Machine Readable by Steven Johnson
Metadata
- Author: Steven Johnson
- Full Title: Machine Readable
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/machine-readable
Highlights added June 27, 2025 at 10:41 AM
The essay does a great job of capturing the kind of collaborative brainstorming you can now do with an AI that is grounded in sources that you have personally curated. Unless you have experienced it firsthand, it’s hard to explain how different it is from just riffing with a general-purpose model where the knowledge base is not a specific collection of works that you have assembled. (View Highlight)
I find this kind of exercise amazingly valuable, assuming I have done two key things first: 1) explained to Notebook who I am and what kind of book I'm trying to write, and 2) curated a unique set of sources that allows the AI to explore a new configuration of ideas, and not just resort to its typical "average" response. (View Highlight)
it's not giving me a final, definitive outline -- it's helping me quickly draft possibilities. (View Highlight)
When I'm in this kind of exploratory mode, I mostly just ask Notebook to help me generate possibilities, and then I evaluate what works and what doesn't work on my own. (View Highlight)