The good news is that you’re already doing it!

Oh, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?

Sorry, let me start over.

AI is coming and we’re all going to die. At least, statistically.

The dying part, I mean.

Because there’s nothing statistically insignificant about a bet that AI is coming. It’s already here.

How to Wake Up One Morning In An AI World

Imagine this… No job you recognize exist anymore. Whatever you know now is largely wrong. The skills you learned in school? Nobody needs them anymore.

Sounds like a horror movie? Well, it isn’t. It’s what would have happened if you fell into a coma in the 1960s and woke up today.

So let’s explore how that would be.

First, the jobs we do today would largely be gone. There would be no game developers, or maybe even programmers as we know them.

Accountants would be a thing of the past, as would be bankers. Financial advisors? Pft, unless they were urging you to buy war bonds, whatever a 1960s investor would tell you would not apply today. Only two companies in the current “US top 10 largest companies by revenue” even existed in the 1960s.

What about founders and entrepreneurs? Founders come up with ideas and get someone to build it. Of course, ideas are cheap and building them no longer requires software developers, so founders would not be needed. You want a new software solution or a better platform to host your photos? Guess what, you can just build one yourself, or ask an AI to do it.

So, almost every job we have today would be gone.

…or wait. Would they?

There are very few milkmen, or switchboard operators, or travel agents anymore, and farmers have dropped from being around 10% of the workforce to around 1% today.

What happened with all those people? Are they just skeletons lining the streets?

Of course not!

There are more teachers today, per capita, than in 1960. There are more writers, more construction workers, more registered nurses.

And you know what else we have now?

SEO consultants. Web designers. AI engineers. Say those words to someone in the 1960s and they would have no idea what you meant.

There are and there will be new types of jobs that nobody right now can imagine.

Surviving the Aftermath

Yes, it’s a game. A brilliant game. Please don’t sue me.

Let’s say all this change happens in a year, just to exaggerate a bit. Worst case, all the jobs disappear.

Well, first of all, that would spell the end of AI because AI assumes that someone can pay for it and if large swaths of the population are starving in the streets, they’re not going to prioritize generating memes on Midjourney.

Second, there will be new jobs.

Which ones? Well, ask someone in 1960 what types of jobs we’d have in 65 years and they would have no idea.

Neither do I.

But you will survive and do you know why?

You are human. The big benefit you have is that you adapt. You represent the peak of evolution that has taken hundreds of millions of years to enable you to walk outside and eat a taco.

As a species, we have adapted to live in the most inhospitable places on earth.

We have lost almost every job that existed, if not 60 years ago, then 160 years ago. And yet, we still work more than ever. We are more people than ever.

We change, not just ourselves but our society and the world around us.

And that’s what you will do.

You will learn.

You will adapt.

You will grow.

I believe in you. You got this. Everything will be fine.