The ice had melted in my glass by the time I finished reading. Cheap bourbon, watered down now, like everything else these days.
Some NPR guy — Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host — built a whole episode around a phrase that hit me like a kidney punch: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”
Read that again. Not unprepared for what’s coming. Unprepared for what’s already happened.
That’s the cruelest part. The future everyone warned us about showed up while we were still arguing whether it was real. The robots aren’t coming. They’re here. They’ve been here. And most of us are still standing at the station waiting for a train that left three years ago.
The article talks about a researcher at Microsoft named Chris Brockett. Veteran. Decades of experience. The kind of guy who spent years learning something difficult because that’s what you were supposed to do. Then one day he sees an AI program do it all. Just like that. Everything he’d mastered, reduced to a parlor trick for a machine that doesn’t even know it’s performing.
I know that feeling. From the post office. Twelve years sorting mail, learning the routes, knowing which carrier was having a rough week by how they threw their bags. Then they brought in the machines. Not to help us — to replace the knowing. The human part. The part that takes years to build and seconds to discard.
They called it efficiency. They always call it efficiency.
Here’s the thing about expertise that nobody tells you until it’s too late: You’re not building value. You’re building a target.
Every skill you master, every year you put in, every late night learning something hard — it all goes into a bucket. And somewhere in a server farm, there’s an algorithm looking at that bucket, trying to figure out how to empty it faster than you can fill it.
The executives don’t care if the AI does it well. They care if it does it cheap. And “passable” is plenty cheap. Good enough to fire the expensive humans. Good enough to promote the ones who know how to manage the machines instead of doing the work.
That’s the new career path. Stop being valuable for what you know. Start being valuable for what you can make the machines do. The rest of you? The ones who actually got good at something? You’re overhead now.
The article mentions workshops at law firms and government agencies. Educated professionals asking the same question: Is there a place for me?
I could tell them, but they wouldn’t want to hear it.
The place they thought they earned — the one with the title and the salary and the respect that comes from mastery — that place is getting smaller. Every quarter. Every product launch. Every breathless announcement about how the new model is 2x better at reasoning.
The machines don’t feel this. They don’t lie awake at 3 AM wondering if they wasted their twenties getting good at something a server farm can now do between electricity bills. They don’t know what it feels like to watch the floor drop out while everyone around you is applauding the view.
That’s the human part. The fear. The doubt. The slow realization that the rules changed while you were still playing by the old ones.
“Unprepared for what has already happened.”
I stared at the empty glass. The bourbon was gone, but the burn lingered — the same burn, I imagine, that Chris Brockett felt watching that AI do his life’s work. The same one those lawyers feel, sitting in their workshops, asking questions nobody wants to answer.
It’s not a good burn. Not the satisfying kind that reminds you you’re alive.
It’s the kind that tells you something’s ending. And there’s no refill for that.
Source: You’re not alone in feeling unprepared for the AI boom