when you do it yourself

you'll need some tools

I love the Canadian Tire Flyer. It come out weekly. There was a rule growing up. Well, there were many. There were rules everywhere - ESPECIALY around shopping.

My Nanny who lived to be 94 (not the one who is still with us) used to go to all of the Boxing Day Sales back when Boxing Day Sales really mattered. She’d then proceed to buy all of the Christmas and birthday presents for the family for the entire next year.

I can’t help it. I’m Scottish, she’d protest, we never pay full price

So, in addition to the family’s unofficial slogan “Dallings Win”

¹

our other motto is: “Never pay full retail price.”

I love the Canadian Tire flyer because it has affordable, accessible tools whose sale prices range from 50 to 80 percent off.

Over time, I’ve accumulated a large number of tools. Sometimes I buy tools for a project. Other times, create a project as an excuse to use the tools.

Kevin Kelly - founding editor of Wired - loves tools. He sees these new artificial intelligence platforms as tools. In a recent interview with Tim Ferris, he’s been bullish about the problems that AI tools like Chat GPT will solve. Sure, he said, these AI tools will create a lot of problems. And we as humans will just keep getting better at solving problems with them.

When we humans learned how to control and transport fire, we developed a tool. We solved a problem. Doing so has led to countless deaths. War as we know it today would not have been possible if we had not taken the step to control fire. Who knows how many would have lived if we were not able to control fire. How many endangered species would still be here today if only we hadn’t been so foolish.

But here?

We’re Remarkable Fools. We use tools foolishly.

When I hear someone like Elon Musk signing something calling for a pause in AI development, I get suspicious. I’m not suspicious about the AI tools. These AI tools are not new. They’ve been around for a decade. What’s different?

Now, dumb slugs like you and I? Since the arrival of Chat GPT and Midjourney things have changed. Now we have consumer level AI tools. Now the AI tools are available to everyone. We are at a time much like when the internet went from chat rooms and graphical interfaces - who other than ‘Nis remembers that - to Netscape and the browser revolution.

These tools are really the next big thing. I’m guessing that some of you signed up for Chat GPT accounts and were disappointed. The results seemed banal, trite and milquetoast. That was my experience at first too. Have a look here at some of the earliest of websites. We’ve come a long way baby.

Tools like Chat GPT are incredible - especially if you pay for the plus version and play with the plugins. I don’t use Chat GPT for any of my writing here. If I did, I’d have better headlines. I do use it for a lot of other stuff - especially when it comes to career counseling (that’s a bit of a thing that I do)

One client wanted to find work at a ‘think tank’ but complained that he didn’t have a PhD. Worse still, his POV was centrist. In the humanities these days, they don’t have much room for POV’s that don’t lean hard left.

That’s where “The Ad lib Ad hoc Punk Rock Post Doc” was born. I told him to create his own PhD. Publish his own articles. Form his own committee. Find his own supervisor. One question remained: How.

With him in the room, I wrote the following prompt:

Assume that you are a professor in the humanities. You are giving advice to a former student who wants a phd: What are the stages of writing a phd? I know there is course work. I know there are ethical reviews. I know there is a chapter called the lit review. how do you go about writing and defending a phd in the humanities? describe the steps involved. Go into as much detail as possible.

Within seconds, it provided an outline you can find here. The document is still very basic. But that’s where the fun of being a human coms in. Each of the points it provides can be easily expanded.

If I were doing a PhD on the place of humour within a Gestalt Therapy framework, I’d likely as it this:

Assume that you are a professor in the humanities. You are helping a student create a course of study to do a PhD. The topic: The role of humour within a Gestalt Therapy Framework. Create the Coursework and Foundations for this program. Come up with course titles and short outlines for each relevant to Gestalt therapy, gestalt psychology, phenomenology, Fritz Perls, critical theory, theories of humour as well as the latest trends in therapy and knowledge from neuroscience. Also add courses in research methods focusing on qualitative methods and narrative inquiry. These courses are in preparation for the students research

The results were interesting. Here’s a link to them.

The next step would be to take each of the courses described in three sentences and expand those. From there, Chat GPT could suggest reading lists, current gaps in knowledge base / literature etc. On top of this there are plugins that connect to tens of thousands of journals and support academic research.

Oh the plugins! They don’t merely generate the content, they can analyze the data.

But it all begins with your curiosity.

The tools are all there to make magic happen. They are both more affordable and vastly more powerful than any half price Master Craft shop vac.

So much is possible.

What are you waiting for?

1. This was created by my wife in collaboration with my brother in law