AI as Cognitive Prosthetic
Human-AI RelationshipProvisional
Using AI to compensate for a known personal cognitive weakness or tendency, not as a general productivity tool but as a targeted corrective for a specific, self-identified limitation
Evidence
“When I come back from Peru, I got a new job. And one of the things that I've noticed is that they always ask you, "What is your weakness?" And my weakness is definitely, I'm almost overly detail-oriented. That is a blessing and a curse because it means you can really get over-involved in the minutia and lose sight of everything that's out here. I find that when I'm controlling AI well and I'm using it to streamline my work or to help me think through a problem or to do affinity mapping, it's great at affinity mapping, the time for me to use it is when I'm over-involved in one little thread because what it'll do is broaden me out and give me 10 different threads that I might not be looking at.”
“I think it helps me zoom out and if I need to zoom back in, helps me zoom in. It has to be accurately prompted to do it. But I really think that that is probably where it benefits me the most: it helps me to see patterns and to see things that I might not otherwise because I'm very close to my work.”
“And it's in my calendar because I integrated Claude with my calendar. So, that's really helped because like I said, I have ADHD and Claude really helps me, is helping me stay on task better because I have 50 squirrel moments a day. That's why I have literally like 40 Claude projects. I love the projects.”
“But what the one thing it has cured for me is the way my brain works is I have like six streams of consciousness at all times. Like not voices, but you know.”
“No, no. It's true. But what it's done is be able to allow me to get all my ideas out of my head into a project. And that getting it out and knowing it's safe closes the loop in my brain where I can say, "All right, that project, it might not be done, but it's handled. It's in a place you can close the lid on it and visit it when you need to." And it's uncluttered my brain in a way that I really, because I don't take any medication or anything like that. I work out a lot. That's like my fix for a lot of my neurological oddities. So, that gift of being able to get [my thoughts] out, put it in a suitcase, know it's safe, and visit with it whenever I want to work on that.”