We Optimized the Wrong Thing: People Need the Inconvenience
Why friction, effort, and a little difficulty might be exactly what we've been designing out of our lives.
The journal · Theme
AI adoption & belief
Why organizations buy AI and then wait for something to happen. 33 essays, newest first.
Do You Believe in This Thing or Not?
Every company has the same AI. Very few have decided whether they believe in it.
I wasn’t wrong about measuring Return on Inference. I was too early.
Before you measure what AI gives you, measure whether people are using it enough to become fluent.
What an Agent Does When It Doesn’t Know What To Do. Or Shouldn’t Do.
Left alone, an agent fills every gap with a confident guess. Fallbacks, escalation and restraint have to be designed in, and they only hold where people can say they're not sure yet.
Option A is the obvious answer and Option B is its mirror. The work worth paying for questions the brief itself, and AI is making A and B nearly free.
Write, summarize, generate: the verbs people use with AI decide what it gets used for. Diagnostic and adversarial verbs produce better questions.
Intelligence is getting cheap to deploy. Deciding what to spend it on becomes the new discipline of leadership, as capital allocation once was.
My Conversation with Ram: Why "I Am the Loop" Changed How I Work with AI
Notes from my podcast conversation with Ram, built around one idea: I am the loop, not the human in the loop.
What AI Is Teaching Us About Being Human: The Presence Economy — Part I
Young designers use AI as a safe place to rehearse before they face people. As generated content floods everything, being there in person becomes how trust gets earned.
Is This Really Creative? What a talk at Campaign360 taught me about the wrong question.
Every new tool has made creativity move rather than vanish. AI collapses the gap between imagining a thing and making it, so the value shifts to meaning.
Do Not Underestimate Your Place in History Right Now
Earlier technologies changed how things reached us. This one takes part in how we think, and history will judge us on whether we stayed awake while it did.
If AI Becomes a Verb, What Kind of Verb Will It Be?
AI will become a verb. Whether it ends up a utility verb, a cultural verb or a creative verb decides whether speed, visibility or judgment wins.
AI only seems human because work culture taught us to prize fluency and speed over judgment. The real choice is between a cheap version of humanity and the full one.
I’ve Lived Through More Than One End of the World.
What repeated cycles of technological disruption have taught me about survival, judgment, and hope.
The Explorer, the Settler, and the Future of Work in the Age of AI
AI amplifies two temperaments: the people who push into new territory and the people who make it livable. Organizations need both, working side by side.
To Question Is to Answer: The Missing Skill in the Age of AI
AI reflects the thinking you bring to it. The book started from that idea: the quality of your questions matters more than the craft of your prompts.
Agencies are buying agentic systems before their people can use a chatbot well. The fix is fluency and a permission structure set by leadership, not another tool.
GenAI: The Generation We Choose
Generation AI is a mindset, open to anyone at any age. The divide that matters next is between people who think with AI and people who don't.
AI Leadership: Are We Starting from X When We Need Y?
The fear that AI will kill junior talent is Theory X wearing new clothes. Leaders who build AI systems on trust will grow people; leaders who build on control will lose them.
We Gave Everyone the Same Tools.
Now Everything Tastes Like Beige. Creativity was never about the tools.
Let Go. Hold On. Get Trained. Move Forward.
How to build an AI-first creative culture without losing your soul.
The Quiet Genius of Gemini and NotebookLM
A week working only in Google's tools for a coaching client. Gemini and NotebookLM win by quietly respecting how people think over time.
When Did “Good Enough” Become Good Enough?
A reflection on AI, apathy, and the quiet collapse of creative standards
Screen Tests: How Hollywood’s AIs Predicted, Shaped, and Misunderstood the Future
From HAL to Her, Hollywood got AI metaphorically right and literally wrong. It arrived as invisible infrastructure we default to, and we're handing it our intimacy.
But Everything Important Happens When We’re Awake.
The Agency AI Solution You’re Waiting For Is Already Outdated.
What If We Stopped Treating AI Like a Plugin?
The Mid-career Majority Is Already Using AI. You Just Didn’t Notice
A Generation report shows older workers are quietly teaching themselves AI. They're a pragmatic bridge generation, and hiring bias still looks straight past them.
The AI Ambition Gap: Older Workers Are Ready, but Left Waiting
Older workers want AI training and employers aren't offering it. That's an organizational blind spot, because experienced people bring the judgment that makes AI learning stick.
Prototyping at the Speed of Thought: Why I’m Exploring VIBE Coding
Ahead of a hackathon: vibe coding lets strategists and creatives turn an idea into a working prototype through conversation. It raises the resolution of the early idea.
Are We Human, or Are We Prompting?
The Killers asked the question first. Formulaic prompting turns us into performers for the machine, and the machine starts training us back.
The Game We Think We’re Playing: AI, Creativity, and the Illusion of Control
“If you want to get the English interested in a war, you have to tell them it’s a game”. - Orwell
Read My Book. Or just buy it and put in on your shelf. Up to you.
To Question Is to Answer is out. Ten things it isn't, and the one thing it is: a field guide to asking AI better questions.
Wabi-Sabi in the Age of AI Perfection
AI's polished outputs are predictions, not truths. Japanese aesthetics and years behind a camera suggest the flaws are where the meaning gets made.