From the course: Smarter Thinking and Better Living in an AI World: A Conversation with Daniel Pink

How can AI help to both focus and expand our thinking?

From the course: Smarter Thinking and Better Living in an AI World: A Conversation with Daniel Pink

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How can AI help to both focus and expand our thinking?

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- You teach that to get more done, do less. And so I'm wondering how you think people might be able to prioritize this principle as they're integrating AI, especially, you know, given the perception that AI seems to be all about doing more, more, more. - You're in control of how you use it. You can use it to help you narrow, you can use it to help you widen. So I use it to help me narrow by saying, "Hey, remind me every morning of my MIT and check in on me sometime in the afternoon when I'm probably spacing out." That's a way to narrow my focus. What it can also do in terms of particular focus work is that it can expand your choices and say... I'm trying to think of an example that I used recently. Okay, so let's say that I'm writing something and maybe I use a cliche that "So and so was spinning his wheels, right?" I'm not going to write "spinning his wheels." I'm a trained professional, right? But, you know, could be late in the day, I'm tired. I could say Chat GPT or Cloud or whoever. "What are 25 more inventive ways to say 'spinning your wheels'?" And what typically happens, at least in my experience, is that 24 of them will be terrible. And one of them will get me unstuck in the same way that I would get unstuck in the old days by turning around to one of my colleagues and shouting something across the office. Maybe it'll be more surgical about delivering instantly usable answers in the future. But for now what it does is it gives me pretty good things that just loosen me up and make sure that I don't get stymied. And I think that right now it's an accelerant. It's a WD40, you know, it gets you on. It's an incredible un-stucking tool.

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