You Cannot Escape the Details

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David Nicholas Williams

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In a lot of meetings and need a system to keep track of key points and actions week to week?Check out Docket, an active note-taking system for thinkers who want to use their own brain (not AI) to distill what matters from meetings.<br>You cannot escape the details<br>What's behind the majority of the excitement about AI? I think ultimately it's a dream about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.<br>But you cannot escape the details. There's no level of abstraction that solves this. The closer you look at anything, the messier and more nuanced it gets. You've got to get deep, you've got to get meticulous, to do anything novel or good.<br>You can't hand all of the details off. You certainly can hand some of them off. To be good at something is to know, or be able to work out, precisely which 'some'. If you aren't good, you just won't know. So you can't do something well with AI without first being good at the thing yourself, and to become good at something in the first place requires a complete reversal of the mindset that would lead one to having wanted to hand it off.<br>I think most of the optimism around AI is a projection of how reality might be if it were true that one could be good at things without caring about the details. But things don't work that way, and there's no reason they should. It's not a good thing to not have the skill or knowledge to do something. It's not empowering to hand off the details, because the extent to which that can be successful is the extent to which you have played no role; have done nothing at all. I can't think of anything less empowering.

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