On Collaboration - With AI and With People
I’ve found that the most effective way to collaborate - with AI and with people - is to take a thought as far as I can myself before involving anyone else. I have found that a floating: “What are your thoughts on X?” is wholly ineffective. It is too open-ended and asks too much of the other party.
Instead, if I have invested in developing my own tentative solution to a problem - or at least in understanding the problem to the point where I can frame it clearly - I give a sparring partner much more to hold on to.
I think this strikes at the heart collaboration. I am no longer asking them to do my thinking for me but to help me expand on and refine what I have already done. The difference is remarkable.
My guess is that many critiques directed at the ineffectiveness of AI come from those who take a different approach - one of giving primacy to collaboration. They are the people who think and hope that great ideas come from workshops rather than long hours of individual hard thought.
But this cannot work - neither with AI nor with people. Collaboration adds value primarily by refining and augmenting an existing thought. The greater and more developed the initial thought, the greater the basis for collaboration. You cannot improve upon a zero.
If you hope to get AI or other people to do your thinking for you, then you are bound to get disappointed. When the so-called collaboration offers nothing of value, the issue will not be with AI or with other people but with your strategy. Nothing will ever replace individual, hard thought if you want to be productive. It is the atomic unit of all creation, and it must precede collaboration.