Joan Westenberg on the absurdity of trying to future-proof your life:
We’ve all seen the LinkedIn exhortations: learn the right skills before the machines take your job, invest in the right companies before automation hollows out the market, anticipate the right policies before artificial intelligence rearranges the political order. Etc.
But the more we live in that posture of anxious fortification, the more absurd it feels. Every week there’s a new prediction, every week there’s some new vision. A Greek chorus of confident forecasters seem to dominate every social platform, declaring that AI will erase half of all jobs by 2030, or 2040, or it will create more jobs than it destroys, or it’ll go bust and we’ll all move on, or AGI will arrive…
We keep repeating the same hubris. We keep praying to the oracle of prediction, hoping we’ll be spared the storm. But the storm always comes. And it never looks like the forecast.
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