Pre-AI Thinking

A friend told me this week she's using AI "a little."

But she really needs to do a course first.

A few days later, another friend said almost exactly the same thing.

It baffles me.

Because the course is sitting right there. It's the search box.

The same box you used to plan your trip to Vanuatu. Then asked to explain how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Google has made us think a search box is bounded by the information it indexes. AI isn’t. It can reason. It can plan. It can teach you anything you need, including how to use it.

Ask it how you should be organising your work around it. Tell it to build something with you, and to explain itself as it goes.

There is no syllabus because the syllabus writes itself. And then rewrites itself with every new prompt.

We've been trained to wait for structure. For someone credentialed to hand us a curriculum and tell us where to start.

That's pre-AI thinking.

To learn how to use AI, use it.

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3 things that made me write this

1. I watch people type "best pizza in Sydney" into Claude the same way they'd type it into Google. It'll answer that. But ask it to plan a week's meals around what's in your fridge and it'll do that too. Most people never discover the difference because they never ask.
2. We expect software to teach us how to use it. AI turns that upside down. You can ask the software how you should be using the software.
3. A client asked me, "What's the best time to post on LinkedIn?" Instead of giving her the usual generic answer, I gave ChatGPT her last 20 posts and asked it to figure out when she should post. It found a pattern in her audience, content and results that no generic "best time to post" article could know.