Had you noticed? AI is like an exoskeleton: it makes easy things even easier, and hard things embarrassingly complex.
We’ve entered the era where asking AI to pre-cook a report draft is as routine as ordering a coffee. What gets harder, though, is attaching actual reasoning to that report — finding the so what?
More exoskeleton than robot, AI makes the easy stuff (summaries, drafts, slides, emails) effortless — it carries the weight for you.
The hard stuff (critical thinking, complex decisions, ethics, strategy) gets harder. First, you have to make sure the machine hasn’t fed you complete nonsense. Then you’re left alone to do the genuinely human part. And there are no shortcuts there.
In a way, AI doesn’t steal your job — it steals your excuses. It becomes very hard to tell a colleague, or a business owner, that you didn’t have time to think, when everyone now knows (or thinks they know) that the machine handled the operational side in four minutes. “So what exactly are you telling me, that you had no time?” — that’s the reply you can expect.
And since it’s not actually true that the machine does everything, and since — by using it — you’re triggering a Jevons paradox that guarantees it will be used even more in the future, you’re about to find yourself competing in the league of deeper competencies. A league where neither you nor the people around you are necessarily ready to play.
It makes me wonder: how much of what we considered complex work was, in reality, just easy stuff dressed up as complexity?
The glass is still half full, if you choose to look at it that way: invest in the hard stuff — comprehension, judgment, creativity — and you’ll find that AI becomes an amplifier of the best of what you already are.
The catch remains: if we are what we look at, and AI now amplifies that too, we’d better make sure we’re not staring into the worst of our instincts. Because AI, unfortunately, amplifies those as well.
How are you managing the amplifier effect of this new technology?