Hi you,
I just had the most thoughtful, joyful, real AF conversation this morning, and I can’t wait for you to watch it. I met Shae Omonijo two months ago at what I declared then and still believe is the best AI conference I’d ever been a part of. It was organized by Dr. Prudence Carter, director of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. (There is still one. It exists. Don’t tell nobody.)
Shae is a Harvard PhD candidate, founder, and the person I’m now calling our Chief Critical Thinking Officer. She is an academic who actually makes shit, and talks like a person. Watch the video above and you’ll see what I mean.
We covered a lot of ground:
The good steward principle: AI has an environmental cost, and most of it isn’t on you. It’s on the companies and systems that designed this mess. But in the space you do control, she makes a practical case for local AI that runs on your own device instead of a distant data center. The benefits go beyond the environment: it’s privacy, it’s control, and it’s not being stuck in one company’s worldview. Want to try it yourself?
Start with Jan.ai, a free open source alternative to ChatGPT.
Check what your hardware can actually handle at canirun.ai.
And if you want a guided entry point, Shae put together a beginner’s guide to local AI (I bought it today).
The great de-skilling: We are losing skills and losing trust in the skills we still do have. Shae picked up a pen after three and a half weeks of travel and it felt foreign in her hand. She’s a writer. That’s core to who she is. A software engineer friend told her he’d been looking at code he thought was wrong but letting Claude Code execute anyway and waiting for it to break to confirm what he already knew.
“Every skill requires constant refinement. If I stopped reading today, I’m going to become a crap writer.”
Good friction vs. bad friction: Bad friction is spending seven hours navigating an archaic digitized archive. Good friction is writing your morning pages by hand because you know you won’t be distracted. The question worth sitting with: what tasks define you, and which ones are just in the way? For example: I’m learning French by writing it longhand so it absorbs into me rather than bouncing off.
The critical thinking bot: Shae built an AI that doesn’t think for you. It questions you until you can give your idea back to it “clear, concise, and defensible.” She deliberately didn’t name it, so you always know you’re talking to a bot. It’s even programmed to tell you to stop: “Why don’t you go touch the grass? I’m gonna be here.” It’s free at criticalthinkingbot.com.
Independent thought, independent models: Shae’s vision is local AI that is decentralized, community-run, and running on your own data so that access can never be cut off. AI was built on human labor and data, so people should own it. “You built this, whether you like it or not.” I translated for the people in the back: reparations now, reparations forever.
Watch the full conversation above. Then come back and tell us in the comments: What skills are you keeping for yourself? Where are you letting good friction do its work in your life?
Subscribe to Shae’s work on Substack at Ai, Humanities, and the Future of Work.
And subscribe to Life With Machines if you haven’t already and we’ll send you our AI Go Bag: a guide to extracting what these tools know about you so you can move freely, whenever you need to.
We’ll be doing this again. Shae-tunde. You heard it here first.
Stay free,
– Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
