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New guide (free): How to survive the AI age.
This is the most important guide I've written so far. For that reason, it’s fully free. If you find it useful, share it widely!
I’ve written this because my last article gave some of you serious anxiety (the main thesis was borrowed from David Oks: tech kills jobs not by automating tasks but by making them unnecessary). This is my attempt to give you something more useful than that.
The problem with advice for the future—especially coming from AI leaders—is that it says a lot to people who already know and nothing to those who don’t.
It presupposes the mindset it prescribes. “Be adaptive” only means something to someone who's already adaptive. Same thing for “learn to learn” or “don’t fall behind.” Yeah, ok: if you drown, I will shout: just swim!
This guide is the opposite of that. It’s more a set of principles than a recipe. Ultimately, no one knows what’s coming. In a way, this is me giving advice to myself out loud.
Talk to someone who survived an industry collapse. The specifics won't match, but the emotional arc will, and that arc is what makes the transition survivable.
Don’t obsess over learning AI skills. Take the single most tedious task in your job and try to automate it. You'll learn more from failing at that than from any course.
Untangle your finances from your identity. One is a logistics problem with concrete steps, the other is existential, and mixing them creates an anxiety blob you can't work on.
Keep one task permanently AI-free. A new Wharton study found that people with AI access followed wrong answers 80% of the time and grew more confident doing it.
Your opinion about AI is irrelevant. The labor market has already made its decision, and that decision—AI for the win!—is binding whether it's correct or wrong.
The gap between zero and competent is weeks of regular use. The gap between competent and expert is years. You don’t need to be an expert but competence goes a long way.
AI makes skilled people prolific and unskilled people into “slop cannons” (they produce a lot and can't tell if any of it is good). Hone your skills before offloading.
If you can now do in four hours what used to take eight, that's four hours back for your life. Most people fill them with more work instead. Don’t.
