AI comes up in almost every conversation I have now: what to build, how to organise, what work still matters, and what any of us should do next.
I’ve watched it grow up. I studied AI at university in the 1990s, when it was mostly a clever tool for games. Demis Hassabis had written the AI for one of them, Theme Park.
In 2015, a friend from Google joined DeepMind, the company Demis had co-founded, and helped build AlphaGo. Extraordinary, but still a game.
In 2022, ChatGPT arrived, and AI started to look useful. I wondered if it could be as important as the web or mobile.
Then, this year, it got personal. I started talking my thinking out loud, and it worked with me: interviewing me about how I think, helping me rebuild my website, writing code I could never write myself.
Most days now, I come upstairs to make a coffee, already buzzing from what we’ve just done, and tell my wife all about it. I talk better than I write. Now it helps me shape what I say, and it still sounds like me.
As intelligence gets cheap and plentiful, the things only people can do matter more: judgement, courage, emotion, connection, knowing what you want and deciding what matters.
The leaders who thrive will be those who get better at being human.
That’s the work I do.
