Pushing Yourself Beyond the Google Mindset of Self-Reliance (and Embracing Personalization)
With a few examples of fun AI prompts
One thing that’s hit me lately: Google trained us all to be self-sufficient information hunters and synthesizers. When we need to diagnose a health issue, fix a coding bug, choose a vacation destination, or write a paper, we've learned to search, read, compare sources, and synthesize into personalized informed decisions or work. All the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Better learn how to leverage it. “Let me Google that for you?” captured this ethos. How dare you ask a question that you could find or figure out yourself!
Well… thanks Google. The more I find myself taking advantage of AI, the more I realize I’ve been unlearning this trained self-sufficiency. What we all have now is an expert available to us to ask any question or even delegate many tasks. Yes, sometimes we need to give it some back-up documents, or clearer instructions, and sometimes it has no idea what it’s talking about (not that it will tell you). But if you can move from a mindset of self-sufficiency by default, to asking the LLM expert at your fingertips by default, a world starts to open.
This isn’t about moving queries off of Google into ChatGPT. It’s also a shift in the kind of problems we can tackle, and how we’d approach them:
Google Era: I’m stuck on a bug. Let me search and read a bunch of StackOverflow threads to debug this.
AI Era: Pull request to an AI developer who has access to your entire codebase.
Google Era: I wonder what diet changes or supplements I should be taking given my latest blood test results. [Does a lot of searching.]
AI Era: Uploads latest blood test result into a ChatGPT Project, “You are a medical analysis expert specializing in interpreting blood work results and creating personalized health recommendations….” [full prompt instructions here].
Google Era: I wonder how good our team is at communicating together. [Bookmarks a lot of articles on team communication to read later.]
AI Era: "Tell us something we don't know, or wouldn't want to know about ourselves" [uploads file of team Slack conversations]. (-idea and instructions from Tom Lawrence)
Google Era: My wife just did an embryo transfer. Let me search for articles on what she should be eating to maximize the changes of a healthy pregnancy.
AI Era: "You are the world’s foremost expert on maternal and pediatric nutrition like Dr. Lily Nichols. You’ve studied the nutrition studies and lore from every culture in the world that best promote maternal and baby health and brain development. Help me put together a week by week menu — breakfasts, lunches, dinner, snacks — for my wife from embryo transfer to end of fourth trimester.
My wife is a pescatarian but will do bone broths, butter, dairy, etc. She just doesn’t like eating meat, though maybe that may change with pregnancy. We have a worldly palate.” (-instructions from Aike Ho)
Are the experts perfect for every question? No, of course not. (I like how Ethan Mollick describes the “jagged frontier.”) Is this the worse they will ever be? Yes.
This isn’t just about an AI doing the work we once did of finding/synthesizing information. One thing that hits me is how much more personalized an AI result can be than a Google search will ever be. The paradigm is just so different. When I do a Google search, we all have some expectation of objectivity in the results. We critique Google when two people do the same search (e.g., on a news event) and get different results. And of course the means by which Google personalizes results has been more implicit - inferring from my searches, geo, etc. So personalization gets pushed to the edges to sites that are also stuck in a Google / search paradigm. Take TripAdvisor as an example. I have to figure out the best hotel for me by looking for clues in reviews that are relevant to me personally. Whereas with an AI, I can just tell it about my family and vacation preferences. I can store those preferences in a project, add my own reviews on hotels or trips we’ve taken, and get personalized recommendations.
This transition won't happen automatically. At least for everyone older than GenZ, self-sufficiency is deeply ingrained. Unlearning it will take conscious effort. But once you start, you realize how different the future will be. Have fun.
Being Gen X, my parents would tell us " Look it up! " and we dug into the Brittanicas, some times leading us down different paths of curiosity, now my kids will just ask any number of apps and get an answer in seconds and then on to the next task. Hope our overall thirst for knowledge is not stunted by this new generation of technology.
I love the framing!
It’s also about letting it be smart.
In the google era it was I have this issue and let me read enough to figure out what to do.
Now it’s I have this issue, please give me personalised options that work for me.
It means a higher level of problem solving / thinking needs to be attached to issue resolution.
On the other hand in the google-way it means one has to be thinking the whole time one is digging around and you get exposed to different things.
In the llm era, the “truth” is presented to you on a platter so you need the thinking skills to dig deep into the solution to figure out if it’s really what you need.
Rather than iteratively thinking through the problem, you have to do it all at once. And that’s a hard skill to develop and it’s also not one that many people have.