The most important AI habit I have is making one phone call a day

Once a day now, I force myself to make an old-fashioned phone call.

Not a Zoom. Not a Teams meeting. Not a recorded conversation with an AI notetaker quietly humming in the background.

I do it because afterward I have to reconstruct the conversation from memory. I have to remember what was said, identify the themes, connect the dots, and then summarize it for my AI agents. In other words, I make myself do the work first. The technology comes second.

It’s a small habit, but one I’ve adopted because I’m thinking a lot about the doom-and-hype cycle we’re in with AI. Every conversation seems to swing between extremes. AI is either the second coming of the Industrial Revolution—unlocking unprecedented productivity and entirely new industries—or it’s about to eliminate every job, drain our resources, and leave us hiding on remote ranches while robot towers patrol the horizon.

The truth, as it usually is, is somewhere in the middle.

Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about all of this through the lens of a novel I just finished, Yesteryear.

The book follows a social-media “trad wife” who suddenly wakes up in 1855 and has to become a real one. What struck me wasn’t the time........

© Fortune