There’s an overwhelming cacophony of articles and posts and tweets and overall low-hum anxiety of being replaced with AI. For one, I don’t believe it - I’ve worked both in startups and large enterprises, and in both, technology is only a part of the solution; the friction is human. When the technology changes, humans change how they operate, but we still need… humans to navigate the intra-human friction.
So yes, LLMs can make images, and design UIs, and write, and code, and summarize, and analyze. There are plenty of “hard skills” or “bread and butter” paid tasks that are either drastically decreasing in demand or going away entirely. If your career is measured entirely by how fast you can spin out a “useful” product, then yes, instant generation means that you might be screwed.
But that doesn’t linearly translate to all jobs going away, because many knowledge jobs were never about who can produce the most output. They were about knowing what’s worth producing, and doing it in a way that supports whatever the broader goal is.
What skills are immune to AI automation?
Immunity to automation comes from curation, personal taste, and the emotional resonance of organic, human friction, whether it’s used to write a novel, make a sale, or pitch a strategy to a VP. AI can replicate styles and will generate endless outputs—to your aid!—but it cannot manufacture a unique perspective or connect with another human in a way that greases the skids.
If you want to build a resilient practice (and career) in the age of AI, you have to stop trying to be a machine and start leaning heavily into your creativity and humanity. Here is how you shift your focus:
1. Cultivate depth and taste over output
A computer can make a billion random connections, but these new connections are significant only if they generate new meaning. An AI can process the data, but it cannot use intuition to tell which connection smells interesting. That is entirely reliant on your human taste. Kurt Vonnegut famously noted that the most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Your job is no longer to generate the raw material; it is to have the perspective to curate what matters.
2. Embrace the inefficiency and friction
We are starting to look at intellectual and creative work the same way 1800s nutritionists treated food: as a sum of useful components that can be extracted and optimized. But when you strip away the human effort to just get the "data," you get an intellectual equivalent of Soylent or Huel: fast, useful, tasteless and dead. True writing and creating is a physical activity, a deliberate wrestle with facts and ideas. Do not outsource the struggle, because the wrestling itself is the purpose. The friction is where you leave your human fingerprint.
3. Look for novelty, not usefulness
The trap of AI is that it is infinitely, perfectly "useful." To compete, we often exit our own state of exploration to try and satisfy an imaginary audience. You must resist this. If you want to write or create, you must not worry about being interesting, you must just be true. When you write or build to represent yourself faithfully, you create something irreplicable.
Nothing is new and everything is original
It is easy to feel like everything has already been said or done, and that a machine can just say it faster. But ideas are like clouds. No two clouds are exactly the same, and no individual person will be able to see those exact two clouds the exact same way at the exact same time.
The machine can predict the average shape of a cloud based on a billion images. But only you can stand in a specific field, look up, and tell us exactly how the light is hitting it right now.
Your output is replaceable, but your perspective is not.