Humans In The Loop

What if instead of setting quantitative goals, I focused on how I wanted to feel on the other side? 

In the case of my OneNote course, I wanted to end each day feeling productive, proud, and confident that I’d covered each lesson extensively. 

The change was immediate. Some days, I felt especially creative and filmed ten videos in a row. On other day... See more

For people seeking to make a difference, it begins with helping other people make a difference.

Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:

1. We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.


2. We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed flavor-of

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People worried about AI taking their jobs and taking control are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans even as they develop better AI. People are still in control, but they need to use that control wisely, ethically and carefully.

“With technology advancing so much, and humans needing to learn how to collaborate with technology to get their work done, the skillset we need more and more to collaborate are the power skills,”

First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly possibl... See more

When someone acts in a surprising way, we can begin to understand by wondering what they might be afraid of.

For now, at least, innovation is a uniquely human ability—one that would be critical to a system that could recursively imagine and create better versions of itself.