It is difficult to open any newspaper (I know, who still does that anyway?) or consume any news, let alone join any business discussions, without having to talk about AI. The topic does not go away, though within this broad topic there are so many layers and subthemes and messages that it rarely gets boring, anyway.
As Garrison Lovely noted in his brilliant book, Obsolete, people tend to fall into three categories when it comes to AI attitudes. There are the accelerators, who are basically in the utopian camp and accordingly convinced that artificial intelligence will solve all of our problems, so we cannot go fast enough in our efforts to accelerate and evolve AI. At the opposite extreme, we can find the worriers, who think AI-induced human extinction is looming and even if not, there’s a strong chance that AI will have devastating effects on work and life. And then you have the critics who are broadly skeptical about most popular claims about AI, whether positive or negative, and perhaps most controversially believe that AI is simply overrated.
Since nobody has data on the future, we will avoid picking camps here—time will tell, and by “time” we should really mean the next two or three decades rather than 2027 or 2028. Indeed, obsessing over the future can be an unhealthy strategy for not dealing with present problems and concerns, including how to remain relevant in an age in which AI is unquestionably performing a large number of “knowledge economy” tasks that were hitherto the exclusive remit of human intelligence. As I predicted in I, Human, AI’s growing ability to compete with human skills is not just redefining what it means to be human, but also forcing us to double down on the things AI cannot replace even in order to remain employable.
Key indicators
So, how should you assess your employability and career success in today’s AI age, and what are some positive signs that you are unlikely to be automated or made obsolete by AI? As of today, here are five critical indicators to consider:
(1) You have a “messy job”: As Luis Garicano at the London School of Economics wisely noted, one of the best ways to resist automation is to have a chaotic, unpredictable, or “messy” job. Indeed, AI’s value is mostly in automating tasks, but you can only automate what you can standardize first; conversely, if you automate chaos you get chaos at scale. This is not to be mistaken for having a disorganized or chaotic mindset, which makes even predictable and orderly things seem chaotic, but rather an objectively unpredictable, complex, and nonrepetitive working routine—or if you prefer, a nonroutine!.
(2) You have a “hungry mind”: As my colleagues and I showed, contemporary careers require not just a strong work ethic and people skills, but also high levels of intellectual curiosity. Indeed, this is even more pressing in the AI age, which removes incentives for developing or harnessing human curiosity—why learn, after all, if you can answer any question at your fingertips just by prompting genAI? In that sense, you can think of genAI as the intellectual equivalent of the fast food industry. It’s there 24/7 and provides you with a tasty, quick, cheap but not very nutritious fix, and it can be quite addictive too. Just like our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t need standing desks, gym memberships, or Pilates (for they were active all day and only ate very healthy and nutritious food . . . IF they were active enough to procure it!) it is conceivable that their offspring may need to develop new cultural adaptations in order to keep their mental muscles from atrophying. For example, they may go on “thinking retreats” to stimulate those parts of the brain that have become nearly dormant because every thinking task is outsourced to AI. Until we get there, curiosity will keep some people more active in the thinking and learning departments, and for them there is hope. (Incidentally, this will also allow them to understand and leverage AI more, including for augmentation purposes.)
(3) You are entrepreneurial: While employers are trying to figure out what AI will do to their organizations and jobs, some people are finding ways to leverage AI’s disruptive and innovative potential. Not so much to delegate boring and tedious tasks—typically, the value AI brings is not in what it automates, but rather what humans learn to do with the time they save—but in order to experiment and test new ideas and innovations. In essence, entrepreneurial people see opportunities where others don’t, and they are quicker than others to act on those potential opportunities by bridging the gap between demand and supply. For example, in the AI age, a single individual can now launch a business that would previously have required a small army of employees, using AI to conduct market research, develop products, build websites, create marketing campaigns, manage customer relationships, and even provide customer support. Likewise, professionals can turn their expertise into new products and services, identify unmet customer needs, or experiment with business models that would have been too expensive or time-consuming to test before. In that sense, AI is not just a tool for doing existing things faster or cheaper, but an opportunity to do things that were previously impossible, or at least economically unviable. The critical difference, of course, is that while AI makes it easier than ever to execute an idea, it does not necessarily make people better at coming up with good ideas in the first place, let alone identifying which ones are worth pursuing.
(4) Your employer is seriously committed to “augmentation” rather than “automation”: Most organizations promise their employees “augmentation dreams,” which roughly translates into a utopian world where their jobs are more interesting, fun, and rewarding, and they are more productive because they have AI as their copilot or co-intelligence. However, many of these employers give up on the vision and instead yield to the temptation to automate and cut entry level jobs just to show some ROI from AI. Fortunately, some employers have not given up yet. You may consider yourself fortunate and less vulnerable to automation if your employer is genuinely trying to figure out how to augment rather than automate humans in the AI age. As always, choosing your employer (and boss) wisely is often more consequential for your career than whatever skills, personality, or talent you may have.
(5) Artificial general intelligence is less likely than techno-enthusiasts think: As Garrison Lovely explains in Obsolete, much of the debate about AI’s impact on humanity rests on assumptions about the future that are presented as if they were facts. In particular, the notion that AI will inevitably progress from today’s impressive but imperfect systems to artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of matching or surpassing humans across virtually every cognitive domain, remains a prediction rather than an established scientific fact. Indeed, there is a rather significant difference between building machines that can perform an ever-growing number of intellectual tasks and creating machines that can think, reason, learn, and adapt as flexibly as humans do, particularly in unfamiliar situations. Of course, this does not mean AGI is impossible, or that we should dismiss the very real risks of AI simply because some of its most enthusiastic advocates have a tendency to confuse science with science fiction. Nor does it mean that AGI is necessary for AI to displace millions of workers. However, the assumption that human intelligence is merely a temporary competitive advantage, destined to disappear as soon as machines become sufficiently powerful, is far from proven. In that sense, perhaps the most reassuring sign that you will not become obsolete is that nobody, including those who are most confident about predicting our obsolescence, actually knows when, whether, or how AGI will arrive. And while betting your career on the failure of technological progress would be unwise, betting against the accuracy of Silicon Valley’s predictions may be a rather more sensible strategy.
Ultimately, the best way to avoid becoming obsolete is not to obsess over what AI may or may not be able to do in the future, but to focus on what you can do today to remain valuable, relevant, and adaptable. This means cultivating the skills, mindsets, and opportunities that enable you to work with AI rather than compete against it, while remembering that your employer’s choices may matter as much as your own. Even if AI stopped evolving today (which, let’s face it, is unlikely), we would still need to work hard to upgrade ourselves as humans, especially to be future-fit for an employment market that has already been shaken up by AI.
