Journalist Ira Glass, who hosts the NPR show “This American Life,” is not a computer scientist. He doesn’t work at Google, Apple or Nvidia. But he does have a great ear for useful phrases, and in 2024 he organized an entire episode around one that might resonate with anyone who feels blindsided by the pace of AI development: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”
Coined by science journalist Alex Steffen, the phrase captures the unsettling feeling that “the experience and expertise you’ve built up” may now be obsolete – or, at least, a lot less valuable than it once was.
Whenever I lead workshops in law firms, government agencies or nonprofit organizations, I hear that same concern. Highly educated, accomplished professionals worry whether there will be a place for them in an economy where generative AI can quickly – and relativity cheaply – complete a growing list of tasks that an extremely large number of people currently get paid to do.
Seeing a future that doesn’t include you
In technology reporter Cade Metz’s 2022 book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World,” he describes the panic that washed over a veteran researcher at Microsoft named Chris Brockett when Brockett first encountered an artificial intelligence program that could essentially perform everything he’d spent decades learning how to master.
Overcome by the thought that a piece of software had now made his entire skill set and knowledge base irrelevant, Brockett was actually rushed to the hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack.
“My 52-year-old body had one of those moments when I saw a future where I wasn’t involved,” he later told Metz.
In his 2018 book, “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” MIT physicist Max Tegmark expresses a similar anxiety.
“As technology keeps improving, will the rise of AI eventually eclipse those abilities that provide my current sense of self-worth and value on the job market?”
The answer to that question, unnervingly, can often feel outside of our individual control.
“We’re seeing more AI-related products and advancements in a single day than we saw in a single year a decade ago,” a Silicon Valley product manager told a reporter for Vanity Fair back in 2023. Things have only accelerated since then.
Even Dario Amodei – the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company that created the popular chatbot Claude – has been shaken by the increasing power of AI tools. “I think of all the times when I wrote code,” he said in an interview on the tech podcast “Hard Fork.” “It’s like a part of my identity that I’m good at this. And then I’m like, oh, my god, there’s going to be these (AI) systems that [can perform a lot better than I can].”
