October 10, 2026
Follow-up question re Everything is Mars to AI
Fellow list member Caleb Stauffer replied to Everything is Mars to AI with a great follow-up question that kicked off an interesting back-and-forth. Here’s our thread (shared with permission):
Caleb:
Aren’t articles detailing experience and knowledge (wisdom) part of what AI consumes? So if you wrote an article that accurately represented your experience, and AI sourced your article, then it’d be able to say “because you’re having this business issue, here’s what to do:” and it’d be as authoritative and helpful as you saying it, and cost the customer much, much less.
Jonathan:
This makes sense in theory, but none of my articles would have the full context of the person’s business issue. The person can give the full context of their business issue to the AI, but that’s different than me having the context and writing an article about it. It’s the AI extrapolating what I might do in their situation. It’s not what I would actually do.
Oh! One additional point:
I can’t even write an article that accurately represents my experience, so there’s nothing for the AI to consume in the first place.
My instructive articles might share what I did in a certain client situation based on experience, but the experience itself is not shared, nor could it be with words.
It’s like trying to tell someone who’s about to be a new parent what it’s like. You can’t. Words fail. You can tell them things to do in certain situations, but there are always tons and tons of exceptions based on the specific context.
Having the actual experience gives you the ability to improvise and apply your experience in different contexts.
Caleb:
That mostly makes sense. I think I’m having a really hard time seeing AI’s limits: it’s only going to get better. Especially if you’re a conspiracy theorist and consider that eventually AI will have access to home camera systems, and it learns what millions of parents do on a day-to-day basis. 🤷♂️
For now, I see the distinction, at least partially. In five years, 10 years...? I don’t know: seems like everything digital will be run by AI. And then when robots are outfitted with AI, humans will have no work to do.
Jonathan:
We’ll see. In the meantime, AI’s capabilities in many areas are seriously overblown, in my experience (see what I did there?) 😎👍
Btw - I’d love to share our convo as an email. Would that be okay?
Caleb:
Very funny. 🤣
Yessir. Keep on rockin’: really great advice and content. 🤘
Here’s the thing...
Maybe it seems like I’m over-indexing on the difference between having an experience vs having read everything ever written about an experience, but my gut instinct is that this is one of the areas where humans have a defensible position against AI disruption.
It’s very hard, if not impossible, to connect with someone (or something) that has no shared experiences. And it’s pretty hard to trust someone (or something) that you can’t connect with.
This concept I’m trying to get at is illustrated perfectly in this scene from Good Will Hunting, and I really think it matters.
You’ll just have to ignore the horrible fake Boston accent ;-)
Yours,
—J