AI could trigger the biggest productivity boom ever

"My AI research assistants have made me at least twice as productive as I was when I wrote my previous books with human assistants. There are obvious examples of how - AI needs mere seconds to transcribe interviews that would take my human assistants all day, and it can pull up any fact or concept in context, across virtually any field, almost instantly."

"For this book project, I exported all of those highlighted passages from Kindle and then imported them into NotebookLM. Now, I can ask my Gemini assistant to pull from that text the six passages most relevant to any topic - for example, productivity growth rates - and it will provide an excellent list in 30 seconds. The AI has read everything of note that I have read in the last 20 years and can retrieve and explain it on demand."

AI research assistants have dramatically increased productivity for knowledge workers compared to traditional human assistants. Transcription that previously took full days now takes seconds, and AI can instantly retrieve facts and concepts across any field. Beyond obvious efficiency gains, AI tools like NotebookLM enable less obvious but significant productivity boosts. By importing highlighted passages from years of reading into AI systems, workers can instantly retrieve the most relevant passages on any topic from their entire personal knowledge base. This capability far exceeds what human assistants could accomplish, allowing workers to access and synthesize decades of accumulated knowledge on demand.

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