I can’t do it

This is what my son said as he attempted to get on his bike for the third time without training wheels the other day. My son struggled because he saw himself as ‘no good’. His friend had just ridden off at full speed and he sat, deflated at his lack of ability. He wanted to give up. (Haven’t we all been there!)

And then I realised, I felt exactly the same way trying to write this article – “Will it be interesting? Will it be relevant? Will it be ‘punchy’ enough”? Only this time, it wasn’t just my peers or the cool kids at school I felt I was failing against. Now I was competing with the awesome computational power of ChatGPT. This nameless, faceless, placeless intelligence – omnipotence at the touch of a keypad. Why bother? Resilience comes from overcoming resistance, doesn’t it? But what for? Haven’t we all taken shortcuts? And if everyone is doing it, then rather than ‘short-cuts’, aren’t we just “keeping up”?

But now it’s not just some hack to cut a corner, we have become time travellers – arriving at the end of something only moments after we have begun it. Let’s face it, it’s weird. And at the same time, it is thrilling, we become God-like in our ability to create output.

AI feels like magic—content appears in seconds, seemingly from nowhere, it is astounding. But scratch the surface, and it comes at a price. Behind the illusion, data centres are multiplying, consuming vast amounts of energy. In time, I imagine each one will have its own dedicated mini-nuclear reactor to power it, like a whole bunch of landlocked Trident Submarines in the battle for AI dominance. On top of that, recent revelations show that the unregulated growth of data houses could be crippling other industries as well as the environment. It could mean we start to choose information over food.

Am I exaggerating? Possibly, but this is not my main concern. GenAI is also the natural consequence of a world obsessed with outcomes and productivity. Where being able to get what you want at the push of a button (thanks Jeff!) has changed shopping, our expectations are now the being cultivated for NOW in other domains. How can we compete? What happens to our agency and sense of self? What is worth struggling for?

AI is now making it feel possible to do knowledge work in no time at all. And we are just getting started. We are heading toward a future where companies may thrive without employees at all. Is that efficiency, or something far more unsettling? Replit, an AI Agent creator, has 160 employees and valuation of $1.2 Billion – that is £7,500,000 per employee. Shane Parrish, recently speculated about the coming of a billion-dollar business made up of just one employee!

This imbalance should come as no surprise: we get rewarded on outcomes all the time. Most companies are driven by an outcome-based appraisal system. It is a natural consequence of our focus on productivity. And what’s the impact of that approach on our lives as we take this immediacy to a whole new level – “If I can’t do it in seconds, should I bother?”

My suspicion is that if some work can be moderately unsatisfying now, it’s going to start to feel completely pointless soon.

Which leads me to my biggest concern: Our resilience and mental fortitude – how do we face challenge when challenge is removed from our working world?*

My son now expects to ride his bike in a minute, but it doesn’t work that way. Of course this isn’t the only factor, but just as our impatience and expectations shorten, what happens to the other tasks on our plate? How do we find the appropriate level of effort in an increasingly “frictionless society.” If the TV becomes the new grandparent, AI will become the new school where kids exist in an internet world without the friction of relationships and failure. Is this a good thing?

I recently joked on LinkedIn how I benefited from using AI as it allowed me to read a mindless magazine article. But at the same time, I am excited by it. I can’t say I am excited about its potential environmental or social impact, but there are other things. Is it a Faustian deal? In some ways yes, but like everything it depends how we use it. Will my son be negatively affected by it? Probably. Will he and the world we live in benefit from it? Probably. So, how do we live with it? How do we keep our sanity in a world that moves faster than we can process?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

PS Disclosure, this article was improved by AI (although I am not sure it saved me any time!)

*I am talking about the work that most people on LinkedIn are engaged in, there are plenty of other jobs out there, but they require labour of some kind, and are often (currently) less well paid. See this great article for a different take.