I live in Amsterdam, and I travel to London every couple of months for some quality in-person time with the EV crew. When I arrived at my hotel on Monday, I realized that I had left my laptop at home.
A year ago, I would’ve felt completely lost without my laptop. If you do office work, you’ll probably relate. For decades, office work has revolved around computers: Slack, Word docs, Excel models, all created with the idea that I’ll be sitting at my desk, typing. That assumption is one of the fictions we built our lives around.
This week, without my laptop around, I found that fiction loosening, and now I believe it will eventually disappear because of how I use AI agents.
I did most of my work this week by chatting to ChatGPT on my phone. So I’m not replacing desk work with squinting at tiny text or craning my neck over a screen, but with talking and having the work talked back to me.
This is thanks to OpenAI’s July release of GPT-Live, which lets you direct agents by voice. I thought it deserved more attention then. It feels a little like talking to Jarvis, Iron Man’s AI assistant. And like Jarvis, it can put your workshop to work (for now, that workshop is mostly digital).
Leaving my laptop behind started a real-life experiment to see how much of my day-to-day work I could get done through my voice assistant.
I want to share more about my setup and what I found during this week of working only with my voice.