How to Maintain Independence from AI in Your Career

Last night I was involved in a panel discussion hosted by Brian Garr on the future of work with #genai. One of the questions was about what workers should do to prepare for the future. Here are a few of my thoughts: 1. Develop specialist knowledge. Generalists are more likely to be replaced. Specialists will be able to use generative AI as a tool and will have the knowledge to correct for its deficiencies, knowledge that generalists are not likely to have 2. Generative AI needs to be understood from a risk management perspective. What is the risk that comes from mistakes (hallucinations, misunderstandings, knowledge gaps)? For cases where that risk is high, humans will be vital. So you need to figure out what you do that requires human intervention and focus on those things where you add value. 3. Learn to use GenAI. Individuals who can work with GenAI stand to fare better than those who avoid it. Not everyone needs to chase the $300K+/year prompt engineer jobs we keep hearing about. But translators, for instance, who can deploy GenAI, will have more to offer than those who cannot. 4. Identify what you offer. What do you do that a ten-word summary of your position cannot cover? For example, localization specialists do far more than translate, but if they cannot articulate what they do beyond that, the bean counters will want to replace them. So you need to have a compelling statement of what you contribute to your employer that cannot be easily replaced At the end of the day, GenAI is being oversold in many circles and you need to be prepared to counter hype with actual knowledge and skills. AI can mean the end for you, but only if you insist on sticking with the past rather than looking for opportunities with the technology. And if you really don’t want to use it, specialization will be even more crucial for you, as you need to make yourself truly indispensable.

If you want to be replaced by AI, do your job. - Clock in at 9, clock out at 5.  - Do what's expected of you and nothing more.  - Focus on fulfilling your tasks instead of automating them. Because who needs a human with complicated emotions, varying levels of energy, and a penchant for mistake-making when I can get AI to do the job for me fuss-free? I'm not being patronizing; I'm being realistic. We all need to realize that technology will replace elements of our jobs. And that is a wonderful thing! I am so excited about AI because it's going to replace the mundane, robotic tasks that no one wants to do... but it can never replace humans. Because humans can think, can feel, can connect. And the more tasks that are delegated to AI, the more space humans have to do those things - and the better our world will be. So if you don't want to be replaced, make yourself irreplaceable. 1. Be results-oriented. Employers don't value task-doing (because we're not robots); they value the outcome of those tasks. 2. Learn how to use AI, don't let it use you. Find pockets of mundane work that AI can do for you. Calendar scheduling, advertising copy optimization sales emails - all can be automated, personalised AND leverage AI to personalize the experience for the end user. 3. Use AI to buy back time for you to THINK. The one thing that AI can't do is think. It can learn from the things that you put into it... but it can't think. So leverage AI to automate the stuff you're doing and free up some of that time to think strategically and find creative ideas for complex problems - become an ASSET, not a cog. Let AI handle the day-to-day tick-off tasks so you can really become the best at what you do without distractions. If you are nervous about the AI revolution, don't be. Because as long as you focus on leveraging your HUMAN you'll always have value to an employer.

TLDR: Be careful what you automate. If your job is to solve problems that affect others (most are), distancing yourself from those problems hurts your ability to do that. What if the current decline of Google is the result of free lunch? __ Many years ago at Microsoft, I got into an argument on Yammer about the merits of free food. A vocal group of employees was angry that at MSFT, we had to pay for our food while at our main rival Google, it was free. The conventional argument for free lunch was that it was a cheap retention benefit: if the value of a hire is equivalent to first year's salary, then feeding someone was significantly less expensive than replacing them. And while free food might seem like a dumb thing to quit about, we know that psychologically, small things often have outsized impacts. Google was famous for this, with everything from free haircuts to free dry cleaning. Laszlo Bock claimed that the Google food pantries were actually a way to get teams to creatively collide, but it is tough to explain away all the other free benefits in the same way. But what if necessity really is the mother of all invention? There is a reason you hear founders tell the same story over and over: they encountered some problem in their life, got curious about how to solve it, learned that many others experienced the same problem, then scaled their solution. Sometimes that is just innovation theater but it is hard to deny that you can't solve a problem you don't know about. Obviously, personally experiencing a problem isn't the only way to conduct discovery but it is a natural part of how we notice things. I'm not advocating for making work or your personal life a miserable place; I think you can argue the merits of free lunch. But particularly if your job depends on the ability to notice problems that need solving, you have to be cautious about what you choose to automate. A headlong rush into AI may make you temporarily more productive but it may also prevent you from experiencing the problems of the world. This gets worse as you move up the pyramid of privilege. In general, the more you have, the more burdens you can avoid. Yet we also look to the powerful as problem solvers, because they have the access to scale solutions. This creates a paradox: the power to solve at scale is inversely proportional with the power to notice problems that need solving. But only if we let it. While privileges like gender and ethnicity are harder to avoid, using power to insulate ourselves is a choice. So if you're using AI every day, maybe pick a day and get in touch with what it is like to work without it. If you're eating a free lunch, try preparing it yourself occasionally. You don't have to become a full-time ascetic but in the immortal words of Training Day: "You gotta control your smiles and cries, because that's all you have and nobody can take that away from you."