The first movies were shot from a theater seat. The camera sat where the audience would have sat. The actors moved across the frame like they were on a stage, and the shot didn’t change for the whole picture. You were watching a play that someone had happened to have filmed.
It took years before folks had the idea to put the camera on the stage. That single move turned a recorded play into cinema.
I think we’re in the silent film era of AI right now.
Most of us approach a problem the way we did before any of this existed. We pick up the same tools we used yesterday and ask the model to make us a little faster. That’s the camera in the theater seat. Useful, but limited. Not really cinema.
The most interesting moves are happening in the corners, where someone forgets the old rules and asks a different question. Rather than use the robot to drive a particular piece of software, you have it develop a system that meets your needs more specifically than the software ever could.
Those of us interested in automation have spent years building Rube Goldberg machines that kind of get it done. Hazel is watching a folder, a Keyboard Maestro macro firing in response. The whole thing held together with twine and chewing gum. AI lets you wipe the slate clean and replace complicated workflows with simple ones that happen in the background.
Instead of stringing five apps together to file your receipts, you describe what you want, and the robot watches your downloads and puts them where they belong. Instead of a tag system across three note apps to find old research, you ask the robot a question, and it reads the folders and answers. Instead of an inbox with twelve filter rules and half a dozen labels, you tell the robot what you care about, and the rest happens before you sit down.
None of those systems existed two years ago. All of them came from someone asking what the new way looks like, rather than how to speed up the old way.
That’s the move I’m trying to make myself, and it’s harder than it sounds. The pull to stay in the old frame is strong. My instinct is still to use the robot to do the same thing I would have done, just faster. When I catch myself doing that, I try to back up and ask the other question. What does this problem look like if I forget how I would have solved it last year?
It leaves me with one question for you. What problem are you still solving the old way because you haven’t asked what the new way would look like?