Letter to a Young Person Worrying About AI

This was written as a post in the private Commoncog members forum, as a response to a young person worried about AI making young knowledge workers obsolete.

The meta point of this response is that it is possible to act without prediction — something that might not be obvious if you have never attempted to achieve outcomes in a complex adaptive system. But the truth is that most good businesspeople do not attempt to predict the future; instead, they design their lives and their organisations for ‘fast adaptation under uncertainty’. This is an idea that we’ve covered before on Commoncog. This letter provides a concrete example of what that looks like, at least for our current AI moment.

Another implication is that you may ignore any essay that attempts to predict the future. And you may do so with peace of mind. Read on to see why.

I’ve been thinking about your question for a few days now, and I think I finally have a coherent response. In the past we’ve discussed how difficult it is to predict anything about the effects of AI adoption. I’m not sure if I’ve said this explicitly here, but I’ve said elsewhere that the lesson I took away from