My Biggest Newsletter Announcement Ever: Introducing The Augmented Intelligence Course
I have big news that I’m excited to share with you!
Starting next week, subscribers get access to a live course I am creating called Augmented Intelligence.
Below are the deets…
TLDR Overview
How To Access The Sessions And Prompts
Types Of Augmentation We’ll Explore
Why I Created The Course
Zoom Link
TLDR Overview
Overview
Access 10 interactive, 60-minute masterclasses focused on how to use AI to become smarter emotionally, socially, creatively, behaviorally, and cognitively.
After each session, you’ll not only walk away with knowledge and practice using AI to augment your intelligence; you'll also walk away with AI prompts you can customize and use forever.
You can see an example of the types of AI prompts you’ll get access to at Augmented Reading: Learn 10x Faster And Better With AI.
Why Learn The Topic From Me
This course is the synthesis of my spending thousands of hours:
Understanding and teaching the world’s most useful and universal mental models
Teaching the skill of learning how to learn
Understanding and using AI to argument my intelligence
To my knowledge, there is no other course like this in the world.
Price
I will charge thousands of dollars for future versions of this course, but as an experiment, I want to try providing it for free to newsletter subscribers to see if this model is economical. My hope is that enough people sign up such that I can keep it at the absurdly low price of $10/month or $100/year.
Who It’s For
You get the importance of the urgency of learning about AI.
You understand AI on a basic level.
You don’t just want to use AI to automate your workflow. Rather, you want to use AI to maximize who you are as a human being.
Dates
Cadence: Weekly
Start Date: Tuesday, July 30
Time: 11:00am-12:00pm EST
Session Format
Topic. In each session, we will explore one new type of augmented intelligence.
Prompt. I’ll share a proven AI prompt that I or someone I respect regularly uses to augment their intelligence.
Practice. You will use the prompt to augment a specific situation in your life.
Refinement. You’ll refine the prompt to customize it for yourself.
Planning. We’ll explore how we can fit the prompt into your lifestyle so using it becomes automatic.
Duration
I will do at least 10 of these sessions. Then, I’ll decide whether to stop or continue them.
How To Access The Sessions And Prompts
Paying subscribers get access to:
Live sessions
Full recordings
A link to the accompanying bots
Source code for the bots (so you can edit them and create your own)
Free subscribers get access to:
The first 30 minutes of each recording
A link to the accompanying bot
To access the program, you just need to be a subscriber. From there, you’ll automatically be notified about live classes and recordings.
Types Of Augmentation We’ll Explore
Why I Created The Course
Overview
AI is the fastest-evolving and most general technology that humanity has ever created.
We are in the calm before the storm, before it profoundly changes society.
Now is the time to proactively understand and use it.
So, the question is:
How do we best understand and prepare for AI in 2024?
In my opinion, the two highest-leverage ways to learn about AI for someone who values the personal growth benefits of AI are two-fold:
Step #1: Understand AI With Mental Models
As I write in This Is Exactly How To Train Yourself To Be Smarter About AI [TOP 100 AI MENTAL MODELS], the first and best way to understand AI is to build the best mental models of it in the following categories:
Capability
Impact across society
Threats
Opportunities
Biases People Have To It
While I have written extensively about using mental models to learn AI, I have not yet written or taught about step #2…
Step #2: Use AI To Augment Your Intelligence
To understand what I mean by augmented intelligence, I need to provide context.
There are two types of cognitive tools:
Competitive. Competitive tools replace human abilities. These tools make processes more efficient but often result in deskilling.
Complementary. Complementary tools augment human abilities. They help magnify our native abilities.
For example…
Calculators are competitive cognitive tools. When you use a calculator, you completely outsource the calculations. You don’t do any calculations in your head.
Maps are complementary cognitive tools. When you remember a subway map, you actually use the map in your head to calculate routes.
Both types of tools are important. And AI can be a complementary or a competitive cognitive tool. It just depends on how you use it.
I’m most excited about using AI as a complementary cognitive tool. If I could press a button and get a blockbuster article back in two seconds, I wouldn’t, because it would rob me of the main reason I write in the first place, which is to do something I love and to maximize my personal growth.
My favorite example of a complementary cognitive tool is the abacus. The video below shows how this simple tool can almost give us superhuman math powers. I love it because it serves as an inspiration for the augmented intelligence that might be possible with AI.
Source: BBC
With abacus training, normal students can do complicated math that would normally require a calculator, and they can literally do it in seconds.
For example, the video above starts with the teacher asking his students to calculate the following:
40,583,971,256 + 7,159,042 + 1,20,436,985 + 8,914,238,175,623,490 + 586,932,584,107 + 681,297,350
A young student gets the correct answer in seconds:
9 quadrillion, 348 trillion, 494 billion, 63 million, 70,000, and 450
WTF?!
As the video clip goes on, we see how the students do equally impressive feats without even using a physical abacus.
At the very end, the students are shown a whopping 15 numbers in 1.5 seconds, and one of the girls instantly calculates the sum:
Holy smokes!
What inspires me about this video is two-fold:
It points out that humans have more potential than we can even fathom when we have the right tools.
It inspires me to wonder how we can use AI as a complementary cognitive tool to improve all forms of our intelligence.
I’m not excited by the future depicted in WALL-E where technology does everything for us, and we just sit around being entertained:
To Sum It All Up
Now is the time to learn AI.
This course will be a fun, interactive way to do it. You won’t just leave with knowledge, you will leave with customizable prompts that will keep getting better as AI improves.
I would normally charge thousands of dollars for a course like this.
But, as a paying subscriber, you get it for $10/month.
This is the only course of its kind that I’m aware of.
Sound like a good deal?