Humans Being & Doing

In the last couple of months, Jill Bear and I have undertaken a major backyard remodel, which is now about 70% complete - on Phase I. Probably five of the eight weekends, we worked on the yard all day Saturday, and a good chunk of the day on Sunday, and some early morning and evening hours too. We’ve changed our chicken coop location and built a new enclosure, relocated garden beds, moved at least a ton of rock - feels like 10x that - planted trees and shrubs, oh, and cleaned out the shed and sold or gave away a ton of stuff! - we’ve been DOING! - feels like our early marriage years - except longer recovery periods!

And - we got away for just over a week over Memorial Day to celebrate our 23rd anniversary in the mountains - staying in Avon but snuck away to hikes, hot springs, and bike trails all around the region - and we found Jill a second-hand E-bike on Facebook Marketplace in Edwards. Working a bit, but also sleeping in, and brunching, and biking, and hiking, and just BEING - together.

So, we’ve been a pair of humans being and doing - together - and it’s been fun, but I’ll tell you what - I’d go for a couple of those Tesla robots and just point them at the patio stones that need to be relocated. Or better yet, just show them an AI image of what I described as my perfect backyard and let them go to work! We’d have a lot more time for being if we didn’t have to do so much doing, but I wonder - what would humans be up to if the doing was all done by robots and computer-brains?

I’ve joked before that if the machines start to do everything, I’ll just go up and move to Alaska and homestead up there as they do on the YouTube videos.

• Build a log cabin with a sod roof.
• Hunt a moose in the fall and preserve it in my root cellar.
• Catch fish when the salmon are in season and smoke them in my smokehouse.
• Of course, pick all sorts of wild berries and grow a huge garden and make tons of preserved fruits and vegetables.

I say all these things because it sounds really meaningful, I suppose, but it also sounds really difficult, and my family might freeze to death or starve. I’d really rather have a couple of Tesla robots do the work for me so that I could - do what exactly?

I suppose that my musings on the topic have been driven in part by my recent conversations with an old friend, Jonathan Irvin - and a bit of show & tell by him on the capabilities of a pretty incredible software he’s been developing - RocketSoft.ai

I should start this next segment with a disclosure. I would say that Loco Think Tank has been slow to adopt any meaningful usage of AI tools in our headquarters office. I use Grok almost like a super Google, or to help understand the value of motorcycles on Facebook Marketplace, and my team has used ChatGPT for a bit of content on events, marketing materials, campaigns, and employment contracts. We’re probably about two out of ten.

But I have grown increasingly concerned about the impact that AI utilization will have on competitiveness for smaller businesses. If they could have a more automated administrative function, more effective marketing and customer outreach, and the guys and gals in the field working and traveling more efficiently, profits could remain strong and small businesses healthy - to use a home services business model as an example.

Along comes Jonathan, and he’s on a mission to rescue small businesses - especially and starting with those in Northern Colorado - from being left uncompetitive by the AI revolution happening in big businesses across the nation and the world. And let me tell you - when we reconnected, I was skeptical, even though I knew he was a tech-forward guy, and had a great business and a successful exit a couple years back.

And - I’ve swung solidly from skeptical to enthusiastically curious. Need a new website page - or a whole new website? - tell it what you need. Need a workflow designed and with automated email scripting at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months for new CRM contacts - customized by event source? - tell it what you need. Need a member portal where their Hallos profiles, BizEquity valuation reports, chapter directory, resources, and more can be securely stored and accessed by members? - tell it what you need.

It’s not magic - it still takes thought work and humans to do stuff and proofread - but golly is it well-structured and capable - and so fast at doing digital stuff! And - Jonathan has his set up with a software called Wispr Flow - an AI-powered speech transcription software - that works amazingly - and so you literally just tell Rocketsoft what you need. You can have rambling, run-on sentences, or maybe you want a thinking partner about optional processes or social media campaigns. And you can feed it everything about your business processes and your brand voice, and feed it every long-ass blog post you’ve written over the last 10+ years. And it can be trained to write a 5,000-word blog post in 12 seconds on any topic that sounds just like me!

And yet - the AI will never BE me.

Will the AI ever BE anything?

Can it BE someone? - be some - thing?

Or does it simply DO stuff - stuff that it’s been programmed to do - or has learned to do?

Pope Leo got into the AI conversation the other day, when he released his Encyclical Letter - Magnifica Humanitas - which I took the time to read through myself after seeing both strong praises and criticisms online. It was actually pretty tremendous to read through - and though I’m no theology scholar, the gist of it to me was that humans are created and particularly graced by God, and that whatever this artificial intelligence is that we’ve created - we are not God, and it is not particularly graced - and so we have to be careful. Careful to preserve the priority of humanity, to seek and develop human relationships, to seek justice and peace, and ultimately - to love one another, as He has loved us. Whether you come from a faith perspective or not, this is a worthy charge, it seems to me.

So - I’ll keep exploring what AI can DO for me, keep investigating how our members are using these tools to help their business grow and be more efficient, and also be mindful to keep the humans being - together - central to our values in business and community.

Thanks for reading - and if you were wondering - this blog is all me, baby, no AI support in this one - except I did use Wispr Flow talk to text for a chunk of it…it’s just so easy!