On sale today, a limited-edition pennant made by hand in Buffalo…

The five-pack from Porchlight (with bonus Spindex) is still available as well. The launch event on September 21 is fully sold out.

Spotify chose The Knot as an editor’s pick this month, and the Next Big Idea Club shortlisted it as a September Must-Read. Here we go…

Thanks for being part of it.

        

We have limited time, limited energy and limited resources. Allocating that effort is often done in response to what’s at stake and what’s on offer.

The clean room at a silicon fab or operating theater is clean because everyone involved puts in a lot of effort to keep it that way. And that effort is expensive.

It’s not efficiency or precision. Those are important on their own. The gap between laziness and not-lazy requires effort in the face of nuance, challenges or frustrations.

The staff at Motel 6 will put less effort into each guest’s requests than at the Ritz down the street because there’s a lot more staff per person at the Ritz.

There’s organizational laziness, in which a system is designed to have each person care a bit less about each task in exchange for completing more tasks, and there’s individual laziness, which is the natural consequence of disrespectful management.

If the boss insists on non-lazy behavior, but doesn’t give the team the time, the training, the tools or the compensation to do so, it’s not going to happen, not in the long run. Over time, not-lazy is rarely free.

AI bots have an economic incentive to do as little as they can get away with, and so do we. Programmers around the world are frustrated that coding bots almost solve the problem, but don’t seem to care enough to put in the extra cycles to get it right. But that’s what we’re (not) paying for.

The mismatches are frustrating. We might be delighted when we get not-lazy responses that we didn’t pay for, but it ruins a brand or a project when the effort we expected from a system or a person doesn’t match what we think we paid for.

Some clarifying questions:

Are our customers already paying for the non-lazy option? Or do they think they should be getting it for free?

If we wanted to disrupt our competitors by being the non-lazy option, what would we have to do and how could we communicate that?

How can we manage systems, processes and people so they have the resources and rewards they need to take the non-lazy approach?

If we’re trapped or pushed into the lazy path, how can we build systems so that laziness doesn’t damage our work?

How much extra could we charge for not-lazy? And are we prepared to keep that promise?

“You’ll pay a bit more but you’ll get more than you paid for” is almost always a winning market position.

        

And the other kind of school is about the content. All the ‘R’s. The software that goes with the operating system we taught in the other school.

For obvious reasons, these have always been integrated.

Now that Socratic and infinitely patient and customizable AI tutors are everywhere, perhaps it makes sense to consider each separately. Let’s not compromise either on the behalf of the other.

        

No, the opposite is, “I’m not sure, but…”

“I don’t know” is a conversation ender. It is almost never followed by a useful question. Instead, it’s a form of surrender. Teach me! Show me answer! Don’t make me figure it out. Most of all, let me off the hook.

Traditional education is built around the helplessness of “I don’t know.” It gives the teacher and the system all of the authority, and requires the student to memorize, obey and regurgitate.

But useful inquiry doesn’t work that way. Neither does effective conversation or even therapy.

Instead, we engage.

We engage with our hunches and our inkling, and we examine the safe spot our apparent ignorance has landed us.

Socrates had no students who sat in the back row, taking notes.

Front row, hands up, ask questions. Inquire.

We’re not asking for a guarantee or a certificate. We want your focus, your analysis and your investigation.

        

Pop musicians have farewell tours that last for decades. The local print shop is still there, reliably getting the job done. We want things that last.

And yet…

When it’s time for a company to raise another round of investment, the smart investor treats the new round as if the old one never happened. Today, right now, is this the best use of my capital?

And the person at the buffet does the same thing. Right here, right now, which dish appeals the most?

We don’t get tomorrow over again. We can choose to spend it on the best option, not the option we committed to ten years ago.

        

At the factory, the answer is known. It’s productivity that’s being pursued. Do it a little faster, a little better and a little more reliably than yesterday. Cut costs. Repeat.

And the dentist? It’s not rote work, but it’s not a dance with the unknown. Meet a client, diagnosis the problem and do the work efficiently as well. Different than yesterday, but it certainly rhymes.

Where do you work?

It could be that you’re getting exactly what you signed up for.

        

We called them this because they used tools. The first proto-humans to clearly do so.

The question that we need ask ourselves today, “Are you a tool user or a tool maker?”

Everyone uses tools. But only a few people, even with access to AI and systems of leverage, choose to make tools.

Part of the gap is failing to ask the question. It generally doesn’t occur to a productive tool user to decide to slow down, risk failure, and take responsibility by making a new tool.

But new tools are one way we change things for the better.

Homo Faciens

        

Email caught on and persisted for the same reason, but more so. There was never “the email company.” Instead, there’s a protocol, and anyone can send and receive. For free.

It’s hard to overstate how profound the idea of permission-less contact was to the flow of information and the growth of commerce and culture. Just as you could mail a letter to a stranger, you could also call or email them. When it works, it’s very powerful.

Friction was the key. Stamps cost money. Phone calls required an account and a human to dial.

The first real challenge for most users wasn’t crank calls or wrong numbers. It was spammers. Computer users who would send thousands or millions of emails or phone calls at a time, taking advantage of asymmetry. It cost them nothing, but it cost each recipient something.

Usenet, the original internet discussion layer, died from this asymmetry. No one had an incentive to create filters or clean it up at scale, so people stopped showing up.

Even with free email, the first generations of spam were mostly uneconomic, and much of it was stopped by filters. No one liked the noise, but email was useful enough that we put up with some spam.

Multiply spam by AI and the cloud and VOIP, though, and it’s obvious that open networks can’t survive. 30 junk SMS notices in one day is more than enough to turn off your notifications. How many voicemails about an approved business loan need to show up before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes simply noise?

We’re going to need to create a cost for the sender (so it can’t scale to ridiculous) as well as an identity layer (so scammers can’t be fully anonymous–reputation is earned, not invented). It might be an open protocol in the spirit of the best parts of the net, or it might be a single monopolist that figures out how to extract value from it.

A thousand years ago, people built walls around their villages because criminal marauders with nothing to lose would destroy open cities. The scale of the new digital marauding is going to be so large (and it’s coming so fast) that we’re about to see a fundamental shift in how we contact each other and who we trust.

I have no idea what it looks like on the other side of this transition, but the assumptions we’ve always made about open communication with strangers are about to change.

        

Of course, there’s plenty of behavioral data. Say this phrase, or offer that treat, and this particular dog is likely to act in a certain way.

But our inclinations about what it’s actually like to be a dog are all inventions, reverse-engineered to give us a clue about what they might do next.

“If I were you,” is a pretty useless sentence, particularly for dogs. You’re not them, and you can’t imagine what it’s like.

The same is true for computers and for AI. We make up a story about what the computer wants, expects or thinks. But it’s simply a way to explain our guesses about behavior, not actually a statement about what it’s like to be that device or program.

You’ve probably already guessed (there I am, imagining what it’s like to be you) that the same is true for other humans. We only know for sure what it’s like to be ourselves. Everything else is speculation.

Empathy is essential, but it’s also difficult.

        

That seems like a fair question. After tenth grade or so, it’s a choice, after all.

One honest answer is, “I have to get a good grade to get to where I want to go.” That means certification, compliance, regurgitation. It means enrollment in the outcome, not the process. When this happens, we’re seeing a failure of the system we call education. Because that’s not learning.

One answer is, “Because I’m curious.” This is a great reason to take a class, and the instructor’s job isn’t merely to satisfy the curiosity; it’s to amplify it and turn it into a habit and the practice of the autodidact.

For many professional settings, the answer might be, “To learn how to use these tools and this insight to make a change in the world after I graduate.”

That sort of enrollment becomes a productive bargain. It gives the student agency–you don’t have to like everything the instructor has to say, you don’t have to use it when you leave, but the standard is: Is it helpful to imagine having this tool in your kit, and does this course prepare you to use the tool effectively?

Teaching is expensive, so is learning. Active enrollment on both sides is part of the bargain. Students are free to reject the pedagogy, the tools, even the aims of the current practitioners of a craft. But they’re on the hook to do that after they’ve absorbed what the instructor has to offer.

Take what you need and leave the rest.