'Out-evolving' automation to remain workplace relevant

FOR a while, the comforting narrative went like this: AI won't take your job - but someone using it will.

- KATARINA BERG, TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC

So all you had to do was use AI; and even if you lost your job, you could simply take someone else's.

The idea that you only needed to worry about AI second-hand, via another human, is in fact somewhat naive. AI is coming for your job directly. Not with fanfare or grand announcements, but through silent, pervasive creep - software agents booking meetings, writing reports, sending personalised emails and making decisions. There are even tools to send your digital clone to video conference meetings, without people even noticing it's not the real you.

If you're an ambitious knowledge worker, the question is no longer whether AI will automate aspects of your job. In today's rapidly changing work landscape, the real question is whether you will have the initiative and creativity to out-evolve the automation.

AI vulnerability

Here's the paradox you need to internalise: the more you use and leverage AI to become hyper-productive, the more you expose yourself to being replaced by it. It's no different from making your memory or spatial awareness redundant by relying too much on Google Maps or Waze, or abandoning any attempt to memorise anything because you can always reach for your smartphone.

In an age where AI can handle the bulk of our cognitive labour, we risk intellectual atrophy. When the American marketing academic and entrepreneur Scott Galloway called AI “corporate Ozempic”, he was definitely onto something: a tool that suppresses the need to think, even as it sharpens our output.