Seldom a day goes by when I don’t find a thread somewhere about someone who has been talking with ChatGPT and finds themselves in a really dark place. When they post their conversations, I pick up on some things in them. One really common theme is the idea of the 1% being the ones who will gain from generative AI. These conversations get quite dark and then get stuck there, generally ending up at ‘without a Universal Basic Income’ the 99% is doomed.
I’m almost 50 and generative AI is the second technology of my life that was going to render my obsolete. The internet started to reshape the economy when I was in business school and there was a lot of fear about automation totally replacing jobs. In some ways, those fears have come true - locally owned retail has been forever altered by online shopping. In other ways, those fears were unfounded - while the internet did replace some jobs, it also created a whole new world of them.
Generative AI has the ability to be even more disruptive because it’s possible to outsource a large percentage of your thinking to it. But humans survived an ice age because we’re creative and resilient.
If my kid was 18 now, I would want to make sure they heard the following advice now. It is in no particular order.
- Get really comfortable with change because it will be the only constant in your life. Love will grow so fast it will leave you in shock and die just as quickly. People will come into your life and leave. Many will die and in many cases, you will carry the last conversation you have with them for the rest of your life. You will age if you’re lucky, technology will change and lifestyles will change. Every single thing about you will change constantly throughout your life. That’s a good thing because it means that the horror, no matter how intense, will pass. And it’s a bad thing because it means the true joy, no matter how intense, will pass too.
- Don’t outsource thinking to generative AI. Outsource manual work, outsource the stuff you don’t have the capacity to learn and get it to help you devise self study guides for things you do want to know. But you’ve got to put in the hours.
- Put in the hours. At 18, you’ll see really talented people in your age group sail ahead. Some have already been accepted to better schools with better financial packages than you. In 10 years, you will discover that hard work beats talent if talent doesn’t work.
- You are extremely talented in ways that people of my generation and older often cannot fully perceive. But assume you aren’t and put in the work.
- Write. Write constantly - write to yourself, write to other people and write to people who you know will never read you. If you ever doubt that you have grown, read things you wrote one, five and ten years ago.
- Eat avocado toast. If you listen to some of my fellow old people, they’ll tell you stupid things like stop drinking lattes, eating avocado toast or going to cocktail bars. This is your chance at life, it’s live and you don’t get do overs. Enjoy every second of it.
- Be careful with the cocktails. Alcohol is great until alcoholism sneaks up on you and turns into a passenger you’ll carry for the rest of your life. Alcoholism is the worst kind of passenger because it will reach over and take the wheel when you’re speeding down the highway.
- Be the only thing in control of you. Whether it is a generative AI, your girlfriend or some standard of beauty you picked up in some beauty magazine, if it controls what you do and how you feel when you do it, it’s time to discard it.
- It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear. If you look into the future with eyes of hope, you have the potential to change the world. If you look into the future with eyes of fear, you run the risk of stopping someone else from changing the world.
- If a crocodile is behind glass, you will still jump back if it lunges no matter how thick the glass is and how safe you are. That is how powerful fear is. If something or someone makes you feel fear, turn that fear into hope by finding solutions.
- You can change the world. The second you stop believing that is the second you can no longer change the world.
- While you can change the world, you can’t change too much too quickly. Be methodical and strategic.
And no matter what, be skeptical when anyone tries to tell you how to live. Except for hope. No matter how you feel about yourself, you’re related to people who survived the ice age. You’re just as strong as they are, only you smell better. No matter what, you’ve got this.