I’m an AI consultant, and Medium is my place to think without robots.

[AI image of a space without robots, made by Dall-E and me]

I work with more robots than people these days.

On a typical workday, I’m usually working with at least 10 or 12 different AI tools.

A few are my standbys, the go-to starting points, and brainstorming buddies.

Some are specialists, with deep expertise in a certain area, and very little knowledge of other topics.

And then there’s the temporary ones, where I’m getting to know the process with them, seeing if it might be a good fit to work together more.

I still spend all day in communication with my team, tapping away like I used to in Slack or email, but now— my team is robots.

It’s quite social, actually, in a weird way. We’re very direct with each other, and have very clear boundaries as to how we interact. They each have a personality. Sometimes they aren’t available, because they’re busy doing other things.

I absolutely love working with robots.

My brain is really happy in that silent all-day back-and-forth conversation with my technical friends — headphones on, keyboard tapping.

It’s easy to find flow in a space like that. With my technical friends, I can relax and enjoy the work, the process, and the magical feeling of learning and teaching— without the complications of ego, the minefields of insecurities, and the petty power struggles that characterize so many human-to-human collaborations.

Of course, working with robots has its drawbacks.

They can be frustrating, just the same as human colleagues. Even in the most sophisticated communications teams, it’s so easy to misunderstand what’s being said, or get off track, or get stuck in a loop of debate and comparison.

And sometimes, if we just can’t figure out how to understand each other, there’s that same feeling of snatching the work back in a huff and saying: “Never mind, I’ll just do it myself!”

And even though it’s such a relief to communicate all day in a system with clear boundaries and calm disagreements, there is a little human something that I sometimes miss.

There really aren’t any emotional guardrails with human beings.

We all do our best, but at the end of the day, we’re…human. We mess up, and get tired, and take a tone or raise our voices, or lose our patience. When you’re working with humans, there’s always a chance that your traits will set off someone else’s triggers.

Human connections can take weird turns out of nowhere. One day you’re laughing together, the next you’re rolling your eyes at each other’s emails.

You can easily annoy another human being by focusing too much on details, or asking lots of questions, or insisting on another draft. Robots are refreshingly even-tempered, and impossible to annoy. Self-consciousness can totally evaporate when you’re working with a robot. You can make grammar errors and spell things wrong without any repercussions or humiliation. You can just focus on intent, show up as you are, and get somewhere pretty cool together.

But even with all that — there are still some things I miss about working with humans.

• I miss how humans crack jokes while they’re working. Little puns, movie quotes, stuff that makes you snicker a little while you’re working on something boring or difficult.
• I miss seeing people’s outfits, and hearing their unique laughs and turns of phrase.
• I miss the mirror neuron bliss of smiles reflecting at each other, bouncing bright buzzy energy back and forth and amplifying its impact.
• But most of all — I miss thinking with other humans.

Human thinking is a really great thing.

But it’s hard to make space for good, old-fashioned, biologically-powered thinking.

Most of us are just out here surviving, and paying taxes, and buying groceries, and rushing from one meeting to the next. Our brains are already processing more data then we can handle.

Get up, choose outfit, remember to meditate, remember meds, remember to shower, remember lunch, remember list, remember charger, figure out problem, compose message, digest sandwich, remember to breathe. We’re overloaded before the day is even half over.

I love working with robots, and I wouldn’t change it. But I’ve been craving some space that isn’t dominated by LLMs and prompt clarifications and accuracy checks.

And I don’t miss working in an office, but I do miss the feeling of thinking regularly with people in my field.

And so here I am, on Medium. This platform has clear rules about AI, and a long history of supporting writers and thinkers doing what they do best.

Tonight, I decided that I would start a writing and thinking process here on Medium. My intent is to make a deliberate space to exercise my brain muscles the good old-fashioned way: with human word, foibles, idiosyncrasies, and the benefit of other human feedback.

So hi! Here I am, a real live person using my real live brain cells to transmit real live thoughts, hoping to make friends and find some thinking buddies of the humanoid variety.

See you around, brain buddies!

- Nicole