into my
note taking system into my second brain, whatever my
personal knowledge management system such as it is.
So then I click save for later and it's like noticing a thought
in meditation. You're like, OK, let go of it.
It's gone. And then it's like I can get on
with the thing I was doing. I have encountered this idea in
a little way and I probably I'll never see it again.
OK, fine. And even in that moment, you
know you're not going to return to it.
I mean, I don't know. No, obviously, as I say, I'm a
work in progress. I certainly do get to thinking,
well, you know, that's great. I'm really going to make sure I
look at that when I've got more time and energy.
Of course, the counter argument, a really sort of Taoist way to
approach this or something might be to be to stop there and to be
like, OK, something has seized my interest so I will read it
now. But I think that is just not
very practical given the amount of this stuff.
So what I have had some success doing myself is trying quite
consciously to sort of nominate portions of time, right?
Not I will process all my read it later things, but I will
spend 90 minutes two or three times this week like swimming in
that sea of ideas and writing, not trying to drink it all down.
Yeah. So related to this, I think
there's something around AI which brings this promise around
kind of summarizing and distilling the most important
part of something into it's kind of like most important essence.
And I think we've lived through some of this version called pre
AI in terms of this being the services, they say, hey, you
know, read a book. Who has time for that?
Here's a 10 minute summary. And as you alluded to, selling
this idea that like, you know, you can absorb all of that
benefit from that book in 10 minutes of of a book a day.
You're not like that's the equivalent of reading the whole
book in some way. And that is obviously, I think
you would agree like a false promise.
And that part, like the absorbing of knowledge from a
book, is not just squeezing out the highlights and being like,
OK, that's the benefit. No, right?
But as someone who hoards research articles, sometimes the
point of the research articles, not to get the incredible
enjoyment of reading the research article, but just to
know the findings so that you can apply it to your work.
And so that's where I I'm kind of torn on these summarizer
tools because I do very much see an upside in distilling a
research article to its main points.
Of course, the downside is, you know, the AI summarizer tool
doesn't think critically about the methods or the findings.
It doesn't even have the ability at this point to tell you
whether you should trust the research or not.
And so you're not so much deprived of the enjoyment of
reading it, but maybe the ability to critically analyze
it. And so that's where I land on
the like pluses and the minuses of AI summarizer tools, both in
terms of the experience of reading it as well, but even the
outcome that you get from it. Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, I was just going to say even you made a better
version of this point with the research papers.
Of course, there are professional context where like
a sort of broadly objective summary of what's in the
document is a thing that you can greatly benefit from in your
role reading that research paper.
Obviously, there is something else going on which is missing
in the summarization, which is the critical assessment of how
it was, of how it was produced and whether it's trustworthy.
And I mean, I think what that comes down to again is like to
the extent that I have let these tools into my writing life, it
is the sort of glorified search engine part of this where I
think it is very useful as a jumping off point in the same
way that is book summarizing services, I mean.
Cal Newport, who's work I admire a lot, you know, always used to
always says, you know, that they are ideal as the way to sort of
reach a judgement about which book to then go and read in full
without tricking yourself that you're going to know all about
it. There are so many problems with
the idea that you should just give up reading books because of
summarize, some because of summarization services.
And I'm not even getting to the point of like how any books are
going to be produced for these summarization services if
nobody's buying the books. Separate question.
Firstly, maybe not certain kinds of professional reading, but for
a lot of reading anyway, like the reading is the point.
And this is like just the old speed reading myth, right?
Sam's a big speed reader. OK, we'll talk about that in a
moment. If you want to challenge me on
calling speed reading a myth, but also like, you know, when I
read a book and certain things stick with me and I maybe use
that to trigger other ideas, maybe I'll quote the book in a
subsequent piece of my own writing.
Like I'm the one who gets to say what salient and important a
summary of what AI thinks the author thinks is most important.
It's sort of beside the point. I feel quite strongly in terms
of even, you know, pre AI note taking unless you're studying a
specific work for a university exam.
When it be your job to regurgitate what's in the book
like doesn't, your job is not to try and make a summary of what
the author was trying to deal with.
It's like to figure out which bits kind of trigger interesting
sparks in your own minds. I'm sure I could think of 100
books I've read where I can tell the thing I really remember from
that is X. Who knows if the author thought
that was a particularly important thing.
I've had that experience myself as an author.
People say, like, I think the thing that really stuck with me
from your book was like, and then I have to think, oh, yeah,
I did put that in, didn't I? Right.
But it just wasn't particularly salient to me.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, And can you just make a
correction? I am a maybe speed listener more
so than a reader. I'm pretty slow when it comes to
reading, but audiobooks I have a pretty high speed.
I guess I'm not deeply opposed to high speed audio, but
listening my son, who's 8, is just getting into audiobooks,
which I think is a very wonderfully wholesome form of
engagement with digital technology compared to what he
could be doing at the moment. I'm still making some effort to
kind of dissuade him from listening to them very quickly.
I feel like that could train his attention in ways that, I mean,
you know, I'll have no power over the question anyway, to the
extent that as parents we make these vague attempts.
When I grew up, I actually was in your son's position of like
my mom would rent these cassette tapes from the local library
basically. And the benefit of that time was
the cassettes you can't really play at higher speeds.
So when she had busy things to do and she wanted me to, I don't
know, not bother her, she would like, put on an audio book and
give him some Lego. And then she would, like, know
that I would be happy for a good amount of time.
But yeah, I had a benefit of not being able to speed up at that
point. Yeah, there are lots of
downsides to the addition of convenience, Yeah.
Because reading, as you say, is a present moment activity,
right? That's one of my takeaways from
you that I have to remember. I'm not just trying to
accumulate the knowledge for some future use.
I need to actually absorb it now and understand it now and get
the value out of it as I am reading it.
And this is obviously a point that generalizes to the whole of
life, right? The point of life is not all
about where you are headed to or where you're going to get.
It's incredibly easy to live as if it is, but there has to be
some meaning to the doing of it. Now, I mean, there are some
forms of reading that of course, we're only doing instrumentally
in order to achieve certain goals, but it makes it
impossible for there to be such a thing as the pleasures of
reading, I would say, if it's completely focused on a future
point of meaning that you're working towards.
So that actually is the perfect segue into our last main
question, which is all about designing and in particular,
behavioral design for your present self versus your future
self. And if you'll allow me, since
you write about this so beautifully, I would love to
just read a little bit from Meditations for Mortals.
OK, OK, so you say if there's a single truth at the heart of the
imperfectionist outlook, it's that this here and now is real
life. This is it.
This portion of your limited time, the part before you've
managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your
procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner, or
retired, and before the survival of democracy, Hopefully that's
my addition or the climate have been secured.
This part matters just as much as any other, and arguably even
more than any other since the past is gone and the future
hasn't occurred yet. So right now is the only time
that really exists. If instead you take the other
approach, if you see all of this as leading up to some future
point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start
enjoying yourself or feeling good about yourself, then you'll
end up treating your actual life as something to get through
until one day it'll be over without the meaningful part of
ever having arrived. We have to show up as fully as
possible here in the swim of things as they are.
So this, to me as a behavioral scientist, is extremely
interesting. And I feel like it's fraught
with complexity because so much of my time is spent trying to
help people help their future selves.
So, you know, saving for retirement, exercising now to be
healthy, you know, all of the things that benefit their future
selves. And this is because of all of
the problems within our society that have come about for people,
you know, not moving enough, not eating well, not taking their
medication, not saving, and so on.
And so I feel this real tension between whether I should be
designing for people's future selves or current selves and how
to kind of bring these two perspectives together because I
do very much believe that it's important for us to set our
future selves up for success. And I'm also fully bought into
your lessons about living in the moment.
And you know this amazing passage of that I've just read
what to do. Yeah, no, it's really
interesting because of course, yeah, right.
I also am attempting to make sensible decisions with money
with regard to retirement and all the rest of it.
And I also struggle as much as anybody with kind of, yeah,
exercise is the obvious one, right?
Like doing something that I don't particularly feel like
doing right now because I feel like it's going to be useful
later on. So I mean, it's just a couple of
strands. I'm not sure I have a sort of
neat answer to resolve all this. Obviously, on some level, it's
both. I think there are a lot of ways
in which a lot of us spend too much time thinking about our
future selves. And I don't think that
undermines the idea that there are ways in which we definitely
should and which people like you should be helping us to do so.
So, you know, I think an awful lot of sort of project of trying
to change your life, trying to get better habits and all this
is motivated by this idea that there's something sort of both
deeply wrong with you now, but also like deeply provisional
about life now. And the important thing is to
get there. And of course, when you get
there, you're just having the same thoughts about a new future
point. So you're never actually sort of
showing up into life. And I think being aware of that
risk and seeking to find ways to not fall into that problem is
totally compatible with using some of your present moments for
judicious future planning. So it's that sort of specific
quality of until I get there, this isn't really the real life.
And that can actually entail sort of being a bit sort of more
indulgent and gentler towards your present self, making sure
that your present self is actually having a good time.
So maybe all we're doing here, I mean, I hate any kind of
response to this kind of fascinating conundrum that just
ends in a compromise. So maybe we can get further than
that in the time we have left. But like, you know, one sort of
simple response to this is to say, well, you know, we need to
do both of these things. We need to make sure that the
ways in which we are taking care of our future selves don't
become forms of kind of punishment of our present selves
that kind of vacate the meaning from our present selves.
And like, that's a consideration that a behavioral designer can
really do something with. And I think probably some of the
ways that we would say actually are more effective in getting
people to do the things now that will benefit them later are
actually those things that create meaning or are more fun.
So like, just to take your exercise example, like joining a
rock climbing gym with some, you know, other dead buddies of
yours, like that could be something that achieves both of
those goals. And a behavioral designer would
say, like, because this is fun and it's social and, you know,
you have a commitment and you sign up, you put the money down
and you have it on your calendar.
Like all those things combined will make you more likely to
show up and you can enjoy yourself.
So there you see, there we got beyond the compromise into the
synthesis, right? It's like actually these things
are the same thing in some way. And I feel, but it's incredibly
frequently the case with this sort of puzzle, I think.
Yeah, it brings a kind of personal anecdote to mind.
I remember a few years back, I went to visit my dad and I
basically noticed that he was doing the dishes and he didn't
have a dishwasher. And I was like, dad, have you
ever thought about getting a dishwasher?
You know, it's convenient. It will save you time.
You don't have to worry about doing the dishes anymore by
hand. And he was like, why?
I enjoy doing the dishes? And I'm like, did you enjoy
doing the dishes? Who enjoys the dishes?
Yeah. And it said, well, you know,
basically a long time ago I realized that I will have to do
the dishes so often in my life. Like, my future is going to have
so much dishwashing on a daily basis that like, I'm just going
to decide to find a way to enjoy it.
And so he find a way to make dishwashing kind of his daily
meditative kind of practice. And I thought I was very
inspiring to be like, OK, yeah, maybe the dishwasher is
overrated sometimes. I love that example.
It speaks to the fact that what we think we want to eliminate
from our lives, very often there's benefits and not
eliminating it. Yeah.
I think a lot of the conversation today has been
around how we deal with this idea of AI being this kind of
deluxe version of the promise we've had over and over again
around like more efficiency, more effectiveness, more value
creation. And this brings us to that maybe
a section of the podcast we call our Quick Fire Round.
We're going to kind of give you some chances to have your say
about whether various tasks or activity is something that
should be recalled to AI or not to AI.
Basically, is this something that AI should do for us or is
it a should not AI? OK.
All right. First one, automatically trim
your to read list for you by knocking off articles that you
probably will never get around to and don't really need to read
anyway. Oh, that's an interesting 1.
And I would say within reason and within limits, yes, that's a
good one. Not necessarily because I trust
the AI to do a good job of that, but because in the situation
that we're in with regard to our limitations, any trimming of the
to read list is a good thing. And if it was slightly
intelligent and how it was done, great.
But frankly, it could be, you know, virtually arbitrary.
So if everyone thought that what was happening was that it was
being very judiciously done, but actually it was just being, you
know, divided by an arbitrary 50%, that would be just as good.
All right, to AI or not to AI? Invite your friends over for
dinner for you, paying no attention to whether you've
cleaned the house and thought about what you'll eat or not.
Ah, scruffy hospitality. This lovely idea that I got the
chance to write about in the most recent book of sort of
inviting your friends around without making a big
perfectionist song and dance about inviting them.
I'm still going to say no. There's going to be very few
versions of this, AI or not to AI where I'm going to come down
pro AI taking over the sort of real warp and woof of human
relationships. So yeah, I mean, maybe it's OK
if it's just setting up the meal, right?
Because the meal is is really humans.
But I'm still a little bit dubious about that one.
OK, next one to AI or not to AIA?
Real time intervention in times of trouble, for example in the
middle of an argument or a stressful situation to remind
you to enjoy the problems because problems don't go away.
It's basically all these things so far so AI implementations of
what I've been thinking of until this conversation's surely human
challenges. I sort of abstain on this
question because I think that or maybe it's not too AIA problem
that many people. I'm sure you're very familiar
from the behavioral science context, but like, if you have
an app that automatically pings you every single day at the same
time, or even it's a different time to remind you to like write
down something you're grateful for, obviously 99% of users
after three or four days are just ignoring that notification.
And if anyone can ever completely fix that problem, and
maybe you think you have, I don't know, but like if anyone
could fix that sort of adaptation problem, they'd be
very rich because that is something that'll make a huge
difference. Possibly AI could choose its
moment and say the things that would make a more of a
difference and resist some of that phenomenon, but I tend to
think that any kind of automated thing like that and ends by
getting ignored. Maybe it's like a hologram that
appears of your future self. Right.
So you've got these two options, right?
Either it's not very convincingly human and you just
forget about it, or it's very convincing and it's sort of
human qualities. And then that's just really
annoying. I mean, that would just maybe
like that would be like me stepping into like an argument
between like, I don't know, two friends of mine.
That's just obnoxious behavior. It is all right, so you've
convincingly figured out what the theme of our to AI or to not
to AI is, but we're going to keep going.
And the next one is a possibility generator to help
you think through what you could actually do with your time,
including mapping out the consequences of each activity.
Oh, I think that's a great use for AII.
Don't know exactly. I can't quite picture how the
consequences part would work in terms of being right about that.
But in terms of setting out a bunch of prompts, a bunch of
thoughts that you sort of bounce yourself off.
To me, that calls to mind, you know, ancient sort of divination
texts and things like right, the AI Ching or something where we
can or tarot where we can sort of argue about whether there's
some real intelligence in that or if it's just a random idea
generator. But that can be tremendously
useful. And if they I could do that,
well then yeah, absolutely. It could do some probabilistic
modelling. So like you go on this vacation
and yeah, you have like a 20% chance of losing your job versus
yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that would be a great
sort of extra addition to those kind of Oracle.
You know, I mean, it's not so much that, again, I'm keep
coming back to these ways in which it's like, yeah, maybe
it's intelligent, but really what it is doing is providing
you with something that can deepen your own engagement.
I'll only add one thing, which is that this is actually my
favorite Oliver ISM. You can do whatever you like,
you just have to face the consequences.
This has been the most useful in my personal life.
Yeah, this is a originally a quote from Sheldon Cop, the
psychotherapist. You're free to do whatever you
like. You need to only face the
consequences. Yeah, anything.
You're just choosing which problems you want to have.
That's right. You can go for a walk in the
middle of the day. You can do it.
Just do it. Or be willing to pay the price
of doing it right. Yeah.
Or yeah, which might be much smaller than you were assuming.
Usually. Usually it's much smaller.
That's what I've learned, yeah. OK, I think this one is
interesting. To AI or not to AIA warning
system to alert you when you're putting too much effort into
some arbitrary task? Yeah, I'd be up for that.
That sounds good. Again, it's interesting to ask
how you could put that into practice, but if it could, that
belongs in the long family of kind of biofeedback and all
those kinds of things that can absolutely have that place.
Well, the big selling point now with AI is the idea that like,
give AI your screen. And so the AI is always with you
on your laptop so that you can, you know, have it there for
help, have it there for whatever you need.
And honestly, in that case, you could also see that, you know,
you've been rewriting the same e-mail over and over again and
be like, you know, this is OK to half ass like it's not.
Probably just send it. Yeah, no, that sounds genuinely
beneficial to me. Wow.
Do you notice you're coming more and more on board with these as
we are? You going to become a real
zealot for technological optimization, yeah.
All right, next one, keep track of your daily done list so you
can bask in your many accomplishments such as waking
up, showering, eating breakfast rather than worrying about your
looming to do's. Right, referring to the fact
that I'm a big advocate for done lists and the idea of sort of
putting things on a list so that you can compare.
Not just always be comparing what you've done to the universe
of things left to do, but you can really focus on what you
have done and might not have done, but you did do and feel a
sense of agency and pride and all the rest of it.
Now, I think it's pretty important that you do that
yourself and that it isn't done for you because that's the whole
point, right? Not to sort of accumulate some
log file somewhere that has these things in it, but to go
through the process of drawing your own attention back to what
you've done. So analog lists for me.
Yeah, analog notebooks all the way.
All right, final to AI or not to AIA timer that counts down from
4000 weeks starting at birth and pops up into your vision
whenever you are using your time suboptimally to remind you of
life's finitude. I think not to AII think the
reason is that I'm generally speaking, people are sometimes
surprised by this, but I'm not a big fan of those kinds of
memento Mori that kind of really focus on sort of poking their
way into your attention and reminding you that you don't
have time. I think that's generally not an
aid to entering more fully into the experience of life.
Generally pings you back into the control mindset.
Seems fair. We have one final question which
we ask all of our guests, and that is what is your most
controversial opinion about AII? Feel like all opinions are so
vigorously put forward on this topic that it's hard to find a
controversial one. But let me go with this because
I did mention this recently in a newsletter, and I think it's
true, and it's got truer since I wrote it, which is that a lot of
very grand predictions about AI, either very optimistic utopian
ones or especially the really sort of Duma predictions, are
best understood as coping mechanisms that the person
holding them is engaging in to deal with the fact that they
don't have a clue what's coming. So I think probably the
controversial opinion there is like that anybody who says with
a strong degree of certainty that they know what this future
is going to look like, they're dealing with their own emotions,
but they don't have any reason for that certainty.
Nobody knows. There you go.
It's very, you know, it's actually strange sort of
existential reassurance to say I know that everything is going to
hell in a handcart almost as much as to say that I know that
the golden age is is about to dawn like in in either case, you
know, and you don't have to face the fact that actually you
don't. Yeah, what a pleasure to have
this conversation with you. I certainly felt like this has
been very much time well spent from our end.
This present movie has really enjoyed every moment of this
conversation. Me, me too.
It's it's good to talk about the implications of some of this
stuff for things that I'm not so habitually talk talking about.
So that's great. Yeah, really thought provoking.
Thank you. Yeah, this has been so much fun.
I'm glad. I hope we did get to push you a
little bit out of your comfort zone, but I think for the best.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you.
And that's a wrap. You've been listening to the
Behavioral Design Podcast brought to you by Habit Weekly
and Nuanced Behavior. Sam and Alene tell me.
This season is packed with incredible insights about
behavioral design and AI, so be sure to subscribe and share the
podcast with your friends. Though you might want to keep it
away from your enemies. In case you haven't noticed, I'm
an AI voice. Yep, pretty crazy.
Quite the improvement since last season's AI outro, don't you
think? If you'd like to collaborate
with us at Nuance Behavior, where we use behavioral design
to craft digital products with Nuance, e-mail us at
hello@nuancebehavior.com or book a call directly on our website,
nuancebehavior.com. A special thanks to the amazing
Dave Pizarro for our show music and to Mei Chen Yap and April
English for their help in producing and publishing this
episode. Thanks again for tuning in.
We'll be back soon with another exciting conversation where
behavioral design and AI intersect.
Cousins. To Mugatroid.
Oh.