This week is the third edition exploring Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Today, we explore the proper way to think about AI and job risk…
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
🎯 The Idea In a Nutshell:
Everyone is worried about AI’s potential to displace jobs, but worrying doesn’t get you anywhere.
If you want to protect your income, you need to move past the fear and take a more nuanced view.
Jobs are not monolithic; they are complex bundles of tasks that fit into larger, even more complex systems.
Invest the time and energy to understand precisely how AI fits in your exact context.
Then use this knowledge to create leverage for yourself.
📝 Diving Deeper
At this point, we’ve all heard the warnings. Pending mass unemployment. The AI takeover. The dystopian prophecies of servitude to our machine overlords.
But let’s slow down for a moment. The future of work may be a dark one. But then again, maybe it won’t be. And for all the confidence the prognosticators project, the truth is, no one actually knows how all of this will unfold.
More to the point, there’s little you can do to influence the overall trajectory of AI. And every ounce of energy you spend worrying about worst-case scenarios could be better spent focused on things you can actually control.
This starts by taking a closer look at the nature of work itself. It’s critical to appreciate that jobs are not monolithic; they are comprised of complex bundles of tasks which, taken together, comprise even more complex systems. For AI to displace a human in any given job, all of this nuance must be accounted for.
Breaking your work down into its constituent parts like this gives you a blueprint. You begin to see the parts of your current value proposition that AI is primed to take over. Even more importantly, you see the parts where human intuition, relationships, judgment, and discretion will continue to play a critical role for the foreseeable future.
With this knowledge, you can lean into a two-pronged strategy:
Lean into AI: Don’t resist AI where it makes sense. Embrace it. Use it to amplify your output and extend your reach.
Double down on humanism: Cultivate the skills, habits, and ways of thinking that are uniquely human, like empathy, creativity, moral judgment, and authentic relationships.
👉 Why it matters:
We can’t put the genie back in the bottle; AI is coming whether you like it or not.
But its impact on work at scale will not arrive overnight like the flip of a switch.
It will take place in phases, automating individual tasks long before transforming entire systems.
Appreciating this nuance can help you unlock leverage in your career that others miss.
🤔 Prompts for Reflection
Are you slipping into doomsday thinking with respect to AI and your career?
How might taking a more granular look at your job help you see things more clearly?
What parts of your day-to-day work are AI primed to take over first? Are you leaning in or resisting these?
What parts of your work does AI struggle with? How can you use these to create additional leverage?
Make today impactful.
~Jason