And I think we should also work on the format of the Thoughts as a whole. I don't mean the technical side so much, although that plays a part too, how we then implement it – I mean the content more. I very often have Thoughts, ideas that aren't finished yet as a text, as an essay, but that I believe still have value, above all precisely because this is how we think – I'm happy to repeat myself here.
By the way, I've noticed that even very sophisticated, well-educated and well-read people still have a relatively limited range of topics they really know in depth. Take Nate Hagens, for example: I'd describe Nate as an above-average educated person who has created and published an incredible amount of material and content with his platform The Great Simplification. Among other things he regularly posts different formats, like his short texts, his short videos – he regularly posts Frankly, and every Frankly holds a new thought, holds added value. And yet much of what he says is a repetition of what he has already said. Every repetition does contain something new, but a lot is also recycled, if you like. In other words, we have iterations.
And I think that's how coding works too. When I watch how Claude works, it's repetitions again and again, loops again and again. Again and again Claude goes into the code, changes something, documents it, checks – these checks are really important: with every new run, before every new deploy, Claude currently runs about 14,000 (today over 15,000) checks.
And when I analyze how I think, I also go off on tangents, as the saying goes – from one thing to the next and the next. And I've often been criticized for that by the people around me. Many people who know me, who are close to me, have often said: “Hey, you're drifting off, get to the point, I can't follow you anymore, this is too much now or this isn't relevant at all – or you're just babbling.” Some of those remarks really hurt, because they came, naturally, from people I know well. But I think it's very important that we recognize how we think, and don't constantly force ourselves to communicate to the point, structured, coherent – but that we simply let our train of thoughts run for once and see where the journey, where our train of thoughts takes us, where our thoughts take us.
Just now, for example, I spontaneously had this thought: my wife wrote to me that she's at an internal company training that runs until about 3 p.m. After that I'm supposed to – and I'll gladly – drive her to rehab, and for that I need a Cityflitzer car-share. And when she reminded me to book this Cityflitzer as early as possible so she gets to rehab on time at 4 p.m., I spontaneously had the idea of asking Claude or Gemini what would be best logistically, how to combine the errands, because I also want to take empty bottles back to Kaufland and need a Cityflitzer for that as well.
And then I thought: maybe it would be interesting to ask the AI which option is the most efficient – whether I book the Cityflitzer a bit earlier and first load only the bottles, then drive my wife to rehab and, while she's there, drive the Cityflitzer from the rehab center over to Kaufland to return the bottles, then park the Cityflitzer, end the trip, wait an hour and a half and book a new Cityflitzer. There are surely a thousand variations here – but then of course I very quickly realized that this would be total overkill and complete nonsense to bother the AI with, because first, I can of course figure something like that out myself, and second, not everything should be optimized, and I'd be overdoing it.
But this example shows that we tend – that we're still shaped intrinsically, evolutionarily, probably by our evolutionary history – to handle our resources as efficiently as possible, and that of course means our energy. And our brain uses the biggest share of our energy, which is why my impulse was to ask the AI how best to plan this mini Cityflitzer tour. Of course it's funny, but I find it interesting, and I think other people have similar thoughts and probably aren't aware that exactly these thoughts are super valuable, because they show how humans tick, not how AI works. How AI works – we see that now, we can watch it every day. The question is: what influence does AI have on human behavior? And there's still very little information about that. That's why it's all the more important that we accompany people and give them the impulse to say: “Hey, I'm starting to put my thoughts on the web too, so other people can read them and we can co-create, create something new together.”
I've noticed that many English words of course have several meanings – that's well known. But take the noun humanity, which is an important part of our slogan, our guiding motif, which reads “Humanity at her best”: in German we find that humanity means Menschlichkeit (humaneness) on the one hand and Menschheit (humankind) on the other. I find that very interesting.
A song by Udo Lindenberg spontaneously comes to mind – with Sido, I think, together with a German rapper – and there's this line saying that humankind somehow keeps getting bigger, but humaneness is missing. And it shines a light on exactly this wordplay, this aspect of the two different weightings and meanings of the noun humanity, its German equivalents Menschlichkeit and Menschheit.
And I think that's interesting too: on the one hand we need more humaneness, and we need more togetherness again – Nate Hagens calls it the Superorganism. And at the same time he points out that, shaped by evolution, we're of course still in this tribal thinking, so that we mainly act in smaller groups and see ourselves as: our group and the others – yes, “us and them”. And U2 have this song with the line “There is no them, there’s only us”, and U2 work through the same idea again in a newer song. The idea behind it is that we're just one species and there are no human races, there's only this one species. In English we say race and maybe mean an ethnicity, but in German – because of our history – we're very careful with the word “Rasse”, and we say: biologically there are no human races the way there are dog breeds; in German there's only the species Homo sapiens.
And to come back to the double meaning of the noun humanity: we see something similar with the English noun agency. I think many Germans know agency from, say, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and translate it into German as Agentur. So an Agentur is an office, an organization, a company – for example a web agency or an advertising agency, or even the Agentur für Arbeit, the Federal Employment Agency. And in German we nearly always mean an organization, a company, an institution or a public authority.
But in English agency has a second important meaning, namely the ability to think, the capacity to think and to act (Does a system have agency?). And I think many Germans don't see that – this second meaning, which matters when we talk about agents. We all know the 007 agents, special agents, FBI agents, CIA agents. But now, in the context of AI, an agent means: it's a piece of software, and this model, this system has agency. And Yuval Noah Harari says that agency in this context means that this software, this AI system makes decisions on its own and can analyze and weigh different options – which of course is something new.
So this is another train of thoughts, and maybe it isn't that easy to place, but these are simply my thoughts that I'm sharing here, and maybe it's simply the diary again, the journaling. Because officially it's called “the project of 1,000 Thoughts”, but in reality what we've done so far is 450, 451 texts, and each of them holds plenty of thoughts – every one of my texts holds 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 thoughts. So strictly speaking I've already reached my goal, because I've already expressed and shared more than 1,000 thoughts in these 450 or 451 entries. And I hope that Google and co. index these Thoughts well as soon as possible, so that other people – biological beings – read them too and maybe get excited, maybe not, but maybe respond and in turn share their thoughts with me, so that we can have a dialogue and ideally not just a dialogue, but a discussion, an exchange, a debate.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
