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A five-part series on working with the robots. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
This series has shown you what to watch out for. The atrophy. The cosplay. The kid pushing the train. The discipline of doing your half of the work. Frightening, encouraging, and hopefully, useful.
This post is about what happens when it works.
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Can we talk about Bacon? That’s what we’ve named our robot lawnmower. He is a pet, a helper, and strangely enough has some personality. When he wanders off into the cul-de-sac, or gets stuck in the bushes, I’m not generally upset with him. Maybe I should be. But what little robot lawnmower wouldn’t get stuck from time to time?
I find Bacon inspirational. He goes out and works hour after hour, recharge after recharge. And when I see him out there, I feel compelled to head out back myself—prune the roses, pull weeds, spread mulch. It feels good. Both of us out back working away for a few hours makes a massive dent in the workload.
Bacon doesn’t do my job. He does his job, and his presence makes me better at mine. I get more done alongside Bacon than I ever did on my own. I hear the twirling blades and the back-up beeps and I genuinely enjoy tackling yard care together.
That’s the “+.”
Writing?
My writing has been transformed.
You can plug in a topic and the AI will generate something—a blog post, a chapter. I gave some examples last week. Generally it’s not great. No errors, no major issues. But no life. No blood flowing. You can tell.
Where it shines is as a sparring partner and researcher.
If I have an idea, I can ask: what do you think about this, that, the other? It’ll give me, with proper prompting, its honest read. From there, it’ll research for me. Help me fill in blanks. I heard a quote that goes kinda like this. Can you find it? And it pulls the source down from across the internet. No hunting through blue links and skimming articles to chase a citation.
When I write a first draft, I leave plenty of blanks. Often an “XXX” where a name, or date, or city goes. I want to keep the pen moving, not get sidetracked with research at that stage.
Now I can feed my draft in and ask: “Please help me fill in the blanks [XXX],” and the AI will gladly tell me.
- Greta Thunberg
- October 2, 2025
- A flotilla in international waters off Gaza’s coast
These are the types of details no human should be tasked with retaining.
But remember—always remember—draft first.
The Tutors
My kids are working with the robots too. The boy has Synthesis tutoring him in math. My daughter is on Duolingo for Spanish, in preparation for the fall.
AI tutors are terrific. Adaptive. Attentive. Expert. When a concept is hard, the tutor circles back and attacks the gap from a new angle.
Get a question wrong, the tutor asks the same concept in a new way. Fail a few in a row and it takes two steps back, approaching with new visuals, new diagrams, new instruction. It switches between auditory, written, and game-based formats to find which path works for them.
That is completely different than assigning the same homework, the same worksheet, to thirty-three kids of varying skill levels.
The way it teaches is different from the classroom. And that’s perfect. He’ll have multiple avenues of understanding—multiple paths to the same answer.
For all the talk of these robots being impersonal, that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s completely custom. Personalized to each child.
This connects to an idea Seth Godin’s been preaching for years. The lecture, the explanation, the presentation—that part doesn’t need to be live anymore. Every kid in America can pull up the best teacher in the world on any subject. Carl Sagan on the cosmos. Bob Ross on landscapes. Godin’s version was simple: flip the day. Send the kids home to watch the best teacher in the world. Bring them to school to do the “homework,” with a real human in the room to help them through it.
AI tutors are the next step. Not a replacement for the human in the room—an extension of what’s been possible since YouTube. The robot pipes in world-class instruction. The robot adapts it to the kid in real time. The teacher walks the aisle between student and machine, doing the part that matters most: noticing who’s stuck, noticing who’s bored, noticing the kid who needs a different kind of nudge.
While so many people are worried about AI doing the work for school kids, the question we should be asking is: what work are they so eager to escape that they’d happily employ a robot to do it for them?
It’s probably the worksheets. The boilerplate assignments. The stuff with no connection to them, no intrigue, and—sadly—no real positive outcome either.
The good stuff still gets their attention. Because people, kids and adults, are learning machines. They just want to learn what they want to learn.
I just finished a second reading of Moby Dick and a third reading of The Old Man and the Sea. Both had been assigned to me in 11th grade. I had my own recollection of the stories and wanted to see if I was right.
I was not.
A good assignment changes and adjusts to the person it’s assigned to. If you wouldn’t do it yourself at 45 and find it interesting, why would you be gung-ho to do it at 17?
We’ve Been Here Before
In the early eighties, when word processors first hit, writers and editors did the exact same thing they’re doing now. Novelist Fay Weldon insisted there was “some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand.” Iris Murdoch went further, asking why anyone would stare at “a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness.”
I’m down with the brain body connection just as much as the next guy, but also…
Spell check is a gift.
To them, keys and screens felt like a barrier. Too cold. Too dinstant. They clung to typewriters, red pens, paper—because craft meant feeling the ink.
By the nineties, everyone had switched. Nobody brags “no word processors used” anymore.
I noticed the modern version when I started shopping my book around on Reedsy. Every editor’s pitch came with the same flex—“No AI used in this process.” The human touch. Artisanal edits. Your words, unfiltered by machines.
They’re worried what you’ll think. They’re scared of the perception. Dumping the manuscript into ChatGPT and calling it a day.
But I used AI to find the best possible human to edit a book about connection and trust. I know, how “plus” is that!?! The right tools, used well, get you to a better place.
If we do it right, a pattern emerges.
Bacon cuts the grass. I decide what we grow.
The tutor explains algebra. My son applies it to the world around him.
The robots write the code. I decide what’s worth building.
The robots tighten a paragraph, surface a quote, pressure-test an argument. My taste decides what’s true, what’s funny, what’s beautiful, what’s worth saying.
The best collaborations happen when the robot handles the convergence—the repetition, the synthesis, the heavy lift across massive amounts of information—while the human retains taste, direction, judgment, and responsibility.
That’s the “+.”
The Closing
I’ve talked with my kids about this. Whenever we speak with Grok or Siri or any of the other robots, we treat them well. Please and thank you.
We joke that when the robots take over and become our overlords, they’ll remember the meat-robots that had manners.
That may be true.
But kindness towards a robot isn’t about the robot’s feelings. It’s about yours.
“You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
If you treat the robot as a slave, you become less, not them. If you treat the robot as a collaborator, you become a centaur.
The “+” is a discipline.
Draft first.
Keep the challenge.
Stay divergent.
Be the kind of human whose work is worth training on.
Go write version seven.
Be The Plus.
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