The Motion/Movement AI Trap

I talked about focus before, and one of the things that comes to mind when I think about how we use AI, and the characteristics of AI itself, is the difference between movement and motion. Many of us, if not all, confuse these two things.

What I mean by that is: sometimes you task AI to do something, and it spins and spins, creates code, creates an application that looks like it’s doing something. But from time to time it might break. It might not achieve what you wanted. It might have bugs.

Yet Another App

Maybe, for example, you’re one of the people who started creating your own iOS app. I for sure did. And as we now know, the category of apps that had the most influx of new applications is transcription apps, apps that use an AI model to transcribe what you say, speech to text.

So maybe you started creating your own app, and that felt like doing something.
But then you didn’t ship it. You didn’t market it. You just let AI spin and spin.
You started configuring your OpenClaw setup, and maybe now you have a Telegram bot that does stuff for you, but that stuff might not translate to actual changes in your life.

You spent time, and that time didn’t result in a change, in a practical improvement.

Motion That Feels Like Progress

That is the confusion between motion, this thing that keeps spinning, and real movement.

It feels like we’re doing something. You get this burst of adrenaline, of interest and enthusiasm, because you’re building something, you’re starting to create something.

For some people who were not coders, this was a new feeling, because they never went through the whole coding experience. But that did not translate into a meaningful change. At least for some people, it did not.

Even skilled people get tricked from time to time into thinking that all this delegation, all this work, produces something when it doesn’t.

6 Questions to Break the Illusion

One of the things AI does well is spinning the wheel, this process of letting you think that something happens while nothing happens.

So the more you use AI, the more you should reflect:

1. Is it helping?
2. What things are you letting go of while doing so?
3. What things are you not aware of?
4. How is it addressing your problems in a meaningful way?
5. Are you learning more, or are you delegating to something you don’t understand?
6. Is this movement tangible, or is it not?

At the end of the day, AI is an incredible new tool that we are pleased to have.
But as with all tools, and all the time we spend on tooling, what we want in the end is to make a meaningful change, either in the world, in our work, or in our life.

Is that new tool you’re using achieving that goal, or is it giving you the illusion, the impression that it’s achieving it?

And if it’s the latter, what should you change?