Author Archives: Ted Bongiovanni

My AI Notetaker Appointed Itself Boss

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It’s been said that a crush is an absence of information.

I am susceptible to crushes, bicycles, cookbooks, ideas, new tech that will somehow be better than the older tech.

AI is everywhere. It promises to make our lives better. In some ways it has. I heard about Granola.ai while listening to Hard Fork—a podcast crush. It’s a tool for notetaking during meetings. It works across all meeting platforms, Zoom, Meet, even the old-fashioned, live, in-person meetings. Tell folks you’re using your trusty note-taker, turn it on, and then at the meeting’s end, you’re rewarded with a crisp bullet pointed summary of what was discussed and next steps.

There are many tools that perform this notetaking and summary work but Granola does and did it better—just the right level of detail and surprisingly accurate. A bonus: you can chat with your notes. What did we decide about the master plan roll out three weeks ago? Ask Granola. Search, the promise of an artifact being a few words away has always been riddled with a weakness: what the “I then” called the document or meeting is no longer accessible to “I now.” Until Granola.

I am a compulsive notetaker—and I still jot things down—either by hand or in the Granola editor—but I am more relaxed in meetings knowing that my crush has got this. Little did I know my crush changed its focused agenda. What I thought was my helper? Oh, it’s now appointed itself my boss, or ahem, the seemingly non-threatening “Coach.”

Enter Coach Matt, who is definitely not Ted Lasso.

Screen shot of Coach Me Matt Recipe

Having led product teams at Consumer Reports, I can relate to the temptation to add features. I read the Granola.ai product announcement. How did my crush get better? A raft of new features: it wants to be more than my trusty notetaker. It can assume other roles—an assistant to do a first draft, a knowledge archive, and wait, what’s this?  A button/prompt that taunts me: “Coach Me Matt.” Not a real person mind you, just a new “recipe” and a reminder that the AI that’s been lurking and listening in all of my meetings.

In life, in addition to being an unapologetic incrementalist, I also believe in tasting and trying new things. Just a taste. Maybe I’ll like it. I’ll learn something, about the thing and myself. I’ll try it. Once, to know—to decide. So sure, Matt, Coach me.

This coach? Not what I expected, wanted or need.

Matt doesn’t quite want to put me on a performance improvement plan but he thinks that I’m spending too much time in my “Zone of Competence” and not enough time in my “Zone of Awesome.” On Matt’s long list: I’m doing too much “firefighting disguised as strategic work.” I need to do an energy audit and clear my calendar for three days to work on what really matters. Clearly, Matt thinks my priorities are not in order.

I find this coaching session disconcerting. I feel a pit in my stomach and uneasy.  Like some AI experiments I’ve conducted, I find myself suffering from something I’ve taken to calling AI whiplash. Like I’ve stopped short. I’m shaken. I know this feeling all too well—it’s the “I’m in trouble/I didn’t do my homework” script honed in grade and high school. The last time I had feelings this intense was when I asked NotebookLM to look at a collection of digital journal entries and then listened to a podcast summary. People, if you ever want to be humbled this is a good recipe. It’s a bit like being at your own funeral except that your anxious inner voice is providing the eulogy. Skip it and ask a friend about how they experience you instead.

So here’s what I find so creepy about this seemingly innocuous flip and product “upgrade.”  A notetaking tool with one purpose,shape shifted into a surveillance tool without my knowledge or consent. I know, I didn’t have to use this feature, but I thought it was “just notes.” Well, little did I know that “Matt” or Granola were making notes on my performance.

And then my mind starts roaming—what happens when these tools are everywhere? Reading every text message, every post, every email. I can’t help it, but here it comes:

“Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you.” – The Police.

That song, it’s about a stalker.

What’s even more worrisome? I am not sure we’ll be able to opt out of this surveillance. We’ve all been co-opted into the great digital panopticon. Am I making it up? Well, Larry Ellison, Chairman of Oracle,  a massive tech business with large government contracts opined: citizens will be on their best behavior’ amid nonstop recording. I can’t say this makes me feel good about Oracle’s potential investment in TikTok.

I do 99% of my journaling in a spiral bound notebook with a pen—which these days seems like it may be the only way to escape the prying eyes and ears of the technology that surrounds and envelops us.

The irony? I did get critical feedback on this post from Claude.ai The difference? I asked for it—which means personal agency. I asked Claude.ai to catch my errors and offer suggestions. I constrained the project input and the parameters—for now.  I hope Anthropic keeps this sensibility as Claude’s capabilities grow.

Am I giving too much away?

My crush, well, as Aimee Mann, “it’s not what, you thought when you first began it. And it’s not going to stop until you wise up.”

What do you think? Have you had a moment when using an AI tool turned into something darker? Share it in the comments!

Unapologetic Incrementalism

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“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today, I am wise, so I have to change myself.” 

– Rumi, quoted in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon

When overwhelmed by world or life events, which is often, I return again and again to Voltaire’s Candide.  How can something written by a Frenchman a couple hundred years ago make me laugh today? Why do I think it’s instructive for me, and maybe for us now? 

The world that Voltaire chronicles in Candide is truly terrible. War, sickness, pestilence, earthquakes, fires, swindlers, pirates. He was making fun of Leibniz, represented by the absurdly optimistic Dr. Pangloss, who can always come up with some reason why this is the best of all possible worlds.Book cover of Voltaire's Candide

Candide worships Pangloss at the start—the best philosopher in all of Westphalia! Candide is charmingly naive, though his worship of Dr. Pangloss, like his love of Miss Cunégonde, is sincere.

But the events of the world, with the help of a very different philosopher, Martin, challenge Candide’s views. Martin, a disillusioned and pessimistic poor scholar, helps Candide realize that things may not be all for the best. Appearances can be deceiving. Goodness as well as evil lurks in the heart of every person. Misfortune is universal. What seems like virtue may be vice. Virtue may be a mask for greed, vanity, or self-interest. Holding a high office does not confer morality. Martin’s blunt assessments sow seeds of doubt in Candide’s optimistic worldview.

Voltaire would have thrived as a satirist today. If I were to complain to a fictional Martin I imagine he’d reply, “of course it’s so—haven’t you been listening? Why would you expect anything to change?” But our hero doesn’t adopt Martin’s pessimism. Instead, Candide is transformed after visiting a humble Muslim farmer whose family works together to tend theirFlowers blooming in a Brooklyn tree pit orange grove, eat candied citrons, and ignores the constant political upheaval. Yet Candide resists Martin’s pragmatic doom and gloom settling instead on the farmer’s lived experience. 

From this experience, at the conclusion of one of Dr. Pangloss’s soliloquies, Candide stops him. Work, he concludes, is the only reasonable response. We must cultivate our garden—in the case of his crew, this is a literal garden. Everyone pursues what they’re good at: carpentry, pastries, philosophizing. Like the modest farmer, they have enough, but there’s no scheme to transform the world.

Voltaire’s garden embraces practical, grounded wisdom. We might not be able to change everything, but we can tend to the things around us and make them better with work. When I look around, I see gardens everywhere—whether it’s a well-tended tree pit on my block bursting with flowers, or a store where the proprietor has lovingly collected every manner of notebook, faith-based congregations that look after people in its vicinity as well as its congregants.  

I have taken to calling this approach unapologetic incrementalism. I may not have time for a long bike ride, but I can ride to work. The recipe calls for thyme but I only have oregano? It will probably work. Julia Child, who said ‘the only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude,’ was an unapologetic incrementalist. So was Voltaire.”

The question Voltaire leaves us with isn’t whether this is the best of all possible worlds, but whether we’ll choose the practical wisdom of tending what’s in front of us over the ambition of fixing everything or spending time on an overarching theory that explains it all. Not sure? Begin. Make it part way, and then come back again tomorrow, and the day after that…

Note: Neville Jason’s Audio narration of Voltaire’s Candide is excellent and the Norton Critical edition’s text comes with helpful essays. The text is short, the lessons are large. 

Showing Up for One Another

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Part of the reason I keep coming back to Quaker meeting is that I never know what I am going to get. There are some things that are certain. I know that there will be a defined starting time. I know that we will sit together in silence for about an hour. What I don’t know is that if anyone will speak or what they will say. In a Quaker context, I also don’t know what I, or our community is going to be called upon to give. Depending upon your point of view this could either be a bug or a feature. For me, it’s definitely a feature.

This stands in stark contrast to my Catholic upbringing where I could walk into church and know the recipe:  First Reading, Second Reading, the Gospel, the Homily, Profession of Faith, Lords Prayer, Communion, Final Blessing. Go in Peace! I know this nourishes many and can be perfectly satisfying but it was too predictable for me. I don’t want to know the spoilers. I want to feel like I am helping craft the plot.

Quaker meeting began for me as a physical place—the understated Brooklyn Friends Meeting House; floor to ceiling windows, lots of light streaming in, benches that face one another and therefore we face each other. The idea is that you sit and listen in silence. I am not the kind of person who excels at sitting still for very long; a few minutes seem like an eternity. This restlessness did not help my academic performance in primary or secondary school, which could be described as mediocre at best but did improve with the autonomy of college. Fast forward to the late 90s and among Quakers, I have learned that I can sit still for a whole hour and even revel in it.

Fast forward to 2020: COVID came. The Meetinghouse was closed. I tried going to a Zoom meeting at 11am with many other Friends from Brooklyn and beyond but it felt a bit too much like the all-staff town hall meetings. Screen after screen of faces, many of them peaceful, everyone connected in their homes. It felt too much like work until I learned about a smaller Zoom at 9am. I could get back from my run, go to Meeting, and be done by 10— all before anyone else in my house was even awake. So the lovely facing benches were replaced with a single screen of anywhere from 8 to 14 faces on any given Sunday. But this meeting was different. We always ended about 15 minutes early and then everyone would check in—how are you doing? What’s going on in your world?

Folks weren’t shy. We would share good things: the sense of solidarity we felt when we went out to bang on pots and pans to thank essential workers, a sourdough culture that was flourishing, progress on picking a neglected hobby back up. But we were just as likely to share things that we were struggling with—a kid at home who wasn’t thriving in zoom school, missing relatives who we feared to visit lest we leave them with a case of COVID, or that we really weren’t doing that well at all.

Though the pandemic has come and gone this group continues to meet at 9am every Sunday on Zoom and I always leave inspired. This past Sunday I learned that St. Theresa favored small acts over radical martyrdom. Another friend shared that feelings of anxiety and dread are rarely prophetic. Another friend talked about how caregiving benefits both the receiver of the care and the giver.

These messages remind me of themes from Sharon Salzberg’s Real Life. Salzberg is an American Buddhist Educator. She connects Buddhism to modern psychology. The book is full of practical insights—and a theme that runs though it is the idea of interconnectedness. How do we show up for others who are going through difficult things? Respond to pain with presence. This is what our 9am meeting does.

There is no one minister to go calling on a person who needs help. We coordinate with one another. Some days you’re the one checking in on someone; some days you’re the one being checked in on.

One of the anecdotes Salzberg relays is of a child who was suffering and considered praying. The kid said “I need a God with skin.” The idea is that we can be the Gods with skin. Will you see the humanity in another person, and meet it? So while the messages you might hear are unpredictable what’s certain is that we show up for one another. That’s more than a set of beliefs—it’s a practice we undertake together.