Leaning Into the Future and Learning with AI

Probably one of my favorite aspects of AI is the way in which it supports and accelerates learning. Some examples from recent personal projects and the takeaways I walked away with:

1. I went back to school last fall to start work on a chemistry degree. While this may appear rather "left field" for a marketing and communications professional, it's actually pretty on brand for me. I've been firmly a dual interest person since high school, pushing myself to excel in both the arts and sciences equally until being in undergraduate with two small children forced a choice. Now that those kiddos have flown the nest, I have time to return to my love for the sciences in a different way. During that first semester back, it was incredible to watch how I used AI to verify my learning. Since I was also working full time while studying part-time, I didn't have time to attend office hours to ask questions about homework. Instead, I would upload my completed homework and have AI evaluate my answers. OR, I would complete my answers, then give AI the problems and compare answers and the way I got there. Going back and forth when the answers differed really checked my understanding. At times, AI was wrong, and I found that to be super motivating: I needed to be on top of the information so I could validate the answers.

2. One of my favorite quotes (and one I had pinned to my cubicle wall at my first job out of college) is by Rainer Maria Rilke: "Resolve to be always beginning -to be a beginner!” (Letters to a Young Poet). While this is fine and good when you are an intern straight out of college, it is another matter entirely when you are nearing two decades as a professional. At this point, you should be an expert, right? But if the AI explosion is revealing anything, it's revealing how uncomfortable a beginner's mindset can be for established professionals. AI presents a kind of starting line, and a professional's future prospects are limited only by how much one is willing to learn. I see this as a positive and exciting thing, because I've carried this beginner's mindset with me always, regardless of how painful or humbling it can feel at times. AI is providing an opportunity for all of us to act as builders, and I've experienced a great deal of joy in what feels like the largest group project of them all: designing the digital future we want, in which I am an active participant with agency. This way of thinking keeps me grounded in the swirl of conversations and headlines which have a tendency to breed fear. This has looked like running personal projects through various platforms and models to see what tools fit different project types better and where I can get the most useful output; joining Google Labs on Discord to conduct early testing on products like Disco; asking questions of the AI/ML experts at work to be able to tease out hype from reality; starting community groups at work where fellow AI power users in various domains can learn out loud and advance the company's upskilling efforts.

3. I am beyond thrilled to see how AI is helping me make space for thinking. My main goal in leveraging the technology is to free up my own cognitive load which I can redirect more efficiently to ideas I'm noodling on and deepening my knowledge of topics I enjoy developing expertise in. As an example, I recently had a conversation with Gemini about a thought that has been bubbling to the surface. Being able to go back and forth with the LLM like in the screen capture below means that I can quickly validate or invalidate certain ideas and more quickly get to the next "wide plain" in my mind, where I need time to wade through my thoughts, marinate, and get to new ideas. Regardless of how advanced technology gets, I still want to treat my mind like the great OG supercomputer that it is, and give it the best conditions for optimal performance. By giving AI the busy, repetitive work that clutters my day, I make this possible for myself.