Welcome to Output AFK. I’m Jason Locklear, explorer of AI and agentic workflows that elevate human work.
**What's Output AFK?**
Output = the work
AFK = Stands for "away from keyboard", used by gamers and online chats when they step away from the device without logging out.The Mission
My mission is to use AI to free us from these tyrannical devices we spend most of our time hunched over, plugged in, and ultimately ignoring the natural world around us.
People get excited when AI systems give them crazy large outputs. Like a 3,000-word article they didn’t have to write, or 60 post ideas they didn’t have to think up. They want more work done. They want 10X this, faster this, more of this, more of that, more work, work, work.
It’s cool to look at a massive article you didn’t have before. You can start editing through it, scrubbing out the em dashes (a quick tell it was written by AI) and trying to re-apply some human element to avoid your “ChatGPT” from showing. But it's kind of missing the point.
For me, the point for AI to do the work is so that I can shut the laptop and go touch some grass. Or I can go jump in the ocean, because that's what I really want to do.
The Point
Wouldn't it be better to just close your laptop and let the AI do its thing?
We're all using this new technology as a glorified search engine, when we could be using it for so much more…
To go search our souls outside and let the machines do the work. That is the best benefit I can possibly imagine from using computers in general, from using systems and automations and AI and all these things that go into The Work.
Let’s put this in perspective. Zoom out. What do I mean by zoom out?
If you were watching a movie of yourself, what would you actually be doing? Reality is, probably hunched over a little box with a light shining on your face from the screen.
Now imagine what the world would look like if all the devices were invisible, but people kept doing exactly what we're doing right now.
Everyone's just kind of looking down, right?
Enthralled in our brains, increasing our anxiety because we’re too much in our heads, and not outside in the world.
The point of Artificial Intelligence is for humans to unplug.
We want the output, but we want it to be “away from keyboard”, or AFK.
It's a classic gamer term. You could set something to happen while you're AFK, or if you want to take a little break, and you don't want to log out, you just type /AFK.
You, away from the keyboard. But you're still gonna get the output.
That’s the goal.
What’s next: Learning how to leverage AI workflows and AI Agents to save time, and maybe be a little more human.
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Jason Locklear
