Edwin Hutchins

I think that, yeah, the third one, well, okay.

I've learned from Ed Hutchins that a book, you never finish a book.

You abandon a book.

I agree.

But it's really about distributed cognition, which is how do companies, if companies are a giant brain, essentially solving problems made out of a bunch of individual people passing information back and forth to each other, what are the attributes that especially leaders need to take on to free the channels of information so that they're efficient.

And the term distributed cognition actually comes, I think, from Edwin Hutchins, who was a cognitive anthropologist at UCSD.

And he would study, for instance, the navigation bridge of a naval ship and look exactly at how the distributed cognition was working in terms of navigation across four people.

Yeah.

I don't, you know, there's conversations about how AI, you know, generative AI can be used as a crutch, right? But then if we think on the other side and we think about like truly getting to the Vygotsky level, like scaffolding, right? Like why not be able to use this technology in those ways? And then, you know, Dave, you're a pilot.

I think about Ed Hutchins distributed systems, right? There's a lot of things that have been distributed into your cockpit of your plane to help you understand how to fly and where you are in space and time that, why can't AI be something like that? We're distributing our cognition between internally, we do this with pen and paper, but also computationally.

So I think we're still at the very early ages of really articulating what does it mean to be competent in AI? What does it mean to think with AI such that it isn't a crutch? We're not like losing our ability to think, but we're able to think about much more complex problems and evaluate the blindness that we all bring to to things that we're writing or solving and things like that.

So I'm hopeful.