Community Comment: Part 39 - George Bernard Shaw's dictum extended to AI

• The "AI is going to take all our jobs" narrative is lazy
• Shaw: "Those who can, do"
• Shaw: "Those who can't, teach"
• Gfesser: "Those who can't do or teach, use AI"

The comments I provided in reaction to a community discussion thread.

Head of Data, Analytics & Automation at Software Development Firm:

The narrative that “AI is going to take all our jobs” is lazy. The truth is more nuanced - and a lot more uncomfortable.

AI won’t replace the best people. It will (however) replace a chunk of people who have been coasting, or have been doing work that lends itself to AI doing it better.

Warren Buffet said "When the tide goes out, you discover who's been swimming naked" - and the tide analogy is a great one to understand the role of AI.

AI is brilliant at:

• Repetition
• Pattern recognition
• Language generation
• Code writing

It is absolutely terrible at:

• Judgment
• Empathy
• Ethical reasoning
• Knowing why something matters

A nice summary is "AI can do. But it still needs humans to decide"

Humans outperform AI in:

• Contextual understanding
• Relationship-building
• Navigating ambiguity
• Original thinking under pressure

AI outperforms humans in:

• Speed and scale
• Repetitive tasks
• Complex optimisation problems
• Language and data synthesis

This means that if the value you add to an organisation is tied to memorising things, formatting things or following checklists - then AI might outpace you.

If your value is in curiosity, creativity, and challenging the status quo - then AI just became your power tool.

AI isn’t an existential threat. It’s a performance review at scale.

It’s not here to take everyone’s job. It’s here to amplify the best and put a whole lot of pressure on the rest.

The question shouldn’t be “Will AI take my job?” - it should rather be: “Am I doing work worth amplifying?”

Because if you are - AI isn’t your replacement. It’s your force multiplier.

Gfesser: