AI, From a Human Point of View

  • Half a Cabbage and a Tuesday

    I had half a cabbage, two eggs, a can of chickpeas, and absolutely no plan.

    So I typed exactly that into a chatbot.

    Mostly as a joke.

    It came back with a skillet recipe, suggested putting a fried egg on top, and told me to finish everything with a spoonful of vinegar.

    I tried it.

    It was good.

    Not restaurant good.

    Tuesday good.

    Which, honestly, is the standard that matters.

    I mention this because conversations about AI tend to drift quickly toward jobs, creativity, productivity, surveillance, or the possible collapse of civilization before dinner.

    Meanwhile, the biggest change in my kitchen is much less dramatic.

    Nobody asks, “What are we eating?” in that tired voice anymore.

    Now we ask a phone.

    And sometimes the phone has a decent idea.

    That small shift fascinates me more than some of the grand predictions.

    AI is becoming useful in ordinary places.

    Not because it is replacing anything spectacular.

    Because it saves five minutes of thinking when you are hungry and nobody wants to decide.

    It still gets things wrong.

    Once, it suggested a cooking time for chicken that I did not trust. I checked it against a recipe I already knew and used the longer time.

    That became a useful rule for me:

    For anything involving food safety, money, or health, I use AI for ideas, not for the final word.

    For the smaller things, though, it has quietly earned a place.

    What can I cook with this?

    How should I word this message to my landlord?

    What can we do on a rainy Sunday?

    How do I use up three slightly tired carrots before they become part of the composting ecosystem?

    Nothing revolutionary.

    No keynote required.

    No dramatic music.

    Just a tool becoming useful in small, almost boring ways.

    And perhaps that is how a lot of technology really enters our lives.

    Not with a grand announcement.

    With half a cabbage and a Tuesday.

  • The Part of Your Job That Was Never Typing

    A friend of mine in marketing told me that she can now produce a first draft of almost anything in about forty seconds.

    Briefs.

    Emails.

    The slightly uncomfortable message to a client who is late paying.

    For about a week, she was delighted.

    Then she noticed something strange.

    She was spending roughly the same amount of time on her work as before.

    The forty seconds had simply moved.

    Before, the slow part was typing.

    Now the slow part was deciding what she actually wanted to say.

    And once she noticed that, she realized something mildly uncomfortable: she had been treating writing as the work, when a large part of the real work had always happened before the first sentence.

    That distinction matters.

    When a task takes an hour, we tend to assume the hour is the value.

    AI makes that illusion easier to see.

    It can make the mechanical part of many jobs much faster. Drafting. Summarizing. Formatting. Rewriting. Organizing information.

    Useful, yes.

    But speed has a way of exposing whatever is left.

    Judgment.

    Taste.

    Context.

    Knowing when to push a client and when to leave things alone.

    Knowing when the obvious answer is probably the wrong one.

    Knowing what matters enough to keep and what can disappear without anyone noticing.

    I suspect this will become familiar in many jobs.

    The repetitive part gets cheaper.

    The decision-making becomes more visible.

    That is slightly worrying if most of your value came from doing something quickly.

    It is much better news if your value came from knowing what was worth doing in the first place.

    Here is a small test I find useful.

    The next time you use AI for something at work, notice where you slow down.

    If you are waiting for the tool, that is one thing.

    If you are staring at the screen because you do not know what to ask for, what to keep, or what you actually mean, that is something else.

    That pause is interesting.

    It may be the part of your job that was there all along.

    You just could not see it because typing was standing in front of it.