AI features can be really useful in automating or helping with tasks, if you know how they work and what to watch out for.
However, in the professional space of those in or close to the AI industry, some thinking is crystallising around what fundamental improvements would and could look like – currently the development lens has been rather narrow, growing as it has from Silicon Valley’s perceptions of needs and benefits.
A study (Forbes link) has just found that ‘on average, users of AI at work had a time savings of [just] 3%’.
Here are a few forward thinking writers on the topic of AI possibilities and how AI could work much more effectively.
The links are sorted by article length, a short one to start followed by a longer article then a couple of 1hr videos. So you can if you like dip in, then continue if you find the topic interesting! Their words are much better than mine so here are the links with an intro snippet for each.
Anil Dash: https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/01/what-would-good-ai-look-like/
“Interestingly enough, while there are tons of valid critiques of today’s AI offerings, we don’t often see an affirmative example of what we would want to see. So, I’d like to share an example that’s been banging around in my head for a while of what a good AI platform might look like. Some of this is just a thought exercise, trying to imagine an alternate future. But this is also an intentional, practical strategy and an attempt at a more effective form of critique — because if we are going to have better AI in the future, we are going to have get lots of people to understand that such a thing is possible.”
Hazel Weakly: https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards/
“…it doesn’t take that much extra effort to build the tooling in a way that facilitates how humans work together; the tooling could be built to improve our capabilities by making everybody more effective, rather than by deskilling critical reasoning loops for practitioners. Here’s how that might look.”
Ruha Benjamin:
The Tanner lectures on human values
Imagining beyond the artificial intelligentsia
A more wide ranging philosophical, cultural and political couple of talks, starting with laying out some problems with the approach so far and ending with visions and examples of some better approaches.
Lecture 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZseJigkUhuE
Lecture 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYIi_OjcotM