Another Lap on the Hamster Wheel, Now with Extra AI

The screen glows. It always glows. I’m staring into the thing, a glass of something brown sweating next to my hand, and the words are swimming like dead fish in a dirty aquarium. Some expert on Forbes, another ghost in the machine with a contributor badge, is telling me the good news.

The good news is that the robots aren’t coming for my job.

Hallelujah. Pass the bottle.

But wait, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. The robots aren’t coming for my job, but a person who knows how to whisper sweet nothings to the robots is. The new company man. The AI whisperer. The prompt engineer. A few months ago, that job title sounded like something a drunk sci-fi writer would invent. Now it’s on LinkedIn, sitting there all smug between “synergy” and “proactive.”

The ground is moving under our feet, the article says. For mid-career professionals, it feels like an earthquake. Mid-career. That’s a gentle way of saying you’re halfway to the grave and starting to smell the dirt. They paint a picture of us poor bastards, clinging to our outdated expertise like a drunk clings to a lamppost in a hurricane.

The solution, they say, isn’t to go back to school. God no. They don’t want you gone for that long; the machine needs its cogs. Instead, they want you to “upskill.” In “bite-sized lessons.” Over your lunch break.

I read that and had to light a cigarette just to make sure I was still a creature of flesh and vice. My lunch break? That sacred half-hour of staring at a wall, contemplating the beautiful pointlessness of it all? That’s supposed to be filled with Coursera modules on how to ask a chatbot for better marketing copy? It’s genius, in a stomach-turning way. They’ve finally figured out how to monetize despair. They’re not just buying your eight hours a day; they’re coming for your sandwich time, for the quiet moments you use to remember you’re a human being.

They toss out statistics like handfuls of gravel. 60% of the workforce needs retraining. 30% of U.S. jobs could be automated. They want you scared. A scared worker is a good worker. A scared worker will learn how to use the AI features in Canva. A scared worker will build a Notion dashboard nobody asked for just to prove they’re still kicking.

The article calls this a “hybrid skill set.” Human judgment plus digital fluency. That’s a nice, clean phrase for a dirty, messy business. Human judgment. What the hell do they think that is? Is it the thing that tells you the woman at the end of the bar is going to break your heart? Is it the gut feeling that your boss is a soulless ghoul who dreams in spreadsheets?

No. That’s not the human judgment they want. They want your ‘judgment’ to be a user-friendly interface for their systems. They want you to be the fleshy, adaptable bit of middleware that translates messy reality into clean data points the machine can understand. They don’t want your soul; they just want to rent your nervous system for a few hours a day to spot the errors in the AI’s poetry.

And the glorious path to this glorious future? LinkedIn Learning. Maven. Reforge. Platforms that sell you certificates. Digital gold stars to pin on your LinkedIn profile. You have to put them on your resume, the article insists, so the other AIs—the applicant tracking systems—can see them.

Think about that for a second. Let it really sink in. You’re using an AI to learn how to use another AI, so you can get a digital badge that proves to a third AI that you’re worth a human taking a five-second look at your resume. It’s a closed loop of automated absurdity. We’re not even in the conversation anymore. We’re just the frightened couriers running messages between machines.

I tried it once. For a laugh. I prompted one of these GenAI things to write a poem about a hangover. It gave me a list of symptoms and a rhyming couplet about drinking water. It had no idea about the dread, the shame, the blinding headache that feels like a divine punishment, the beauty in surviving another night of bad decisions. It had the facts, but it didn’t have the truth. And these people want me to spend my lunch hour learning how to get better poems out of it.

The advice gets even better. “Build a project!” they cheer. “Automate a recurring task! Jumpstart that client pitch!”

I’ve got a recurring task I’d like to automate: the pouring of this drink. I’ve got a project I’d like to build: a small, soundproof room with a good lock. And the only client pitch I’m interested in is the one where I convince the bartender to leave the bottle.

This endless pressure to be productive, to be visible, to post your “learnings” on LinkedIn for all the other trained seals to see and applaud… it’s exhausting. It’s the opposite of being human. Being human is about the unproductive moments. It’s the staring, the smoking, the foolish love affairs, the magnificent failures. It’s about having a goddamn story to tell, not just a list of skills.

Here’s the part they don’t tell you in these neat little articles. The real skill you need isn’t “adaptability.” It’s not learning Zapier or Miro. It’s endurance. It’s the fine art of staying sane in a world that has gone completely insane. The skill is looking at the whole frantic, pathetic scramble—the upskilling, the digital badges, the terrified middle managers—and seeing it for the circus it is.

The real advantage isn’t learning how to operate the new machine; it’s remembering that you are not a machine. Your worth isn’t measured by the number of certifications on your profile. It’s measured in scars, in laughs, in the stories you can tell when the power goes out.

So they can keep their bite-sized lessons and their AI-powered future. They can keep their roadmaps and their hybrid skills. I’ll be right here, exercising my own kind of human judgment. The kind that knows when the bullshit has been poured on too thick. The kind that knows the only real upskilling that matters is learning how to tolerate the madness without letting it swallow you whole.

The world will keep changing. The tools will get shinier. The buzzwords will get dumber. But some things remain constant. A good, stiff drink. A quiet moment of rebellion. The stubborn, glorious refusal to be optimized.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, this glass isn’t going to empty itself.

Chinaski out.

Source: AI Is Changing Work Forever: These Skills Will Keep You Ahead (No Tuition Required)