Embracing your fungal destiny

If you what you do requires you to think, then generative AI cannot do what you do – not now, not ever. Does that mean that some future form of AI won’t be able to think? Of course but let’s cross that bridge if and when we come to it. So you’re safe. Or are you? Where it gets tricky is in how much non-thinking work is mixed in with our thinking work. And how much of our thinking work is a little stale. The gen AI opportunity for knowledge workers making digital products is multi-fold: use it probe for digital manual labor in your work, like an oyster mushroom performing mycoremediation on soil full of toxins integrate it into your products and services to alleviate digital manual labor for users use it to help you think more clearly I think the question to this is “yes but how”? There are many answers but the one my mind stumbles on first is examples. What better use of gen AI in helping you think more clearly than helping you chase down examples. For example, how exactly have oyster mushrooms been used in the way references above? After the massive 2017 California forest fires, the Fire Remediation Action Coalition laid 40 miles of oyster mushroom tubes over the landscape to break down toxins. This is a concrete example but it doubles as a good metaphor; we might need to let gen AI cleanse our minds of the industrial-age mindset, like a fungal network rendering toxic soil fertile.