One of my favourite past-time hobbies is related to the whole notion of “Building a Second Brain”. If you’re very new to this or want to learn more, this book is where you want to start:

Building a Second Brain

The whole idea is that your brain is used for its key capability: thinking. All the capturing, storing and organisation systems should be digital. As a result, you can start using machines to co-think with you.

It started off as a cute idea that I thought would be cool to becoming the thing that I start placing greater importance on as time goes on. Why? Well if we step back and take a look at directionally where the future is going, there are some clear trends:

If it isn’t digital, it doesn’t exist
AI will be able to process larger and more contextual data sets (as long as they’re captured)
Once you know your intent, a greater plethora of tools will be available to scale speed of operations (given you have good models)

Therefore it’s important that you learn to stark co-thinking with your digital tools. You need to learn to treat your digital brain with the same level of respect and care that you do to your real brain.

There’s just one problem, no two brains are the same and the way everyone thinks is different. Therefore you need to invest the time and energy to build your second brain in a way that works for you personally.

For example, I use no fewer than 3 tools simultaneously to augment my thought process in a way that ensures:

I always know what I need to do
I have systems to understand what I need to do next
I can access and go deeper on things that have resonated with me in the past
Systems in place that minimise any non-valuable grunt work that creates friction in the thought process pipeline (from inception to prod)

That last point might be quite a lot to unpack but if ya’ll find it interesting enough I’m more than happy to expand on it!

Closing

I’m still quite primitive in how I use my tooling to augment my human self but my theory is that with enough passing time you should be able to create AI models of your digital self that can then act as a second version of you to bounce ideas off, work, play and build.

If you think this is too far off in the future, you’re wrong mortal. It’s already happening:

michelle huang @michellehuang42

i trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries - so that i could engage in real-time dialogue with my "inner child" some reflections below:

nearcyan @nearcyan

DeepCloning, the practice of creating virtual AI clones of humans to replace them socially, has been surging in popularity Does this new AI trend go too far by replicating partners and friends without consent? This court case may help to clarify the legality (2024, NYT)

Kerman Kohli

Your Second Brain — Coming Soon.