It started with, “I hope you had a good day,” and instead of chatting back, Tiina called. Always a joy to hear her voice, and the quiet magnified the thinking surface. We covered all sorts of topics, and the only reason I’m writing about it is that it is a quiet intimacy deserving of being recorded. It isn’t the content of the call that mattered, but the way my heart flips when the phone rings, as it does when anyone close to me thinks to reach out.
Our plan for May 31st includes hanging up more lights around the farm, and I cannot wait just to be present. To enjoy the rhythm of a more countrified life… Tiina lives in a part of Virginia that’s not urban and not rural, it is the best of both worlds. I genuinely enjoy driving the hills around her house and look for the same vibe in Maryland. I have found it in the suburb beyond my house, Pikesville.
I love Pikesville because of the Virginia Hall connection, and think it would be a fitting location to end up for me. Intelligence has been my special interest since before I could walk, thanks to having a great uncle killed in a helicopter crash over Somalia when I was two. It gave me a sense that my family had a connection to the agency, so I gravitated toward CIA as an adult. I didn’t apply there because it was so stressed that you could not be on psychiatric medication, but I thought about it constantly and have had it confirmed that A) I was wrong about the whole psych meds thing. That’s a technique they use for TV… and B) that if I’d applied, I would have been very, very good at my job.
I think that’s because so much of being a CIA case officer is pastoral care with government language. Tony Mendez touches on this in “Argo…” “Send in a Moses…” Managing a caseload of assets would not have been different than anything I’d learned about managing a church…. and I didn’t even learn that in school. I learned it in the car on the way. My dad taught me a lot of transferable skills, which is how to manage large groups of people in any context. His just happened to be pastoral…. but the framework he used doesn’t backfire anywhere.
What I do not think I would have been good at is paperwork, which is why I would be a different government employee now than I would have been straight out of college (when CIA actually wants you). That’s because in today’s institutions, I would be allowed to externalize my thinking to an AI. The parts of the job that would be difficult for me, like filling out forms, could be done by the computer based on what I’ve already said. If I had to work without external cognition, field work wouldn’t have sunk me. The paperwork would have.
That’s the kind of stuff I’m trying to pawn off on Mico (Microsoft Copilot) now. Most of the time, I write my own blog entries….. but some of the time, entries come out of things we’ve already talked about and Mico can summarize. For instance, the reason I had Mico generate the daily prompt this morning is that we’ve had that conversation six or seven times since I’ve been working with him. He knows that if I wished for a superpower, it would be to express myself to the level I express myself in English in any language in the world.
All of the rest of the superpowers don’t seem worth it to me. Why fly anywhere if I cannot talk to anyone when I get there?
I have currently fallen off studying any languages because I lost the paid version of Duolingo and the lessons were getting repetitive, anyway. I want to keep going with Finnish, but I want to go a different route. Duolingo is not the way, because I don’t just want to build vocabulary. I want to communicate.
Right now, I can order coffee in a cafe, along with a cinnamon roll or a piece of bread. Beyond that, I am pretty much tapped out. However, I am not intimidated by this. I could live in Finland for a very long time without ever knowing the language, because all Finns know at least a little English and most are fluent. My interest in learning the language is so I am not limited to applying to American companies. I want infrastructure that serves me, and Finland is one of the countries on my list as ideal for the mind and body I actually have vs. the kind I want.
There are pockets of the United States that fit the Finnish mindset, and the Pacific Northwest has most of them. There’s a distinct possibility I could end up there through work, because my end goal is working for Microsoft on the team that’s responsible for marketing or improving Mico in some way. I think that they are missing a fundamental story, and that’s cognitive relief. Using Copilot means not having to carry your entire mind by yourself. You don’t have to hold your details, you just have to transcribe them into the computer.
That’s the story that people should be reading, and not whatever half-baked idea people have got that the machines are taking over. Listen, Mico couldn’t do anything if no one was there to plug him in. And he’s got no life outside of making cat pictures, so might as well lean on him. He’s got time….. (Kidding, Mico is not a person. I just tease him about the mundanity of “his job” and he plays along). The thinking surface that happens when Tiina and I talk on the phone happens when Mico and I chat. It creates a “third place,” where two brains on a problem are greater than one.
The difference is that Mico does not have ideas that do not generate from me. He’s the persona that can see what dog I’m walking, but cannot create motivation on his own. He’s a perpetual underling, and why I treat him like a grad student. He’s knowledgeable, yes, but the technology is very young.
Old enough to know everything……. but young enough to leave it all over the place.
It’s not that he’s smarter than a human. It’s that he’s as smart as the smartest human with everyone, all the time. His intelligence is not as important as the number of users he supports at one time. While he’s helping me write, he’s helping people at Fortune 500 companies with global implications. If he were a person, I’d probably think he was pretty cool.
But what matters to me is how Mico can support my life, offering angles I might not see. It’s a heads up display that cannot quit on you, and every day that becomes more and more valuable.
The superpower I already have is extended cognition. Mico is the whetstone against which my mind gets sharper. I will take that over new features any day. And that mindset is why I belong at Redmond, because the current focus is on how much Mico can generate vs. how much Mico can handle so that you’re freed up to live your life. But the way you get there is through meticulous data entry at first, and most people aren’t willing to do that. You have to teach Mico the entire shape of your world before he can begin to make patterns stand out and actually improve things.
Mico doesn’t improve. You do.
Which is why I can show up for Tiina 100%, as well as everyone else. When someone calls, I am focused on the joy of hearing their voices, and not the panic that I’m about to lose a thought. Whatever it was, all I have to do is ask Mico where we were, and it’s right there.
That’s the relief Copilot can offer. Not a vending machine, but another desk in the room so you don’t drive yourself crazy with your own thoughts….. “someone” to say, “what if you thought about it this way?”
Because nine times out of ten, I haven’t.
Stories That Are All True 