I was sitting in an AI users group meeting at work recently. We went around the room and people described what they had been using the tools for. It wasn’t a technical crowd. These were people with domain knowledge and good instincts who had previously been blocked by a specific kind of gap. The gap between knowing what they needed and being able to build it themselves.
(more…)Tag: future
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The Empty Basket
I’ve been listening to a book called Mattering. One of the early chapters is about the weight that comes from someone depending on you, and what happens when that weight disappears. The author tells the story of a woman who cared for her elderly mother for years. When her mother passed, she didn’t just grieve the loss. She grieved something more specific. The absence of being needed in that particular way, every day, by someone who depended on her for it.
I recognized something in that. Not the same loss, but the same shape.
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Whatever Comes After
I sat at a table in the gym at my son’s school. At the other tables, there were a dog groomer, a police detective, someone from the state park maintenance crew, an archaeologist, and other community members. We were there for career day.
My topic was AI.
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What Could Have Been
I was listening to a podcast recently about a woman in her seventies, semi-retired, describing a life built around boards and civic connections and a career that had opened into something expansive in its later years. She sounded settled in a way that felt earned, like she had arrived somewhere she had been moving toward for a long time.
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Nothing, Again
A few years ago, we did genetic testing for the first time. An exome sequencing — not the full genome, but a significant portion of it. They found a variation in the PRICKLE1 gene, which is associated with epilepsy. It looked like it might be something.
It wasn’t.
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