Stop Saying "AI is Coming for Our Jobs"
When I lived in San Francisco, all the women said, “Dating in San Francisco sucks.”
When I moved to LA, all the women said, “Dating in LA sucks.”
When I moved to New York, all the women said, “Dating in New York sucks.”
I believed them every time, as I bounced between those three cities, trying to determine which one sucked the least when it came to dating.
Eventually I discovered that the Erewohn smoothie drinkers were right: reality truly is what we make it. Since we’re the ones with the narrator in our head telling us what’s going on, it’s up to us to determine whether our life is a rom-com, horror movie or some other genre entirely.
Once I realized this (and was back living in LA, where people said dating sucked with even more vehemence than they said it in San Francisco and New York), I came up with a response to anyone who started talking about dating with that familiar “oh, it sucks” sigh. My response became a bit of a mantra. It went like this:
Dating is fun.
Did I think dating was fun? God, no. It was mostly horrific with a smattering of fun. But I knew that if I told myself that dating was fun, it would keep me from misery bonding with the rest of my single friends. I thought this attitude would eventually help bring about the result I wanted: to not have to date.
This means when I went out with the guy who claimed to be 47 and revealed at dinner he was 60 but it was okay because he “looked” 471, I told myself, “Dating is fun.”
When I went out with the guy who sat in silence for so long that I eventually felt compelled to tell him that it was his responsibility to at least try to contribute to the conversation: dating is fun.
When I went out with the guy who accidentally revealed he had a date later that night with a friend of mine: dating is fun.
(Every now and then it was fun but…well, you know that expression about stopped clocks isn’t just true when it comes to stopped clocks.)
My point—almost seven years into my relationship, when all those years of horrific and occasionally glorious dating seem like a bit of a fever dream—is that we get the results we tell ourselves we will. I firmly believe I got what I wanted in the end because I refused to believe what could have been my point of view: dating sucked and I’d be stuck in sucky land forever. I told myself a different story and by doing that, I created a different story.
And that’s what I’m doing with AI now. I simply refuse to buy into the “AI is coming for all of our jobs” fear-mongering. Yes, I know there are AI-written books being released as I write this. And yes, I have witnessed firsthand how much more time and money I can save by having AI do something I used to ask another human (or myself) to do. Yes, AI’s ability to produce is astounding and occasionally terrifying. But I also believe that if I tell myself AI is coming for my job, I can bring about that reality.
I’m not saying that AI isn’t coming for a lot of our jobs. It already has. But you want to know whose jobs it’s coming for now? The ones held by people who have been setting themselves up for it by constantly proclaiming that it will happen.
You know who will be last victims (if indeed they end up up being victims at all)? The people who didn’t drink the misery Kool Aid, who decided once they saw how mammoth AI was that they were going to use it rather than be used by it. The people who set out to master these new tools rather than spend all their energy fighting them, or just yelling about how bad they are.
I understand how Polyanna-ish or out of touch this point of view may seem when there’s already so much proof that AI is taking away people’s jobs. But new developments are always taking away people’s jobs. In the early 2000s, I got very comfortable making $2 a word writing for magazines when the Huffington Post came along and showed that lots of people were writing for free. Then places like Forbes and Fast Company one-upped that and started inviting people to pay to write for them.
The entire industry I’d built my career around was gone. So I had to starve or figure something else out and my biggest regret is that I didn’t wake up and start finding my new path sooner. I spent years pitching articles to make a few hundred dollars and trying to make a living off of running websites when dynamic ads had decimated the web business, rather than looking at the new options out there.
That means that if you’ve been pounding the drum of AI despair, it’s time to stop. You don’t need to become a big fan of it but you do need to learn about it before you become the parent who needs their kid to show them how to text.
Maybe today is the day you…
Revise your website so that it’s more AI-friendly. Or upload your book to an LLM to have it select the most compelling quotes for you to use to promote your book on social media. Or ask AI to proofread the copy on your site. Or use it to help you brainstorm titles for your next book.
But don’t confuse educating yourself with surrendering to the lowest common denominator. Don’t go and have AI write your book or use a schlocky AI book publishing company to publish your book. Don’t let an AI bot sell you on bogus book marketing services.2
But most of all, don’t freak out about AI stealing your work. Instead start focusing on not being left behind.
