You’ve heard the warnings:
“AI is coming for your job.”
“Don’t get left behind.”
“Learn to use the tools.”
Once, this advice felt smart. Now? It’s a cliché.
“AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows AI will take your job.”
OK. Message received.
You’ve integrated AI into your routine. At first, it felt unnatural. Now, you can’t imagine writing an email without asking Chat GPT for feedback. Or you use it for brainstorming. Or coding. It helps with images and even plans your itinerary for a national park vacation.
No way you’re getting left behind. You’re the “someone who knows AI.” Or at least you will be.
But using AI isn’t enough. In fact, it’s worse than that.
If we all use AI to do what we’ve done, we’ll kill critical thinking, expedite our workplace obsolescence, and sign up for a pretty boring life.
It’s not enough to USE AI; you need to use AI differently.
No Learning, No Hugging
As we’ve come to understand, AI is a prediction machine. It’s really good at scanning massive amounts of information, recognizing patterns, and then predicting something.
Pixels, images, words. Optimal driving routes, best lodging options for a family of five at the Grand Canyon.
By definition, that makes everything it produces derivative. It can kick out something that sounds like Shakespeare. It can write in the form of an academic or Andrew Dice Clay. If you feed it enough stuff, it can sound like you. Only better. More concise with lots of em dashes.
Hooray for the stochastic parrots. Let’s keep feeding them tokens. Reinforcing their learning.
But there’s a limit to derivative work. Or maybe not a limit as much as a problem.
Over time, it sucks.
That might be a little harsh.
It’s just not novel. We break apart what makes something amazing, convert it into a formula, and decide how to repeat the magic. Repeat the magic enough and you end up with movies that all follow the same script. In fact, you end up with movies that not only follow the same script but optimize for box-office return and cross-promotion opportunities.
Want to sell a script? Better read Save the Cat, put all of your characters in spandex, and consider action-figure potential.
That’s both a feature and a bug of our capitalist operating system.
Songs start to sound like songs that will work on Tik-Tok or will hook a listener quickly to maximize streaming counts. Publishers invest in books that will fit neatly into Amazon categories and allow for targeted marketing efforts. Starving authors take notice.
Gotta game the algorithm.
In the end, we start to sound like the AI rather than the AI sounding like us (see 50% of current LinkedIn posts).
This commoditization of all things happened before AI. It just took a lot longer. Chuck Berry or Elvis or the Beatles came along and changed music. Imitators (some would put Elvis into that category) figured out how to reproduce what the innovators have done.
Over time, imitation becomes an exercise in least-common-denominator marketing. And marble polishing. The objective function settles on “maximizing shareholder return.”
A few people make a lot of money, and we end up with a pretty boring world.
But that same capitalist machine fosters an environment where innovators recognize it’s a really boring world. Someone challenges the status quo. They swim to a blue ocean. Instead of putting on ever-more-efficient circuses, someone dreams up Cirque de Soleil.
A couple buys a minor league baseball team in Savannah and determines that the team will no longer play baseball. They’ll play Bananaball. They sell out major league stadiums.
Clayten Christensen coined the term Creative Destruction to describe how industries jump S curves.
That same concept applies to art. And life. And your career.
I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners established a new genre known as the Situation Comedy. It had a number of implicit rules. A couple would have a misunderstanding. Chaos would ensue. After 22 minutes of hi-jinx, they’d kiss and credits would roll.
All sitcoms got the memo.
And then Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld said, “Screw That. No learning. No hugging.”
Sitcoms have never been the same.
The Sex Pistols and the Velvet Underground had a similar effect on music. They violated the rules. Did something totally different.
Not everyone got it. But those that did…
Roxy Music founder and legendary producer Brian Eno once said, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold about 30,000 copies in its first five years … I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
I remember reading Kafka and Borges and thinking, “Wait, you can do that?”
Adam Grant wrote a book about this. In Originals, he argues that true originals come from challenging the status quo and drawing on diverse disciplines, not staying in our lane.
By definition, originals are not derivative… even when the pull is strong to imitate.
Einstein In Our Pocket
This isn’t a new concept.
Peter Drucker warned businesses against the “routinization trap.” If we view automation as a way to take cost out of our current model, we’ll find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Before you get to the bottom, though, someone else will come along with Cirque de Soleil, and you’ll be irrelevant.
You want to be that someone else.
AI promises to supercharge what we do. It will shorten cycles and expedite maturation. That’s partially why we’re living in The Liminal Age. If the period of stasis between radical change shortens, we never really settle into “normal.”
Who will thrive in this age of constant disruption?
Not the people living in fear of AI. And not the people using AI to do what they’ve always done.
The more you leverage AI to supercharge your existing work (writing, coding, etc), the more derivative (and replaceable) you risk becoming.
So you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Kind of a silicon-valley style, Heads I Win, Tales You Lose.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
You can be an Original.
You can break the rules. Refuse to be derivative.
Since the first industrial revolution, we’ve lauded specialists. Given them prizes. Created ever-narrowing educational tracks. Many of the smartest people in the world write papers that only a few colleagues truly understand.
We’re now entering the Golden Age of the Generalist. (If you haven’t read David Epstein‘s Range, go read it).
We have Nobel laureates and Pulitzer prize winners and a million other experts in our pocket. Einstein’s avatar can now teach us physics! We’re a voice prompt away from the most obscure fact, the most complicated calculation, the most advanced regression.
The playing field for expertise has been leveled. Who cares how deep your knowledge is? And who cares how quickly you can access that deep knowledge?
It’s the sense-making generalist– the person able to ask questions that cut across disciplines, continue to interrogate information via iterative prompts– that will find outsized success. They’ll start and build businesses. Re-imagine value for their company. Seize new and interesting assignments.
They’ll also have a lot more fun.
The baseball expert optimizing pitch counts and WAR doesn’t see a Harlem Globetrotters opportunity in Savannah. That’s because innovation often comes from outside the domain, not deeper inside it.
It’s the generalist, with no allegiance to convention, who asks the better question: “What if the game isn’t broken… just boring?”
AI might take your job.
Someone who uses AI might take your job.
You don’t have to let it take your career.
And you don’t have to let it take your soul.