You're Asking the Wrong Question About AI and Your Job

More predictions about your work won't help. The real question is who you'll become.

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AI-nxiety in the Workplace

It's hard to ignore the articles roiling the media about what awaits knowledge workers once AI reaches its full potential. I like Diane Hamilton’s description of this state: anticipatory anxiety at work. You may be in the throes of it right now. Reading through predictions, weighing up potential changes to how you will work, and for the very motivated, learning AI skills preemptively to stay ahead of the game.

I share that sense of concern, but I think, by and large, we are getting the diagnosis wrong. Right now, the focus is on better predictions of what AI will do to work. What will be automated? What will stay uniquely human? And how can I prepare? This seems like the logical path forward in such uncertain times, but none of the answers responds to what is fundamentally driving the concern. The problem is not what will my work become, but who will I become? Reorienting ourselves to that last question drastically changes how we should be thinking about the problem.

Fortunately, there’s a philosopher, L.A. Paul, who has thought precisely about these kinds of moments — the ones where you stand at the precipice of change. AI at work will be a transformative experience, and readying yourself for that experience is a different task than the one most of us are pouring most of our energy into right now.

Short on time? Skip to the TL;DR at the end.

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Transformative Experiences

If you’ve ever considered having a child, you have undoubtedly experienced the well-meaning, often unsolicited, encouragements, veiled warnings (sleep now while you can!), and advice. That’s because the standard way you’re told to make big decisions is to collect as much information as you can. You want to be able to picture your new life in as much detail as possible so that you can make the right decision for you. The philosopher L.A. Paul thinks that this method is not nearly as helpful as you’ve been led to believe. Not because people choose badly. Because the choice can’t be made the way we think it can.

There are two important concepts underpinning her argument. The first is what she calls an epistemically transformative experience: one that teaches you something you could not have known any other way, something available only by living through it. She uses a very famous thought experiment from philosophy to illustrate her point: Mary, the color scientist. Mary is an expert in the color red. She has studied every element of it throughout her life, but sadly, because Mary has spent her whole life in a black-and-white room, she has never seen the color red. (Not realistic, I know! But that’s okay. The setup only needs to live in your thoughts.) The day she walks outside and sees it, she learns something no textbook could have given her: what it is actually like. Before that momentous day, Mary has been living an epistemically impoverished life, a life that no amount of book studying could improve. Knowing more about red is simply not the same kind of thing as seeing it.

There is a second way of knowing. Her other central concept is a personally transformative experience: one that, in Paul’s words, radically changes what it is like to be you, sometimes by replacing your core preferences with different ones. This one doesn’t just change what you know. It changes who you are. I’ve bolded that last sentence because that is a new way of thinking about knowledge. This isn’t about what you know but who you become.

Having a child is an excellent example of experiencing knowledge that is both epistemically and personally transformative. It's epistemically transformative because you cannot know what it will be like to hold your own newborn until you do. Holding other people’s children, watching movies, hearing your own parents relate the experience, none of that can teach you what it will be like for you. The experience is unlike anything you've had, so you cannot project yourself forward into it. It can also be personally transformative. Most new parents are remade in one fashion or another: priorities shift, values change. The person doing the parenting is not the same as the person who made the choice to be a parent.

Think back now to all that gathering of information in preparation for making the choice to become a parent. You certainly learn more but none of it really prepares you for what actually happens. And notice what won't rescue you here: more information. The problem was never a shortage of facts. The facts you need are the kind that are only accessible after the fact, held by a newly made self whose preferences you don't yet share. When someone is facing a genuinely transformative change, more information is not what they need. The only remedy is to go through it and find out what’s on the other side.

The Job Changes. So May You.

The fear is simple to state. AI is coming for your job. What's harder is noticing that it's two fears, not one. Both are real and worth taking seriously. But only one can be addressed, so let's pull them apart.

The first worry that is getting a lot of air time is that your job will disappear. The work stops being done by you. In fact, the work stops being done by people at all. Call this worry, replacement. This is a worry about whether your role even continues to exist in that not so distant future.

The other worry is about how AI will change your job. Your job isn’t set to disappear, it’s set to change. The skills that you’ve developed over many years suddenly aren’t the ones you need to be successful. A new mix is called for, some of the ones you have, but also new ones, AI-dependent knowledge and abilities. The work is still there, but not like you’ve known it. Call this one, transformation. Your role continues to exist but it’s turning into something else.

I really don’t believe that we can predict whether a given role is about to be replaced. Work is not just a bundle of tasks. It’s embedded in organizations, which in turn are part of larger systems. Replacing humans requires remaking those organizations and systems to accommodate this new mode of work. How, when, or even if, this will happen is anyone’s guess. There is also the problem of the models themselves. As Ethan Mollick has adroitly explained, the abilities of LLMs are a jagged frontier. They are very good at some things, and very bad at others, and importantly, that mix can be very unexpected. When they will be ready to replace all of the tasks that make up a role also remains an open question. Taken together, I think the question of whether AI will replace jobs can’t be answered and so, should be set to the side.

Transformation is different. It’s here. Whatever the long-run capability question turns out to be, the near-certain thing is that the texture of your work is changing. And it's the one the usual reassurance keeps aiming at and keeps missing. To see why, we need to go back to Paul.

Here is what we can know: a meaningfully AI-changed job will be epistemically transformative. In other words, it’s an experience that you can’t know from the outside. You can master every tool, every piece of advice about prompts and agents, and still not know what it will be like to actually do your work once the work itself has changed. Right now, you’re very much like Mary, the color scientist. You’re reading everything there is to know about red but until you leave the black-and-white room, you won’t really know what it’s like to see it.

But that’s not where I want to draw your attention. The part that I think Paul can really help us understand is that your AI-changed job is highly likely to be personally transformative. It has the potential to change what you value about the work, and about yourself. You cannot study your way into who you will become. No amount of AI literacy will help you understand the new you.

Some of you may be thinking: no, I know exactly how I'd feel. I am NOT interested in a working life that's been remade by AI, whatever it turns out to be like.

If that's you, you're in good company. Consider Carol Sturka, the hero (anti-hero?) of last year’s excellent show on Apple, Pluribus. An alien virus infects humanity, joining all into one shared consciousness. It’s beautiful! People share understanding, thoughts, and crucially will. Those who are infected are happy. Genuinely happy. Carol (and 12 others) are immune. She isn’t part of this new utopia, and is very, very sure she doesn’t want to be.

There's a philosopher who'd take Carol's side. Elizabeth Barnes, writing in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, published a review of Paul's book on transformative experiences that pushes back on exactly this point. She grants Paul nearly everything, but denies that this makes refusing it irrational. Sometimes, Barnes argues, you can turn down an experience you've never had, and you don't need to have lived it to know it isn't for you.

She cites three conditions that make this rejection rational.

1. Whatever it's like, you can tell it's not for you. You don't need the experience from the inside to judge it against what you already value and find it wanting. Think shark attack or beheading here.

2. The change itself is what you're refusing. Not that your future self would have different tastes, but that becoming that self is alien to who you are now. Carol illustrates this beautifully. She values her individuality. It’s a core value. Joining the extended consciousness of humanity will erase what she values.

3. You'd refuse even knowing you'd be glad afterward. That’s the tension of the show. Carol may, indeed, be better off — less angry, less lonely — and even knowing, she doesn’t want to experience it.

So where does this leave you? You aren’t Carol, but may be facing an equally life-altering decision about your work.

Start by pivoting away from the question we see everywhere. “What will work be like?” is the wrong question. Recall epistemic transformation and what it means when answering a question like that. You can’t really know what the job will be like until you’re doing it.

So ask a question you can answer: who will I become? This is about you, your own knowledge of yourself. Barnes can help you here. Whatever the AI-changed job is like, can you already tell it's not for you? Is it the change itself you'd be refusing, i.e. the prospect of becoming someone whose values you don't currently share? And would you refuse it even knowing you might be happier on the other side, much the way Carol refuses the contentment of conformity?

If you can answer yes to those, you have Carol's clarity. Congratulations. You know. If not, then there is still much to consider. The task in front of you was never really about the tools. Learn them if they serve you. But the question underneath was always the older, harder one: who are you?

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TL;DR

There are two different worries driving anxiety about AI's impact on the workplace. One is replacement — that the job will vanish — and the truth is that nobody can predict whether that will happen right now. The other is transformation — that your job will be remade by AI. That's the one to pay attention to because it's already happening. The way we frame this second worry, though, isn't helpful. Everyone tells you to prepare by learning more, building AI literacy, getting ahead of it. But the philosopher L.A. Paul shows why that misses the point. An AI-changed job is a transformative experience. It's epistemically transformative: you won't know what it's like until you're in it. It's also likely to be personally transformative, changing what you value about your work and yourself. The way forward is not to focus on the work, but on you. If you're to truly come to grips with what's at the foundation of your anxiety about AI in the workplace, the question you should be asking yourself is: Who will I become?