Your (Personal) Future of Work
Most of the questions people ask about AI are asked at the scale of the zeitgeist. Will it replace what I do? What is the future of my field? Which tools should I be using? They are reasonable questions, and they rarely lead anywhere, because the answers arrive in the same general register as the questions. Someone else’s forecast about marketing, design, or education tells you very little about your Tuesday.
AI Literacy, the way I teach it, lives on the line between the zeitgeist and self-authorship. The work is learning how you work, so that new tools have somewhere to land. You can’t integrate a tool into work you haven’t described.
Sort your work into general and specific
The first question is usually some version of whether AI will replace what you do. A more useful one is which parts of what you do are general, and which parts are yours.
List a week of tasks. Mark each one general if it is repeatable and could be handed to someone with a template. Mark it specific if it depends on your judgment, your relationships, or your taste. Most people are surprised by how long the general column gets, and relieved by it.
The general column is a shopping list of things to be built: automations, templates, and small digital products you make for yourself. The specific column is harder.
Describe your human skills with more specificity
Instead of asking about the future of your general field, I would rather ask about your personal, specific future of work.
Look at how people describe their human skills. Empathy, creativity, communication, strategic thinking. These words are the easiest thing for a model to reproduce, because they are general and reductive. A skill described generally has been automated in language, whether or not anyone has built the tool.