on navigating the AI era without getting lost
AI can produce any answer now. Which one matters is still entirely yours to decide. That gap is what I write about here.
These tools amplify whatever you bring them. Bring clarity and they compound it; bring confusion and they scale it, faster and more convincingly than anything before. The machine keeps getting better at how. What matters, why it matters, and whether the direction is even yours: no engineer is working on that part. It stays your job, and it is the part that compounds.
I work with AI most mornings before the coffee is done, and I built my writing, my teaching, and a small company on it. So this is not a publication against the machines. It is about the other half of the work, the half nobody is automating: developing the judgment and the nerve that decide whether AI amplifies you or just runs you faster toward a place you never chose.
We are all navigating without a map now. The old certainties are dissolving, and AI is only the loudest of them. The machine holds oceans of knowledge; what it cannot do is tell you where you stand in them, or sort what is yours from what was installed in you. The hopeful part is that this kind of navigation compounds. The more you practice it, the more capable you become, which is the exact reverse of what dependence does.
Who’s writing this
I’m Chris W Greene. I’ve practiced law for entrepreneurs and small business owners, worked as a financial analyst, taught innovation as a tenured professor, and built The Ruby of Crested Butte, Colorado’s top-rated inn, with my wife at 10,000 feet. Different rooms, one job every time: walk in where the ground was already moving and help people find the way through before anyone had drawn the map. That is the work AI just handed to everyone at once.
One essay most weeks, written by me, every word. Real photographs only. Everything here is free to read and stays that way. If the work earns it, a paid subscription is how you keep it coming and keep it independent.
If you want to know where you stand with AI, start with WILDiQ. Eight minutes, free, and it writes back.
P.S. I still make cinnamon rolls at altitude, and yes, I ship them. There is a lesson in there about making something good in hard conditions, but mostly they are just very good.
