The Hard Edges of AI
If a person is going to be needed when the AI machine does the work, then here are some of the hard edges.
A hard edge, to start, means this: it will tend to be there, no matter the choice of AI or the person driving it. Let’s make a list.
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The person with something to lose acts differently with AI then the all others who don’t. The boss whose job is on the line will think twice before risking something that an AI came up with, unvetted. Same with the owner who could risk losing their business. The consultant who risks their reputation, same. The bank that’s in the business of guarantees, they won’t play with fire. The person sending an email that doesn’t sound right, they’ll change the wording if the email matters. A person making decision that isn’t reversible, same idea.
Where there’s real consequence, there’s a hard edge.
The person has to be healthy to be able to work with AI. A person ruining their health from decision fatigue or review fatigue, or from blowing a fuse from overexcitement, that person won’t be able to work for much longer. Time in the zone, doing deep work, working on interesting challenges, keeping the parts you find fun and delegating the rest, there’s a healthy line to be drawn somewhere in there.
Where health and safety are starting to be threatened, there’s a hard edge.
The work will move to problems without attention. Just like osmosis theory says that molecules will move, through a membrane, from a high concentration area to a low concentration area, the same can be said about problems needing attention. If an AI is trained on solving a problem, people will tend to move to problems that haven’t gotten the attention of AI yet. The adjustment period might be long for some, and that’s where there’s a problem. Re-skilling, finding out again what you like to do, finding a place that will pay you for the transition, that’s the part that hurts.
Where the migration is tedious, there’s a hard edge.
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Creativity no longer defines a hard edge with AI (but it still helps to develop your creativity). For many people, taste is also no longer a holdout (but it still helps to develop taste).
The good news about these hard edges is that you don’t have to play in the grey area anymore. You can be confident that a boss will pull an experiment before it hurts too much, that renegotiating to prioritize your health will pay in the long run, and if you can afford to move where there are fresh new problems, you’ll be better off.
The last hard edge, though, is the one shared by all of us creatives. It doesn’t matter how many projects we build with AI, if we haven’t shipped a single one. Nobody else will make the scary step of serving our audience like we think we can, unless we decide to put it out into the world, for real.
It’ll have to be us, because with these new hard edges, owners get all the benefits.
