Journalist Ira Glass, who hosts the NPR show "This American Life," is not a computer scientist. He doesn't work at Google, Apple or Nvidia. But he does have a great ear for useful phrases, and in 2024 he organized an entire episode around one that might resonate with anyone who feels blindsided by the pace of AI development: "Unprepared for what has already happened."
Coined by science journalist Alex Steffen, the phrase captures the unsettling feeling that "the experience and expertise you've built up" may now be obsolete -- or, at least, a lot less valuable than it once was.
Whenever I lead workshops in law firms, government agencies or nonprofit organizations, I hear that same concern. Highly educated, accomplished professionals worry whether there will be a place for them in an economy where generative AI can quickly -- and relativity cheaply -- complete a growing list of tasks that an extremely large number of people currently get paid to do.
Seeing a future that doesn't include you
In technology reporter Cade Metz's 2022 book, Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World, he describes the panic that washed over a veteran researcher at Microsoft named Chris Brockett when Brockett first encountered an artificial intelligence program that could essentially perform everything he'd spent decades learning how to master.
