“Are you crazy, nobody uses ChatGPT like that, you know that right?” Mark said as we sat in the pub. I took a sip of cold crisp beer, slightly puzzled. I thought about how I’d been using generative AI to change my life recently. How I had used it to build a zen-like focus-point around a huge Japanese Acer in my garden. “Surely everyone uses it like that, isn’t it obvious?” I said, feeling slightly self-conscious. I hesitated. Should I tell him how I had also spent all evening talking to ChatGPT coming up with ideas for a cottage garden? It had factored in thousands of different plants that would make even Monty Don drop his trowel in surprise. That was when it struck me that most people use ChatGPT like Google. They punch in a prompt pieced together from some cheat sheet they found on social media and watch it spew out information like a hot bubbling volcano of knowledge, before copying and pasting the answer and never to give it a second thought. For me, this was a bit like using an expensive Macbook Pro laptop as a tea tray. Sure, it works and it’s useful to some degree, but there is so much untapped power in this method of computing, and by method, I mean “conversational intelligence” computing.
Steve Jobs famously once compared the computer to a bicycle for the mind — for its efficiency in propelling humans to where they wanted to go. I would be so bold as to say, extending this analogy… That AI is a motorcycle for the mind.
