Have you ever built a sandcastle? I’ll presume you have. You’ll likely recall the devastation that grips you when the tide comes in and rips your bucket-shaped palace from its tentative foundations. You invested several minutes sculpting your sandy beach house only to watch it wash away. Utterly helpless, you look on. Do you bother to restart knowing that another wave would tear down any time and effort you invest?
For knowledge workers who have dedicated their careers to acquiring skills for specialised roles, this sandcastle analogy rings eerily true. Decades of education upended by Large Language Models (LLMs). Financial stability, credibility, status, and career prospects are being eroded by ever-enhancing AI models developed and distributed by a handful of frontier laboratories in the United States and China. Change forced upon us without our consent. Our legal systems, copyright laws, and institutions cannot adapt fast enough to stem the tide that’s drawing in.
Everything is moving too fast for the average worker to comprehend. After more than a decade of tribulations like Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, a carousel of Prime Ministers, weak economic growth, poor mental health, toxic social media, aggressive climate change, and several ongoing wars, society could be forgiven for wishing that the world would slow down just a tad.
As an individual, it’s easy to feel powerless, demotivated, confused, and anxious. We’ve been led to believe that work, career, and money are the engines of adulthood, which power everything else we aspire to achieve. We look on, helplessly, as the world around us is reorganised in plain sight. Media outlets seem to make everything feel despairingly worse, not better. I’ll admit to feeling as though the future looks bleak, at times.
I’ve reflected deeply on AI’s threat to work and careers. I’ve come to believe that there are four (+ one) responses that any one of us can take to alleviate the anxiety we’re experiencing. Unfortunately, we are unable to consciously choose the response, since it’s a primal reaction to fear. Nevertheless, once you can see how your previous reactions may have worsened your situation, or are perhaps leading you somewhere you don’t want to go, you can take proactive steps in a preferred direction.
So, four (+ one) responses to the threat of AI to your work and career. Let’s tackle each in turn:
