The Internet’s Cautionary Tale for AI: Are We Learning from Our Mistakes?

And for some Friday big ideas, here are a few to ponder over the long weekend.

A piece in the New York Times by Christopher Anderson.     The internet was supposed to make us smarter and more capable collectively.  Instead, it has led to a degradation of attention spans and cognitive abilities due to constant distraction. The same mistake may be made with artificial intelligence (AI), which has the potential to distract and entertain rather than focus and deepen human intelligence. The author argues that we need to build AI and workflows that do not overwhelm and diminish us, as we failed to do with the internet.

And how about this one by Jennifer Riggins in the New Stack.   Are you putting enough effort into documentation?    Good documentation increases self-service and decreases internal customer support, and teams with good documentation deliver software faster and more reliably. Technical writers are best suited to document the common jobs and create a stigmergic path. Documentation should be discoverable and include a step-by-step getting started guide, be specific to the user, interactive, filled with examples, and kept up to date with versioning. Documentation can also act as internal marketing, and innersourcing offers a great way to enrich platform documentation.

I’ll start with documentation, which should be an IT provider’s backbone due to a focus on process.      Take stock of your investment here.

Then, think big picture of AI.    Anderson’s argument is a potential guidepost for implementers, helping customers be better rather than degrade.  It’s a context to consider… because it’s both challenging and valuable.   The exact space to look for.