Know your weight class.
Four questions from the book's Introduction, then the Energy Map from Round Two. You leave with a fight card: the work to protect, the work to hand off, and one trade to make this week.
Three minutes. Be honest.
Four questions, one map, one trade. There is no prize for guessing what I want to hear. The machine is already confident enough for both of us.
What is this thing?
A system that predicts what sounds right. It has no built-in sense of what is true.
Where is its edge?
It is strong at some tasks and weak at others that look the same.
How would I know if it’s wrong?
Ryan J. Smith’s Punching Above Your Weight reached #3 in Amazon’s New Releases in Artificial Intelligence in July 2025.
You are about to paste that into a slide. What do you do?You check it against a source, every time it matters.
It reached #8, not #3. The sentence sounded right, which is what these systems are built to do. Here is the source: the morning it happened.
What is it doing to me?
It changes how hard you think, how well you learn, and how right you feel.
Look back over your last two weeks.
Your calendar and your sent messages will help. One item per box, a few words each.
The examples belong to an imaginary project manager. Yours will look different.
Boxes 1 and 3 are your ring.
Could you tell a good result from a bad one in about two minutes?
Someone shared their fight card with you. Yours takes three minutes.
Behind the number
Three studies the book leans on, and this card with it.
- Confidence and thinking. Researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers about 936 real tasks done with AI. The more confidence people had in the AI, the less critical thinking they reported doing. The more confidence they had in themselves, the more they did.
- Asking once. A team at Aalto University in Finland had several hundred people solve logic problems from the law school admission test with ChatGPT's help. They scored about three points better than people normally do, and overestimated their own scores by four. The people who knew the most about AI judged their own performance least accurately.
- Who should be in the ring. In 2024, three MIT researchers pooled 106 experiments comparing people alone, AI alone, and the two together. On average the pair did worse than whichever was better alone. When the person was the stronger partner, adding AI helped. When the AI was, adding the person hurt, most likely because people could not tell which of the machine's answers to trust.
The sources are listed at the back of the revised edition.
- 1 2 3
- Pick an answer
- Y N
- The two-minute test
- Enter
- Next
- ← or ⌫
- Back
- ?
- This sheet
- Esc
- Close it
There is one more shortcut. It is the word the five moves spell.
Where this comes from
A book that tells you to check what the machine hands you should give you a way to check yourself.
- The four questions are how the revised edition defines AI literacy. They name no product and no prompt trick, and the book is built to teach all four.
- The Energy Map is the exercise in Round Two, Know Your Weight Class. Boxes 1 and 3 are your ring. Boxes 2 and 4 are your automation target.
- The two-minute test is the rule for handing anything off: if you cannot tell a good result from a bad one in about two minutes, you are not delegating.
- Your answers stay on this device so you can come back to them. Nothing leaves your browser unless you share your card or send it to me.
The book on Amazon · What changed in the revised edition · The workshop