You’re Not Cooked
Gen-Z is not cooked. White collar jobs are not cooked. Society is not cooked. AI will not take our jobs and human ingenuity will always triumph, end of story.
Despite the constant stream of panic-driven headlines, we need to stop falling for doom hype. Currently, social media is flooded with AI marketers predicting how agentic AI will take your job, how Claude Code will destroy software, and how white collar jobs will be replaced. None of it is true.
It’s easy to be anxious, so just read and hear me out. The real logic should simply fall back down to evolution laws.
Augmentation vs. Automation
This is the difference between “write this essay for me” and “help me learn + teach me how to write this essay.” The latter is how education will evolve to teach students how to use AI. It’s also how society will evolve to use AI agents and tools. Currently, in education, the vast majority of students use AI to learn or do their work. It’s fundamentally useful, and students SHOULD rely on AI to learn, especially as one of the biggest use cases is allowing students to digest hard information fast. What’s not good is not understanding the concept, while having models write their essays (this also still doesn’t get good grades to this day btw).
The essay analogy applies to all white collar jobs. We’re never going to have autonomous models replace us. Everyone will just move up one rung in the ladder for problem solving breadth. As humans, we really shouldn’t be doing busy work anyways. We should be thinkers and problem solvers; i.e. constantly learning.
Anthropic has literally published studies that people up-skill while coding more efficiently, not by fully vibe coding, but by using models to learn and by constantly questioning outputting model code. The same companies that are marketing these fear inducing AI coding tools, are also publishing studies on why we can’t fully be reliant on AI generated code and output.
Evolution Laws
So, AI helping us expand our domain problem solving and learning is good. Cognitive atrophy is bad, and society will learn to fight this. Thus, we are okay. I’m so sick of it; time and time again people continuously underestimate human resilience and ingenuity. I mean, we once used to be bacteria.
Anything good for the human collective as a whole, wins in the long run. And elevating collective human IQ is intuitively good for us. Having a majority of workers unemployed is not. It’s fairly simply.
Workers will not be replaced by autonomous agents. Busy work will be. The same amount of jobs will exist, just focused on problem solving work. I’m all for the culture shifting to reform thinking into how we treat exercise; it is healthy for us.
On top of this, accessibility to information has never been easier. The lower socioeconomic class will benefit from having level playing fields to learning. Currently, there’s more people in lower socioeconomic classes resistant towards AI under pretenses that it is ruining human connection, hurting the environment, or enlarging the wealth gap. It’s the opposite though, because enhanced accessibility to learning is the greatest thing for class equality, as well as allowing more people how to figure out larrge social issues.
The 19% Lesson
BCG and Harvard researchers found performance dropped by 19% when users relied on AI beyond its capability frontier. Human problem solving is still required.
AI is statistical autocomplete. It’s amazing, but not holistically adaptive. We still need ingenuity and creative thinking.
That’s the balance.
Use AI to learn. Stop following hype. Good work will always be good work. Create good work and enjoy creating good work.
{ Constantly Learning. }