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Think Like a Human: The Power of Your Mind in an Age of AI
A new way of thinking that improves how we work, create and live, empowering readers to outsmart AI—a tool that can never do what humans do
The bedrock on which technology has been built and on which we now make strategic, political, ethical and even day-to-day decisions—“algorithmic thinking”—is flawed. As we race headlong into a future where we outsource all our problem-solving to artificial intelligence, the greatest threat is not superintelligent machinery, but too much trust in Big Tech and not enough trust in the power of our own minds. Think Like a Human offers a new way forward—what Dr. Weitzner calls “artful intelligence”—a philosophy that can help each of us solve problems and make better decisions.
To think artfully is to approach problem-solving not just with our brains but with our hands, eyes and ears, along with our literal and metaphorical hearts and guts, tapping into the myriad of underutilized cognitive resources distributed throughout our bodies. Think Like a Human is a refreshing antidote and reality check to artificial-intelligence mania and fear. Cutting through the hype, misinformation and corporate hustle around AI, this book will inspire you to adopt the artful approach, bringing intuition and emotional intelligence to your work and life.
The bedrock on which technology has been built and on which we now make strategic, political, ethical and even day-to-day decisions—“algorithmic thinking”—is flawed. As we race headlong into a future where we outsource all our problem-solving to artificial intelligence, the greatest threat is not superintelligent machinery, but too much trust in Big Tech and not enough trust in the power of our own minds. Think Like a Human offers a new way forward—what Dr. Weitzner calls “artful intelligence”—a philosophy that can help each of us solve problems and make better decisions.
To think artfully is to approach problem-solving not just with our brains but with our hands, eyes and ears, along with our literal and metaphorical hearts and guts, tapping into the myriad of underutilized cognitive resources distributed throughout our bodies. Think Like a Human is a refreshing antidote and reality check to artificial-intelligence mania and fear. Cutting through the hype, misinformation and corporate hustle around AI, this book will inspire you to adopt the artful approach, bringing intuition and emotional intelligence to your work and life.
320 pages, Paperback
Published May 13, 2025
8 people are currently reading
14 people want to read
About the author
David Weitzner
6 books15 followersDavid Weitzner is a writer, teacher, and consultant, working to uncover the best of what makes us human. He researches the science of artful thinking and creative co-creation, as well as strategies for bettering our ethical, spiritual, and business decision-making.
Dr. Weitzner is an associate professor of management at York University, with a PhD in Strategy, an MBA in Arts and Media Management and an Hon. BA in Philosophy. His paper, Harm Reduction, Solidarity, and Social Mobility as Target Functions won the R. Edward Freeman Journal of Business Ethics Philosophy in Practice Best Paper Award, and his book, Connected Capitalism, won the Bronze INDIES Book of the Year Award for Business and Economics.
David writes the Managing with Meaning blog for Psychology Today, offering strategies for a more human-centric approach to business. His research has been published in prestigious peer-reviewed outlets like the Academy of Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Organization Studies, and Journal of Business Ethics. He also coedited Corporate Social Responsibility (Routledge) and coauthored Strategic Management: Creating Competitive Advantages (McGraw-Hill Ryerson).
David has presented as an invited guest at several high-profile international conferences, including Repurposing Management for the Public Good, hosted at the Møller Institute at the University of Cambridge, and Business as an Agent of World Benefit, co-sponsored by the UN Global Compact. His ideas have appeared in popular media outlets like NPR, Politico, Salon, The Globe and Mail, The Conversation, Business Insider, Tablet Magazine, The National Post, Yahoo News, and The Financial Post Business Magazine, among others.
Dr. Weitzner is an associate professor of management at York University, with a PhD in Strategy, an MBA in Arts and Media Management and an Hon. BA in Philosophy. His paper, Harm Reduction, Solidarity, and Social Mobility as Target Functions won the R. Edward Freeman Journal of Business Ethics Philosophy in Practice Best Paper Award, and his book, Connected Capitalism, won the Bronze INDIES Book of the Year Award for Business and Economics.
David writes the Managing with Meaning blog for Psychology Today, offering strategies for a more human-centric approach to business. His research has been published in prestigious peer-reviewed outlets like the Academy of Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Organization Studies, and Journal of Business Ethics. He also coedited Corporate Social Responsibility (Routledge) and coauthored Strategic Management: Creating Competitive Advantages (McGraw-Hill Ryerson).
David has presented as an invited guest at several high-profile international conferences, including Repurposing Management for the Public Good, hosted at the Møller Institute at the University of Cambridge, and Business as an Agent of World Benefit, co-sponsored by the UN Global Compact. His ideas have appeared in popular media outlets like NPR, Politico, Salon, The Globe and Mail, The Conversation, Business Insider, Tablet Magazine, The National Post, Yahoo News, and The Financial Post Business Magazine, among others.
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August 19, 2025
When is the last time you have encountered an AI system, whether it be a chat bot or some auto generated content? How often do you interact with them? In today’s world, it’s unlikely to get away from AI if you even so much as touch a computer connected to the internet. You may feel dependent on it, or think that you cannot escape the barrage of content put out with so little effort it barely has any intention. Enters David Weittzner, an associate professor at York teaching Management courses, with his second book, Think Like a Human, showing us how to navigate this world consumed by AI and use Artful Thinking to explore your human creativity and ingenuity to solve everyday problems in an artful and lively manner. Except that he focused a bit too on criticizing AI and autonomous systems, rather than filling us with hope and energy to go beyond.
Algorithmic Dependence: Knowing the Enemy
How does one make themselves feel more righteous? You point out how silly your competition is, of course. Weitzner points out that despite being called “intelligent”, AI is really messy and nonsensical. He points out how ironic it is that they are considered “algorithmic” despite being inconsistent with their answers. The author also has a lot of beef with how many people working on developing AI are describing and “hyping” it up; anyone who dares liken how AI works with how humans think is clearly mentally unwell and only cares about machines as far as Weitzner is concerned. While it isn’t untrue that AI is wildly different from humans’ intelligence, there is a lot of scrutiny put on those statements that just seems unfair and is only meant to put AI under more bad light. This is a very common occurrence in this book but at least there is always a novel reason given as to why AIs aren’t humans, so it is not as if the author is always rewriting the same thing over and over again to prove the same point. However, some very good points are brought up against AI and their developers, like lazily patching their systems rather than actually fixing them to avoid embarrassing errors such as accidental racism. The example used for this is Google’s Photos app tagging a certain group of humans as Gorillas rather than humans. Google’s fix? Removing Gorilla1 as a category… Not exactly something to be proud of.
AI and Big Tech aren’t the only baddies in this book; businesses are also under fire from this management professor. He goes over how businesses use the “Five Step Hustle” to sell solutions to problems that only they can offer, and that any other solution cannot possibly work and should be ignored (while begging policy makers to make their solutions the de facto way to solve a problem). This is quite an interesting idea that can be easily demonstrated by looking at how businesses promote their new products; it clearly works as some of us swear by them, while the more cynical point out how unnecessary that “solution” really is. This isn’t the only thing that makes businesses bad; the author is very annoyed by how unrealistically optimistic they are. He points to the WEF and how many of its 2015 predictions2 completely missed the mark. While not all of them are AI related, this doesn’t stop the ranting from happening. At least context was given so it was not all emotional hate. The point remains that businesses shouldn’t be the shining light of human development.
Closing off this section, we look at how humans and automated systems interact. Starting off with technologies seemingly removing humans from the equation, like touch screen ordering machines at fast food places or Amazon’s “Just walk out” stores, the latter of which actually relied on humans behind the scene3 to perform the monitoring. Weitzner argues that this makes the experience less pleasant for everyone involved, which is quite the assumption coming from someone who cares about non algorithmic thinking, since many consumers enjoy having fewer human interactions. A bit of AI training was brought up around this point, where people would manually help train the AI by classifying images and other learning data. There was an argument about how meaningless and badly paid those jobs are, the latter being a fair criticism while the former seems a bit idealistic to say that all jobs must be mentally stimulating. Moving on from this remark, the next point brought up is how businesses are influencing their audience to be more dependent on their products. As brought up earlier, this is a very valid point and something worth watching out for, not only from an educated consumer standpoint, but also from a creative avenue, as the author argues.
At this point, the reader may feel like the author is being overly harsh on AI and its supporters. Worry not, as this is still just the beginning…
Artful Intelligence: Think with BEAM and defend your VICE (also hate AI)
“Think with BEAM and defend your VICE”. This is what the author describes as “Artful Thinking”. The two components of this statement get explained later in the section but we clearly cannot move along without complaining about an algorithmic or AI related topic, in this case, it is all about ideologies employed by transhumanists and similar groups. Weitzner argues that those ideologies are too rational, short sighted, and/or algorithmic to be realist or useful to humans in the long run. He criticizes the vision of having humans and machines merge, where we end up all in our own worlds within our “minds”, and where we would achieve some level of spiritual ascension, almost as if AIs become our gods. His biggest complaint against those ideals is that it dehumanizes us, reducing us to data points or broken machines that need fixing to become “perfect”. While transhumanism is a bit of an extreme ideology, there are certainly benefits to having machines assist us in our lives, whether it be to help overcome disabilities or push the boundaries of medicine, both of which are considered positive. It is fair to criticize those ideologies, but dismissing all the positive aspects isn’t necessary to demonstrate the benefits of Artful Thinking.
BEAM, body, environment, action, and mind. Think with them and you shall achieve Artful Thinking, at least partially. The human thought process is not simple and is influenced by a myriad of things. The author goes over how each of the components of BEAM help us overcome problems and situations. He shares an anecdote about how one of his mentors, Dr. Yitzchok Block, likes dancing on tables. Block being a Rabbi, Weitzner asks him why he performs as such. Block reveals that it brings him joy and uses it as an expression of a life well lived. While this anecdote may belong more to the VICE chapter, it is still interesting to the reader to see how one can use more than intellect or logic to demonstrate something. Block used his body to show joy. Once the explanation and joyful anecdotes are done, it is complaining time again. The
comparison between human thinking and how AI learns is brought up again, and this time we focus on Geoffrey Hinton’s quote about the difference between AI and humans: “I don’t think there is anything special about people, other than to other people.” The article Weitzner references for this quote4 is taken from a political journal and talks about AI “taking over” due to its recent explosion in advancements. 2 years later and those advancements feel mostly stalled out, there is just a plethora of similar AI assistants out there that only really differ by their specialization. There is nothing that could be considered “sentient” or at risk of taking over. But that is not what Weitzner wanted to talk about. In fact, he just wanted to express his disapproval of Hinton’s likening human thinking with AI learning, where he claims that Hinton simplifies how humans think. Was it worth including Hinton’s quote in this chapter? Most likely, but it would have felt much more hopeful to use it as a springboard to explore humans’ abilities rather than a negative talking point about how “AI experts think humans are simple therefore they are bad people”.
VICE was purposely used as an acronym as the author believes that the algorithmically controlled future will see artful thinking as going against the grain. VICE, volition, intention, choice, and explanation, is all about free will and defending your decisions. In fact, most of this chapter revolves around the exploration of free will, using anecdotes such as Rosa Park’s, where she famously would not give up her seat, defending her decision by claiming that she was tired of segregation, and that moving would mean that she was agreeing to the social norm forced onto her and her peers. There is much less complaining in this section. The obvious bit was about some Tech leader mentioning something about humans not having free will, because there had to be some complaint, and since so many of the Tech leaders happen to be transhumanist, it was fairly easy to find quotes that would please the author’s need to complain about some opposing point of view.
Artful Models: Living the art
While the first half of the book focused on definitions and explaining what Artful Living is about, the latter half focuses on examples of artful people and some more general ranting about how to live life artfully. The models section is a series of conversational interviews the author had with people he deemed were exemplary artful models, starting off with one of the author’s idols, Perry Farrel, Jane’s Addiction’s singer, who infamously had a recent altercation with fellow band mates during a reunion tour. This isn’t mentioned despite occurring before the release of the book, and while it isn’t relevant to the content of the book, those who know about it may have strong emotions about the content of this chapter. Here, Perry talks about how he isn’t trying to be rational at all, leaving that part to his wife. He mentions looking at the blue in the sky in moments where he feels overwhelmed by his computer, to which Weitzner adds that looking at the sky helps one appreciate their body image5, which isn’t completely related to what Perry was going for but it goes back to BEAM so it’s all good.
The second model is Weitzner’s therapist Dr. Joe Goodman (yes he is a real person and it's his real name). Goodman encourages the use of love to solve problems. The author does joke about the cheesiness and how love is referred to as “the jargon”. There is also some talk about how society is more addicted to their computers and get access to information provided in a lazier manner. This chapter is a bit less conversational than the last and the author uses it to explore artful medicine. This isn’t meant to be some pseudo-science bit but he goes on about how medical practitioners should be weary of trusting AI and machine learning systems as those systems could misdiagnose and that medicinal practice should not be algorithmic. There is some question about the validity of this statement as the author is very much not a medical expert, but it is a generally fair assessment and he did provide some sources to solidify his point.
The final model is the cyclist Nicole van Beurden, introduced after a bit of an intro going over how humans solve problems that are solved by AI, as AIs can only solve problems that their human creators let them solve, therefore human creativity is necessary for problem solving. Nicole doesn’t have an engineering background, but she knows how to ride a bike. She was concerned by how higher performing bikes require 5 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...
physically stronger and larger athletes to handle, which made it so smaller people could not achieve the same levels. She went out to solve the weight problem of the heavier high performance bikes and found some secondary effects in her solution that increased her performance even further. The author points out how businesses are often focused on solving a specific problem a certain way and don’t try new approaches. This is a wonderful point as so many businesses are effectively stagnant and are at risk of a competitor making a breakthrough using alternative problem solving. This isn’t to say that this chapter isn’t without flaws. The author brings up automation in planes and mentions how “planes with higher levels of automation have higher accident rate”, while referring to the 737 MAX crashes. Those crashes were due to faulty automation, but this was more of an engineering issue and lack of testing than the automation itself, as the problem has since been addressed. He ironically compares the 737 MAX crashes to the Miracle of the Hudson, where an A320 was involved, which arguably has more automated systems than the 737 due to its fly-by-wire system. The author isn’t an engineer and doesn’t have a background in aviation so he unintentionally negates his own point through ignorance…
Artful Living: Sometime we just want to rant
Closing out this book is a section about how people should live their lives to be artful. The chapter opening this section is all over the place. Starting off by mentioning how dynamic pricing works and is implemented by some system. Most people agree that the latter is incredibly infuriating and so does the author. What follows is rather weird and feels like the author releasing some built up frustration. He linked up the pro-Palestinian protests with Nazi sympathizing. He makes this relevant to the book by using it as an example of people not being algorithmic but not defending their VICE properly. This just seems to go against his earlier point about free will and doesn’t bring much value to his book, other than some emotional bias. Closing off this weird chapter is the author wanting more creators on online platforms, complaining about the ratio of creators vs consumers. It is fair to think that more Artful Thinkers would imply more creators but it wasn’t necessary to bring up here as a mild complaint.
Thankfully the following chapters are far less controversial. Weitzner wants more social environments and situations. Starting off with a mild rant about how modern students would rather have asynchronous classes with the least amount of interactions possible, weirdly linking it up to “learning about the enemy” as his students are mostly business majors which he has a disdain for. Moving on from that, he claims that social events help promote Artful thinking and brings up an example of an artist marketing their new album by setting up some speakers and mats in a circle and having bystanders listen and enjoy the moment. This is a nice example of artful thinking as an unusual method of advertising is used and the participants experienced something new and enjoyable, which may help promote more artful thinking.
The book ends on a more hopeful note. He brings up how so many tech leaders are claiming that an AI future is inevitable, but he refutes them by stating the benefits of Artful Thinking. He does make the mistake of overselling his solution, which he ironically condemns many times in this book. He ends on a warning that we should use BEAM and VICE before big tech removes all semblance of privacy and control from our lives.
Worth the read
Despite all the ranting, this book is definitely worth reading, especially if you are feeling overwhelmed by AI or if you can only live with it. If you were already against using AI, you may find some comfort in knowing that your feelings are shared and reinforce your ideas of using human thoughts and creativity to solve problems. This book could benefit from a future edition or a foreword to address the overwhelming complaints the author has but it is well written and is an easy read. It will be interesting to know if this book will end up as a staple of modern self help and used as reference in a future society.
Algorithmic Dependence: Knowing the Enemy
How does one make themselves feel more righteous? You point out how silly your competition is, of course. Weitzner points out that despite being called “intelligent”, AI is really messy and nonsensical. He points out how ironic it is that they are considered “algorithmic” despite being inconsistent with their answers. The author also has a lot of beef with how many people working on developing AI are describing and “hyping” it up; anyone who dares liken how AI works with how humans think is clearly mentally unwell and only cares about machines as far as Weitzner is concerned. While it isn’t untrue that AI is wildly different from humans’ intelligence, there is a lot of scrutiny put on those statements that just seems unfair and is only meant to put AI under more bad light. This is a very common occurrence in this book but at least there is always a novel reason given as to why AIs aren’t humans, so it is not as if the author is always rewriting the same thing over and over again to prove the same point. However, some very good points are brought up against AI and their developers, like lazily patching their systems rather than actually fixing them to avoid embarrassing errors such as accidental racism. The example used for this is Google’s Photos app tagging a certain group of humans as Gorillas rather than humans. Google’s fix? Removing Gorilla1 as a category… Not exactly something to be proud of.
AI and Big Tech aren’t the only baddies in this book; businesses are also under fire from this management professor. He goes over how businesses use the “Five Step Hustle” to sell solutions to problems that only they can offer, and that any other solution cannot possibly work and should be ignored (while begging policy makers to make their solutions the de facto way to solve a problem). This is quite an interesting idea that can be easily demonstrated by looking at how businesses promote their new products; it clearly works as some of us swear by them, while the more cynical point out how unnecessary that “solution” really is. This isn’t the only thing that makes businesses bad; the author is very annoyed by how unrealistically optimistic they are. He points to the WEF and how many of its 2015 predictions2 completely missed the mark. While not all of them are AI related, this doesn’t stop the ranting from happening. At least context was given so it was not all emotional hate. The point remains that businesses shouldn’t be the shining light of human development.
Closing off this section, we look at how humans and automated systems interact. Starting off with technologies seemingly removing humans from the equation, like touch screen ordering machines at fast food places or Amazon’s “Just walk out” stores, the latter of which actually relied on humans behind the scene3 to perform the monitoring. Weitzner argues that this makes the experience less pleasant for everyone involved, which is quite the assumption coming from someone who cares about non algorithmic thinking, since many consumers enjoy having fewer human interactions. A bit of AI training was brought up around this point, where people would manually help train the AI by classifying images and other learning data. There was an argument about how meaningless and badly paid those jobs are, the latter being a fair criticism while the former seems a bit idealistic to say that all jobs must be mentally stimulating. Moving on from this remark, the next point brought up is how businesses are influencing their audience to be more dependent on their products. As brought up earlier, this is a very valid point and something worth watching out for, not only from an educated consumer standpoint, but also from a creative avenue, as the author argues.
At this point, the reader may feel like the author is being overly harsh on AI and its supporters. Worry not, as this is still just the beginning…
Artful Intelligence: Think with BEAM and defend your VICE (also hate AI)
“Think with BEAM and defend your VICE”. This is what the author describes as “Artful Thinking”. The two components of this statement get explained later in the section but we clearly cannot move along without complaining about an algorithmic or AI related topic, in this case, it is all about ideologies employed by transhumanists and similar groups. Weitzner argues that those ideologies are too rational, short sighted, and/or algorithmic to be realist or useful to humans in the long run. He criticizes the vision of having humans and machines merge, where we end up all in our own worlds within our “minds”, and where we would achieve some level of spiritual ascension, almost as if AIs become our gods. His biggest complaint against those ideals is that it dehumanizes us, reducing us to data points or broken machines that need fixing to become “perfect”. While transhumanism is a bit of an extreme ideology, there are certainly benefits to having machines assist us in our lives, whether it be to help overcome disabilities or push the boundaries of medicine, both of which are considered positive. It is fair to criticize those ideologies, but dismissing all the positive aspects isn’t necessary to demonstrate the benefits of Artful Thinking.
BEAM, body, environment, action, and mind. Think with them and you shall achieve Artful Thinking, at least partially. The human thought process is not simple and is influenced by a myriad of things. The author goes over how each of the components of BEAM help us overcome problems and situations. He shares an anecdote about how one of his mentors, Dr. Yitzchok Block, likes dancing on tables. Block being a Rabbi, Weitzner asks him why he performs as such. Block reveals that it brings him joy and uses it as an expression of a life well lived. While this anecdote may belong more to the VICE chapter, it is still interesting to the reader to see how one can use more than intellect or logic to demonstrate something. Block used his body to show joy. Once the explanation and joyful anecdotes are done, it is complaining time again. The
comparison between human thinking and how AI learns is brought up again, and this time we focus on Geoffrey Hinton’s quote about the difference between AI and humans: “I don’t think there is anything special about people, other than to other people.” The article Weitzner references for this quote4 is taken from a political journal and talks about AI “taking over” due to its recent explosion in advancements. 2 years later and those advancements feel mostly stalled out, there is just a plethora of similar AI assistants out there that only really differ by their specialization. There is nothing that could be considered “sentient” or at risk of taking over. But that is not what Weitzner wanted to talk about. In fact, he just wanted to express his disapproval of Hinton’s likening human thinking with AI learning, where he claims that Hinton simplifies how humans think. Was it worth including Hinton’s quote in this chapter? Most likely, but it would have felt much more hopeful to use it as a springboard to explore humans’ abilities rather than a negative talking point about how “AI experts think humans are simple therefore they are bad people”.
VICE was purposely used as an acronym as the author believes that the algorithmically controlled future will see artful thinking as going against the grain. VICE, volition, intention, choice, and explanation, is all about free will and defending your decisions. In fact, most of this chapter revolves around the exploration of free will, using anecdotes such as Rosa Park’s, where she famously would not give up her seat, defending her decision by claiming that she was tired of segregation, and that moving would mean that she was agreeing to the social norm forced onto her and her peers. There is much less complaining in this section. The obvious bit was about some Tech leader mentioning something about humans not having free will, because there had to be some complaint, and since so many of the Tech leaders happen to be transhumanist, it was fairly easy to find quotes that would please the author’s need to complain about some opposing point of view.
Artful Models: Living the art
While the first half of the book focused on definitions and explaining what Artful Living is about, the latter half focuses on examples of artful people and some more general ranting about how to live life artfully. The models section is a series of conversational interviews the author had with people he deemed were exemplary artful models, starting off with one of the author’s idols, Perry Farrel, Jane’s Addiction’s singer, who infamously had a recent altercation with fellow band mates during a reunion tour. This isn’t mentioned despite occurring before the release of the book, and while it isn’t relevant to the content of the book, those who know about it may have strong emotions about the content of this chapter. Here, Perry talks about how he isn’t trying to be rational at all, leaving that part to his wife. He mentions looking at the blue in the sky in moments where he feels overwhelmed by his computer, to which Weitzner adds that looking at the sky helps one appreciate their body image5, which isn’t completely related to what Perry was going for but it goes back to BEAM so it’s all good.
The second model is Weitzner’s therapist Dr. Joe Goodman (yes he is a real person and it's his real name). Goodman encourages the use of love to solve problems. The author does joke about the cheesiness and how love is referred to as “the jargon”. There is also some talk about how society is more addicted to their computers and get access to information provided in a lazier manner. This chapter is a bit less conversational than the last and the author uses it to explore artful medicine. This isn’t meant to be some pseudo-science bit but he goes on about how medical practitioners should be weary of trusting AI and machine learning systems as those systems could misdiagnose and that medicinal practice should not be algorithmic. There is some question about the validity of this statement as the author is very much not a medical expert, but it is a generally fair assessment and he did provide some sources to solidify his point.
The final model is the cyclist Nicole van Beurden, introduced after a bit of an intro going over how humans solve problems that are solved by AI, as AIs can only solve problems that their human creators let them solve, therefore human creativity is necessary for problem solving. Nicole doesn’t have an engineering background, but she knows how to ride a bike. She was concerned by how higher performing bikes require 5 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...
physically stronger and larger athletes to handle, which made it so smaller people could not achieve the same levels. She went out to solve the weight problem of the heavier high performance bikes and found some secondary effects in her solution that increased her performance even further. The author points out how businesses are often focused on solving a specific problem a certain way and don’t try new approaches. This is a wonderful point as so many businesses are effectively stagnant and are at risk of a competitor making a breakthrough using alternative problem solving. This isn’t to say that this chapter isn’t without flaws. The author brings up automation in planes and mentions how “planes with higher levels of automation have higher accident rate”, while referring to the 737 MAX crashes. Those crashes were due to faulty automation, but this was more of an engineering issue and lack of testing than the automation itself, as the problem has since been addressed. He ironically compares the 737 MAX crashes to the Miracle of the Hudson, where an A320 was involved, which arguably has more automated systems than the 737 due to its fly-by-wire system. The author isn’t an engineer and doesn’t have a background in aviation so he unintentionally negates his own point through ignorance…
Artful Living: Sometime we just want to rant
Closing out this book is a section about how people should live their lives to be artful. The chapter opening this section is all over the place. Starting off by mentioning how dynamic pricing works and is implemented by some system. Most people agree that the latter is incredibly infuriating and so does the author. What follows is rather weird and feels like the author releasing some built up frustration. He linked up the pro-Palestinian protests with Nazi sympathizing. He makes this relevant to the book by using it as an example of people not being algorithmic but not defending their VICE properly. This just seems to go against his earlier point about free will and doesn’t bring much value to his book, other than some emotional bias. Closing off this weird chapter is the author wanting more creators on online platforms, complaining about the ratio of creators vs consumers. It is fair to think that more Artful Thinkers would imply more creators but it wasn’t necessary to bring up here as a mild complaint.
Thankfully the following chapters are far less controversial. Weitzner wants more social environments and situations. Starting off with a mild rant about how modern students would rather have asynchronous classes with the least amount of interactions possible, weirdly linking it up to “learning about the enemy” as his students are mostly business majors which he has a disdain for. Moving on from that, he claims that social events help promote Artful thinking and brings up an example of an artist marketing their new album by setting up some speakers and mats in a circle and having bystanders listen and enjoy the moment. This is a nice example of artful thinking as an unusual method of advertising is used and the participants experienced something new and enjoyable, which may help promote more artful thinking.
The book ends on a more hopeful note. He brings up how so many tech leaders are claiming that an AI future is inevitable, but he refutes them by stating the benefits of Artful Thinking. He does make the mistake of overselling his solution, which he ironically condemns many times in this book. He ends on a warning that we should use BEAM and VICE before big tech removes all semblance of privacy and control from our lives.
Worth the read
Despite all the ranting, this book is definitely worth reading, especially if you are feeling overwhelmed by AI or if you can only live with it. If you were already against using AI, you may find some comfort in knowing that your feelings are shared and reinforce your ideas of using human thoughts and creativity to solve problems. This book could benefit from a future edition or a foreword to address the overwhelming complaints the author has but it is well written and is an easy read. It will be interesting to know if this book will end up as a staple of modern self help and used as reference in a future society.
August 4, 2025
Worth the read; but not sure I agree on BEAM and VICE. I like the examples he writes about. I am fascinated with AI . I Challenged AI and This Is What Happened" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-6Sn...
But I worry that we will allow AI to poll us and then make decisions for me.
But I worry that we will allow AI to poll us and then make decisions for me.
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