Melbourne’s water storages are 71.8% full.
I know this because earlier this week I wondered how our dams were doing - as one does in an El Niño year - and looked at the Melbourne Water website. I got the answer right there, and that should have been the end of it.
Ahem.
One thing led to another, and I now run a website about Melbourne’s water situation. It has historical storage levels you can scrub through, a visual map of every reservoir, per-person consumption, absolute and relative desalination production volumes, at-a-glance history for all the reservoirs, oh, and a platypus for a logo. It checks for new data every evening and updates itself.
Did anyone ask for this?
NO.
Hell, even I didn't ask for this. Not at first, anyway.
Let’s take a step back.
I have always been prone to going into research-y rabbit holes. Something catches my attention, and I ‘need’ to know more.
Whatever I was meant to be doing? Yeah that can wait. This won’t take long.
In the ‘good old days’, a rabbit hole used to be of self-limiting depth.
There was only so much time you could spend on it.
I’d be happy to order a book or two, and read them.
But then you ran across a paywalled paper, or a spreadsheet and a model you’d have to build by hand, and every step cost a bit more in both time and money, so at some point you just looked up from where you’d dug myself into, and climbed out.
With AI, these obstacles mostly aren’t there, or are greatly reduced.
Every “one more thing” is catered to.
Make a full literature review on the topic at hand? Of course.
Historical comparison? Happy to help.
Interactive? On it.
A logo? Done.
Make it into its own website? But of course.
It’s the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
You can play with the result at https://water.transitionlevel.aero/
Do we learn anything from this?
I mean on the face of it, clearly not, at least if by ‘learning’ we mean ‘stop doing it’. I’ve also made a hybrid human-machine signal-scanning site called The Future Is Already Here, which - and I can’t believe I got the domain - can be found at https://thefutureisalreadyhere.com/. Go play, I think that’s great too.
Each of these have cost me under five hours of time each, roughly. The AIs have put in a great deal more than that, in the background, while I got on with other things.
And the work I was actually meant to be doing did not get neglected. It just got… postponed, a little.
And when it comes to hobbies, which curiosity 100% is, five hours is nothing.
But that five hours has produced something that is now harder to stop than a rabbit hole that eats a whole weekend and then gets climbed out ot.
Now they’ve become these things that cost an hour here and there (because improvement ideas come to mind! obviously!). The old ones at least ended in forty open tabs, mass-killed, and often with no product other than learning.
Today, they end in a product. Well, a “product”. Whatever. Anyway, the point is it feels like I got something done.
So how could that be a bad thing? Maybe it isn’t. I get nice websites out of these, I’m getting better at making them, and for someone in my line of work, poking at the art of the possible arguably is my job.
I can’t tell from inside the hole. I’m not sure anyone can.
So maybe I do need to set a Pomodoro-style timer on any particular rabbit hole.
Maybe I’ll set it at 5hrs. Or one reset of my AI tool token budget?
And next time, before I buy a domain for anything, I need to figure out who’s going to maintain it for the next whatever.
If the answer is “me”, I will sleep on it before building anything. Or at least before buying the domain.
Probably.
Now, the same tools are there for everyone in your organization. Researchers who spent eight months inside a tech company noticed a similar thing than I experienced: people drifting into work nobody had asked them for, because suddenly they could.
Maybe somewhere in your company there is a dashboard with a platypus on it.
Is that a good thing?
Ps. Working out which of your organization’s rabbit holes should be polished products, and which ones should be filled in (after rescuing the person digging it)? That’s what you hire me to figure out. Let’s talk.