AI를 이해하는 방법

This is Part 1 on a short series on sensemaking. It is 2026 and AI hype is everywhere. If you’re like most people, you’re probably feeling some fear that you’re falling behind. Perhaps your fellow company operators are talking about successful AI use in their companies, and you’re questioning if you need to retool everything. Perhaps your friends are freaking out about losing their jobs. Perhaps you’re spending countless cycles trying to predict what’s coming next. This is understandable. Widespread panics are more common during technological revolutions. It feels scary when things are changing so quickly — and in ways that will impact your livelihood and therefore your life. If there’s anything that we’ve learnt during the Covid years, it’s that humans don’t like uncertainty. Who knows what the landscape of work would look like in a few short years? Nobody does. And yet there is an effective way to make sense of these accelerating changes. With the right frame, you can maintain your equanimity and focus on the right things — that is, only the things that may affect your outcomes. This doesn’t mean sitting back and passively observing the changes around you. In some ways you’re going to take more action as you investigate the new capabilities of this technology. But you want to be able to investigate without flailing around. The ideal response looks like this: you are able to make decisions without being emotionally affected, without feeling FOMO, and without the distraction and panic that has claimed so many in the business world. You will seem oddly quiet and determined, unfazed by any change that comes your way. You will ignore unfounded AI doomerism and unfounded hype equally; you are able to test assertions and measure outcomes without emotion. Done right, this frame will help you become effective at ‘fast adaptation under uncertainty’, so that you know how to direct your attention and therefore your actions. In 2023, at the start of the current AI boom, I decided to read a bunch of histories about previous technological bubbles revolutions. The most helpful book was Engines That Move Markets, by Alisdair Nairn, which covers 10 different tech bubbles. A second book that was helpful (h/t David MacIver) was David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, which I’ve mentioned in passing in Letter to a Young Person Worried About AI. I also reread multiple biographies that coincided with certain new technologies — Reminiscences of a Stock Operator was one (the protagonist, Jesse Livermore, dealt a fair bit with railway stocks), plus bits from Titan, Ron Chernow’s history of John D Rockefeller (oil) and chunks of The House of Morgan, Chernow’s history of J. P. Morgan (railroads, steel, and oil). Then I skimmed various biographies of the early PC era, just to get a feel for the takeoff stages of these bubbles. All told, my reading program took 1.5 years. I couldn’t articulate what I was looking for then, but I think I can articulate it now. First, I wanted to know what it felt like as these technological revolutions progressed. I was too young for the dotcom bust, though I watched the outcome of that revolution unfold in my teens and my 20s. (One common thing with all of these revolutions, by the way, is that they take multiple decades to unfold). The second thing I was looking for? I wanted a generalised strategy for sensemaking revolutionary new technology. This essay will lay out what I’ve worked out for myself. It will be short. It contains a method of sensemaking that you may adapt to your own circumstances, assuming that you are a business operator. (Note: if you are an investor, this essay is not for you. The sensemaking needs of investors are significantly more advanced). The sensemaking approach outlined here is generally useful; it applies to any new technology. This means that once you master this approach, you will be able to apply it to all other paradigm-changing technologies that will emerge over the course of your life. In latter instalments, we will cover what sensemaking actually is, and how experts sensemake more effectively compared to novices. This is informed by research funded by the US Military decades ago, which was in turn motivated by a need to help warfighters and intelligence analysts make sense of uncertain, fast-changing scenarios. Then, with some theory at hand, we will examine why the method laid out in this essay is a good start, but is actually not enough. The Method First, let’s lay down a few ground rules. The first ground rule is that your attention is a limited resource. You are inundated with news, opinions, Substack takes, and (god forbid) tweets, which are designed to elicit responses from you. Some of these responses will be helpful. Others will not. At its core, sensemaking is the art of regulating attention. This is a fancier way of saying that you must know what to ignore. And then you must have the discipline of mind to ignore those things, so that you may focus only on t