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Audiobook: Chapter 5 Make AI Work For You
CHAPTER 5: Make AI Work for You (Not the Other Way Around)
If you're a student or recent graduate, you're almost certain to be a regular user of AI. Believe it or not, you're among the only existing group of experts at using modern AI. If you're further along in your life and work, you're less likely to deliberately use AI. It's a tool you may use here and there for a specific task. You may do some experimenting, but it's most likely not yet a no-brainer, go-to resource.
Students, I'm jealous of you. Everyone else, I get it. I write this in my early fifties. Artificial intelligence is the first technological change in my lifetime to challenge my ability to adapt. When the personal computer became accessible, my parents were in their thirties and got one right away. I learned to use it at home after elementary school. I learned to type and use spreadsheets on a computer in my public middle school. When dial-up services came on the scene, I connected my PC to the first internet communities and chatted online in high school in the eighties and college in the early nineties. A few years after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, my friend Sam showed me a primitive website with pictures of ancient caves published by someone far away from our college. A few years after that, I worked at Ask Jeeves, an early web search company. When the cell phone became ubiquitous in the late nineties, I texted my friends last minute social plans, to the amazement of my parents' generation. When the smartphone came out in the mid-2000s, I started using one without thinking twice. But AI makes me feel the calcification of age. It's the first widespread technology in my lifetime that I just don't want to deal with. I'm fortunate to be an insider. It's my job to help my organization understand and use AI. I see so much potential to positively impact the world I live in and the world my grandchildren will live in. But it's really hard. Contrast my situation with that of my daughter who is experiencing the start of AI in the same way I experienced the dawn of the World Wide Web. ChatGPT arrived during her freshman year of college. Her brain and expectations were what neurologists call plastic—still moldable. She started using AI because she didn't know any different. It's been amazing to see how rapidly her methods of accomplishing her schoolwork have evolved.
My daughter is responding to AI under a new evolutionary pressure. We're used to thinking of evolution resulting from something "bad" happening. A comet striking the earth. Climate change. A new virus. Artificial intelligence is not that, though it may sometimes seem so. Artificial intelligence is like the printed book. The invention of moveable type was an evolutionary pressure that accelerated and widened the exit of civilization from the Middle Ages. Europe's Middle Ages were not romantic knights and princesses. Picture population decline, feudal subjugation of peasants, plague, famine and wars. One war lasted so long, it was called the Hundred Years' War. It was so bad, that some historians referred to the whole mess as the Dark Ages. Europe got out of this civilizational decline because of printed books. More and more knowledge was captured in books. More and more people learned to read. People could contribute, could create value beyond their back-breaking manual labor, fighting ability, or birth. A kid who learned to read could grow up to do anything. People living in Europe through historical periods following the Middle Ages came to value book-enabled knowledge and education for pulling them out of their grandparents' and great-grandparents' desperate times, when the graves from the plague were still fresh. Books and education were so revolutionary in terms of human well-being, people in Europe and elsewhere established public libraries and schools to further share and democratize knowledge.
Let's jump into the future and rewrite that last passage: "More and more knowledge was captured in AI. More and more people learned to use AI. People could contribute, could create value beyond their mind-numbing office labor, their access to expensive higher education, their network of rich friends. A kid who learned to use AI could grow up to do anything. People living through historical periods following the chaos and stagnation of postmodernity came to value AI-enabled knowledge and education for pulling them out of their parents' and grandparents' desperate times, when graves from the pandemics were still fresh. AI was so revolutionary in terms of human well-being, people established public large language models."
I see AI as having the same potential to improve our fragile world as the book did hundreds of years ago. Enough to quit my job and write this book. Enough to creakily learn to use AI so I can respond to its evolutionary pressure just as my ancestors did with books. And it's both as simple and complex as that.
Use AI.
The more we use AI in a thoughtful, informed way to improve the quality of our work and our lives, the better the long-term outcome for us as individuals and for our society. Like it or not, AI is an inevitable and inextricable part of our lives, just like all the revolutionary technological changes that came before: the printing press, the household telephone, the pocket camera, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, the smartphone, and social media—all of which became extraordinarily beneficial when put to creative use by billions of humans. All of which have their own side effects and pitfalls. In every case, recognition of the costs, benefits, and creative use of the technology by people like you steered (or is steering) these industries to better human outcomes through user (consumer)-driven change. The same can happen with AI.
Where to start?
Augment Your Life
Start by answering three questions: What are you good at? What do you want to be better at? What do you need to do but takes an unsustainable amount of time or effort? If this feels like therapy, or is maybe a bit uncomfortable, you're not alone. Another word for augmentation is "self-improvement" or "self-help." It can be challenging to take a critical look at your life and how you live it and then try to make changes. It's even weirder to do that and then consider getting help from "artificial intelligence." But doing so can help you succeed, lead, and remain engaged in the modern era.
Let's take myself as an example. I'm good at coming up with creative ideas. I want to be better at doing my laundry regularly. I need to keep my email inbox clean, but it takes too much time.
We turn the tables on technology when we approach it with the goal of living a more satisfying life. My ultimate goal isn't to "use AI" any more than it is to "use a smartphone." My goal (and yours) should be to get more out of my natural efforts and abilities, enhance creativity, and pursue new and different projects that I might not be able to tackle on my own. How can AI be a means to this end? I'll go first.
I started a completely unrelated podcast as a creative outlet about a year before writing this book. While I was writing, my daughter and I started another podcast to share stories of living with AI, also called "You Teach The Machines." We figured that since this is all so new, lots of people are going to have new and different experiences with AI and it would be helpful for others to hear about them. A fun podcast needs music, so we made a theme song with a music generation AI. I wrote the lyrics and set a few other parameters, and in about an hour we were able to dress up our human discussion with machine-generated music. My creative contributions were the lyrics I wrote and the direction I gave the AI. Artificial intelligence helped me make more of my ideas by generating a catchy tune, along with vocals. It has turned out to be a hit with the college students we interview! Now, do I value this music as much as the original music I paid my friend Jay Nash to write, perform, and record for my other podcast? No. My collaboration with Jay led to a live performance on stage together and ongoing creative human collaboration. Did I create a fun little musical addition that enhances our AI podcast more than generic stock music? Yes! It's always fun to learn in areas where you're already familiar, so if you're new to AI, music is a great place to start.
Everyone is familiar with washing dirty clothes. We have to do it; we don't want to do it. I want to be better doing my laundry regularly. My clothes build up on both the dirty and clean side of the washing machine cycle. My hamper is always full of two to three loads, which creates an artificial mental block in and of itself. I feel great when I manage to run it all, fold it, and reflect confidently on a two-week supply of clean underwear. But that's not happening regularly. So what's a way that AI could help? (Besides a laundry robot—we're not there yet, and, tbh, the waiter robots I saw in a dim sum restaurant in Chicago were both creepy and entertaining, but I can't imagine having one in my house.)
We'll start with the ground rule that the machine isn't going to do my laundry for me. A simple use of AI to improve my laundry habits is to use tools for behavior or habit change. I asked both my smart speaker and the digital assistant on my phone to set weekly reminders to start a load of laundry on Thursday evening, switch to the dryer Friday morning, and prompt me to fold on Friday evening. You may already be doing something similar in your life. Guess what? It worked!
Gentle reminders are a good start, but what if I had less laundry in the first place? I enlisted AI to reduce the amount of laundry I have by finding clothing that doesn't require as frequent washing. Retailers have been working on AI-enabled wardrobe recommendations since the dawn of e-commerce. In fact, a social media algorithm recently profiled me as an "outfit repeater" as it served me an ad for odor- and stain-resistant pants. Long ago, in a dot com boom far away, I worked as a software engineer at Ask Jeeves, an early attempt at AI-enabled web search. We didn't call Jeeves "AI" at the time; that term was out of vogue, redolent of mid-century science fiction. Instead, we called Jeeves "Natural Language Understanding," the marketing term for natural language processing, which we defined in Chapter 1. We built a wardrobe recommendation search engine so Jeeves could pick out a Gap or Nike outfit like a proper digital butler. Fast forward twenty-five years and I can try using any number of free AI-enabled personal clothing assistants "who" will set me up with an entire wardrobe of outfits I can "repeat." In fact, I did just that while writing this book! There are a bunch of clothing recommendation apps available on your smartphone. Turns out that using X resulted in Y.
What don't I have time for but need to get done? This one is straightforward and probably something you're already benefitting from anyway. Go into your email account and look for your spam or junk folder. Open it and witness the result of teaching a machine to do beneficial work. We discussed this in a previous chapter, but it's worth revisiting. Spam email is a fact of life. Artificial intelligence controls spam. You couldn't pay me enough to filter spam out of my inbox. I'm very grateful for the AI that does it for me.
Now It's Your Turn
Start by answering these three questions for yourself:
- What am I good at?
- What do I want to do better at?
- What do I have to do but life gets in the way?
Try not to overthink it; just write down whatever comes to mind for each. Now go through the exercise of looking for ways to augment your life using AI for each question. If you get stuck, it may well be that there isn't a ready answer—yet! If that's the case, consider what you would want from an AI tool and be on the lookout.
If you find an option that seems helpful, remember to always evaluate the AI using what you've learned in the previous chapters. You are an informed user and consumer of AI, and you are capable of making a decision to use or not depending on your own viewpoint.
It's important to step back and focus on your humanity now that you've considered AI in your life. The most important thing you can do is recognize what makes you uniquely human. You don't want to be a machine. You'll never compete successfully with a machine. So don't try, and instead focus on your human abilities. That's the point of a wonderful book called Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, by Kevin Roose. Here's an example. My friend Jean is an architect with a thriving independent practice. Another architect I know, David, is getting out of the business after seeing his income erode. David is incredibly technically proficient. His eye for design, proportion, and ability to model is top notch, but he's not so great with people. Jean is an excellent designer, but maybe not as good as David. What Jean has is empathy, patience, and an understanding of how to help her clients navigate the rocky emotional and financial experience of designing and building something as personal as a home. Jean brings her humanity to bear on her business. She has what some call emotional intelligence, and importantly, the ability to use it in her work. David, not so much. David and Jean are already subject to the pressures of automation. AI-enabled architecture design software is becoming ubiquitous. I'm not worried about Jean in the coming years, but David is smart to seek alternatives.
Augmentation shouldn't be about becoming a cyborg. Futureproof is a great read because it illustrates that if you just use machines to hustle harder, work faster, you'll eventually be replaced by a robot. Augmentation should be about helping yourself be more human, doing more of the things humans can do. Cyborgs and Terminators are creepy because they are machines pretending to be humans. When we use AI to try to make ourselves more machine-like, we're creepy too. Use AI to be more human, not the other way around. Reading Futureproof can help you understand your uniquely human qualities in a world of increasing automation. It's an important book because it can help you develop a defensive strategy for the change AI is bringing. Help you differentiate yourself by strengthening your best human qualities. In this book, I strive to present an optimistic offensive strategy. I hope to help you build on the message of Futureproof and use AI so you can make informed choices, influence how AI develops, have more fun, and have an even greater impact on the world around you.
Using AI for Personal Safety
My mutt dog, Lilo, is a perfect example of specialized, superhuman intelligence in action. She lies dormant on the couch or bed until her sensors detect something of concern. It could be footsteps on the driveway, the scent of a fox approaching our duck coop, or the sleepwalking of one of my children. I will never surpass her ability to hear, smell, or intuit. I will never beat her vigilant cognitive processing that detects and responds to concerns at all hours, day and night. Even while in a deep sleep, upside down, looking ridiculous, she will lift a head, cock an ear, sniff the air to gather more information. She growls a warning above a certain threshold. When a threat is confirmed, she loses her mind, barking and scratching at the door to defend her humans from possible harm. If I were allergic to dogs, I would want a machine or alarm system that could do all of this for me.
Safety concerns present humans with one of the greatest opportunities to benefit from AI. A machine can be taught to be ever vigilant and to detect possible harm before we can. Machines can learn from our environment what is "normal" and what may be something to worry about. A machine can learn that the mail is delivered every afternoon. Which, apparently, my dogs can't do because they attempt to murder our mailman, Bill, every day at two-thirty in the afternoon, even though he leaves them dog biscuits.
Safety-critical situations are a great place to take advantage of AI. You're building layers of redundancy by adding a machine into your life to keep you safer. In my own life, I have seen major safety benefits from the AI in my car.
Imagine Lilo perched on the dash of my car. She stares intently through the windshield, never blinking. I put the car in reverse to back out of the driveway and she runs to the back of the car, furiously scanning through one hundred and eighty degrees for any hazard. She barks at the sight of a pedestrian walking into the path of the car, out of my line of sight but visible to Lilo's well-trained eyes. I brake and the pedestrian strolls safely by (hopefully without a dog of their own so I don't end up with the two knuckleheads barking uncontrollably in the car).
The good news is you don't have to train a dog to be your safe-driving assistant. Most new cars now include AI systems that do even more to keep you safe on the road. As we discussed in chapters 1 and 2, these systems are trained to recognize a bunch of hazards through cameras, radar, and driver inputs to the steering wheel. Some even watch your eyes and can detect when you're getting sleepy. Every time you drive a car with one of these systems, you're putting the machine through continuing education. The car records and uploads data about the safety system to the manufacturer to help improve the AI (and probably sell your data to Starbucks so they can decide where to put a new store, but let's focus on the positives). Driving safety is a very positive outcome from all of us collectively teaching machines. I know I'm a safer driver in my reasonably priced 2024 Subaru that came standard with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). My ADAS has prevented at least two collisions where I absolutely would have rear-ended another driver. In both cases, it detected a car coming to a sudden stop in front of me and slammed on the brakes just before I did. The machine saved me from an expensive inconvenience at best, and from hurting another driver and myself at worst. When our teenage drivers go on long trips, this is the car they take. My wife's and my criterion for a kid's car used to be the cheapest car with air bags and a top crash safety rating. Now, when we can afford it, we help them replace their old beaters with cars running AI safety systems. Never going back!
This safety feature also helps my dad drive safely at night now that he's lost vision in one of his eyes. When he got his first car with an AI safety system, his stress levels dropped from knowing that everyone would be safer when he had to drive my mom to the hospital or come home from a concert after dark. I am a car enthusiast and truly enjoy the raw driving experience. I own and drive three classic vehicles (1982 Jeep CJ5, 1982 GMC C6000, 1995 Toyota Tacoma) that don't even have airbags, much less sensors and AI safety systems. Warning beeps and robots making decisions for me seemed like an intrusion into a meditative escape. That can be true, but the value of these systems is so clear, I now do ninety-nine percent of my driving in a 2024 Subaru with the help of AI. AI can really, truly improve our safety, the safety of our loved ones, and the well-being of people with whom we share the road.
Be a Smarter Patient
The potential for AI to help us be healthy, or at least less unhealthy, is remarkable. If AI captures human knowledge and makes it accessible at scale, then the knowledge of clinicians could have a great impact through its careful use. The health industry is an enormous, nearly $20 trillion-with-a-T sector of the American economy. Venture capitalists are already investing in AI startups and directly in the sector and are certain to invest more with that much money at stake. The typical economics of health mean that investment follows the money, as has been the case in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. In my work, the earliest adoption of AI is in hospital financial operations—billing, collection of unpaid bills, and pre-approval and increased approval of insurance claims. These are all worthwhile efforts to gain incremental efficiency in the complex financial enterprise of a large hospital. After financial operations, AI is being used to sustain or increase the margin of already (relatively) high-margin treatment and diagnostic care. In both cases, investment follows returns. But there is so much more potential.
So how is a patient to profit from AI? First, try to avoid being a patient. Health screening is an excellent area for the use of AI. At a minimum, when it's time for your colonoscopy, you can look for a gastroenterologist who also uses GI Genius or another computerized adenoma detection tool. Ask them how it has affected their adenoma detection rate. It's a good sign if they have a concrete answer. For other types of screening, get a sense of the growing number of health AI systems approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), listed on their website (https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-aiml-enabled-medical-devices at the time of publication). More than one thousand had been approved at the time this book was written. Ask your doctor, nurse, or hospital administrator what they're doing to evaluate and adopt AI systems that improve the care they provide. You may be surprised at their answer. Ask them how they are paying for the system so you can evaluate how their incentives align with your own health needs. Ask them how they have ensured the AI will perform fairly for all patients. Ask them how they are checking the performance of AI over time to make sure it continues to perform.
Cornucopia
What follows is a collection of real stories from people just like you who have tried using AI. Consider these stories encouragement to try AI for the same use, or for a different but related use. Ask yourself what aspects of the story could translate to your own life or work. Get in the habit of asking people you know how they are using AI. You may be surprised at their creative problem solving.
Awesome Editor
Ann, the developmental editor of this book, used AI for the first time to edit the Introduction. She started by editing the raw draft manually, using her laptop and Microsoft Word. This gave her a version she was happy with as the product of her decades of expertise. She then went back to the raw draft and fed it into an AI service, asking the AI to edit it for clarity and enhance it for content. We then sat down together and compared the two results, one entirely manual by a human expert, one done by an AI. We found that Ann made edits the AI did not that were important to me, the author. She had acquired a sense of my "voice" through our multiple meetings to develop an outline and her subsequent reading and editing of my draft. Her editing helped bring my voice out and make it stronger in the written words of the Introduction. Watch a singer with their vocal coach and you'll see the coach help the singer find more expressive, impactful vocalizations of the sounds they are creating. That's what Ann does for me. In comparison, the AI is like the auto-tuner used by recording studios and pop musicians to polish and make vocals appealing. You hear about "heavy" versus "light" use of the auto-tuner. The Introduction we got back from the AI was like the auto-tuner turned up to eleven. Technically, my words and ideas, so very polished, but no longer… me. The AI-edited Introduction appears in the Appendix, along with the prompts we used to generate it. Decide for yourself which is "better."
Japanese Dinner
My friend Rob used AI to teach himself to put a seven-course meal on the table while everything was hot. Rob loves to try new things in the kitchen. He recently started learning traditional Japanese ingredients and recipes, cooking one dish at a time using cookbooks, videos, and online information. After getting familiar with a bunch of dishes, he wanted to do something special for family and friends and cook a multi-course meal. The problem was that it was really hard to learn how to time the preparation and cooking of a wide variety of dishes so they would all come to the table hot at the same time. He asked an AI for the ordered series of steps required to prepare, plate, and serve all seven recipes. He followed the composite recipe and succeeded at serving a hot seven-course meal the first time he tried.
Memorial Podcast
My friend Diane wrote a memorial message at the passing of her mother. She read it aloud to friends and loved ones at her mother's funeral, sharing a warm remembrance of a life well lived. A number of people who could not be there heard about Diane's message and asked for a recording of her reading, which didn't exist. Uncomfortable with making a standalone recording, she decided to try an AI service typically used to create audio podcasts from written information. The resulting podcast had two perfect-sounding human voices sharing Diane's written message as a warm conversational tribute to her mother. She sent the audio to far-away friends and family, who took grateful comfort from the tribute
Wholesale Metal
My friend Johan uses AI to read metal supplier specification documents from hundreds of suppliers to his wholesale metal business. He works with many suppliers to build and maintain a diverse inventory of products from space-age alloy tubes for building airplanes to rough steel stakes for farming tomatoes. Each supplier sends an electronic copy of a document describing the metal product, lot, and batch information along with the actual metal products on a truck. That information needs to be transferred into Johan's inventory and sales database. It's challenging because every supplier uses their own document format. Stock-keeping unit, description, batch number, lot number, and safety information all appear on every document, but in slightly different places. He used optical character recognition (OCR) software for years to partially "read" the documents, with limited success. Recently, he started experimenting with AI systems that have been taught to retrieve information from different parts of documents based on a prompt such as "give me a list of all stock-keeping unit identifiers along with the accompanying description." He hopes this tool will help improve the quality and timeliness of inventory and sales information so his sales team can sell more and his warehouse team can fill more orders.
Robotic Coffee Machines
My friend Stephan uses AI to help his coffee machine customers troubleshoot problems in faraway places. He cofounded and leads Poursteady, a robotic pour-over coffee machine company. But these coffee machines are global. Poursteady machines are installed in coffee shops as far away as Korea and the Middle East, meaning that when a customer needs help, it could be the middle of the night in Brooklyn. He subscribed to an AI service that "read" all of the technical and how-to documentation and the ten years of customer-support emails Poursteady had collected. This was an example of fine-tuning a pre-existing generic foundation AI so it can help with coffee machines. The result is an AI chat "bot" that can answer questions and help troubleshoot problems based on its prior knowledge of the world (from the foundation AI model) and what it has learned about Poursteady's products (the fine-tuned AI). His staff further teaches the AI by asking it for help based on their expert knowledge of what has gone wrong in the past and confirming or correcting its answers (something you do when you use ChatGPT). With a well-taught machine in hand, his team hopes to give it to their distributors in Korea and the Middle East so they can better use the knowledge captured from Poursteady experts in Brooklyn. The economics of Stephan's young business are such that he can afford to either manufacture his coffee machines in Brooklyn or hire humans to do twenty-four-hour customer support, but not both. He is choosing to manufacture in the U.S. and scale the customer support knowledge of his expert team with the help of AI.
Boat Influencer
Dockdeals is an Instagram account run by an anonymous boat enthusiast who uses AI to quickly create high-quality visuals for boat-for-sale listings he is excited about. He uses a service called Canva to process low-quality pictures from the for-sale listing into high-quality images that jump out and better represent what he thinks is cool about the boats. He learned that Instagram's algorithm favors high-quality pictures and will show his posts to more people if he uses AI to improve the images.
Team Builder
My friend Jason runs a consulting company that uses AI to put together the best possible teams. His company builds financial analysis tools for businesses all over the world. Projects are successful when one or two of his analysis tool experts work as a team with one or two financial experts from the business. He subscribed to a service that uses an AI model to match people into high functioning teams or at least identify possible personality conflicts to be on the lookout for and work to avoid. He used the AI service with a few projects and found that it had helpful suggestions that improved the performance and satisfaction of the teams.
Insurance Appeals
A former colleague used early AI to automatically appeal denied insurance claims and pre-approvals to pay for prenatal diagnostic testing. This system overwhelmed the insurance companies, who then came to the table to negotiate blanket approvals. In my experience, insurance companies deny and delay payment in the hope of creating disincentives that reduce the rate at which they pay claims, likely with the help of AI. In this case, my colleague fought fire with fire and used AI to level the playing field.
Financial Reporting
A friend uses AI to analyze and generate summaries of why financial results change from quarter to quarter for the divisions of a holding company. Every division—and there are many—is required to explain why their sales, expenses, and profits are up or down. The head of the division provides a narrative explanation, really the only way to analyze and capture the complexity of the situation. In addition to human analysis, they use AI to read all the explanations, identify unique events, find possible trends, and generate summary explanations across an incredibly complex array of subsidiary businesses.
Search
My godson uses ChatGPT instead of Google for all his web searches. He was in his freshman year of college when ChatGPT was released. He started playing around with it early on. When I heard he bought a paid subscription to ChatGPT, I felt it said a lot about the utility he found in the tool. On top of not having much money because he's a full-time student, he's also frugal in the nicest possible way. Generous to others, but it pains him to waste money. He uses ChatGPT constantly to look up information and identify trees and buildings from pictures he takes with his phone.
Study Aid
My daughter used AI to generate practice problems while studying for a final exam. She struggled with a class in college one recent semester. It was a requirement for her major, and she needed a C or above. There was a real possibility of a D or worse! It wasn't enough to go to all of the professor's office hours, seek help from the teaching assistant, study with classmates. She prompted AI by asking it to generate practice problems for concepts in the lecture that hadn't been covered in prior homework assignments.
Retail
An engineer I interviewed for a job on my team used AI to help convenience store retailers stock their shelves to maximize sales-per-square-foot. The next time you go into a large chain convenience store, look up at the ceiling for dark plastic bubbles. You're right that these are for security to detect and prevent shoplifting, but if the store is a customer of my candidate's company, they do more. The convenience store AI has been taught to watch how individual people move through the store, browse shelves, choose items, and make purchases. After a few weeks of watching customers, it recommends changes to the store layout and to where products are displayed. The process continues after the changes are made, in a constant cycle of optimization and adaptation to changing customer behavior. Grocery stores are increasingly using this technology as well. Next time you notice that your favorite candy bar or bag of chips has moved to a new location, it's because AI thinks it'll sell better there.
I could go on, but in the end the best way for you to learn about AI is to use it. Hopefully, the variety of these stories can help you see how AI could be useful to you. AI is changing and evolving so rapidly that it's not feasible to write a definitive "how to" instruction manual. Also, the best AI should be easy to pick up and learn. With the information in this book, you now understand the fundamentals of how you and people like you teach machines and can choose how you engage with AI on your own terms. You are better equipped to recognize AI in the world around you, and with a healthy awareness of the current AI industry, you're a more knowledgeable consumer. Use your knowledge to influence how you live with AI by voting with your feet and wallet. You are better positioned to see the value of your data and decisions and to help your own school, business, or employer maximize the value of both in the use of AI.
Keep Up!
I started a podcast with my twenty-something daughter, Maryjane, so I can keep up with the evolution of AI in the real world—more how it's impacting people's lives as they use it, less the evolution of the underlying technology. We talk to students, educators, and experts about their life with AI. It's called "You Teach the Machines" and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
We started the podcast because this book is simultaneously the best way to share a holistic view of AI and the worst way to keep up with the constant change happening at the time you're reading or listening to it. Artificial intelligence evolved significantly in the time it took to write and publish this book. When I started writing in November of 2024, the latest available language AI were capable of responding to your prompt or question with a single answer. Four months later, the latest available AI was able to respond with an answer backed up by the steps it took to figure out the answer! It shared its reasoning! As an insider, this was both hugely necessary and mind-blowing.
The steady and rapid pace of change will continue, punctuated by Black Swan events. My hope is that by reading this book you shed uncertainty about AI and the fear it can cause. I hope that any remaining fear of the Five D's are rational and help you make better decisions. I hope you are better able to recognize your own Survival Signals when bad actors in the AI industry try to manipulate you in their marketing, and that you choose to support the AI companies that take the high road. I hope you are better equipped to manage unexpected change brought by future Black Swans. I hope you are better able to think critically about side effects and pitfalls of AI and, as a more informed consumer, can make choices consistent with your values. I hope you have a new appreciation for the incredible value of your data and the data you generate—truly how you teach the machines—and exert more influence over how it is used. Most of all, I hope you see AI for the incredibly useful tool it can be when it augments your life. I encourage you to seek out AI and experiment with it in your life and work. Be the windshield, not the bug. You teach the machines!
References
Roose, Kevin, 2021. Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Random House.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2025. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)‒Enabled Medical Devices. (Retrieved on May 10, 2025, from https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-aiml-enabled-medical-devices)
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By Jeff Pennington and MJ PenningtonCHAPTER 5: Make AI Work for You (Not the Other Way Around)
If you're a student or recent graduate, you're almost certain to be a regular user of AI. Believe it or not, you're among the only existing group of experts at using modern AI. If you're further along in your life and work, you're less likely to deliberately use AI. It's a tool you may use here and there for a specific task. You may do some experimenting, but it's most likely not yet a no-brainer, go-to resource.
Students, I'm jealous of you. Everyone else, I get it. I write this in my early fifties. Artificial intelligence is the first technological change in my lifetime to challenge my ability to adapt. When the personal computer became accessible, my parents were in their thirties and got one right away. I learned to use it at home after elementary school. I learned to type and use spreadsheets on a computer in my public middle school. When dial-up services came on the scene, I connected my PC to the first internet communities and chatted online in high school in the eighties and college in the early nineties. A few years after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, my friend Sam showed me a primitive website with pictures of ancient caves published by someone far away from our college. A few years after that, I worked at Ask Jeeves, an early web search company. When the cell phone became ubiquitous in the late nineties, I texted my friends last minute social plans, to the amazement of my parents' generation. When the smartphone came out in the mid-2000s, I started using one without thinking twice. But AI makes me feel the calcification of age. It's the first widespread technology in my lifetime that I just don't want to deal with. I'm fortunate to be an insider. It's my job to help my organization understand and use AI. I see so much potential to positively impact the world I live in and the world my grandchildren will live in. But it's really hard. Contrast my situation with that of my daughter who is experiencing the start of AI in the same way I experienced the dawn of the World Wide Web. ChatGPT arrived during her freshman year of college. Her brain and expectations were what neurologists call plastic—still moldable. She started using AI because she didn't know any different. It's been amazing to see how rapidly her methods of accomplishing her schoolwork have evolved.
My daughter is responding to AI under a new evolutionary pressure. We're used to thinking of evolution resulting from something "bad" happening. A comet striking the earth. Climate change. A new virus. Artificial intelligence is not that, though it may sometimes seem so. Artificial intelligence is like the printed book. The invention of moveable type was an evolutionary pressure that accelerated and widened the exit of civilization from the Middle Ages. Europe's Middle Ages were not romantic knights and princesses. Picture population decline, feudal subjugation of peasants, plague, famine and wars. One war lasted so long, it was called the Hundred Years' War. It was so bad, that some historians referred to the whole mess as the Dark Ages. Europe got out of this civilizational decline because of printed books. More and more knowledge was captured in books. More and more people learned to read. People could contribute, could create value beyond their back-breaking manual labor, fighting ability, or birth. A kid who learned to read could grow up to do anything. People living in Europe through historical periods following the Middle Ages came to value book-enabled knowledge and education for pulling them out of their grandparents' and great-grandparents' desperate times, when the graves from the plague were still fresh. Books and education were so revolutionary in terms of human well-being, people in Europe and elsewhere established public libraries and schools to further share and democratize knowledge.
Let's jump into the future and rewrite that last passage: "More and more knowledge was captured in AI. More and more people learned to use AI. People could contribute, could create value beyond their mind-numbing office labor, their access to expensive higher education, their network of rich friends. A kid who learned to use AI could grow up to do anything. People living through historical periods following the chaos and stagnation of postmodernity came to value AI-enabled knowledge and education for pulling them out of their parents' and grandparents' desperate times, when graves from the pandemics were still fresh. AI was so revolutionary in terms of human well-being, people established public large language models."
I see AI as having the same potential to improve our fragile world as the book did hundreds of years ago. Enough to quit my job and write this book. Enough to creakily learn to use AI so I can respond to its evolutionary pressure just as my ancestors did with books. And it's both as simple and complex as that.
Use AI.
The more we use AI in a thoughtful, informed way to improve the quality of our work and our lives, the better the long-term outcome for us as individuals and for our society. Like it or not, AI is an inevitable and inextricable part of our lives, just like all the revolutionary technological changes that came before: the printing press, the household telephone, the pocket camera, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, the smartphone, and social media—all of which became extraordinarily beneficial when put to creative use by billions of humans. All of which have their own side effects and pitfalls. In every case, recognition of the costs, benefits, and creative use of the technology by people like you steered (or is steering) these industries to better human outcomes through user (consumer)-driven change. The same can happen with AI.
Where to start?
Augment Your Life
Start by answering three questions: What are you good at? What do you want to be better at? What do you need to do but takes an unsustainable amount of time or effort? If this feels like therapy, or is maybe a bit uncomfortable, you're not alone. Another word for augmentation is "self-improvement" or "self-help." It can be challenging to take a critical look at your life and how you live it and then try to make changes. It's even weirder to do that and then consider getting help from "artificial intelligence." But doing so can help you succeed, lead, and remain engaged in the modern era.
Let's take myself as an example. I'm good at coming up with creative ideas. I want to be better at doing my laundry regularly. I need to keep my email inbox clean, but it takes too much time.
We turn the tables on technology when we approach it with the goal of living a more satisfying life. My ultimate goal isn't to "use AI" any more than it is to "use a smartphone." My goal (and yours) should be to get more out of my natural efforts and abilities, enhance creativity, and pursue new and different projects that I might not be able to tackle on my own. How can AI be a means to this end? I'll go first.
I started a completely unrelated podcast as a creative outlet about a year before writing this book. While I was writing, my daughter and I started another podcast to share stories of living with AI, also called "You Teach The Machines." We figured that since this is all so new, lots of people are going to have new and different experiences with AI and it would be helpful for others to hear about them. A fun podcast needs music, so we made a theme song with a music generation AI. I wrote the lyrics and set a few other parameters, and in about an hour we were able to dress up our human discussion with machine-generated music. My creative contributions were the lyrics I wrote and the direction I gave the AI. Artificial intelligence helped me make more of my ideas by generating a catchy tune, along with vocals. It has turned out to be a hit with the college students we interview! Now, do I value this music as much as the original music I paid my friend Jay Nash to write, perform, and record for my other podcast? No. My collaboration with Jay led to a live performance on stage together and ongoing creative human collaboration. Did I create a fun little musical addition that enhances our AI podcast more than generic stock music? Yes! It's always fun to learn in areas where you're already familiar, so if you're new to AI, music is a great place to start.
Everyone is familiar with washing dirty clothes. We have to do it; we don't want to do it. I want to be better doing my laundry regularly. My clothes build up on both the dirty and clean side of the washing machine cycle. My hamper is always full of two to three loads, which creates an artificial mental block in and of itself. I feel great when I manage to run it all, fold it, and reflect confidently on a two-week supply of clean underwear. But that's not happening regularly. So what's a way that AI could help? (Besides a laundry robot—we're not there yet, and, tbh, the waiter robots I saw in a dim sum restaurant in Chicago were both creepy and entertaining, but I can't imagine having one in my house.)
We'll start with the ground rule that the machine isn't going to do my laundry for me. A simple use of AI to improve my laundry habits is to use tools for behavior or habit change. I asked both my smart speaker and the digital assistant on my phone to set weekly reminders to start a load of laundry on Thursday evening, switch to the dryer Friday morning, and prompt me to fold on Friday evening. You may already be doing something similar in your life. Guess what? It worked!
Gentle reminders are a good start, but what if I had less laundry in the first place? I enlisted AI to reduce the amount of laundry I have by finding clothing that doesn't require as frequent washing. Retailers have been working on AI-enabled wardrobe recommendations since the dawn of e-commerce. In fact, a social media algorithm recently profiled me as an "outfit repeater" as it served me an ad for odor- and stain-resistant pants. Long ago, in a dot com boom far away, I worked as a software engineer at Ask Jeeves, an early attempt at AI-enabled web search. We didn't call Jeeves "AI" at the time; that term was out of vogue, redolent of mid-century science fiction. Instead, we called Jeeves "Natural Language Understanding," the marketing term for natural language processing, which we defined in Chapter 1. We built a wardrobe recommendation search engine so Jeeves could pick out a Gap or Nike outfit like a proper digital butler. Fast forward twenty-five years and I can try using any number of free AI-enabled personal clothing assistants "who" will set me up with an entire wardrobe of outfits I can "repeat." In fact, I did just that while writing this book! There are a bunch of clothing recommendation apps available on your smartphone. Turns out that using X resulted in Y.
What don't I have time for but need to get done? This one is straightforward and probably something you're already benefitting from anyway. Go into your email account and look for your spam or junk folder. Open it and witness the result of teaching a machine to do beneficial work. We discussed this in a previous chapter, but it's worth revisiting. Spam email is a fact of life. Artificial intelligence controls spam. You couldn't pay me enough to filter spam out of my inbox. I'm very grateful for the AI that does it for me.
Now It's Your Turn
Start by answering these three questions for yourself:
- What am I good at?
- What do I want to do better at?
- What do I have to do but life gets in the way?
Try not to overthink it; just write down whatever comes to mind for each. Now go through the exercise of looking for ways to augment your life using AI for each question. If you get stuck, it may well be that there isn't a ready answer—yet! If that's the case, consider what you would want from an AI tool and be on the lookout.
If you find an option that seems helpful, remember to always evaluate the AI using what you've learned in the previous chapters. You are an informed user and consumer of AI, and you are capable of making a decision to use or not depending on your own viewpoint.
It's important to step back and focus on your humanity now that you've considered AI in your life. The most important thing you can do is recognize what makes you uniquely human. You don't want to be a machine. You'll never compete successfully with a machine. So don't try, and instead focus on your human abilities. That's the point of a wonderful book called Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, by Kevin Roose. Here's an example. My friend Jean is an architect with a thriving independent practice. Another architect I know, David, is getting out of the business after seeing his income erode. David is incredibly technically proficient. His eye for design, proportion, and ability to model is top notch, but he's not so great with people. Jean is an excellent designer, but maybe not as good as David. What Jean has is empathy, patience, and an understanding of how to help her clients navigate the rocky emotional and financial experience of designing and building something as personal as a home. Jean brings her humanity to bear on her business. She has what some call emotional intelligence, and importantly, the ability to use it in her work. David, not so much. David and Jean are already subject to the pressures of automation. AI-enabled architecture design software is becoming ubiquitous. I'm not worried about Jean in the coming years, but David is smart to seek alternatives.
Augmentation shouldn't be about becoming a cyborg. Futureproof is a great read because it illustrates that if you just use machines to hustle harder, work faster, you'll eventually be replaced by a robot. Augmentation should be about helping yourself be more human, doing more of the things humans can do. Cyborgs and Terminators are creepy because they are machines pretending to be humans. When we use AI to try to make ourselves more machine-like, we're creepy too. Use AI to be more human, not the other way around. Reading Futureproof can help you understand your uniquely human qualities in a world of increasing automation. It's an important book because it can help you develop a defensive strategy for the change AI is bringing. Help you differentiate yourself by strengthening your best human qualities. In this book, I strive to present an optimistic offensive strategy. I hope to help you build on the message of Futureproof and use AI so you can make informed choices, influence how AI develops, have more fun, and have an even greater impact on the world around you.
Using AI for Personal Safety
My mutt dog, Lilo, is a perfect example of specialized, superhuman intelligence in action. She lies dormant on the couch or bed until her sensors detect something of concern. It could be footsteps on the driveway, the scent of a fox approaching our duck coop, or the sleepwalking of one of my children. I will never surpass her ability to hear, smell, or intuit. I will never beat her vigilant cognitive processing that detects and responds to concerns at all hours, day and night. Even while in a deep sleep, upside down, looking ridiculous, she will lift a head, cock an ear, sniff the air to gather more information. She growls a warning above a certain threshold. When a threat is confirmed, she loses her mind, barking and scratching at the door to defend her humans from possible harm. If I were allergic to dogs, I would want a machine or alarm system that could do all of this for me.
Safety concerns present humans with one of the greatest opportunities to benefit from AI. A machine can be taught to be ever vigilant and to detect possible harm before we can. Machines can learn from our environment what is "normal" and what may be something to worry about. A machine can learn that the mail is delivered every afternoon. Which, apparently, my dogs can't do because they attempt to murder our mailman, Bill, every day at two-thirty in the afternoon, even though he leaves them dog biscuits.
Safety-critical situations are a great place to take advantage of AI. You're building layers of redundancy by adding a machine into your life to keep you safer. In my own life, I have seen major safety benefits from the AI in my car.
Imagine Lilo perched on the dash of my car. She stares intently through the windshield, never blinking. I put the car in reverse to back out of the driveway and she runs to the back of the car, furiously scanning through one hundred and eighty degrees for any hazard. She barks at the sight of a pedestrian walking into the path of the car, out of my line of sight but visible to Lilo's well-trained eyes. I brake and the pedestrian strolls safely by (hopefully without a dog of their own so I don't end up with the two knuckleheads barking uncontrollably in the car).
The good news is you don't have to train a dog to be your safe-driving assistant. Most new cars now include AI systems that do even more to keep you safe on the road. As we discussed in chapters 1 and 2, these systems are trained to recognize a bunch of hazards through cameras, radar, and driver inputs to the steering wheel. Some even watch your eyes and can detect when you're getting sleepy. Every time you drive a car with one of these systems, you're putting the machine through continuing education. The car records and uploads data about the safety system to the manufacturer to help improve the AI (and probably sell your data to Starbucks so they can decide where to put a new store, but let's focus on the positives). Driving safety is a very positive outcome from all of us collectively teaching machines. I know I'm a safer driver in my reasonably priced 2024 Subaru that came standard with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). My ADAS has prevented at least two collisions where I absolutely would have rear-ended another driver. In both cases, it detected a car coming to a sudden stop in front of me and slammed on the brakes just before I did. The machine saved me from an expensive inconvenience at best, and from hurting another driver and myself at worst. When our teenage drivers go on long trips, this is the car they take. My wife's and my criterion for a kid's car used to be the cheapest car with air bags and a top crash safety rating. Now, when we can afford it, we help them replace their old beaters with cars running AI safety systems. Never going back!
This safety feature also helps my dad drive safely at night now that he's lost vision in one of his eyes. When he got his first car with an AI safety system, his stress levels dropped from knowing that everyone would be safer when he had to drive my mom to the hospital or come home from a concert after dark. I am a car enthusiast and truly enjoy the raw driving experience. I own and drive three classic vehicles (1982 Jeep CJ5, 1982 GMC C6000, 1995 Toyota Tacoma) that don't even have airbags, much less sensors and AI safety systems. Warning beeps and robots making decisions for me seemed like an intrusion into a meditative escape. That can be true, but the value of these systems is so clear, I now do ninety-nine percent of my driving in a 2024 Subaru with the help of AI. AI can really, truly improve our safety, the safety of our loved ones, and the well-being of people with whom we share the road.
Be a Smarter Patient
The potential for AI to help us be healthy, or at least less unhealthy, is remarkable. If AI captures human knowledge and makes it accessible at scale, then the knowledge of clinicians could have a great impact through its careful use. The health industry is an enormous, nearly $20 trillion-with-a-T sector of the American economy. Venture capitalists are already investing in AI startups and directly in the sector and are certain to invest more with that much money at stake. The typical economics of health mean that investment follows the money, as has been the case in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. In my work, the earliest adoption of AI is in hospital financial operations—billing, collection of unpaid bills, and pre-approval and increased approval of insurance claims. These are all worthwhile efforts to gain incremental efficiency in the complex financial enterprise of a large hospital. After financial operations, AI is being used to sustain or increase the margin of already (relatively) high-margin treatment and diagnostic care. In both cases, investment follows returns. But there is so much more potential.
So how is a patient to profit from AI? First, try to avoid being a patient. Health screening is an excellent area for the use of AI. At a minimum, when it's time for your colonoscopy, you can look for a gastroenterologist who also uses GI Genius or another computerized adenoma detection tool. Ask them how it has affected their adenoma detection rate. It's a good sign if they have a concrete answer. For other types of screening, get a sense of the growing number of health AI systems approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), listed on their website (https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-aiml-enabled-medical-devices at the time of publication). More than one thousand had been approved at the time this book was written. Ask your doctor, nurse, or hospital administrator what they're doing to evaluate and adopt AI systems that improve the care they provide. You may be surprised at their answer. Ask them how they are paying for the system so you can evaluate how their incentives align with your own health needs. Ask them how they have ensured the AI will perform fairly for all patients. Ask them how they are checking the performance of AI over time to make sure it continues to perform.
Cornucopia
What follows is a collection of real stories from people just like you who have tried using AI. Consider these stories encouragement to try AI for the same use, or for a different but related use. Ask yourself what aspects of the story could translate to your own life or work. Get in the habit of asking people you know how they are using AI. You may be surprised at their creative problem solving.
Awesome Editor
Ann, the developmental editor of this book, used AI for the first time to edit the Introduction. She started by editing the raw draft manually, using her laptop and Microsoft Word. This gave her a version she was happy with as the product of her decades of expertise. She then went back to the raw draft and fed it into an AI service, asking the AI to edit it for clarity and enhance it for content. We then sat down together and compared the two results, one entirely manual by a human expert, one done by an AI. We found that Ann made edits the AI did not that were important to me, the author. She had acquired a sense of my "voice" through our multiple meetings to develop an outline and her subsequent reading and editing of my draft. Her editing helped bring my voice out and make it stronger in the written words of the Introduction. Watch a singer with their vocal coach and you'll see the coach help the singer find more expressive, impactful vocalizations of the sounds they are creating. That's what Ann does for me. In comparison, the AI is like the auto-tuner used by recording studios and pop musicians to polish and make vocals appealing. You hear about "heavy" versus "light" use of the auto-tuner. The Introduction we got back from the AI was like the auto-tuner turned up to eleven. Technically, my words and ideas, so very polished, but no longer… me. The AI-edited Introduction appears in the Appendix, along with the prompts we used to generate it. Decide for yourself which is "better."
Japanese Dinner
My friend Rob used AI to teach himself to put a seven-course meal on the table while everything was hot. Rob loves to try new things in the kitchen. He recently started learning traditional Japanese ingredients and recipes, cooking one dish at a time using cookbooks, videos, and online information. After getting familiar with a bunch of dishes, he wanted to do something special for family and friends and cook a multi-course meal. The problem was that it was really hard to learn how to time the preparation and cooking of a wide variety of dishes so they would all come to the table hot at the same time. He asked an AI for the ordered series of steps required to prepare, plate, and serve all seven recipes. He followed the composite recipe and succeeded at serving a hot seven-course meal the first time he tried.
Memorial Podcast
My friend Diane wrote a memorial message at the passing of her mother. She read it aloud to friends and loved ones at her mother's funeral, sharing a warm remembrance of a life well lived. A number of people who could not be there heard about Diane's message and asked for a recording of her reading, which didn't exist. Uncomfortable with making a standalone recording, she decided to try an AI service typically used to create audio podcasts from written information. The resulting podcast had two perfect-sounding human voices sharing Diane's written message as a warm conversational tribute to her mother. She sent the audio to far-away friends and family, who took grateful comfort from the tribute
Wholesale Metal
My friend Johan uses AI to read metal supplier specification documents from hundreds of suppliers to his wholesale metal business. He works with many suppliers to build and maintain a diverse inventory of products from space-age alloy tubes for building airplanes to rough steel stakes for farming tomatoes. Each supplier sends an electronic copy of a document describing the metal product, lot, and batch information along with the actual metal products on a truck. That information needs to be transferred into Johan's inventory and sales database. It's challenging because every supplier uses their own document format. Stock-keeping unit, description, batch number, lot number, and safety information all appear on every document, but in slightly different places. He used optical character recognition (OCR) software for years to partially "read" the documents, with limited success. Recently, he started experimenting with AI systems that have been taught to retrieve information from different parts of documents based on a prompt such as "give me a list of all stock-keeping unit identifiers along with the accompanying description." He hopes this tool will help improve the quality and timeliness of inventory and sales information so his sales team can sell more and his warehouse team can fill more orders.
Robotic Coffee Machines
My friend Stephan uses AI to help his coffee machine customers troubleshoot problems in faraway places. He cofounded and leads Poursteady, a robotic pour-over coffee machine company. But these coffee machines are global. Poursteady machines are installed in coffee shops as far away as Korea and the Middle East, meaning that when a customer needs help, it could be the middle of the night in Brooklyn. He subscribed to an AI service that "read" all of the technical and how-to documentation and the ten years of customer-support emails Poursteady had collected. This was an example of fine-tuning a pre-existing generic foundation AI so it can help with coffee machines. The result is an AI chat "bot" that can answer questions and help troubleshoot problems based on its prior knowledge of the world (from the foundation AI model) and what it has learned about Poursteady's products (the fine-tuned AI). His staff further teaches the AI by asking it for help based on their expert knowledge of what has gone wrong in the past and confirming or correcting its answers (something you do when you use ChatGPT). With a well-taught machine in hand, his team hopes to give it to their distributors in Korea and the Middle East so they can better use the knowledge captured from Poursteady experts in Brooklyn. The economics of Stephan's young business are such that he can afford to either manufacture his coffee machines in Brooklyn or hire humans to do twenty-four-hour customer support, but not both. He is choosing to manufacture in the U.S. and scale the customer support knowledge of his expert team with the help of AI.
Boat Influencer
Dockdeals is an Instagram account run by an anonymous boat enthusiast who uses AI to quickly create high-quality visuals for boat-for-sale listings he is excited about. He uses a service called Canva to process low-quality pictures from the for-sale listing into high-quality images that jump out and better represent what he thinks is cool about the boats. He learned that Instagram's algorithm favors high-quality pictures and will show his posts to more people if he uses AI to improve the images.
Team Builder
My friend Jason runs a consulting company that uses AI to put together the best possible teams. His company builds financial analysis tools for businesses all over the world. Projects are successful when one or two of his analysis tool experts work as a team with one or two financial experts from the business. He subscribed to a service that uses an AI model to match people into high functioning teams or at least identify possible personality conflicts to be on the lookout for and work to avoid. He used the AI service with a few projects and found that it had helpful suggestions that improved the performance and satisfaction of the teams.
Insurance Appeals
A former colleague used early AI to automatically appeal denied insurance claims and pre-approvals to pay for prenatal diagnostic testing. This system overwhelmed the insurance companies, who then came to the table to negotiate blanket approvals. In my experience, insurance companies deny and delay payment in the hope of creating disincentives that reduce the rate at which they pay claims, likely with the help of AI. In this case, my colleague fought fire with fire and used AI to level the playing field.
Financial Reporting
A friend uses AI to analyze and generate summaries of why financial results change from quarter to quarter for the divisions of a holding company. Every division—and there are many—is required to explain why their sales, expenses, and profits are up or down. The head of the division provides a narrative explanation, really the only way to analyze and capture the complexity of the situation. In addition to human analysis, they use AI to read all the explanations, identify unique events, find possible trends, and generate summary explanations across an incredibly complex array of subsidiary businesses.
Search
My godson uses ChatGPT instead of Google for all his web searches. He was in his freshman year of college when ChatGPT was released. He started playing around with it early on. When I heard he bought a paid subscription to ChatGPT, I felt it said a lot about the utility he found in the tool. On top of not having much money because he's a full-time student, he's also frugal in the nicest possible way. Generous to others, but it pains him to waste money. He uses ChatGPT constantly to look up information and identify trees and buildings from pictures he takes with his phone.
Study Aid
My daughter used AI to generate practice problems while studying for a final exam. She struggled with a class in college one recent semester. It was a requirement for her major, and she needed a C or above. There was a real possibility of a D or worse! It wasn't enough to go to all of the professor's office hours, seek help from the teaching assistant, study with classmates. She prompted AI by asking it to generate practice problems for concepts in the lecture that hadn't been covered in prior homework assignments.
Retail
An engineer I interviewed for a job on my team used AI to help convenience store retailers stock their shelves to maximize sales-per-square-foot. The next time you go into a large chain convenience store, look up at the ceiling for dark plastic bubbles. You're right that these are for security to detect and prevent shoplifting, but if the store is a customer of my candidate's company, they do more. The convenience store AI has been taught to watch how individual people move through the store, browse shelves, choose items, and make purchases. After a few weeks of watching customers, it recommends changes to the store layout and to where products are displayed. The process continues after the changes are made, in a constant cycle of optimization and adaptation to changing customer behavior. Grocery stores are increasingly using this technology as well. Next time you notice that your favorite candy bar or bag of chips has moved to a new location, it's because AI thinks it'll sell better there.
I could go on, but in the end the best way for you to learn about AI is to use it. Hopefully, the variety of these stories can help you see how AI could be useful to you. AI is changing and evolving so rapidly that it's not feasible to write a definitive "how to" instruction manual. Also, the best AI should be easy to pick up and learn. With the information in this book, you now understand the fundamentals of how you and people like you teach machines and can choose how you engage with AI on your own terms. You are better equipped to recognize AI in the world around you, and with a healthy awareness of the current AI industry, you're a more knowledgeable consumer. Use your knowledge to influence how you live with AI by voting with your feet and wallet. You are better positioned to see the value of your data and decisions and to help your own school, business, or employer maximize the value of both in the use of AI.
Keep Up!
I started a podcast with my twenty-something daughter, Maryjane, so I can keep up with the evolution of AI in the real world—more how it's impacting people's lives as they use it, less the evolution of the underlying technology. We talk to students, educators, and experts about their life with AI. It's called "You Teach the Machines" and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
We started the podcast because this book is simultaneously the best way to share a holistic view of AI and the worst way to keep up with the constant change happening at the time you're reading or listening to it. Artificial intelligence evolved significantly in the time it took to write and publish this book. When I started writing in November of 2024, the latest available language AI were capable of responding to your prompt or question with a single answer. Four months later, the latest available AI was able to respond with an answer backed up by the steps it took to figure out the answer! It shared its reasoning! As an insider, this was both hugely necessary and mind-blowing.
The steady and rapid pace of change will continue, punctuated by Black Swan events. My hope is that by reading this book you shed uncertainty about AI and the fear it can cause. I hope that any remaining fear of the Five D's are rational and help you make better decisions. I hope you are better able to recognize your own Survival Signals when bad actors in the AI industry try to manipulate you in their marketing, and that you choose to support the AI companies that take the high road. I hope you are better equipped to manage unexpected change brought by future Black Swans. I hope you are better able to think critically about side effects and pitfalls of AI and, as a more informed consumer, can make choices consistent with your values. I hope you have a new appreciation for the incredible value of your data and the data you generate—truly how you teach the machines—and exert more influence over how it is used. Most of all, I hope you see AI for the incredibly useful tool it can be when it augments your life. I encourage you to seek out AI and experiment with it in your life and work. Be the windshield, not the bug. You teach the machines!
References
Roose, Kevin, 2021. Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Random House.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2025. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)‒Enabled Medical Devices. (Retrieved on May 10, 2025, from https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-aiml-enabled-medical-devices)