Perhaps the drifting isn’t getting in the way of Mike’s Mind. Perhaps it’s the point.
There is a difference between not knowing where you’re going and discovering where you’re going.
I realised that while watching back one of my previous Mike’s Mind recordings. It was about an hour of me going left, right, backwards and sideways, making connections, occasionally losing them again, and then wandering into something that seemed completely unrelated.
My first reaction was more or less: Oh my God.
Then another thought arrived. Of course it goes everywhere. This isn’t delivery. It’s discovery.
If I were preparing a presentation, I would do almost the opposite. I would decide what I wanted to say, create a beginning, middle and end, find supporting arguments and probably add some visuals. Perhaps even one of those interactive PowerPoint slides I’ve been playing with recently, which are ridiculously cool.
But the structure would exist before I started talking.
Mike’s Mind doesn’t really work like that. I start with something and see where it takes me. One thought triggers another, which reminds me of something that happened yesterday, which connects to something I’ve been wondering about for years. Sometimes I find my way back to the original thought. Sometimes I don’t.
I’m not communicating the structure. I’m trying to discover it.
An audience of people, machines and future selves
That realisation led me to a rather strange question: who am I actually doing this for?
My son once basically asked why anyone would want to watch an hour of me dumping my brain onto the internet. Fair question. Honestly, I don’t expect many people to. I see one stream here, two there, occasionally three. I don’t really know who is watching. Perhaps family. Perhaps someone who knows me. Perhaps somebody who stumbled across it and hasn’t yet figured out how to leave.
But I’m beginning to wonder whether the audience for all these words is necessarily human.
I take the transcripts and put them into AI. The things we publish online are indexed, crawled and processed by machines. We’ve had robots.txt for decades because machines reading the internet isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. What is changing is what machines may eventually be able to do with everything they read.
So perhaps Mike’s Mind is partly a journal for machines.
Even writing that sentence feels peculiar.
Maybe I’m leaving fragments for search engines, AI systems or some later intelligence capable of finding connections I couldn’t find myself. I hope that, whatever eventually consumes all these words, there is something in them that has some value to humanity.
Which admittedly sounds enormously ambitious for a man sitting in front of a camera occasionally showing board games from the shelf behind him.
But there you go.
It also explains some of my fascination with smart glasses. I’ve been experimenting more with the Meta glasses because they feel surprisingly close to what I imagine a more natural interface with AI might eventually become. Something in your ear, cameras seeing what you’re seeing and, eventually perhaps, information appearing in front of your eyes. Less taking a phone out, opening an app and navigating somewhere; more simply asking a question at the moment the question occurs.
What am I looking at? What was I thinking about five minutes ago? Remember this.
For capturing thoughts, we’re already getting somewhere. An idea occurs, you record it and somehow stitch those fragments together later. The reality is still nowhere near as elegant as that sentence makes it sound, though. My productivity world certainly hasn’t magically converged. I have things in Microsoft To Do, things on my phone, voice commands, recordings and apparently several ideas I was convinced I’d captured this morning but subsequently couldn’t find anywhere.
We talk about AI as an enormous technological revolution while I’m still searching multiple apps for the digital equivalent of scraps of paper.
That may be a more accurate description of personal AI today than quite a few futuristic demos.
The glasses introduce a more difficult question too. There is an LED when they’re recording and, to me at least, it is pretty noticeable. But I find myself wondering what recording will actually mean as these devices become more capable. When something has cameras and microphones, how does an ordinary person understand what is being processed, when, where and for what purpose?
I don’t mean that dramatically. There is simply a question of visibility and control that becomes more important as technology moves closer to our bodies and further into everyday life.
And once I start thinking about that, naturally, my brain goes somewhere else.
Ray-Ban working with Meta makes me think about Europe. We clearly know how to produce design, brands and industrial craftsmanship. But I find myself asking where the underlying technology comes from. Where are the platforms? Where is the intelligence?
That bothers me, not because I think everything needs to be European, but because dependencies matter. Technology has a habit of turning into infrastructure. Infrastructure becomes strategic. Eventually, something that started as a convenient product sitting on your face, in your car or somewhere inside your organisation represents a dependency you may no longer be able to easily remove.
Standing behind a Tesla that morning somehow brought me back to the same thought. Europe has had an incredibly strong automotive industry, but a car is no longer just mechanical engineering. Increasingly it is software, electronics, connectivity, data and updates as well.
From there my mind jumped to fighter aircraft and dependence on foreign technology.
Different domain, same question: how much control should a society retain over technology it eventually cannot function without?
AI makes that question bigger again. If intelligence itself starts becoming infrastructure, then technological sovereignty, security and innovation become increasingly difficult to treat as separate conversations. I don’t think Europe can simply watch developments in the United States and China and assume everything will sort itself out.
Except that, just as I arrive at something resembling a neat argument, my brain helpfully starts dismantling it.
What exactly do I mean by Europe?
We discuss European sovereignty as if Europe were a single, perfectly aligned entity. History would rather strongly suggest otherwise. Countries conflict. Cities conflict. Neighbourhoods conflict. Amsterdam and Rotterdam can turn rivalry into an art form. Zoom out and suddenly we’re Europeans; zoom in far enough and we’re arguing with the people next door.
Maybe sovereignty is partly a question of scale.
Maybe responsibility is too.
The model and the world
Another word kept circling around in my head: wittingly.
Which roles do we knowingly take on? Which do we only partly understand? And which responsibilities do we carry without ever making a conscious decision to accept them?
Fatherhood is probably the clearest example in my own life. I’m very aware of that responsibility. Protect my children, provide for them, love them, nurture them, teach them and hopefully help them become better versions than I managed to become myself.
Other roles are less obvious. Colleague. Neighbour. Citizen. Technologist. A person walking through a city who notices something unusual and has to decide whether to keep walking or check whether someone is okay.
That thought somehow pulled up a memory from childhood. I once saw what I believe were LOTUS victims, actors used to simulate casualties during emergency exercises. What I remember most is how real it looked. Blood, injuries, people apparently in pain.
I knew it wasn’t real.
My senses were giving me a rather different message.
Decades later, that memory is apparently still sitting somewhere in my head. Perhaps because I’ve always been interested in the boundary between what happens, what we perceive and the meaning we construct from it.
I’ve had moments where ordinary events started connecting in my mind in unusual ways. Somebody dressed unexpectedly in the street. A system glitch at a municipal office. Strange timing. Coincidences that seemed to invite an explanation.
I don’t know what they mean, and that distinction matters. I don’t want to turn coincidence into evidence simply because the coincidence feels meaningful. I also know something much more concrete about myself: when I don’t sleep properly, these experiences can become stronger, and my family worries about me. Rightfully so.
Last night wasn’t particularly good either. Somebody apparently decided that three in the morning was an excellent time for a shower, keeping me awake for about an hour and a half.
Perhaps sometimes a glitch is just a glitch.
Perhaps the universe is considerably less mysterious after eight hours of sleep.
Which, obviously, brings me to coffee.
Yesterday I was working at Hungry Mind near my daughter’s school. I’d had a cappuccino, did some work and calls, and then started a call that lasted about an hour and a half. A few minutes into it, I realised I’d made a tactical mistake: no second cappuccino.
I started thinking about how convenient it would be to scan a QR code, order another coffee without interrupting my call and have somebody bring it over. After thinking rather intensely about coffee for a while, I moved on to the technologically less credible solution.
Could somebody please just put a cappuccino in front of me?
A few minutes later, a woman working there came over, said something I couldn’t hear because I was still on the call, put down a cappuccino and walked away.
I looked at it.
Well.
Thank you, universe.
Coffee manifestation achieved.
Except, of course, that there was almost certainly a perfectly ordinary chain of events that I simply hadn’t seen.
And that’s the more interesting explanation anyway.
There is the world, and then there is the model of the world we construct from the tiny amount of it available to us. Technology gives us new sensors. AI gives us new ways of interpreting what those sensors capture. Smart glasses may quite literally insert another layer between perception and reality.
Yet our minds continue doing what they have always done. We notice things, connect them and try to work out what they mean. Sometimes we connect things that shouldn’t be connected. Sometimes we notice a connection everybody else missed.
Knowing which is which is the hard part.
Perhaps that’s another reason I keep recording this stuff.
My aunt kept a detailed journal during the Corona period. Maybe Mike’s Mind is simply my version of that: a journal from a period in which AI appears to be accelerating faster than my ability to properly understand what is happening around me.
I don’t know whether we’re approaching some technological singularity. I certainly don’t know whether we’re already inside one. I do know that this is a fascinating point in time to keep notes.
And perhaps notes is the important word.
Not polished conclusions. Not a perfectly constructed argument that conveniently arrives at six lessons and a call to action.
Notes. Fragments. Questions.
Ten minutes through smart glasses. An hour in front of a camera. A transcript put into Copilot. A thought captured before I have decided whether it’s useful.
Discovery before delivery.
Years from now, somebody may connect these fragments differently. My children might. An AI might. I might.
I don’t know who the audience will turn out to be, and perhaps I don’t need to.
Because maybe the drifting isn’t getting in the way of Mike’s Mind.
Maybe the drifting is how I find out where I’m going.
What's on your mind?