Two Extra Hours

I was thinking about how much I’ve been using AI these past few weeks for research. This alone isn’t unusual—I verify everything I write, and using multiple AI systems to double check facts has been a part of my workflow for years now.

What’s odd is that I used it so much from my phone while Dad was in the hospital, and in the ensuing days after his passing. There was simply an overwhelming amount of information thrown at us while trying to make sense of everything.

The information was centered around Dad’s health and comfort—this all happened very fast—but there was a lot more going on, too. We needed to understand the financial implications too, so as new information was coming in, I was scrambling to figure out how it would all be paid for.

It’s a good thing I had an eager research assistant ready to work for me 24 hours a day. I certainly put this assistant to work and got tremendous value from that work these past few weeks, but the amount of very specific, deep research I was able to do was unbelievably helpful, to say the least.

Figuring out next steps after death is never easy, but it would have been ten times harder without a research aide. I simply didn’t have the time or bandwidth to scrub through web results, as would surely have been the case prior to 2023 or so, when web search via AI became possible. Even then, I would have spent hours comparing and verifying things, while today I can get a good answer by using a pro or thinking model to do better initial work for me.

I began to contemplate how much time I was using this cointelligence, as I’ve come to think of it. By myself, I’m pretty smart. With AI, I have another pseudo-mind to bounce ideas back and forth, or to do very tedious research for me.

When Dad was awake, I was there with him every moment. As one might suspect, there were long periods where he wasn’t awake, though, and since we were stuck in the hospital and had already talked to the staff on hand, it was really useful to put all the test results (sometimes dozens per day) into context quickly and effectively.

There’s just no way I could have kept up as well with this barrage on my own.

Similarly, navigating the ultra-complex world of health care finance has been demystified and made vastly simpler by formulating sensible next steps based on priorities.

After a couple weeks of this, I began to wonder how much it all added up to per day.

There are a few different ways to count this. I would often have my phone in my hand to ask a series of questions, but I soon realized that it was far better to wait and then ask one follow up to clarify things, and not read the output for more than a minute or two, lest I get pulled into a rabbit hole of one answer I don’t want.

I asked for TL;DR responses so I could ask way more questions quickly, and synthesize the gist of the information that had been delivered to me. This worked well enough, and I was able to continue having my research assistant work for me, even while I turned my full attention to Dad if he woke up.

If I count this way, I’d say that I had cointelligence on my side for at least 2 hours every day, and maybe as much as 3 hours on average. There was a great deal to learn very quickly, you see.

If I count in terms of when I was typing, reading, or staring at my phone, the time gets cut in half, give or take. Even with the TL;DR responses, I needed to type with my potato-sized thumbs, which was clumsy and incredibly slow. As I peek up at what I’ve typed this morning in about 20 minutes, I guesstimate that this would take closer to 2 hours on my phone.

I hate typing on my phone.

If I wasn’t in a hospital room with Mom and Dad, I might switch to voice mode, where I can think really quickly and get at least a sounding board. Unfortunately, this crisis moment didn’t allow it. Fortunately, I still had an extra couple of hours of thinking at my disposal every day, even if I wasn’t the one doing that extra thinking.

My dad’s research assistant during the late 80s and early 90s: our cat Harold