What I'm Teaching Myself About Machines
Not how to use the tools — how to stay the author of my own attention.
It would be easy to let a machine answer almost anything for me. I can’t undo how good these tools have gotten, and I’m not sure I’d want to. What I can do is stay the author of my own attention while the tools get louder.
Curiosity before answers
The reflex I most want to protect in myself is the pause before asking — the few seconds where I form my own guess first. A guess I made and then checked teaches me something. An answer handed to me cold mostly just ends the thinking.
The tool is not the teacher
A model can explain almost anything. It can’t notice when I’ve gone quiet because I’m stuck, or catch the tangent that would have actually taught me something. Learning lives in those swerves. People catch them in themselves, if they’re paying attention. Tools don’t.
Make things that don’t scale
I build things by hand on weekends — birdhouses, bad bread, a garden that mostly fails. None of it is efficient. All of it teaches the lesson I care about most: that the satisfying parts of a life are usually the ones you can’t automate.