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Everyone Gets a Superpower

Published 18 days ago • 2 min read

Week in Review  ·  Issue 53

Hi Reader,

Funny thing about writing this week's issue. Halfway through an essay arguing that everyone now has a superpower they barely use, I caught myself doing a research task the slow way out of pure habit, the exact behavior the essay diagnoses. I stopped, ran my own robot question, and got the afternoon back. Physician, heal thyself. So this week I built you the version I wish I had been running all along, below, and it is only in this email.

Steve

For Email Subscribers Only

The Robot Question: a five day experiment

This week's essay names three practices for actually wielding the superpower everyone now has. This is the one to start with, and it is the one I use to find out where my own sense of what is possible has quietly gone out of date. The rule is simple. Before you do a meaningful task the old way, stop and ask whether the machine could produce the first version, then actually ask it, especially when you are confident the answer will be useless. The confidence is the point. That is the belief being tested.

Run it once a day next week. Keep it to one line each time.

Mon   The task I assumed it could not touch:
Tue   What it actually produced:
Wed   Where I was right to be skeptical:
Thu   Where I was wrong:
Fri   The belief I am rewriting because of it:

Friday's line is the whole exercise. Everything before it is just evidence gathering. If you run this and something surprises you, hit reply and tell me, because I read every one of these and the best ones end up shaping what I write next.

This Week's Issue

Everyone Gets a Superpower

Everyone Gets a Superpower

Roughly 24 million people ever learned to code. Eight billion can now direct machines in their own language, at nearly zero cost. A superpower this universal should be reshaping everything, and mostly it is not, because power is not the same thing as rewiring. This week: why the gap exists, what it has to do with reinventing yourself for the decade ahead, and three practices for actually wielding the thing.

Read the full issue

Think Forward · Episode 151

Think Forward EP 151 with Paul Baier

Everyone Gets a Superpower

Paul Baier, CEO of GAI Insights and Harvard Business School Executive Fellow, has spent years inside the rooms where enterprises decide what to do about AI. We talk about why adoption is nearly universal while returns are not, what separates the organizations seeing real results, and why the bottleneck is almost never the technology.

Listen to the episode

Prefer to watch? Watch the full episode on YouTube →

From the Community

This week's question: what is one thing you have gotten a machine to do for you this year that you would have flatly called impossible for you in 2021? The thread turned up a pattern worth reading, almost every story came with a confession attached about how long people waited before testing the assumption.

Join the Future Proof Community →

Keep looking forward,
Steve

Think Forward Network

Keeping You Future Proof in the Age of Intelligence

I'm a filmmaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who loves to talk about business & entrepreneurship, personal development, and artificial intelligence. Subscribe and join over 5,000+ newsletter readers every week!

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