Love to Learn Sign
|

Linked – How to avoid sleepwalking into irrelevance in the age of AI

Irina thinks many of us in the tech world aren’t taking the threat of being replaced seriously enough:

Let’s be real: most people in tech are still too chill about AI.

https://www.thecaringtechie.com/p/how-to-avoid-sleepwalking-into-irrelevance

I’m unsure how many tech jobs will be displaced by AI. Part of me doubts that GenAI tools are capable of doing all the work, but I also know that CEOs don’t necessarily care as long as it’s good enough and cheaper than hiring human beings. (Which it might be right now.)

The important thing, however, is that the skills Irina recommends are the same skills we need to develop to deal with change, and our industry is constantly changing. The suggestions she offers will help you in your tech career, regardless of whether you think a GenAI tool can do your job.

Learning how to manage yourself, constantly learning and sharing your knowledge, being an effective communicator, and following all the other tips she shares are essential for success. Those are the things AI can’t do as well as you, and they are the things that make you stand out in any career situation.

Similar Posts

  • |

    Linked: Women in the Workplace

    This is an acute problem for many of us, who want to participate in doing the work of promoting diversity and inclusion but are still getting measured by everything other than that. And, as the survey points out, it is oftentimes women who take on this work, in an effort to help other women and minorities achieve.

    But, as much as the C-Level folks talk about the importance of this work, it is not a part of the job performance, nor is time and effort really allocated for it.

    How many of you volunteer to take on this work, running an employee resource group, putting together presentations, leading group discussions, often at the behest of top management, and then when it comes times for performance reviews, the only thing that matters is time spent on bringing in revenue?

    The message seems to really be, “It’s great that you want to do this work for us, but make sure you do it on your time because your productivity will be measured against the people who don’t spend any time at all doing this work”

  • |

    Over-Simplistic Scientific Intelligence

    And this really brings me back to my point, that we do a poor job of truly understanding science, statistics and cause and effect. We believe that algorithms have all been well-thought out, and produce a “true” result, even when they are trying to predict something as unpredictable as what traffic will look like 20 years from now. We assume social science studies are giving us the “right” answer for how to educate people, or train them for the best outcomes, without considering what we are teaching them about the larger world. We assume that we can tweak one belief, or one thing, without human beings reacting to those changes in unpredictable ways, all the while thinking our one change will cause the reaction we DO predict.

    We assume a lot that should never be assumed. We over-simplify a world that actually has more influences than we can possibly account for, and assume that what is really a small statistical difference represents a universal truth.

    It doesn’t. There are no simple answers. It takes hard work, hard discussions, and lots of listening to figure out the best way forward. Don’t wait for AI to tell you what to do, it may be missing quite a bit.

  • So you want to work in IT?

    Consider this fair warning if you’re thinking of working in IT. While I can’t get into the specifics of this situation, suffice it to say that somewhere along the line in your IT career you’ll be in the middle of this situation. It involves a former employee, a security policy breach (among other reasons why…

  • Worth Reading – General Purpose AI Will Never Be Safe

    I think we can agree that granting someone full access to the open internet without education or tools to protect themselves would be dangerous, no? 

    OK, but what is a general-purpose LLM but a collection of everything that the model could ingest, without rules about what was safe and what wasn’t? 

    Yet we expect people to use them, and aren’t making any effort to make them safer. 

  • Shared Links (weekly) August 17, 2025

    For more like this, subscribe to the newsletter and get these links and more in your email.

  • | |

    Linked: Is Your Corporate Culture Cultish?

    I think this might apply to much of Silicon Valley, but is there a little bit of this within law firms as well? “What characterizes corporate cult is the degree of control management exercises over employees’ thinking and behavior.  This starts with recruitment, where employees are screened for their “fit.” Once in, they then see…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)