So one of the things I love to do is a computer science Professor who also thinks more broadly about how we live in work in the modern digital environment is to draw connections between these two worlds of mine the computer science and the advice world so I went to a talk the other day it was given by a computer security researcher from around this area and it sparked in my mind that interesting thought about one of the Reasons why we often feel so exhausted and unhappy with contemporary knowledge work so what I want to do
here is try this out for size I am going to connect a very narrow computer security issue with the very broad question of how do we make our work lless exhausting all right so let's get into it I've pulled up on the screen here for people who are uh watching instead of just listening a meme that gets at a clear computer security issue so here's What this meme is there's someone at a computer and here's the text sorry but your password must contain an uppercase letter a number a haiku a gang sign a hieroglyph and
the blood of a virgin all right does this sound familiar uh starting in the early 2000s and in picking up with increasingly urgency has been these ever escalating request from software and security Ops to make your password Increasingly better from a hard to crack or security perspective and the way this sort of process unfolded was like like At first there were sort of suggestions like hey a good password you know should have this people ignored that and so then they started educating like well we're going to give you some like information about like why you
want a better password and what makes a better password that was largely ignored and Then the software and security operators finally just begin forcing people like your password has to obey all these rules or not going to accept it so you have to figure this out when you set up your password um there's other rules as well it's not just what a new password has to do they begin adding rules about like we looked at your last passwords as well and it can't be too similar to your most recent password uh also rules about like
you have to change this password Roughly like once every 18 minutes I seem seems roughly what they seem to request um so from a Security operation perspective it's as if their mindset is why are users resisting these rules having more complicated passwords objectively makes these system safer and harder to C and it's bad if these systems get hacked into and crack and from the security people's perspective it's not like these rules are somehow super onerous like People don't know how to do them or it requires some sort of complex skill that people don't have it's
just coming up with a password that matches these various rules like we're not making that big of an ask and it's like important for passwords not to be cracked all right so this is like a a mindset in the security world I'm going going to give it a name the N the mindset behind this approach to computer passwords I'm going To call the isolated optimal mindset so I'm going to try to generalize this mindset and then we're going to bring it out of computer security here in a second but the isolated optimal mindset looks at
specific behaviors and isolation and asks what's the optimal thing for a person to do in this situation so um let's just look in isol setting up a password for our this it system at our company what is the Optimal thing for user to do here oh to give a password that we know will be largely resistant to uh Brute Force cracking attempts and the way that this isolated optimal mindset unfolds is like look if the optimal thing to do here is not crazy like okay you need to go on a quest of ever increasing com
you know difficult obstacles and when you make it back on the other end of the quest You'll have your password as long it's Not crazy like that or something that people just won't know how to do right so you're not saying yeah we just need you to write like a quick C script and let's just have it do autogeneration of your password and make sure that it has like proper polymorphism on its objects actually I don't know if C is objectoriented so that reference might have just upset Jesse got really upset when I made a
I referenced a property of object-oriented programming when Referencing C or famously you would use C++ more often than c for object-oriented programming um and and Jesse he just like World his eyes and shook his head he gets really mad would you say that's true when I mess up computer programming references all I can think of is like Neil Stevenson's cryptography books when you're talking about all this and I'm like I don't understand any of this if there's one thing that upsets Jesse is when we're Talking about polymorphism in objects and object-oriented programming not correctly referencing
the the in ingrain polymorphism support in various language classes we fight about this all the time but anyways all right so trust me we're leaving the nerd in a second but we're starting in computer science and we're going to move to the world that 99% of you care about so this is the mindset that drives all that annoying password stuff the isolated optimal mindset which Again is just hey what would be the optimal thing for someone to do here and if that answer isn't crazily complicated or onerous then like why won't they just do this
I think this mindset explains a lot of the expectations in the broader world of work that tend to exhaust us as well so I I'm this mindset in security which I heard it talked about in a talk the other day Got me thinking about you know what this is the mindset in the world to work more generally that is causing some problems I want to give you two concrete examples to try to make this more clear what I mean consider all the issues surrounding email and let's apply the isolated optimal mindset to help explain these
issues isolated in the moment if I send you an email with like a question the optimal behavior is for you to just to respond right away right Because think about it if if you would just respond to my message right away it gives me a lot more flexibility uh and ease in how I do my work like when I need information I can get it much in the same way that when you know I need information from the internet Google will just give me that answer and if I look at this behavior and isolation you
answering my email it passes the test of this is not super onerous I'm not asking you to go do something really hard or beyond your ability in fact it will probably just take you three minutes right you just have to look this thing up and get me back an answer so the isolated optimal mindset says yeah just respond to my email right away when I send it but out of this comes that culture of responsiveness that we know creates a lot of problems let me give you another example of this at play In the world
of work think about meetings isolated in the moment if you could just agree to a meeting when I need to get a group of people together to make a decision or to gather information or better yet as is they're they're trying to make the norm in certain parts of my my University right now better yet just have your calendar made public so that other people can just see all your free time and just choose a Time that works on everyone's schedule and just have a meeting invite show up so I don't even have to interact
with you to pull you into a meeting we don't even have to talk about when you're available if you would just do this it would make my life easier it would be optimal in isolation because I have this thing and I need feedback from these three people on it that that would be a good way to make progress on it and if I could just without having to do much Else just have a meeting go on the books and we'll all get together at the next available time we can all get together and talk about
it uh that makes life easier it seems optimal in isolation and it's not super onerous like what do you care if like some meetings show up on your calendar it's work work has meetings and you your time was free and like what's the problem not asking you to do something onerous so the optimal isolated mindset says yeah we should Just be able like Autos schedule people in the meetings when we need them this of course creates that culture of meeting availability which itself leads to all sorts of problems in practice so what is the alternative
well this is where I want to go back to the world of computer security because that approach the passwords is now something that's getting a lot of push back and if we look at how the computer security world is beginning to push back on the Give me the super complicated password because it's going to make our system more secure if we look at how the computer security world is starting to push back on that narrow issue we can see that that solution is going to generalize to our broad work issues as well so we're going
to get some insight about how to fix the world of work more broadly so this was the talk I was hearing about computer security uh there is a new Subfield within this broader topic that's known as human Centric security and the subfield does something interesting they work with talk to and observe at their actual jobs real people so they're not just sitting back and saying for example what level of complexity of a password means that like these cracking software we have is is going to struggle like what's the technically what's going to be the thresholds
we need in our standards That's going to make it hard for a hash attack to you know crack it they're actually watching real people hey what's going on in the day when you get a request to set up a password what else are you doing what do you do with this password why aren't you setting up this password like what else is happening what's your concerns here so they actually talk to real people and they figure out the context in which these individual decisions are being made so Instead of using the isolated mindset of just
in isolation this would be the optim way to set up a password they say no what's the whole context of this person's like life and day and it situation when they're asked to do that and what they realized when they did this type of human Centric research was like well wait a second users are dealing with all sorts of different it systems both in their professional life and their personal life and all the time They have to set up accounts and all these accounts are making these demands and the problem is the number one problem
users have is not that they couldn't come up with a password that meets those demands they worry about forgetting them they're not memorable and if you forget it it's a problem now you've added a big time overhead of having to get your password recovered and that can that can be stressful that like what if this system doesn't even Let me do that now the IT professional might say like well there's these like password managers you can use but that's not obvious and people have different systems they're using like well I use this computer at work
and this phone is not for work but also I use it sometimes for work and my computer at home is both and this system though I might want to access on both systems it's not obvious if you're not much more in the Weeds on These type of computer security systems and I hate to say this Computing researchers but these password managers you talk about are not so obvious especially when you have many devices of different operating systems used and owned for many different types of purposes people aren't that confident about how do I set up
these passwords they don't necessarily trust those things they say well why is this any more secure like what if that gets Hacked all my like passwords are there um you might say instead we'll write it down somewhere but that's really fraud as well where am I writing this down what if someone gets access to that where am I storing it well when I'm at a hotel I don't have you know access to that right that might be at home in a filing cabinet and how am I going to remember this um and so they're like
if there's any way we can resist the rules to try to just get something in here That I'm going to remember maybe like a single password that's easy to remember that passes these rules I can use for all my systems people are calling back to that not because they don't understand the rules not because they don't understand that yes this makes a password more hackable but they're doing a calculus and saying this is not worth it for me the overhead of trying to obey these rules in the right way is worse to me than the
fear of like your system Might be compromised so a human Centric security research says great that's what we have to work with the the reality of the psychology and the life and the context in which these decisions are being made and like maybe we need to set up systems that don't require passwords for the security or maybe we as a because there's Alternatives you can do here or maybe we as a company have to make standard the password manager and we' have pre-installed it and it's part Of your training when you work here and we
we you you learn about it and it's not so scary and it kind of makes sense how it works and it's been explained to you and that's where do up front or whatever it is but you're meeting people where they actually are you're not tackling problems in the abstract hey it's Cal I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the Lost start of Accomplishment without burnout this is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in
these videos you can get a free excerpt at Cal newport.com slow I know you're going to like it check it out now let's get back to the video all right so let's bring this mindset back to our work problems we had from before so if we return to email for example we said the problem with the isolated optimal mindset is that yeah It's optimal for you to answer my email fast but if we all are making that same decision I get 300 emails a day and all I'm doing is trying to answer the emails and
I get exhausted you bring a human Centric mindset to the email picture and you immediately see wait a second this is exhausting the actual behavior I'm watching this user doing at their real desk in a real job they are exhausted because they have 200 emails they have to answer and they're all different Context they have to keep shifting brain from one context to another and when they're away from the email they know more are piling up and that has its own sort of social psychological cost as well which is also stressful wait a second this
is not good this approach to communication makes people like miserable and cognitively fractured and not very effective oh great we need to think up other ways to deal with communication that doesn't cause this Problem I don't care what's optimal for you in this moment for this one question I'm like What's the best way to run this office so understanding the context tells you like okay we need to get away from ad hoc unscheduled messaging is our primary Vector for like information flows same thing when we apply the human Centric approach to meetings right uh as
talked about in the isolated optimal approach if it's look it just be optimal if you make it easy for me to grab you To a meeting we get over scheduled and that becomes uh we get a situation here where your schedule becomes so full of meetings with these little gaps of time in between but all you're doing is going from meetings to meetings with no real time to recover or do anything else that it could become deranging you have no breathing room you're exhausted uh you're falling deeper in the task hole instead of trying to
Get out of it because every meeting generates more things but before you can even process those things and make sense of them and write them down you're in the next meeting and more things are piling up so it can be uniquely deranging you you can't actually get work done it's exhausting it also becomes super inequitable because the only way to suc in these setups is to actually do your work outside of the work hours and guess what not everyone Is set up to be able to do that not everyone is like a 24y old living
with roommates and boor who's like yeah let me just like crush it from 8 to 12 at night like other people have things going on in their lives the human Centric mindset would say okay let's look at the context of Autos scheduling meetings we look at the context of a real person in their real day they have a ton of meetings on their schedule this looks really stressful so I don't care that it's optimal for the person in the moment setting up this meeting the whole context shows that this is a very stressful way to
do it so we need another way of having group interaction or collaboration that doesn't fracture the schedule so much and then at least of the other types of solutions we talk about like office hours and docket clearing meetings and prescheduled standing meetings and things where you have regular Opportunities to have real-time interaction with people but the footprint is Con uh constrainted right these are not you know the alternatives to ad hoc communication the alternatives to ad hoc meetings they don't pass the test of is this the optimal thing in the moment for this what I
need right now they don't pass that test they're more inconvenient they're less flexible some bad things will happen but when you look At them from the human Centric approach they make the actual day-to-day experience of the human users involved significantly better so this is basically what I'm calling for this is the idea that I'm pulling from the security world and trying to bring to the world to work more generally I think in a lot of different ways we think about productivity and digital era knowledge work a lot of these ways we are acting like the
the computer Security Engineers from the early 2000s we're just thinking in isolation what's the most efficient way to do this thing I need to get done right now o technology could make that really fast let's do that we need to be thinking more like the human Centric security researchers of the 2020s who are saying what matters is the actual experience of the humans what they're thinking how they're feeling what's easy what's hard for them and we Want work to be effective and sustainable for the humans not for the task we want the humans to feel
energized and successful and do good work not individual task and isolation feeling like they got executed in the most efficient number of Cycles so this human Centric approach I have found this to be a useful analogy for thinking about how how to think about work there's a page we can take from the world of computer security and We can bring that over here let me tell you Jess it was funny awkward about that talk great talk but uh they the re the professor had done this really cool research but I was it was awkward for
me because I was talking about they were looking at the way that people online doing uh VPN ad reads were misinforming the public I'm like oh we do VPN ad reads and I I I eventually raised my hand I was like look let me give you like The Insider View because it was interesting I think her view was um that it's like these YouTube personalities are just like riffing on VPN I was like oh let me tell you about scripts let me tell you about like how this happens but it's interesting I was like I'm
in a very unusual situation where I'm a computer scientist who also does AD reads on technical stuff what' she say I don't know I think she was like uh am I in trouble like is he mad at me Is um she thought it was interesting I I was just talking about like and I it was an interesting discussion I was like let me tell you what that world looks like on the other side um it was really cool research actually it they some they random sampled YouTube and were able to calculate like how many people
are actually seeing some of these ads by like figuring out like how many people uh are doing these ad reads and their their View and the idea was was actually Basically um for anything not just for vpns if there's a brand that is spending a lot on Advertising um on like YouTube or something you could be hitting a huge amount of people because actually the cost per person is pretty low on YouTube so you could be reaching like a huge amount of people so you have to care about the information that that you're reaching the
other thing I thought about that was awkward when I was thinking writing this deep dive is I thought About our password security here at the HQ which I don't think I don't think pass muster our to give people without giving away our passwords I would say the password I use on our machines here is like the second easiest possible password would you say if the first easiest possible password would be password would you say without saying what ours is that it's probably the second most guessable easiest possible password that you would use it reminds Me
of space BS when he's like your luggage combination is 1 two three four it basically is like that but my thought and this is why I'm not a computer security researcher is my password protection of these computers is the door lock like we've already lost if someone is in here trying to log onto our computer they're just going to grab all our stuff and go right like that's T also it's like congratulations you have just gained access to four years of Local archive copies of the deep questions podcast like there you go I it's not
exactly missile codes on these machines the one other thing that I think about is for YouTube is I can't believe more people don't pay the $12 a month for ad free YouTube you're you're talking about me basically I that blows my mind I just haven't got around to it I was telling someone about this the other day people were like oh see ads like I never see Ads on YouTube Let me give the context Jesse is on my back because no it wasn't necessarily you I I know but he is rightly rightfully on my back
that whenever I load up a YouTube thing on my computer I get the ads and we make I don't know we generate just on YouTube ads alone probably like tens of thousands of dollars a year and I don't pay the whatever2 what is it $12 yeah it's like less than $20 a month yeah it's I just Don't know how to do it that's this goes back to this question of like human Centric Computing so you can be like YouTube Pro or something like I know it's something you sign up for yeah but I don't know
what it is so I just am constantly skipping ads and like watching ads and I'm really plugged into the world of advertising on YouTube um I definitely I'll tell you what we need is like Liberty Mutual Insurance I'm seen a lot of Liberty Mutual ads and then also Ads for like whatever I just was talking or thinking about somehow those always those always show up uh so what is it though Pro yeah premium premium yeah okay I guess it I mean we do YouTube premium we have like a 275,000 subscriber Channel and I don't pay
the $12 I should I should all right well there we go so we nerded out about as much as I think our audience can take so uh we've got some good questions coming up But first let's hear from some sponsors so I want to talk uh in particular about our friends at uplift look muscles are vital for movement they play a key role in supporting the vascular system uh the Cales if you know this Jesse are often called the second heart they help pump blood Against Gravity Aid and circulation throughout the body by using a
standing desk and incorporating movement accessories you Are more likely to engage these muscles promoting improved blood flow and overall health this is where uplift comes in they have the uplift desk which I think is at the Forefront of ergonomic Solutions these things are uh they're really good technology now we know what a standing desk is they go if you haven't seen them in a while they go up and down now so you can adjust them and they are much more compact than they used to be somehow the lifting Mechanisms are built into the legs themselves
they also hold a lot of weight that's another ad I see a lot uplift desk ads on YouTube and they're they're compelling like the one they I keep seeing is uh they have all this crap on the desk and the desk can still raise up and down see I remembered that YouTube abs are effective uh but uplift also has these other accessories that are also meant to promote sort of healthy Movement ergonomics during your day the one I have and I've been messing around with is the wobble stool I'm going to bring it here Jesse
so you can see it it's like a stool that wobbles it won't fall over but it wobbles so like you can do some like you have to do with some core not just like hold up your core but allows you to get movement so you're not just stuck in one position I learned recovering from my my uh my back stuff that being stuck in a position can also Be a problem so I like these type of movement uh movement accessories so uplift is really a smart new way to think about the Furniture you use in
your office to promote healthy posture ergonomics and movement uh the uplift desk itself has over 200,000 configurations which allows you to tailor your workspace to perfectly suit your needs they even have a desk configurator that helps you build out a complete workstation with storage Seating wire management you can build out like just the space you need and again the other movement accessories are excellent as well so make this year Yours by going to uplift.com deep and use our code deep to get four free accessories free same day shipping free returns and an industry-leading 15-year warranty
that covers your entire desk and they will give you an extra discount off your entire order that's u l ft Dk.com deep for a special offer and it's only available at that link so start 2025 right stand move Thrive with uplift desk this show is also sponsored by better help all right let's talk numbers here traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $ 100 to $250 per session which adds up fast but with better help online therapy you can save on average up to 50% per session you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions which
saves you big Uncosted and on time uh the thing is therapy should be accessible it should not be a luxury online therapy helps with that because you can get Quality Care at a price that makes sense and it can help you with anything from anxiety to Everyday stress your mental health is worth it and now it is Within Reach I really feel like I've been talking to people about this a lot more recently uh maybe it's because I'm the next chapter I'm writing in my book after the current One but I've started outlining the next
one is on reclaiming your brain and I've been thinking a lot about the role of your brain and your relationship with your brain and the role it plays in cultivating a deep life so this is really on my mind this idea that your relationship with your brain is so vital we think about all the external stuff that might be relevant for making your life better or more meaningful how you manage your time your goals your plans But if you have a bad relationship with your brain all this is going to be difficult to put in
place or Implement therapy is one of the best ways to improve that relationship ship with your brain and why I'm proud to uh be sponsored by better help is that I really think they make this accessible to more people it's online it's easy you're not stuck having to be in a specific location or stuck with a particular um therapist and as mentioned The price I think is right there's over 30,000 therapist in the better help network making it the world's largest online therapy platform they serve over 5 million people globally again it's convenient you join
a session with a click of a button so it's easier to fit this into your busy life your well-being is worth it visit betterhelp.com dequ questions to get 10% off your first month that's betterhelp Hp.com deep questions speaking about questions Jesse let's get on with our listener questions for the show first questions from Raphael I struggle with contact switching especially with complex problems that take days to solve how can I effectively switch to smaller tasks should I treat the larger task just like the smaller ones externally izing things in a Trello until I get back
to them next well it's a complicated question uh there's two Different possible things going on here so so one is approaching bigger projects using the David Allen approach and this might be what you're suggesting so let's deal with that first the David allet approach to Big projects is there are no big projects I mean there are but you don't work on big projects is the way David Allen would say it he would say all you can do is next actions actions that are and them take a few minutes to do that are clearly defined and
you know Exactly how to execute them so like in his approach projects just get turned into next actions that go on list with any other sorts of next actions whether they're associated with projects or not and work remains turning through next action list and the fact that some of these next actions are supporting a bigger project is great but you don't actually treat it different in the moment uh it's a computer processor Paradigm right like a computer processor Just executes and instructions from a limited instruction set it doesn't care or know that this particular instruction
is part of this big program that does this particular function and this instructions from another uh program doing this type of function it doesn't care it just says give me the next thing to do increment register done retrieve this uh value from memory done right so that's kind of the David Allen approach you if you can just be executing Instructions that are very clear you save yourself from having to constantly be trying to think about what you need to do and why what that means when you're not negotiating with this with yourself all the time
work becomes less stressful I believe in the David Allen approach you have he calls them stakes in the ground you have a list of projects but you just sort of review that uh semi-regularly to say like do I need to generate some more next actions From some of these projects to put over my next action list and then otherwise you're just executing those list I tend to think this approach doesn't work particularly well for most projects because a lot of big projects can't actually be decomposed into a sort of uh a sequence of I olated
NEX actions that you can just inter leave with other types of NEX actions most of these type of projects especially in sort of non-entry level Knowledge work positions require uh non-trivial sustained engagement right you have to go through the time required to build up the cognitive context relevant to the project you're working on swap in the right things inhibit the things that unrelated to it and then once that cognitive context is loaded really give some time to try to Grapple with the project make progress on it learn from that progress adjust how you understand It
and when you're all done sort of like update your notes and your understanding of what's going on it requires sustained attention you can't just break down that project into two-minute steps you can inter leave with changing the cat litter and calling the credit card company to renew your card so I don't tend to be a big believer in breaking down big projects into just small isolated things that you treat like anything else uh I think projects have to be scheduled on Multiple scales this is why I recommend with multiscale planning that you kind of have
the the open Loops are there on your quarterly plan which you review every week and you can look at your week and say when am I going to make progress on these big projects this week and you're moving things around and actually making time for them to make sure that time happens and then on the daily schedule you're making a Time block plan For your day that's based first and foremost on what's on your calendar so the time gets preserved and that's the way I like to think about big projects right it's like to be
more concrete here's a big project I'm working on um writing a chapter for a new book that doesn't break down in the the small next actions I put on a Trello board it's instead each week I one of the big things I keep in mind is I'm working on my book this is one of my big things This quarter and in fact what am I trying to get done this quarter I'm trying to get done these two chapters so how can I make sufficient progress on this this week and I'm looking at like well most
of these mornings I can start each day with writing let me like protect them this day I can't I have a faculty meeting so maybe I'm going to put together like an evening block uh and then these are Big Blocks to make sustained effort on a Hard project so in general I'm not a big fan or a big believer in treating all work the same it all gets knocked down in the little projects I think big projects sometimes need big blocks of time and those have to be treated differently than small tasks all right who
we got next Natalie's next how do you think AI will affect living the Deep life do we need to Pivot to new skills because AI will be able to automate so much and deliver Things like hard tasks and deep research better than humans are you making any adjustments yourself and your approach well I mean more generally lifestyle Centric planning says you should always be keeping up with what is my career Capital that is the rare and value valuable skills I offer to the market U because that is your your main source of Leverage for continuing
to shape your life in ways that resonate and that take it away from things that Don't so like in a broad sense well sure you want to be aware of anything that might be reducing the value of your current Care Capital Andor give you an opportunity to build up new career Capital if we get more specifically I would say for most people like 99% of people in the knowledge economy um AI is not that relevant in its current form it's not that relevant yet to these questions I mean if you're a freelance photographer sure um
but if You're uh an executive it's not there yet right so what I keep arguing about AI is you don't have to be a technology prognosticator um I don't think you need to be trying to guess okay where is this going to evolve towards and let me try to preemptively start building up skills that will meet AI when it gets there so I can take advantage of that skill I think right now these efforts to try to learn new skills to be AI ready are Largely wasted effort because you're learning skills relevant to AI in
its current form and its current form is clearly not the form in which is going to have the biggest economic impact so AI we argue this all the time on the show so I won't I won't belabor it but AI right now is like a generative AI based on language models I'll be more specific um is largely right now interacted within a chatbot Paradigm of I type text into a box and then an Entity that sort of acts like an oracle answers back that kind of answers my request there was this hope open AI in
particular had this hope that if the the AI Oracle on the other side is sufficiently Advanced and Powerful that just having this text box interface with an all- knowing Oracle would just people would find ways to make it useful for their work and this by itself would be a killer app or lend itself the killer applications in many different fields That didn't happen I mean this was the the in 2022 this was the thought yeah we're like six months away from massive disruption that's just going to start pouring like waves over Niche after niche in
the knowledge economy but year after year passed and that didn't happen even as the technology got better so it's it's pretty clear now like oh there's another evolution of sort of classic product Market fit that's going to have to happen before we get the Biggest professional disruptions from AI um most people interacting with a chatbot is not actually they're not building killer applications for their work it's going to be some new integration into existing software some sort of new way this it hasn't been invented yet but clearly this current chatbot form is not causing the
disruption that was seen but a lot of people were still saying well I need to learn to be really good at using the Chat Bots and so like aot lot of people invested a lot of time into for example prompt engineering for the current generation of chat Bots that's going to be a worthless skill two years from now if we're looking at Industries being highly disrupted by AI it's not going to be people typing these like carefully constructed prop sequences into a chat poot it's going to be something that's going to be way more intuitive
and easier to use so what I'm arguing is you Have to wait until the disruption Vector is visible before you can adapt to it and we just don't know what that's going to be for most jobs so if you can't Point towards in my job AI is starting to disrupt it in this way there's more and more people doing X this company is doing it this is going to make a lot of the things I do now less valuable if you don't see that happening now or similar things happening in related Industries you don't really
know what skill to Build up so I always say let's have cautious cautious watch and wait right now with AI for most jobs we don't know how it's going to evolve into the vectors that are going to have disruption but right now if we think about the disruption like a viral infection through the job market the current form of this virus is not highly infectious like a lot of people maybe a lot of people have been exposed to it there's a lot of people who mess around With these chat Bots but really it's still the
enthusiasts who are using them most right now um so let's keep an eye for it to evolve but I don't know yet what skill to tell you to pick up or what skill of yours might become less relevant this might be slower and Messier and more bespoke uh then you'll realize I mean my big argument I've been making on the show is probably my best guess is the first wave of actual disruption will Be unlocking Advanced features that already exist in existing software like you could always do this advanced stuff in Excel I just don't
know how to do it but with an AI natural language interface now I can so it's going to be unlocking productivity in terms of latent ability in existing skills it's like a very different Vision to what people fear which is going to be somehow chat GPT is it's going to just like start on its own doing parts of Your job or something like that so keep an eye on it cautious weight but it's unclear now where the the disruption is going to happen or what skills it is you should be learning all right who's next
how to say no is next I work on a multi-year transformation project but I'm also seen as one of the faces of the department I use time blocking and combine but the work still never stops my waiting for others is overwhelming is there a way to Say no to certain requests that don't derail our long-term goals well you need the first face to productivity Dragon here and actually like write down in one place all the different types of thing that you find yourself responsible for right now and I think you're going to find that you
have yed your way into an overwhelming number of information slows or systems where you have to be involved like to be the face of a department means like you're you're Reasonable you're reliable people like you you're personable so of course people are going to come to you and say can you do this can you do that and there's like a little thrill you get when you say yes but if you face a productivity Dragon you might just like well this is too many things like this fractures my time too much I it's it's more than
I can service well and then you need to simplify down from that overwhelming amount to an amount that uh Is more reasonable the the key thing I can tell you is based on how you describe yourself you're a face of your department you're sophisticated and you're use of things like time blocking and kbon people really like working with you they don't want you to go their fear is not oo are you going to say something unreasonable or make an unreasonable request we're just waiting to drop the axe on you as soon as like you say
Something or show any sort of like lack of gratitude no no Their Fear is what if this person goes this is a really good person so for you to come in and say look I'm documenting all the different things I'm working on this is too many this is the amount that I think actually allows me to be effective on them so I am going to reduce down to this if you have Clarity you have numbers it's clear you know what you're doing you're responsible you're responsive your Personal people like you you have a lot more
latitude than you think because you're leverage here is you going people don't want good people to go it is very hard to hire good people so my instinct here is yeah you you have to reduce so starting with facing that productivity dragon is the right way to do it so it's not just an ad hoc decision that you personalize and be like wow I'm being mean to this person and instead you have a realistic assessment of your workload A realistic assessment of what is a reasonable load for you and then saying hey trust this assessment
I have to find one way or another to get there I mean it is hard I've been I say no to so many things Jesse so many things uh I always think like my my publicist and my speaking agent think I'm either crazy or like don't want to be successful but I have to say no to so many things uh and I'm still doing too much every week you say no to things yeah cool stuff too I Don't know it's just hard to too many jobs things you got to write chapter three I I'm good
at time management that's why it's easy that's why I know like this seems like you it would be nice to say yes in the moment but I know too much about my productivity Dragon to be like no no I know the impact of doing that and where I am and how much of the stuff I can do and I just can't be doing that right now I found that people are Actually pretty reasonable about it if I'm like look here's the thing and I'll I'll do things like this like I had a conversation with someone
recently where there was like a without giving like away details uh a thing that was coming on we need people to sign up to like do X Y and Z and I just had to be like look I can't um I can't participate in any of this this month just I'm I'm sort of scheduled about two months out now and I Just don't have give for this and I know it'd be good if I'd be there I normally would I've done this past years I just can't do any of it this year you know if
you're clear think people get it like okay yeah must be busy you know so I I get a lot of it saying no is hard I'm excit that's why I'm excited for Tim Ferris is new book which is just about saying no mhm M that one's going to be good all right who we got next David's next I'm an architect that left a Traditional practice for an in-house design leader for a hospital system an executive has encouraged me to take on a diverse roles to broaden my skill set how do I balance openness to opportunity
while staying focused on a deliberate career tra trajectory well just be deliberate about your openest opportunity so okay what they're really saying is like don't just do one thing uh you might might want to pick up other skills that's fine but be very Deliberate about that well if I'm going to do that what is my current workload let me face the productivity Dragon let me just do one new skill at a time that's what I'm doing this year is like I'm I'm going to take on this other role and I'm going to simplify this other
one until I can Master it then I'll I'll put that aside and take on another one U like being really clear again your workload is your workload and being very careful about it The other thing you could do here is just get more clarity on your career trajectory so yes this executive has a vision for what they want your trajectory to be and maybe taking on these diverse roles as like a good path forward towards an executive position like his or hers but maybe that's not what you want maybe that's not what you're looking for
you're like no no I want to just like do this type of project and eventually get like more Autonomy so I can like move over here and you know build my my farmhouse in dor County up in you know Illinois or something in Wisconsin and and walk among the trees and I don't know you could have just some different Vision great be specific about that like that's what I'm working towards if you're working towards something specific it's easier to resist the blandishments of people who are trying to push you over there which is not where
you actually Want to go so get clear about what you want to do and if having experience and other roles will be key for what you want to do be very deliberate about that you can be servicing that General desire without having to for example overload yourself you could be exposed to like other types of obligations in the office without taking on all the other obligations in the office so you know be care careful of traps where a good intention creates a bad scheduling Situation I was thinking about dor County dor County God this is
coming up from Deep work I think that's the I think it's deep work where I talk about Rick fur making the Viking sword and he works with at a a barn with the doors open like overlooking one of the Great Lakes and that was in dor County that's what I was thinking about this guy cool up there it's nice nice country all right who do we got next is Jay is it possible For a nurse to implement time blocking in a 12-hour shift no it's a different type of job um time pling presupposes a job
more like a knowledge work position where you have a relatively large amount of autonomy in terms of how you execute your work so anything that's objective based like yeah here's the things you've taken on to do you need to make progress on these things and maybe attend some meetings but how you fill your time between that me is up to you time Blocking is very useful so that time is not wasted uh a nursing shift typically no no it's way more structured than that like you're you're seeing patients either as like assigned by the incoming
appointment flow if it's at a private practice or what's going on on the big board if you're in a like a emergency department type of situation it's way more structured what you're doing throughout your shift so U time time blocking is not that relevant there's Other things that are relevant in the medical scenario that could make work more sustainable or less exhausting um like I'm a big believer in looking at places in the medical context where there's unnecessary friction that adds up over time to a lot of exhausting heat like the way that people have
to uh Wrangle with electronic medical records for example can sometimes be like a big source of friction that really makes things less sustainable um being Explicit about the sort of patient per hour load and saying what actually is a reasonable number there as opposed to just like let's push people as far as they can physically go so there's a lot of things that could be done in healthcare to make these jobs more sustainable but they typically aren't the type of things I talk about which are more queued into a more highly autonomous knowledge work type
role all right what we got so we have a Bonus question from Bill Bill that we're gonna dedicate the theme music too is our excuse to still play the slow productivity theme music yep all right um Let Me Show You by the way bill sent me not to encourage this Behavior but I kind of do he sent me a first edition of the Good Shepherd a book I praised on this show is what I think like one of the very first techno Thrillers takes place on the deck of a destroyer in World War II and
it's Written in this sort of uh tight I don't if it's third person or first person let me see um but it's tight perspective all right I think it's done in tight third person so by tight perspective I mean it's third person but it follows the captain so the perspective never leaves the uh the where the captain is is what the captain sees and it just follows them through this like very stressful 24-hour ship on the destroyer and it's written it feels Like in like a real time type format like it just unfolds linearly like
what's happening tight third person perspective so you're just from the perspective of a single person and it's impressionistic like trying to build up what it's really like but also tons of technical details of World War II era anti-submarine operations on Destroyer so like a lot of technical details which are presented like in a good techno Thriller without much explanation just Like they they just talk about this stuff like they would be talking about it even though you don't understand as the reader what all this stuff means like a good techno Thriller I think it's a
really cool interesting book it's from I'm going to guess 1955 let me see I mean it's post-war but not super post-war why can't I find it on here it's not the copyright what if it was like 2019 yeah 1955 you called it there we go so thank You Bill you've earned yourself with whether you ask for it or not the slow productivity Corner theme [Music] music all right what's this question can a conbine system work across all departments in an organization without being overly complex so for those who don't know I mean we talk about
a lot in this show but the combon style system is where you have the The Columns and you have the Cards in the column so like in combon typically you have like a waiting to be done working on and completed column and if you're in a team you might have a working on column for each team member so you can clearly see who's working on what and clearly how much they're working on kbon has clear limits called wips or work in progress limits on how much card is can be in anyone's column so it's a
great workload management I also like about combon systems That stuff that needs to be done is not all spread out on people's plates but exists by default in a generic Team level waiting to be done and the only thing you're responsible for the things that are on your column this is important because it's the things you're working on that generate administrative overhead so sometimes people just say hey it's just convenient if stuff comes in I don't know who let's just spread it out you don't have to work on it all at Once but like you
know hey can you handle this you can put it on your list the problem with that approach is that once something is in your hands it can generate administrative overhead you have to deal with emails meetings and Cycles so by keeping things by default off of any individual's hands it can't generate administrative overhead there's no one that you can email about it it doesn't belong to anyone yet there's no meetings to have about it because it's Not being worked on yet and so each individual is not only just working on a reasonable number of things
at the same time they're dealing with a reasonable amount of overhead at the same time so I really like those systems agile methodology systems like scrum use combon style boards this is why it's a little bit confusing um they also have boards with columns and cards representing things that have to be done there's more of a variety of what those Boards are and different collections of rules and terminology that that surrounds them so agile methodologies and kbon have similar metaphors for dealing with work but they differ in the details can these apply to a lot
of different type of work yes can they apply like every team in a big organization uses things like this yes here are the two caveats a you want these to exist at the team scale so six people sure this works fine 60 people you can't have one big board for that it's going to be too many things and too many people um you can't easily coordinate with all the people so usually these systems have a very efficient approach to coordination like let's all just like stand up and talk to each other for 10 minutes like
how's your card doing what else you need what should we do next so they need to exist at the team level not at larger scales each team should have their own board And the key thing is to resist I think the thing that bogged down these approaches in software Dev where they really got big is that we nerded out too much on them software types we just nerded out too much and we begin to obsess about the rules and there's all these like rules and sub rules and it became about the rules themselves because you
know I'm a computer scientist so I can use the the second person plur plural here we love Complicated rules so we want our Dev system not just to be like hey here's a place to keep tasks and see who's working on what we want to be rolling like 2d1 to see if like I I my attack number is above your hit point level and like the goblin got killed by the wizard like we want to have all these rules and rules and all these complexities and it can get pretty absurd like agile and a software
development environment people Have scrum Masters and secondary scrum Masters and dungeon master screens and I don't know all the it just becomes super complicated and everyone gets obsessed with doing it just right because we're all like slightly antisocial in these circles if you're adopting these ideas outside of software don't overburden it with rules what matters is we have a centralized place to store what needs to be done so it doesn't by default these things do not by default exist on Individual's plates we have clarity about who's working on what we have constraints about who's working
on what and we have a clear way to check in with everyone about what they're working on what they need and when they're done what they should work on next you do those things that is good you get you know I'm going to read some complicated scrum manual and have all the different roles and do all the different like the story Requires this and that it gets over the top you don't need that my book a world without email and slow productivity both talk about this world without email gives a particular case study of a
healthc Care Group that uses this that I think is a good example of a a combon style system outside of straightup software Dev um and I get a lot more details in slow productivity as well about like what are the key ideas of these systems that matter so yes I do Think these can exist across large organizations if they're integrated properly all right do we do we play it twice if it's a bonus question yes all right let's hear [Music] it all right do we have a call this week we do all right let's hear
it hey call and Jesse it's Derek from the case study and episode 340 thank you very much for the advice it was really Validating hearing your thoughts as recall I have two Trello boards right now one for admin and one for Grant application processing I've been doing a lot of deep diving in slow productivity A word without without email and the podcast on what else I can do to help keep my work sustainable and to this end I figured out how to create a taskboard within Microsoft teams that have shared with my co-workers my vision
is this will serve as one of those two status Lists that you've written and spoken about right now my columns are Q active back burner and done my question is what granularity of obligations should live on this board do I put grant related activities in the queue like draft Financial agreement for X should administrative tasks go in here too or just your definition of what a project is from slow productivity which is any work related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session lastly how Does this board interact with the existing ones that I
have for admin and application processing I'm really excited to take this for a spin and report back I would just really appreciate clarity about what types of things go in such a taskboard especially since this is shared with my team thank you very much uh usually I don't put projects on task boards I want the granularity of what's On a taskboard doesn't have to be like a David Allen style next action but but something you could work on in a single session is typically the way I like to think about that so when there's projects
you're working on they can exist in your larger scale plans and then you can decide on the smaller scale plans what progress you want to make on that uh project that week or not whether or not that interacts with your taskboard it depends right so sometimes If it's a project like I'm writing a Grant application and it's on your quarterly plan when you make your your weekly plan what that really means is I want to like block off 10 hours of writing this week and it'll be on my calendar and when I get to those
days I'll work on the writing then I'll be making progress on it there's not really a task need to put on a task list somewhere I mean you could put WR 10 hours at the end of the week take that Off your your taskboard but that seems like a little bit over the top or or superflous right on the other hand uh a project might be kind of complicated like that it generates different types of tasks so maybe it's organizing a conference and you're like okay this week I need to work on this there's really
like six or seven different things I need to get done for this project this week that are all sort of tasky there I would put them on my task List perhaps um what I might do in that situation is create a temporary column for that project and then have those tasks under it or if I have like work on this week I might label certain projects related to this project like with that just in caps like the project name and then then have the task in it um and there when I'm working off my task
list I I sort of see those there oftentimes though if it's something that I I I know I want to make Progress on I might have put aside time for working on that project and and so you know I'll know when I get to that time oh the details of what I should do right now are on my task list so I just think about the interaction between those task boards and projects about whether I need help knowing or remembering what about that project I need to work on this week and if the answer is
yes you can put them in task on that board and if the answer is no Like it's just writing it doesn't have to interact with your taskboard but I would keep the cards on the taskboard at the granularity of things you can do in a single session it's why you need other stuff in your practice other than just a taskboard right that's why you need your like this is what I'm working on this quarter and it's deadlines of my strategy for getting this done you need somewhere the like in March we really have to get
out in front of this Grant Application but not until late March should we really start ramping up this work on the website overhaul but let's wait till then to do it like you need that type of thinking in like some sort of quarterly plan or or semester plan document and then how that translated in the actual work again just the depends on do I need help remembering what it is specifically I need to do to work on this each week so so you know a lot of my project work Just exists as projects like my
my task board is it's more like oneoff specific things mhm I would say if I really looked at it um it's fine by the way I like that Derek had specific uh he had some specific task boards for recurring obligations in his work to come up all the time and like the application processing or this or that like okay I get this stuff all the time and like here's my dedicated board I kind of have a system going with it I Think that's good that's fine all we also have a case study here this is
where people ride in to uh talk about ways they' put the advice we talked on the show in the action in their own life so we can see what it looks like out in the wild today's case study comes from Jake Jake says the other day I was beginning to explain to my wife the concepts regarding career capital and traded it in for more control a one schedule versus traded it in for more Responsibility and increased pay while doing so I realized that she has done exactly that with her career she is a pediatric dentist
who has worked at an office for about 10 years while doing so she has focused on doing great dental work and interacting with the patients in a way that leavs them happy with the visits making her the company's top earner and most senior doctor we recently had two boys now 2 and a half and four years old one thing that was Really important to her was that she was able to pick up our boys after school every day when her older son started school she told her work that she was unable to work past 2
p.m. because she needed to pick up our son being the top earner they created a new schedule for her to work 7 to2 doing op only she not only gets to pick up her son every single day from school but because she is op only she actually makes significantly more money I have Read all of C's materials so it goes without saying I also have tremendous work flexibility and I'm able to drop him off in the mornings every day us being able to drop off and pick up our son every day as working professionals is
incredible did you know what she he means by op I was wondering that when I first read it she is op only op Capital op is that operation that could make sense so's see She's a pediatric dentist yeah maybe she's only doing operations yeah that's possible um well regardless I appreciate the case study what I like about it is that this gives you a realistic view of Lifestyle Centric planning in the Deep life so when we think about living a deeper life especially in our modern distracted world again we like to connect with the the
idea of the grand goal so the traditional Grand goal thinking would say if you're in this Situation where you're like uh I'm unhappy with my work because I really want to be there to pick my boys up from school and I I kind of work these longer hours the grand gold thinking was say you need to make a radical change you need to like start your own you know uh store open up a store in town where you can control the hours or become like a full-time novelist or some sort of grand change and and
we need to make our life completely different but what did uh Jake's wife do instead she said I have a lot of career Capital I'm very good at what I do people don't want me to go and so I'm going to say I'm going to leverage that capital and say here's what I need here's what I I I want to create a situation in which I am done it too and because she was very good at what she did they said okay we'll make this work you can start early and you'll just do this and
not that type of work and now she's done it two and because She was working backwards from not a vague dissatisfaction with being busy which again would lead to the radical change but with specificity about what would my ideal lifestyle look like and a big part of that Vision was very concrete I'm there to pick up my kids from school she's like well how could I get towards that Vision oh I see I don't have to radically change my job I could change the configuration of my job and I'll probably get away with that because
I'm pretty good so that's like classic applying career Capital Theory in lifestyle Centric planning these are the type of things that can make like a really intentional life the intentional life doesn't necessarily mean uhoh I guess I need to quit this job and we're going to sail around the world with our kids on a Sailing Boat right it doesn't have to be that type of dramatic uh radical change it just has to be figuring out what attributes you Want in an ideal lifestyle and then working with what you have what are my opportunities what are
my obstacles how do I make that how do I make that actually work so there's a there's a lot more of that possible than people realize once you understand the game it's not this like vague uh radical change and it's more like I'm trying to reconfigure and change and shift towards the ideal lifestyle and knowing that it's skill and rare and valuable skills Is what's going to help you actually get there it's a cool story all right we got a final segment coming up another tech Corner if there's one thing you haven't heard from me
enough it's overly technical jargon but first to hear from another one of our sponsors talk about in particular our friends at Shopify if you sell things you need to use Shopify I would say most of the people I know who have some sort of business where they sell directly to Consumers maybe like I know writers who do this like with online stores with merchandise Etc uh they use Shopify and for good reason like Shopify is the tool if you want to be selling things no one does selling better than Shopify it's home of the number
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whatever you're doing in between just don't think farther than Shopify it really does get it done so you can upgrade your business And get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells things online uses sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com all lowercase you got to type that in all lowercase go to shopify.com deep to upgrade your selling today shopify.com deep I also want to talk about our friends at mybody tutor I've known Adam Gilbert my body tutor founder for many years used to be the fitness advice columnist in
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who's coming to your house and helping you do your food so uh it's way more affordable than what it used to require to have that type of one-on-one accountability and consistency so if you want to get healthier don't look farther than my Body tutor here's the good news Adam will give deep questions listeners $50 off their first month all you have to do is mentioned this podcast when you join go to mybody tutor.com that's t r mybody .c and mention deep questions when you join all right Jesse let's do our final segment so I want
to do a quick Tech corner I want to follow up on our recent Tech corner so I had talked I believe it was on the last episode about the Ezra Klein podcast episode that was Generating a lot of attention it was an episode on uh how AGI artificial general intelligence was closer than people think he had on a someone who knew a lot about it who was saying yeah we will probably quote unquote reach AGI at some point during the current presidential Administration and this generated uh a lot of energy and attention and I came
on the show and said we have to be very careful about what AGI actually means I think it gets misinterpreted and it get It's not unimportant but it's not as scary as you think but it gets misinterpreted with other types of things that people fear with AI um so this happened and I want to bring up a particular example of this so that we could maybe be a little bit more reassuring when we're thinking about AI in our current moment um so up on the screen here for people who are watching s just listening is
a a clip from the breaking points TV show so with Sager And Crystal uh they did a segment on this article and it was a very good segment this is Sager and Crystal who's up here but what caught my attention is how their YouTube guy labeled this video um so it's not them but it's how their YouTube guy labeled a video I actually met them yeah when I wrote that New Yorker piece a few years ago I went and hung out at their studio and I remember Sager telling me about their YouTube titles and they
have a person who does It and they have caps and blah blah blah they use caps lock or this or that and they sort of have like someone who does this anyways let me read you the title of the YouTube clip from this episode that was about that erra Klein interview the title was uh former AI insight colon AI superintelligence coming under Trump all right so here's what I want to emphasize this is the type of conflating of issues that we need in our current moment to be very careful about super Intelligence is a very
different thing than AGI all right that ezr Klein discussion had nothing to do with super intelligence and certainly the the person he was talking about was not claiming that super intelligence was coming under Trump he was talking about AGI so I want to just again uh briefly emphasize the differences and why the differences matter right so AGI As we discussed last week artificial general intelligence is a subjective Threshold at which point we just kind of agree more or less that the the types of things that these AI systems do right now that we know they
were doing and we're seeing them doing the generating text and conversations and data searching and photo generation whatever when they can start doing the types of things they do really well when the ability at which they do them are are Doing them gets at what we roughly agree is like comparable or better than like the average human who does them that is not a ma it's not a a a binary threshold that like you cross that threshold and then everything is different because these systems are already doing things very well if you look at the
text a generator the photos to generate you're like wow that's as good as a person or close to it AGI is just where we agree like yeah this is All as good as a person it's like we're not that far from that right now and that's what that official was saying so that is what AGI is in general it's an arbitrary threshold why it's important is just from like a general like economic and security disruption standpoint the better these models get at the things they're already doing now like the more we have to worry about
various economic and security disruptions and so certainly as they get Better uh we we're going to have to care about that more but there's not like something that happens post AGI that like oh we've crossed some Rubicon and now our relationship to technology is different because these systems already do things close to human level right so I mean we're not going to notice something different immediately when the systems that can do pretty well like a certain type of math exam can now like do as well as like a good you know Human test taker like
these are not necessarily major Epsilon so they they matter but they're not scary super intelligence is talking about something very different so it's over in this sort of tree here if we're looking at the phology of AI it's on this different tree where you get first some notion of artificial Consciousness where you have a system that has it's alive it has like autonomy and a sense of itself and can take autonomous actions we talked about That in the last episode and super intelligence is a Step Beyond that it's where a system that is autonomous with
some notion of self and Consciousness begins creating ever better versions of itself and the idea that is like that can somehow recursively speed up so that like it creates a better version of itself which is now really smart so it can create a better version of itself even faster and you get some Sort of exponential speed up until you have something that's not only like conscious and self-aware and autonomous but is like exponentially smarter than humans and then game's over because like it it can outsmart Us in all ways because it's just much more smarter
than us that's super intelligence that's sci-fi stuff that's really different than like the moment when the research reports generated by AI which right now are pretty good but kind of are sloppy In some areas or like less sloppy in those areas that's what AGI is hey you know what this like memo is now good enough produced by Tachi like right now it's like okay but there like a few things in here I'd be embarrassed about but now it's good enough I could use it without editing it that's important that's very different than super intelligence and
so I what I'm guess I'm trying to emphasize is we have to draw a clear line between this tree Of discussion around like Artificial Intelligence coming alive and the the existential implications that is very different than these discussions that are happening like on edra show about what happens when capabilities in certain things get comparable to people and it's economic impacts and security impacts it's a very different Thing Crossing AGI we're still talking about using chat GPT doing the types of things we're doing now it's just doing it x% Better those are those are two completely
different things I I made that point last time I'm trying to clarify it this time but this is the type of the thing I don't want people thinking because I you know when I talked to people about that article their sense was like a Rubicon was being crossed if we get to AGI now systems will be able to do X and now we have a new thing in our world that's not the case at all they don't do anything new They can't do now they'll just be doing it x% better so super intelligence I'm still
at the school of thought by the way that we have no reason to believe that's even computationally possible like we're just making huge assumptions that a our level of intelligence can create a more intelligent version B that that is recursively true that there's always these new levels of intelligence that Are uh possible and computable and that the the speed at which these intelligences can be created somehow also speeds up so like going from intelligence level 10 to 11 is somehow going to be faster than going from Ence level one to two even though like these
are all just like massive assumptions that like Nick bostra made in a a philosophy seminar at Oxford right it's not anything we actually have any reason to believe is true it's also just as Plausible that like when it comes to like general self-aware intelligence like Evolution got us about as good as it can get this is it like there's not like some higher plane of uh really complicated you know understanding that just that's out there that we computers can achieve but humans aren't there we just don't know there's a lot of assumptions there all right
so there we go that's my PSA this week Jesse a continuation of last week super Intelligence and artificial Consciousness are different concepts than AGI I don't know if that makes people feel better or worse I think it should make you feel better though AGI is an economic it's an issue of Economic and security disruptions and the the threshold itself is arbitrary it is not like the thing is aware now and it wasn't yesterday and now we've crossed a line it is not that it is like an arbitrary subjective threshold and how We evaluate the things
that these systems are doing the type of things are already doing when they get sufficiently better we s sort of say that we passed that threshold it's a big deal but it's not a big deal from like a sci-fi movie way it's a big deal from a like the powered Loom was bad for uh textile workers Type of Way mhm so hopefully that makes sense all right well that's all the time we have for today back next week with another Episode and until then as always stay de if you like today's episode you might also
like episode 341 titled drowning treading swimming which takes a closer look at how to avoid the worst impacts of overload and create a work and personal life that's going to be much more sustainable I think it complements well what we talked about today check it out I think you'll like it one of the major themes I talk about here is how to tame Overload in your life and work that type that can be supercharged by modern technology to the place where you uh really have no space left in your life to cultivate more depth
