Cross the bridge
one step at a time.

Before moving to the next chapter, take a few minutes to record your starting point. Write one paragraph describing how you currently feel about artificial intelligence.

Complete this sentence: I am too ______ for AI. Write down the first word that honestly comes to mind, not the one that sounds best. Then ask where that belief came from.

Take a piece of paper or open a blank document and write your job title at the top. Then forget the title. List ten tasks you actually perform during a normal week.

Before moving on, try explaining artificial intelligence in your own words without using any of the definitions from this chapter. Imagine that a friend who has never heard the term asks you, “What exactly is AI?” Give yourself no more than two or three sentences to answer.

Think through an ordinary day in your life, from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed, and identify places where artificial intelligence may already be involved. Consider the applications on your phone, the way you travel, your email, banking, shopping, entertainment, social media and anything you use at work or school.

Choose a subject you know particularly well. It might be your hometown, your profession, a hobby you have practiced for years, a historical subject you have studied or something connected to your culture or community.

If you already use an AI tool, take a moment to identify what kinds of information it can work with beyond ordinary text. Can you upload a photograph or document, speak to it, ask it to generate an image or give it another type of information?

Take the first real conversation slowly. Start with what you actually want, add the context that matters, and treat the first answer as the beginning.

Return to a question or instruction you have previously given an AI system, preferably one where the answer felt too general or did not quite meet your expectations. Look at the original prompt and consider whether the outcome, audience, context and important constraints were clear.

Choose something you genuinely want to improve, but instead of trying to create the perfect first prompt, deliberately treat the task as a conversation. Give the AI enough information to begin and examine the first response carefully.

Ask an AI system a factual question about a subject that has enough reliable information available for you to investigate the answer. Choose something more substantial than a simple fact but not so complicated that verification would require hours of research.

Choose an AI system and ask it to describe several people in different professions without specifying their gender, age, nationality or background. You might ask for short profiles of a successful technology entrepreneur, an elementary-school teacher, a nurse, a construction worker, a chief executive and a domestic worker.

Take an imaginary situation in which you want AI to help respond to a complaint from a customer. Imagine that the complaint contains the customer's name, address, telephone number, account number, details of the problem and what they want the company to do.

The next time you encounter a surprising photograph, video or claim online, resist the urge to immediately decide whether it is real or fake. Instead, examine where it originated.

Think of three decisions you might reasonably ask AI to help with. Make one relatively inconsequential, such as choosing between two ideas for dinner; make another moderately important, such as deciding which course to take or how to organize a project; and make the third something that could have significant consequences for your finances, health, career or family.

On a piece of paper or in a note on your phone, write down three tasks that created friction for you this week. They might involve understanding, organising, writing or learning.

Choose one ordinary task: a letter to understand, a short plan to make or a personal story to organise. State what you want, what information you can safely share and what you will check yourself.

Choose something you are trying to learn, however small. Ask an AI tool, if one is available, to explain it without solving your actual assignment or making a decision for you.

Choose one ordinary task from your work or from a role you know well. Break it into three parts: the information needed, the draft or analysis that might be assisted, and the decision or action a person must own.

Choose one repeated business question or process, whether from your own business or one you know. Write down the facts that are certain, the details that vary and the point where a person must decide.

Choose a small creative task: a short invitation, the opening of a story or a poster idea. Write down one true detail that gives it meaning and one boundary you will not cross.

Choose a process you know: booking an appointment, preparing a class activity, handling a customer question or organising a family event. On paper, write what starts it, each main step, the person who owns a decision and what counts as finished.

Think of one repetitive action you might want to automate. Write down the exact event that would start it, what information the system would need, what it would produce and who would see the result.

Choose a narrow job you would give an assistant for one week. Write down its goal, the exact sources it could read, what it would produce and what it must not do.

Choose one task you expect to repeat in the next two weeks. On paper or in a phone note, write five lines: the task; the information it needs; one safe step AI might help with; the detail you will check against the original source; and the action that still belongs to you.

Choose a problem you know through experience, perhaps at work, in your family or in a community you belong to. Describe who has the problem, what they currently do and what part is hardest.