The fear-mongering says that AI will take your job.
Be afraid. It’s all bad. At best, our future is one where we all sit around with nothing to do because of AI. At worst, AI tries to kill us.
In reality, AI, or at least its current and near-future state, has quite the opposite effect. Learning how to use it will make you more valuable to your company and customers.
The current state of AI is what I call “personal automation.”
It’s still you, but it’s you with a drill and circular saw. If you dig in, your productivity will go up.
However, productivity isn’t the only value that AI increases. Because it’s also you with an editor, an Excel expert, a personal assistant, a graduate assistant, and an awkward teenager in his parent’s basement who’s learning to write Python code to scrape the contents of questionable websites.
“Here is a list of highlights from last year. Create a message to send to our partners that summarizes it succinctly with an optimistic tone.”
“Create a formula that looks through my table of data and makes 3 categories: > 100, < 1, and everything else.”
“Look through this chain of emails, summarize it, and tell me if I’ve been asked to do anything, and if so, create a reply that indicates I’ll work on it next week.”
“Find the trends in this set of data.”
“Here is a Python script. Keeping this same style, add a new function that takes in a filename from the –ofile argument and directs all output to this file. The default is out.txt.”
It’s you, but more valuable.
