Sent into the mosh pit by Z Johnson, Founder at MRXplorer (AI-MR Strategy & Innovation)
Recent releases from Anthropic have rocked markets.
They’ve caused some “is SaaS going to die?” questions.
There’ve been more “where is my job going to go?” discussions.
There’ve been more “what are we going to do about entry level jobs??” questions.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and have some ideas.
First, to level-set.
- Entry-level work as we know it today needs to be redefined.
- We are barely through one existential question when something happens that causes another existential question, and it’s causing constant existential shock.
- Tech updates are showing us just how much of our work has been executing processes.
The skills of the industrial era were to take a thing from A to B to C. Memorize a set of instructions and follow them precisely.
The skills of the information age were to process information. Ingest information, restructure it, filter it, output it differently than you received it.
The skills needed now are not necessarily about executing process. When AI can out-process you, what are you left with?
Creativity.
Critical thinking.
What ARE the skills of the AI age? I think they’re the ones we’ve long discounted and discouraged, even put in their own separate box and said they weren’t worth time and energy cultivating.
While schools have been cutting arts programs and trying to standardize the way everyone thinks, we’ve needed to teach the exact opposite to our children for them to excel in this future we’re now living in.
Perhaps the rebels and the punks and the creatives and the neurodiverse are the ones who have the superpowers for this era, and NOT the business executives who are too invested in the direction they’ve been going to pivot quickly.
Perhaps it’s the people who constantly reinvent themselves and have multiple hobbies and skills who will thrive, and not the people who specialized in a single subject.
Maybe – just maybe – we’re spending too much time worrying about the entirely wrong questions and need to start focusing on embracing the thing that makes us human: our ability to truly think.
