They will get stuck somewhere you never expected. That is the moment you find out how much you really know.
Do this
- Find one person. A friend, a neighbor, somebody at your table. Somebody who has said they do not understand this and does not want to.
- Do not explain what AI is. Open it on their device, not yours, and have them type one ordinary question with their own hands.
- Sit on your hands. Do not take the keyboard. This is harder than it sounds and it is the whole technique.
- When they get stuck, notice exactly where. Write it down afterwards.
- Show them the two-answers experiment from stop 1. It does more than any explanation.
Watch it done first, if you would rather
Let my human assistant John show you what that looks like. He does the same thing you are about to do, at the same speed, with nothing edited out.
Filming This one is not recorded yet. Everything you need is written out above, and the video will appear here when it is ready.
What just happened
They got stuck somewhere you did not predict. Almost everybody does, and it is almost never the part you prepared for. It is usually something you stopped seeing months ago, like which box to type in.
That is the real reason this is the last stop. Explaining something is the only reliable way to find the gaps in your own understanding, and the gaps are never where you expect.
Taking the keyboard is the single most common mistake. It gets the task done and teaches nothing, because the person watching learns that this is something other people do for them. Their hands have to be the ones on the keys, even when it is slow, even when it is uncomfortable to watch.
And that is the trail. You started at stop 1 not knowing what this thing was. You now know what it is, how to talk to it, when not to believe it, and how to show somebody else. That is further than most people ever get.
If something did not go as expected
- They are not interested.
- Then stop, genuinely. Ask what irritates them most about a day, and only come back to it if an assistant would actually help with that. A demonstration nobody asked for convinces nobody.
- They asked something I could not answer.
- Excellent. Say so, and look it up together. Watching somebody find out is a better lesson than watching somebody already know.
- They are frightened of breaking something.
- Very common. Show them that closing it and opening it again fixes almost everything, and that nothing they type can damage the device.
The view from here: The parts you only thought you knew