Personally Augmenting Your Intelligence

For the next 11 months, I'll be working with university students to show them how they can blend third level course work with transformative processes to reduce their cognitive workloads. I've been advised about clever workflows during the past four years by Fortune Ndlovu and I'm currently receiving laser-like instructional design treatment on transforming my instructional material from Frances O. . Fortune has helped me augment my thinking by suggesting ways to cut through mental fog. Frances has a gift for templating the visual environment that I show learners. Both of these clever people have enhanced the quality of my work.

Single-Pass Processing

As a university student and instructor pilot, I learned that I can cut through the noise of the moment by capturing the important items as I hear them, see them, or feel them. Forty years ago, I had to remember what was happening because I was flying at four miles a minute down a cut in a mountain or carefully guiding a four engine jet behind an airborne tanker. Back then, I was totally embedded in the user experience. After training flights and operational missions, I debriefed what I committed to memory, rarely writing anything down because I needed to focus on critical items out front. I didn't fly with cameras back then and if we had an unfortunate incident--we would open the black box.

The technology, literally at my fingertips and in my hands, augmented what I directed the aircraft to do. No autopilot flew those low level routes in a T-38. And when teaching the final points of hitting a refueling boom, I walked the throttles to help us close behind and underneath the tanker aircraft.

Today, I have a different first person experience. I can often record what is happening--even while watching it with myself on the screen. I often wear a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses to capture high quality photos, high definition videos, and stereo audio clips just by watching something happen in front of me. The Metaview app stores the clips on the arms of the glasses before I tap a button and cause all the recordings to drop onto my handset.

These smart glasses would have captured priceless footage decades ago, had I been able to wear them on T-38 low level missions or while aerial refueling with my C-141. The glasses automatically capture perfect first person views.

I've set up several automated processes with the glasses today so all the images, video, and spoken commentary can be quickly sent to Magisto AI where they are rendered as short stories for Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

As I continue discovering new technologies emerging all the time, I try to figure out ways of keeping my focus on tasks that need to be done while balancing the need to leverage clever advances that drop into my life. I've started trusting intelligent agents (and agentic intelligence in some forms) to do jobs for me so I can stay in the moment and keep things from crashing.

Letting AI reduce the workload

As I continue downshifting as a university lecturer, I need to reduce my workload and figure out the pathways that make my job easier. I want to offer anyone who slips into the position I'm leaving to know they can quickly automate many of the processes I did by hand. And if they need to do some heavy lifting, they should read some of my working notes--the ones I've kept from advice I got from Gold Star Human Designers Fortune Ndlovu and Frances O. .

I integrated some of the precious information they shared into a Level 9 Digital Transformation module I helped write with Springboard funding. I strongly recommend this subsidized training for anyone needing to augment or automate their working lives.

[Bernie Goldbach has 52 Mondays remaining.]