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Today, I bring you this week’s practical guide with some advice to become irreplaceable in the AI era. Contrary to what people think, it’s possible to achieve exactly that.
The first thing you learn about AI is that a man who can explain exactly how he does what he does is in danger. The machine needs only a description. It is the man who cannot quite say how he does what he does—the poet, the priest, the philosopher, the prophet, the parent, the painter, the plumber—that the machine finds indigestible. It is in this sense that you’ve spent your professional life carefully documenting your own demise.
You were trained to measure, to register, to systematize, to legibilize. The result of those activities was the food your employer used to train a replacement, and it is food for the AI to become your replacement. Don’t repeat your mistakes; you had no choice then—your company had KPIs or chains or whatever to enslave you—but you have a choice now: stay away from AI’s path, learn all the things that can’t be measured or described. If you want to be irreplaceable you need to find the skills you have been taught to hide all your life. Those that make you you.
They like to say that AI will eventually conquer everything, even those things that make each human unique, but they are wrong. Look, the main unanswered question inside the top AI companies is whether what’s going on with coding and math—AI seems to have achieved a superhuman status in those areas—will happen across the board. They really don’t know how to do it or whether it’s even possible with existing methods. To put the dilemma more generally: Can AI master everything, or only those tasks where we can hand-hold it to mastery?
It’s always funny to think that language has turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of language models. Like, you only had one job! My fellow writers agree: Erik Hoel writes, “it’s been six years since GPT-3, and there has been no ‘move 37’ moment for writing.” Jasmine Sun writes that the problem is that authorial voice only emerges from a lived life, and thus, AI will never develop one because it “cannot live, cannot feel, cannot smell, cannot taste, cannot sense.” Something similar writes Adam Mastroianni when he claims that AI “can only read the cookbook; it can’t taste the meal,” or that AI writing is “all necklace, no neck.” AI has nothing to hold on to, no ground on which to rest its fictitious feelings. As Sam Kriss writes, “However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI.” Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed.
What differentiates math and code from stories? That you’re either right or wrong—either closer to being right or further away from it—and it’s easy to describe what right or wrong mean in those areas, and thus it is easy to reinforce the decisions in between. Describability is a necessary condition for AI models to improve at things, and yet the world is full of undescribable stuff. You are partly—mostly—undescribable. If you lean on the things that make you you, you will be irreplaceable.
From the wisdom of some of the most undescribable historical figures, I’ve gathered five principles to help you achieve just that. (Cheatsheet at the end.)
I. LEARN TO ACT ON INTUITION
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