Thinkslop

intention, agency, self-possession, cognitive sovereignty

My career is an odd one. My first job was strategy. Then start-ups, a charity, a social enterprise, founded filtered.com, wrote Timeboxing and, this year, started AI in the Wild. I’d not reflected much on all these decisions and exertions until writing this newsletter. There are some common threads running through these various endeavours: intellectual challenge, societal benefit, learning & education, doing something that’s not been done before, and autonomy.

And intention. Intention is at the intersection of timeboxing and AI. It’s essential to timeboxing because to timebox anything, you need to choose what matters most to you, what you want and need to do, what you intend. It’s essential to AI because as more and more of us have this powerful tool, we need to tell it what to do for us - we need it to fulfil our intentions, and for that we need to be crystal clear on what those are.

But our intentions have become opaque to us. There’s so much going on to confuse, overwhelm and influence us. Algorithmic feeds, advertising, tribalism, notifications, propaganda, the opinions of others, content overload, etc. It’s hard to know what we even really think these days.

On Monday of this week, Harvard Business Review published this article that I wrote. It’s a summary of the third annual study into how people are using AI. One of the main themes is that people are worried they are turning to AI too easily, giving up on the thinking process themselves. Note that thinkslop is not output (like what is meant by AI slop or workslop). Thinkslop is a cognitive behaviour, a cognitive laziness. And it’s bad because we deny ourselves the fun of thinking, we may well be denying ourselves the possibility of having certain creative thoughts, and over the long term, we may even be eroding our ability to think.

And AI is just one of the many modern phenomena that inhibit independent, critical thought and actions.

In the HBR I didn’t offer anti-thinkslop solutions. It’s difficult because the system we’re part of thrusts us more and more into unthinking behaviours. The first step must be to become aware of the problem and to want to reject it. The second is to develop a system to guard against it. Timeboxing is such a system - repeatedly and reliably giving yourself a little time and space to become aware of what’s most important to you. With AI, it might be to restrict the situations in which or the degree to which you use it. With algorithmic feeds, it might be to turn some of them off. With notifications, it might be to permit fewer or permit them only at certain times.

Find a little time and space to reacquaint yourself with your intentions, reclaim your agency, and think for yourself.

Marc

Links

Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
LinkedIn