The Reluctant Cyborg: From Google Docs to AI Digital Twins

This week on my transformation journey, I’m discovering the wonders of Google Docs.

It’s amazing. I can write from anywhere, it autosaves to the cloud, and I can easily draft posts from my laptop and my phone with seamless transfers. I’ve used Google Docs in the past for freelance editing projects, but for my own work I always drafted in Microsoft Word, saving the doc only on my hard drive.

Changing it up is a big deal for me. In recent years I’ve battled a ton of paranoia about such things. I was constantly worried about hackers, Big Brother surveillance, and psychological warfare vis-à-vis the CIA. And to be honest, I’m still concerned about those things. I certainly don’t plan to use Google Docs for sensitive top-secret info (because of all the classified state secrets I know, of course). But I’m having fun with it for now.

Here are some other things I’m thinking about this week…

Something New:

AI-first Internet. The web was created for humans, but now AI crawlers and agents make up more than half of web traffic. That’s why experts say that the next era of the web won’t even be for humans. Last week, Cloudflare (one of the largest web infrastructure providers in the world) introduced a new web model that converts “human-optimized HTML into agent-optimized markdown”–a fancy way of saying that it will be easier for AI agents to navigate the web. This makes all those “are you a robot” questions feel kind of silly now. We are literally outnumbered.

Something Old:

Dostoevsky’s prediction (1864). Long before personalized social media ads, Russian novelist Dostoevsky wrote about a future world dictated by algorithms.

“And since all wantings and reasonings can indeed be calculated – because, after all, they will someday discover the laws of our so-called free will – then consequently, and joking aside, something like a little table can be arranged, so that we shall indeed want according to this little table.” Notes from Underground (1864)

You know what Dostoevsky didn’t have? Google Docs. He wrote his Notes from Underground with pen and paper, during a period of intense personal and financial turmoil, determined to shed light on the importance of free will. Much respect.

Something Inspiring:

Better cancer detection and treatments. While some people use AI to make fake videos of celebrities fighting each other, other researchers are pitting AI against cancer. Take the Mayo Clinic’s partnership with GE Healthcare, for example. Scientists there are using AI “digital twin” technology to create a dynamic, virtual version of a patient. This could help to test treatments in a simulator, narrowing down which treatment will work best. This means that the patient can spend more time healing, and less time going through side effects from treatments that won’t be effective. Hope for the future of cancer research? A good thing.

Alright, that about wraps it up. Join me here next week for more.