My Current Approach to AI
And/Both, Not Either/Or
My advice on AI is a little paradoxical.
I’ve always had an inner Luddite and an inner tinkerer. I was slow to adopt tech when I was younger (didn’t get a cell or a computer until I was in my 20s), then became an early adopter of just about everything. That’s still my posture now. When a new tool shows up, I dive in, experiment hard, and figure out what it’s actually good for.
AI is the biggest multiplier of mental output most of us will ever see. It can help you write, organize, build, and execute faster. The economy is going to keep shifting around it. If you don’t learn how to use it well, you will fall behind. So one side of my advice is simple: dive in. Learn it. Take the free classes. Watch the tutorials. Experiment. Use it to multiply the good you’re trying to do in your work and life.
But here’s the other side.
Create a hard partition in your life. Not balance. Partition.
Have one “house” where you go deep into digital tools and AI. Then have another that is as analog as possible. Real books. Physical media. Offline spaces. Long breaks from social media. Times when the internet is simply not present. Protect skills and habits that keep you grounded in the physical world and attentive to the people in front of you.
These two houses serve the same mission. They aren’t at war. But they need to stay distinct so you don’t get swallowed by the digital world and lose the disciplines that make for a faithful, grounded life.
Use the machine. Learn it well.
But don’t live inside it.
"Create a hard partition in your life. Not balance. Partition.
Have one “house” where you go deep into digital tools and AI. Then have another that is as analog as possible. Real books. Physical media. Offline spaces. Long breaks from social media. Times when the internet is simply not present. Protect skills and habits that keep you grounded in the physical world and attentive to the people in front of you."
This is exactly the kind of advice we need in our technology-driven culture right now! Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate this, Michael. I am a 3D Artist in the game industry and have been so against generative AI for a while now because it will in fact erase a LOT of opportunity for me in the future. But as I've been thinking and praying more on it, I think I am starting to see that it's not so much erasing opportunities as it is changing what those will look like. I'm still not a fan of gen AI, but I get why non-artistic folks want to use it to bring some visions to life. Because as a non-technical guy (coding), I see the power and usefulness of leveraging AI to help me get something off the ground that I otherwise couldn't on my own.
It's a balance, I think, and I appreciate where you're setting up the lines.