How to AI
How to AI is Christopher Mims’ practical AI book discussed in Making the most of AI, without the hype. The episode describes it as a guide to cutting through hype, mastering AI basics, and using AI to transform work without treating the tool as a replacement for human expertise.
The book’s first law, as presented in the episode, is that AI is an assistant, not a replacement. That makes the book a bridge between AI Assistant Augmentation, Expertise-Amplified AI Use, Mundane AI Use Cases, and Human Judgment Under AI.
Making AI work - for work adds the workplace version of the book’s advice. The episode presents How to AI as a guide for choosing bounded tasks, redesigning workflows, treating agentic AI more like an assembly-line robot than a magic replacement, and recognizing older Invisible Classical AI already present in everyday systems.
Connections
- Christopher Mims - author.
- Marketplace Tech - show context for the interview.
- AI Assistant Augmentation, AI Hallucination, and Ambient AI Interface - central ideas drawn from the first episode.
- Business-Led AI Transformation, AI Workflow Triage, AI Economic Diffusion, and Invisible Classical AI - workplace and older-AI extensions from the follow-up episode.
- Deep Research, NotebookLM, Flow, and Google Personal Intelligence - examples used to make the book’s advice concrete.