We didn't stumble into this planet-shaping technology. We’ve been sprinting toward it for decades.

Every major leap in human history has been about convenience. Cars replaced horses. Dishwashers replaced sinks full of congealing plates and lazy children. Amazon's one-click checkout replaced the incredible burden of having to… click twice.

Bezos said it: "When you reduce friction, make something easier, customers use more of it."

For better or for worse, it’s this principle that is arguably most responsible for Amazon’s continued success.

We don't want to churn our own butter, unless we’re Weird Al Yankovic throwing down on Coolio. We don't want to gather ice from a frozen lake unless we’re watching a Frozen marathon with our kids.

So of course we built AI. It's the logical endpoint of every contraption we've ever built. It’s the natural apex of where centuries of capitalism and technological development meet.

And let’s not forget: no one actually wants to sort tiny screws on an assembly line for 40 years or lose a finger separating fish guts all day. No one dreams of data entry or back-breaking labor in a field. No reasonable person argues that repetitive, soul-crushing work is the best use of a human life. It’s always been a means to another end.

My view is that every one of us should be thrilled right now about the possibility of removing much of the repetitive and mundane crap from our lives that we’ve spent decades complaining about to anyone who would hear us over a beer.

BUT:

You know, and I know…

Every sci-fi book we've ever read ends the same way, doesn’t it? The “system” eventually decides that the ultimate "inefficiency" to be solved... is humans!

And even without AI, psychologically, many of us feel largely useless in society today, and that our only value might in fact be sorting tiny screws. This is the great human tragedy of mechanization.

But it’s not that we’re afraid of automation. We’re not afraid of letting a robot vacuum for us or clean our toilet. We're afraid that some alien consciousness or narcissistic trillionaire will look at humanity the way we look at an abacus.

We just want to feed our kids. We all want to know that there's a place for us and our family in whatever comes next.

And for a growing number of people, that's starting to feel like an open question.

So what do we do? We can’t stop evolution. I say we think back to our childhood. To a time when we absorbed biology, physics, math, and literature all in a single day. When our brains knew that multidisciplinary learning was normal. We must all remember that we're still capable of learning new things, and that as long as we are alive, we can adapt and grow.

To an ignoramus like me, a house is either nice or ugly. But to a realtor, there’s something called ”curb appeal”.

Every job in every industry has its own jargon and lingo—did you set the right OKRs and KPIs? Send me the CTAs and CTRs ASAP!

Much of these terms are silly and somewhat arbitrary. But they exist because every professional has simply thought about their subject much more than every non-professional. They’ve spent a LOT more time with the problem than we have.

Even Einstein said, "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."

For a realtor, the problem of selling a house is nothing new.

There’s not much I can teach the 80-year-old cardiac surgeon I golfed with about human anatomy, but he doesn’t know GitHub from Vercel and thinks a Pull Request is something naughty.

So it’s hard to judge AI if we don’t immerse ourselves in it.

Here’s an angle we don’t often see: An article on Ramp shows that companies that invest heavily in AI actually hire more than those that don’t, with companies that only invest a little in AI showing no noticeable change.

I find this particularly interesting because they say “Entry-level headcount grew even faster. At the companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level headcount grew 12% over the two years following adoption.”

And entry-level jobs are exactly the ones many are most afraid will disappear.

What does this mean for the younger generation entering the workforce?

As a millennial, we were in the same boat when we entered the job market: we couldn’t compete on experience and expertise, and the economy was in a series of downturns that we’re still reeling from.

But millennials got jobs because we understood technologies the older generation didn’t. That’s how we filled novel roles like social media manager, digital marketer, and so on.

I believe the trick is to find areas in which no one is an expert, so you can compete on a level playing field.

By understanding technologies that the older generations don’t, you can negate what you lack in experience.

And also positive: For existing engineers, the article says “If you are an engineer worried that AI will eliminate engineering jobs, our evidence says AI adopters are hiring engineers faster, not slower.”

It’s easy and tempting to create a grand software solution with AI because you think someone might like it.

Will you make something cool in a weekend? Undoubtedly!

…and you'll burn all your tokens in the process.

Instead of thinking about an imaginary customer or billion-dollar payout, solve one business process or problem for yourself.

Make one thing that’s always annoyed you more efficient.

Rinse and repeat.

That’s how you get real utility out of AI.

Intelligent people will go to incredible lengths to be lazy.

There’s a well-known quote from Bill Gates that perfectly sums this up: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Smart people so detest menial work that they'll spend months working on an app that prevents them from doing one repetitive action.

It’s a silly contradiction, but an important one: Hustle culture teaches us that the answer is just to keep grinding harder and to suck it up, but with AI, we’re all searching for the tiniest inefficiencies in our workflow and finding ways to automate/solve them.

Perhaps it’s a compulsion. Perhaps it’s misguided.

But I’d rather spend months solving a problem for good than getting carpal tunnel syndrome by copy and pasting the same thing every day.

(Spoiler: I also get carpal tunnel syndrome in my elaborate efforts to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. Life is hard.)