Making decisions

I read a lot of news articles about AI. I think about it a lot. What will it change, what won’t it change, what skills do I need, what skills do my children need. I’ve not really come to a conclusion, becuase if I had, I’d probably be rich, not feeling so skint that I’ve not bought a really cheap esim for my trip to America. I can survive on the WiFi, so why pay another £5.

The bits I have concluded on AI, as of October 2025, is that I don’t have time to work out how to use AI well. I’m not sure anyone does. The reason I don’t have time to work out how to save myself time is that I am bad at prioritising what matters. I used to be really good at it, but over the years, I feel as if I have lost focus. I used to think about just outcomes, what I need to do to make a meeting work. But once you have more meetings than you can adequately prepare for, and the purpose of the meeting got lost somewhere around the Covid obsession with talking faces on a screen, I think I lost focus on which meetings matter, to my great cost.

Anyway, so why can’t I work out a happy path to harness my skills, increase my influence, increase the amount of time I can devote to working out what matters? I think it’s because fundamentally, I have become unthreaded, like a screw you keep trying to shove in, and then realise it will never fit becaues it’s been pushed too hard. That’s hardly unique thogh. We are all “tired all the time”, too many demands, too many different contexts to switch between. Did I buy butter, do the kids have vitamins, did I cancel the London meeting I’ll be in Madrid for, why is my Garmin telling me I’m overreaching, where is the stuff I need to produce this deck, oh gosh look at the RPI data. Everyone has that, I think, the jumble. I think that longer term, AI only increases the jumble. There is more of everything, because everyone can produce more. . Most people take great care drafting job applications, for example. They feel they need to devote time and effort to crafting phrases that match the job description. They are therefore limited by their own time and diligence in how many applications they can submit. Now, the average recruiter is receiving 10 times as many applications – because everyone can use an AI to match the job description in a cover letter, and they get much more accurate job recommendations, which only increases the incentive to apply. So we end up back at square one

My internal atttention mechanism is about the same as everyone else’s, paying attention to what I can see, to other people, to their immediate needs. I try to do more planning for the long term, but there is only so much time. I keep playing the AI hand, but it’s too much to sift through. I think it is rational not to think too far ahead, as you can waste a great deal of time on things that change fundamentally within a week.Just keep iterating on now, with a single thread; stay intellectually flexible, keep fit, learn interesting things, fix what you can fix. As I make decisions, I think about what I uniquely bring to the conversation – what do I pick out from the sea of information?

There will be a future with AI, just as chess is entirely unaffected by computer chess.