Josh Allred's Blog

Once the printing press helped millions to gain access to information, domain knowledge became less valuable if it was something that could be looked up. As long as you knew how to read, a blacksmith could search how to optimize building swords. The Internet and Google have sunk this even further. “Just Google it.” wasn’t a saying when I was born.

We are seeing the same trend now with doing a task. After all, an ATM, a self checkout at the grocery store, and an automated driving car, much like the printing press, took someones job. And with Agentic AI, doing digital tasks are getting easier (and the tools are only going to get better).

So what’s valuable?

It isn’t the knowledge (although some will help) but really who has the guts to try to solve something, the person who can organize, and the person who can communicate. Those who initiate and lead. All the soft skills, that have been preached for 50 years, are even more valuable today. If you have been a generalist, this is a huge moment to get to work.

Debt compounds and compounds making it more difficult to ever pay off.

The problem with digital debt, companies are not  incentivized to help you declutter. The more clutter you have, the more you will pay in the long run.

For instance, think about switching from an Apple ecosystem to Google–fron password managers, hidden emails, apps, etc. Another example, is cleaning up Google photos. Google isn’t incentivized to create a tool to quickly scan which photos to keep and which to delete. Have you tried to unsubscribe from Disney lately? They make it hard to let go.

The point here is that there is a cost to change systems. The later we wait to pay for it, the more expensive it gets.

The default is to think about what we can add to it. We don’t think what we can take away to make it better.

Some examples:

The John Muir Tail doesn’t have Internet access most of the time. That’s a feature not a bug.

Not setting expectations based on reel you saw on social media, changes how you feel when you walk along the sunset at Big Sur.

Instagram makes it easy to be seduced you are missing out on something. And it’s right. You are missing out on being present to what the experience can offer right now, not what it could be.

Unsubscribing today can feel like you’re doing something wrong. Companies bury the button under a plethora of pages. Buttons are misdirecting, making it easy to click the back button. Warnings asking if you’re sure. Threats that you’ll do something (even if they don’t know what that something is themselves).

Recently, I went through and compiled a list of everything I subscribe to (AI was wonderful at helping me create it). And the list was longer than I had suspected. So, I started slashing. Taking note of which companies were treating humans as dignified beings with autonomy and which ones were screaming, “Don’t leave!”

It’s liberating. And I think it’s worth taking some time to see which services you actually use and which are just gimmicks.

There are good political reasons to do this too.

Companies must earn our trust and attention. And it’s worth thinking about why we have five different television apps, Amazon Prime when you have a store on every corner, unnecessary auto-completes in the age of AI, and so on. 

The amount of blame people place on each other when we are the ones hurting inside never ceases to amaze me.

Often, the thing we are most upset about is the thing we fear the most.

When we are lonely, we reject the people around us.

When we are scared, we take our anger out on those closest to us.

Philosopher Barbara Herman points out that the goal and purpose are two separate things. For instance, professional baseball might seem like a sport where the goal and purpose is to win. But that isn’t true. To be clear, the goal is win the game. But the purpose is to entertain. And as fans, we can watch our favorite teams’ strategies in a way that follows the metrics, to the point where the game is optimized (which, in most ways, it is now), but that isn’t entertaining to watch. It turns out that, in an age of analytics, we think we want everything optimized to create more convenience. But the reality is, this isn’t a world we want to occupy if it becomes so.

How people think LLMs are used:

And what happens when we take a break:

The reality is, there is still a learning curve to these tools. And if you’re not going to put the time and effort into it, it’s going to go haywire quickly.

However, the bar to learning has never been lower, and it has dropped significantly in just two years. Now is the time to get fluent with these tools.

If coding is solved, which anyone who has played with an LLM knows it has, then what’s next?

It seems to me, at least in this moment, what matters now is imagination, great taste, great products that solve interesting problems…not autocomplete tasks. Not bullshit jobs. Not middle managers or TPS reports.

I have talked to many nonprofit leaders over the last year who have it all wrong and are thinking about how they’re going to use AI.

The mindset at the top is: how do I replace my poor performers by implementing AI as quickly as possible?

The problem is the technology, which, while good, isn’t quite good at implementing what you have going just yet. Obviously, there are exceptions, like in the software tech industry.

The better mindset is, how do I use these tools to 10x my top performers? How do I give them the right tools and the time to learn so they can do their job better than they ever could imagine? And when they learn how to do this, the profits follow. Not by cutting costs and employees. But by investing in your best people to do their best work.

If you give a milkshake in a big cup to an eight-year-old that’s half full, someone with a fixed mindset would say, “It’s only halfway full.”

Give them the same amount of milkshake in a smaller cup, and all of a sudden, you have sparked joy.

It’s easy to chalk everything up to growth or to fixed mindsets and to assume everyone needs to adopt a growth mindset. But life is hard. And what I keep getting pulled into is the choice architecture used to deliver the information to change the interaction we are having.