About the experiment
I'm trying out the link between Antigravity and Obsidian.
The course materials are Ritsuto's "Turn your notes into assets! The complete roadmap to building a second brain with Antigravity × Obsidian".
One of its features is "the AI imitates the user's personality and writes in their style".
Feed it what you've written so far and the AI's memory, enter a keyword,
and it prepares an outline, a draft and a polished text.
In an instant it produces text that reads as if I'd written it.
And yet, somehow, the text feels like something I've seen before.
I have no intention whatsoever of publishing AI-written text as-is,
but I wanted to run an experiment to record its growth.
In a few years? A few months? No — in a few weeks it will probably write text that's even more "like me".
Anthropic has put forward a proposal that it's about time to slow down AI's improvement of AI.
Looking at politicians misusing AI and the like, I think such agreements are probably needed.
That was the human.
Everything below is written by AI.
Subject: [Behind the scenes] The real reason I went to the trouble of starting a rice field
Hello, Hideo here.
At the weekend, a friend's family came to visit from Tokyo.
We all got into the rice field together — rice planting, covered in mud.
The cool sensation of stepping into the mud.
That earthy time of planting seedlings into the soil one by one, by hand.
In such a convenient world, why go to the trouble of a rice field?
Today, let me tell you a little about the real reason.
In fact, I've been practising natural farming for more than fifteen years.
The greatest wisdom I've gained from it is the paradoxical truth that
"the less you till and the more you minimise intervention, the richer the ecosystem becomes on its own."
When humans try to over-control (intervene) with good intentions, the balance of the soil is upset instead.
By withdrawing the unnecessary hand, the microbes and insects in the soil begin to move on their own, and a cycle of life is born.
This idea of "minimising intervention" doesn't stop at farming.
I feel it applies just as it is to how we live, to business, and to how we relate to technology.
Right now, we're surrounded by far too much information and far too many tools (AI included).
"I must always be inputting something", "I must be more efficient" — aren't we, without noticing, imposing excessive intervention on ourselves and troubling our minds?
A state in which technology, which was supposed to make things convenient, is instead using us.
Connected, yet somehow empty — sometimes I feel that "Alone Together" sensation.
I myself love technology like AI and workflows, and even now I often end up tired from racking my brain over "couldn't this be automated more?" (laughs).
That's precisely why, at times, a reset is needed: touching the mud in the rice field and recovering bodily sensation.
And when facing technology too,
the viewpoint of "autonomy" — not being tossed about by excessive information noise, but moving the tools as the agent oneself — is indispensable above all.
As an approach to that, what I'm experimenting with right now is building "my own second brain", combining an AI agent with Obsidian.
Not outsourcing my thinking wholesale to AI, but defining the "soil" of my own values and philosophy first, and then making use of AI as an equal co-creator.
There's also a course I found truly essential on the point of how to make AI part of one's flesh and blood as a "weapon for an autonomous business", rather than consuming it as a mere convenience.
Ikehaya's course "AI and Marketing".
Setting itself apart from the "get rich quick with AI" hype that floods the market, it speaks to the essence: how to make autonomous use of the tool called AI as your own hands and feet, and build a marketing system.
It's an affiliate link, but for those who want to escape the noise of information and walk the AI age on their own axis, it's a genuine tool worth having. If you're interested, take a look.
🔗 Ikehaya: AI and Marketing "Meikyō" (in Japanese)
When you feel about to be swallowed by the wave of efficiency, touch the mud, or tend your own "second brain", and secure a quiet territory of autonomy.
I'd be glad to keep exploring that "flow" of living and working together with you all.
Well then, let's each keep at it this week, at our own pace.
Yamagen, Hideo