Last week I reached AI overload. All the new features and that multi-threaded, multi-tasking feeling of just trying to keep up with it all.
So from this last weekend it has quite deliberately been an AI detox week. Just time in the garden, largely pulling weeds out of the lawn and then back in the office with spreadsheets and emails… ahh the good old days.
Stepping away to get a bit of downtime I think it has worked… and has given me a bit space to notice something…
Is our relationship with AI changing?
For much of the last year, AI has been a great support, and a very useful tool for sure. With tasks loaded to complete, AI has become my handy helper… but it was largely still me running the task, actually doing the work.
This was not how it felt the last couple of weeks.
Development is now running at such a pace, and with my new set up in the office, that today it really feels much more like I am AI to do the work now… then reviewing the output, catching mistakes, refining prompts and re-directing.
No longer having to get it all done myself, being able to manage and organise, to have it done for me… I can now delegate. It is a feeling of getting promoted.
But, the thing is, this is also a different skill set… for those that have been managers, something they will recognise… and of course, as with real life, once you are managing things, everything become more complex… make sure you explain things clearly and accept that things are not always done exactly the way you would do them yourself!
I am wondering if this is happening here too. Are these also skills we are going to need going forward… AI may not be just about the technical, coding, integration with APIs… but also how to I effectively manage a bunch of agents, to deliver high quality output (to spec), to be effective and efficient… Management skills.
Are you keeping up?
And then there is another problem – managing AI energy. No, not energy for AI… but my own.
AI has this incredible capacity to get things done. It doesn’t have a Thursday afternoon slump, it doesn’t have a hankering for an early exit and curry on a Friday night and it certainly doesn’t need 2 cups of tea, a coffee and an undisclosed number of digestives to get going in the morning!
It is quite literally, the keenest employee you will ever have. It sounds great… if you can keep up. By Friday I was exhausted and reminding myself I was not a machine!
So in this human and machine ecosystems we are developing is this something else we need to consider… and this may not be a phase, but the start of a new type of relationship going forward.
AI, after all is probably never going back to being a fancy calculator. The way things are going we are going to need to have clear boundaries over what happens, who does what when… just like real life… it is us the humans that need to create and enforced these rules.
It may just be the biggest irony that the more we use AI, the more we may need very human management skills… and not just for the machines, but also for ourselves too
Have a great upcoming weekend, everyone.
