Joe Polish warns that leaning on AI for thinking and content creation erodes critical thinking, curiosity, and real connection. He saw successful people crack during the pandemic, including a multimillion-dollar entrepreneur found incapacitated at 59, which pushed him to take a year off in 2021 to reconnect in person.
Chapters
In the world of AI, when it comes to content, if you just want content, you'd be hard-pressed to, as a human, to be able to come up with answers to things quicker, faster, and often even better than what you can now do with AI. It's a machine, and a lot of people are outsourcing their ability to think to the machine. That's useful in a lot of ways, but it's not all good either. If you lose the ability to connect and socialize and do critical thinking and be helpful and generous and curious, you strip away that which makes us human. You want to connect in person. I took a 1-year sabbatical in 2021 because once the pandemic started, I started getting phone calls from very successful, very well-known people that I'd never seen start to lose it. And I saw the cracks of the foundation of their lives starting to come apart. And one of my dear friends who was worth millions, in the hundreds of millions range, I got a call from his son who let me know he found his 59-year-old father in bed that morning. And I had this just thought come to my head, take a, take a sabbatical, but not just take a sabbatical, take a 1-year sabbatical.
