Facts are friendsUnderstanding what AI means for your life - without the fear or the hype.
I am Quentin Solt - a solicitor, a father of three, and someone who has spent forty years advising businesses through change. For the last few years I have watched artificial intelligence quietly rearrange work, law and daily life, and I have come to one conclusion: the only way to meet what is coming with hope rather than dread is to understand it clearly first.
That is what this website is for.
Why "facts are friends"
The phrase is not mine. It came from Wayne Fox, a mentor of mine, who taught me that only by understanding reality - however uncomfortable - can we hope to address it. You cannot prepare for what you refuse to look at.
I have adopted that as a rule for how I write about AI. No softening the parts that are genuinely alarming. No exaggerating them either, to make a better headline. Clear sight first. Everything else follows from that.
Not someone else's problem
It is tempting to assume this is happening to other people, in other industries, at some safe distance. I understand the temptation - I have felt it myself. But the changes already under way in my own profession, one of the most protected in the country, suggest otherwise.
If it can happen to lawyers, it can happen to almost anyone.
The question worth asking is not whether this affects you, but when, and what you intend to do about it while there is still time to prepare.
Two more specific doors in
If you found me through LinkedIn, and you work in law - you will want the fuller, sharper version of this conversation. Go to: AI and the legal profession →
If you are young, and trying to work out what comes next - qualifications and job security do not mean what they used to. Go to: For young people →
From living to work, to working to live
For most of history the economic problem was scarcity: not enough to go round. AI, if we handle it well, offers something we have rarely had to think about seriously - genuine abundance. The danger is that we simply pour it back into the same race for more. The question this site keeps returning to is what we do with abundance once survival is no longer the only question: whether we can move from a life organised around work, to work that serves a life worth living.
What you'll find here
Explainer
Start here
Case study
The legal profession
Agency
What you can do
Forthcoming
The book
Reading
Journal
A word about faith
I am a Christian, and I have not hidden that here. I have tried, though, to write in a way that does not require you to share it.
Love is the answer to fear, not the other way round.
Whatever you believe, or do not, I think that much holds.
One honest thing before you go further
I have been wrong before - about technology, and about people. I once argued that SMS would die when everyone had email on a BlackBerry. I have made mistakes closer to home too, including with the people I love most, and I try to write about those honestly rather than edit them out. This site is not a highlight reel. It is an attempt to think out loud, in good company, about something that matters to all of us.
If that sounds like your kind of company, I would be glad to have you along.