Intelligence Living and Working With AI

The Book in 3 Sentences

This book explores the impact and integration of AI in work and daily life, emphasizing the importance of hands-on experimentation with AI tools. It compares AI’s productivity gains (20-80%) to historical technological revolutions, while examining both AI’s limitations and potential societal impacts through historical parallels like the automation of telephone operators.

The author advocates for a “Centaur” approach - human-AI collaboration - while highlighting AI’s current capabilities, ethical concerns, and the need to understand its implications for future employment and innovation.

Impressions

Improvement using AI is real, but there are also a small learning curve for using it right. I think a large problem is in outsourcing the thinking part of the work.

Use AI in all your workflows and see how far you can go.

My Top Quotes

• I believe the cost of getting to know AI—really getting to know AI—is at least three sleepless nights.

• Early studies of the effects of AI have found it can often lead to a 20 to 80 percent improvement in productivity across a wide variety of job types, from coding to marketing. By contrast, when steam power, that most fundamental of General Purpose Technologies, the one that created the Industrial Revolution, was put into a factory, it improved productivity by 18 to 22 percent.

• For example, the entire email database of Enron, shut down for corporate fraud, is used as part of the training material for many AIs, simply because it was made freely available to AI researchers.

• Some of them just cheat, like the image generator DALL-E, which covertly inserted the word female into a random number of requests to generate an image of “a person,” in order to force a degree of gender diversity that is not in the training data.

• You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you—or threaten you and your job.

• Then start working like a Centaur. Give the tasks that you hate but can easily check (like writing meaningless reports or low-priority emails) to the AI and see whether it improves your life.

• By the 1920s, 15 percent of all American women had worked as operators, and AT&T was the largest employer in the United States. AT&T decided to remove the old-school telephone operators and replace them with much cheaper direct dialing. Operator jobs dropped rapidly by 50 to 80 percent. As might be expected, the job market overall adjusted quickly, as young women found other roles, like secretarial positions, that offered similar or better pay. But

• Amara’s Law, named after futurist Roy Amara, says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

• Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, published a paper in 1984 called “The 2 Sigma Problem.” In this paper, Bloom reported that the average student tutored one-to-one performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a conventional classroom environment. This means that the average tutored student scored higher than 98 percent of the students in the control group (though not all studies of tutoring have found as large an impact).

• The gap between the programmers in the top 75th percentile and those in the bottom 25th percentile can be as much as 27 times along some dimensions of programming quality.

• In fact, the speed of innovation appears to be dropping by 50 percent every 13 years, slowing down economic growth.