Leaning into Technologies to Coordinate Life

Maybe AI ain't so bad, if you use it properly.

Twenty-six years ago, I met my wife online. There weren’t dating sites. There wasn’t even asynchronous messaging (aka chat apps.)

In the late 90s, the closest you got to interacting with other people on the internet was either posting to message groups, or using Internet Relay Chat (IRC.)

I met my wife on IRC. There’s a bit of nerdy street cred to that, but also I have to explain how it was possible back then.

I wasn’t looking for love online, neither was she.

The world was a lot smaller then, people were a lot further away.

The internet, and technology, has been an undercurrent of our entire life since then.

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My first blog

Using the internet circa 1998 was all these weird protocols that are irrelevant today. Kermit? Gopher? Heck, IRC is antiquated now as well.

Being on the internet at that time was peak nerd. Starting with a 2400 baud modem, excited to jump to 14.4 kbps before we really hit it big with 56k! At those speeds, the internet was not a place for images.

My first blog, “Brain Droppings”, was a bit like a long form journal entry for me. I’d pick some topic that I wanted to explore, then sit and write about it and publish it. There was no audience… if anyone saw it, I only knew if they were so kind as to comment. (They didn’t.)

Mostly, my blog was something to share when I met new people. There weren’t dating profiles. There wasn’t social media. It was up to me to learn how to register and assign a domain, then put it out to the world. There were blog sites, of a sort, back then. GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod and AOL. Yeah, AOL was a force back then.

I found that writing like that was cathartic, it let me explore ideas and save them for later. The only thinking involved was done on my side of the screen.

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Evolution of useful tech (for me)

YouTube bloomed into being around the time that high-speed internet started to become more widely available. High-speed then was different from high-speed now.

Just like using modems before it, anyone sharing content online had to work with the limitations. Where a 640x480 image was hard in 1998, a 640x480 video was a bit weighty for video.

Before YouTube, I heard about people recording games as they played them, and people would then go watch them. I was flabbergasted. Who would prefer to watch someone else play a game instead of playing it. Times change.

High-speed internet was the start of something big. Online storage platforms. Blogging platforms. Writing platforms. Streaming platforms.

The platformification of the internet meant companies made software to empower to create and share their own content. While it brought a ton of social pitfalls, it also created a tiny world where I can find out how to replace the transmission in my car in the same place I could learn how to crochet.

It kept marching, I kept consuming, and I kept thinking about my place in this world.

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One day, the internet got smart…

We can act like OpenAI invented AI when ChatGPT was launched, but that’s false on a couple of fronts.

• ChatGPT isn’t really artificial intelligence. It’s simulated to feel that way, but it’s just an evolution of knowledge graphs.

• OpenAI didn’t invent knowledge graphs, Google has used them for associating topics and making search work so well. Facebook has used them for connecting people in a similar manner.

So, while we don’t really have AI right now, we do have something that can synthesize knowledge very effectively, make connections and be accessed with natural language.

So, that nerdy stuff just to say, ChatGPT and other platforms like it, have made complicated information accessible to the layman.

A year ago, I was learning Python. Eight months ago, I needed to do something in Python and knew just enough to be dangerous. I went to ChatGPT, laid out my intent, and got ‘passable code’ that did the job for me.

I still needed to have a way to execute the code, I still needed to know enough to know what to ask, but I didn’t need to know how to code properly.

Similarly, ChatGPT is a research assistant, a technology pundit, a coach and when leveraged, a system for managing my life and building my company.

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Lots of words, just to say, “the world keeps shrinking.”

My world got smaller when I, sitting in a room in Oklahoma, could chat with a person in Michigan and form a relationship.

My world got smaller when I had access to words and videos that could answer just about anything I could think to ask.

My world got even smaller when I could sit down and ask for a complicated subject to be explained in simple terms.

The world is shrinking, our reach is growing, and now is probably one of the easiest times to create a business or a community and change lives globally.

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Gratitude and Enthusiasm

Last week, I got to dig into things I was thankful for… the post above supports that. I also got to think of the people in my life, how my past year has evolved and what my idealized next year looks like.

If it wasn’t made clear elsewhere, I’ve settled on, and leaned into the community name and brand.

I’m scheduling out Body Doubling sessions each week. These are a place to just work with someone else connected to you. It helps you feel like you’re accountable.

Coming up will be group coaching sessions, workshops and resources to help people turn the chaos in their lives into something meaningful.

If you haven’t visited that community, you’ll find it at Chaos Cooperative.

I’m also actively working on the initial “analog” version of the ChaOS, a life planning and management system that leans into creating a life based on your values. It’s biased towards what most ADHD brains need, with the caveat that it will work for anyone who’s needing help tamping down the overwhelm or focus issues in their lives.

Sometimes it’s scary to be a tiny community, sometimes it’s exciting to think that there is a vision there with room for explosive growth.

I’m excited to be excited to work on something I feel can change and improve lives!

Namaste

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