AI Makes Us Productive
Anecdotal Example
When my wife and I had a house in Geneva, IL, we had a gigantic garden. Not just vegetables, but flowers, herbs, bushes, and trees. We built the house back in 1993 on an empty lot. It was a new golf course community that had been farmland. They scraped all the good topsoil off and developed it. Here is the front of the house today. Whomever purchased it from us put grass in the front yard. When we owned it, it was full of bulbs and gardens.
We planted the back too.
When we lived there, it was very sunny. Now, it’s shady. That was the plan. We hired Brian Kay, of George Kay and Associates, to design it. He was excellent. Brian put together this amazing plan. It cost us $25,000 to plan, buy the plants, and have his people put them in. Brian had blueprints and told us exactly how it would develop and look. He put in unique plants along with making sure there were always flowers, colors, or unique aspects of the garden to enjoy. He took into account heights and widths so it would be pleasing to the eye. It took some time to generate and execute. It turned out magnificent.
We visited the home on our way to my friend’s daughter’s wedding a couple of years ago. The new owners loved the yard. It was fun to see how it had all grown up. The backyard was incredibly private. Hedges and trees had grown. Hard surfaces offered up some great places to entertain. The path around the house was very dramatic.
Fast forward to 2025.
My daughter and son-in-law own a house in the Midwest. They are doing a lot of work on it to improve it. It wasn’t exactly a fixer-upper, but the yard on the outside most certainly needed a lot of fixing and upping. They have done a huge amount of manual labor to get it ready to be thoughtful about landscaping it.
My daughter asked my wife for advice on how to landscape it.
My wife went to Grok. She input all the conditions like climate, which way the home faced, how to get spring, summer, and fall color, along with leaf types and other plant characteristics.
Grok spat out the answer and more. It had references of where you could purchase the plants in their area and lots of other data. It generated a plan o gram.
She could work with Grok to adjust the initial volley and ask qualifying questions. It was like having a conversation rather than just a regular internet search, where you had to hunt and peck through links to find your answer.
She was able to generate an incredible plan in a few hours that is cohesive and exactly what my daughter and son-in-law want.
What would have been a month-long back-and-forth with a paid professional was accomplished in a few hours. To be clear, my wife is very experienced with Midwestern gardening and knows all the plants. That helps. But you can see how AI is going to change a lot of processes people do.
I have used Grok for pairing wine with food. Have used it for recipes and other things. You can see why Google is hyperfocused on integrating AI search into its search engine.
AI will disintermediate some things. I can foresee a world where highly creative people utilize AI to do incredible things. For some pros like Brian Kay, embracing it will help them get more done and increase the scale of their business. We are on the cusp of making some incredible leaps forward.
That is, if we let it and provide the electrical power so it can scale.
Excellent commentary Jeff. I use Grok, Chat GPT and Copilot, which is embedded in Microsoft's EDGE browser. However, I asked all three a question about a complex subject and I got three completely different answers. AI helps me in my work and I agree the U.S. will become more productive. As for electricity, some of these major companies have the foresight to acquire electrical infrastructure to keep their AI projects running and up into the future, i.e. Microsoft and Constellation Energy are going to rejuvenate the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island and the renamed facility will be the Crane Clean Energy Center. However, our government(s) are well behind and there will have to be another major winter storm like the one in February 2021 in Texas where the Texas ERCOT (their energy department) almost had their entire grid failure (they were about five minutes away) and hundreds of people lost their lives because of freezing temperatures and most of the state had no heat or electricity. Our electrical grid is failing and in disrepair and none of our government agencies are doing anything about it.
I use Grok *all* the time instead of any search engine. I've also been using it for the kinds of things you describe, although apparently I'm not at your wife's level to leverage it so well for my farm & garden / herbal / medicinal / guild / permaculture queries! It just occurred to me to use it for recipes recently, with a deep dive comparing certain veg on nutritional value, bioavailability of same, prepared different ways, etc. which was enlightening.
I'll leap to a generalization springing from your wife, an X post by esr (Eric Raymond), and my own experience: AI is a tool that helps the best and most experienced the most. My epiphany using Grok was an in-depth search and synthesis around an oft-repeated but never cited claim regarding validation of a certain metric in specific circumstances. Since then I've used it to cut the drudgery at work by about a third, generating research outlines, summarizing flaws or gaps in an analytical plan, and a host of other small tasks where I know what to do and how to do it, but Grok does it in 20 seconds instead of taking 20+ minutes from me. Suddenly my whole day opens up with a lot more time to think and do interesting work, instead of staying behind the 8-ball, scrambling just to keep up.