When AI Destroys Your Job: The Story of Josh and a Changing World

I think we'll call him Josh.

Josh isn't real. Josh is an amalgamation of a lot of different stories that I've been privileged to be a part of over the last year or two.
Often in a small way, often overheard in a cocktail lounge or through a conversation with a colleague or in a few cases one-on-one talking about work and life.
Sometimes at a conference, sometimes at home, sometimes on the phone, sometimes out in the world walking around where people talk about AI.
Josh's story is about AI.

So many of our stories are about AI right now.
And the reason I'm sharing this story is because I don't think Josh's story gets shared enough.

Josh is a guy who got a good college education.
He got a journalism degree and he has a little bit of college debt left, not a lot.
And he had hoped, as many hope who get into journalism and liberal arts, to make a career for himself from a media perspective.
He'd hoped to be a celebrated columnist one day.

He got his start at a very small internet newsroom that got shut down very quickly when AI came along.
And Josh will tell you, AI took my job. AI took my job.

He never really got the chance for that to shift because he graduated in 2018.
He didn't have more than a couple of years of experience in the newsroom.
And then COVID hit and things shifted.
And then after CO hit, AI hit.
And Josh feels like he's been taking it on the chin for a long, long time.

And when Josh hears advice like, "Hey, you should vibe code," he just kind of rolls his eyes.
Like that's not what he set out to do.
That's not what he's passionate about.
He got into journalism to tell stories.
He wants to tell people's stories.

And Josh has a dream to tell the stories of how people's lives are changing in tangible ways because of AI.
But Josh is at a local minima to use a machine learning term.
Josh can't get the equipment that he needs.
Josh can't get the contacts that he needs.
It's much more expensive than equipment actually getting the contacts to have the right conversations with people.

And Josh is struggling to get from I have an idea on my couch to I'm putting out some stories out there that help me tell that story and also I have enough to make my you know my college debt payment and make my rent this month.

Josh has moved back home with his parents uh to Vermont.
uh he's settled in and he's not sure where his career is going at this point and all the AI coursework that he can find and he does a little bit of learning online isn't really helping him move forward.
Josh doesn't see AI as an enabler.
Josh rolls his eyes when people talk about AI helping.
Uh all Josh sees is obstacles uh created by AI.
Frankly, AI is the one that took Josh's job away in Josh's words.

And I share Josh's story because as much as I like to talk a lot about the potential that we all have to unleash with AI, I don't want to miss out on the difficult stories.
I don't want to miss out on the challenging stories, the stories that don't fit as easily into that narrative of progress.
And the reality is with any story of technical change, there are stories like Josh's.

And a lot of the responsibility that we carry as a society is to think about how we can support the Josh's of this world.
Not support them in the sense of giving them uh a handout.
I'm not trying to talk about policy in that sense.
I don't think Josh is interested in that either.

I'm talking about helping Josh find a place where he knows that he's valued for the contributions he can bring, the passion he has for telling stories in this world.
Finding the Joshes in our lives, the ones who are feeling lost because of AI and telling them one that we're happy to listen and two that we're happy to try and find ways to help.

Now, I'm the first one to say, having had a lot of conversations with uh folks who sort of have a lot of the characteristics of Josh's story, that Josh is sometimes not an easy person to help.
Josh doesn't want to hand out.
Josh is suspicious if you try to give him advice.
Josh resents AI to the point where if you recommend a practical solution to him that might help, he's going to say no.

Um, and so that makes it difficult, right?
That makes it hard to find ways to be positive and helpful because sometimes we want to sort of fix things.
And so, yes, sit there and listen, but also I think it's fair to check with the Joshes in our lives and say, are you open to having an honest conversation about the idea that the game board has changed?
You're right about that.
The rules of the game have changed a bit.
You're right about that.
But there still may be a space for you and your talents and your passion that you bring even if it's not what you originally imagined.
Are you open to your dreams shifting?

That's the thing at the root that I think we need to talk about.
And that's not really an AI conversation.
And I share that because that feels like that's a conversation many of us who are interested in AI, who are passionate about AI need to be having with those around us.

I see the poll results.
I see that AI is not trusted.
There are a lot of doshes in this world.
It makes sense that they may not trust AI.
I don't blame them.
It's kind of rational.

But in that world, we have to be the ones, we who are interested in AI have to be the ones who are able to sit down and invite a conversation about how all of our dreams are changing because of AI.
That's not something that anybody is immune to.

And so besides telling Josh's story, I'll tell my own story a little bit.

I got my start in uh a job that AI has changed dramatically already, right?
I was doing nonprofit grant management.
AI can do a lot of the work that I was doing at the push of a button.

Then I went over to Oracle eyes store management and conversion optimization.
Conversion optimization doesn't exist as a job anymore. AI took it away.
Uh, and eyesore.
I mean, who has Oracle eyesore anymore?
I'm sure there someone's going to come up and say I have Oracle eyesore after this, but most people don't.

And then I went and did marketing and I looked at marketing attribution systems.
Again, another area where AI has taken a lot of the work away.
I looked at voice of customer almost totally automated by AI now.

And what's funny as I say all of those things is that even though AI has made huge strides, we still have people who are grant fund managers.
We still have people who are working in web production and how to make excellent experiences on the web, which is basically what conversion optimization does.
We still have people who are focused on store management online, which is what I was doing with eyesore.
We still have people who are focused on learning from the voice of the customer which what what I was doing when I was uh later in my career at Amazon.
We still have people who are focused on marketing and understanding marketing data.

Those functions still have humans doing important work in those areas, but many of the individual day-to-day skills ended up getting peeled away.
And that's one of the really interesting things about the nature of work that I think we need to talk about more honestly with ourselves, with those around us, with the Joshes of this world and the Joshes in our lives.

If I had stuck with any individual dream, if I had told myself, I'm going to be a marketer uh and I'm just going to do marketing or I'm going to be in conversion optimization and get really good at that.
or more recently I'm going to be in product management and get really good at that cuz I've done a number of different product management roles now.
I would have given myself a constraint on my dreams that I did not need to have.

Instead, I've been focused on what are problems that I can run after solving as hard as I can.
How can I figure out how to add value against those problem spaces?
Even if it feels scrappy today, even if it feels cluy, even if it feels awkward, even if it feels like I'm not doing a great job because I'm new at approaching the problem in this new way.

When I was uh you know first getting into product management, I felt really awkward.
When I was first getting into the professional workplace decades ago, I had the exact same feeling.
I felt awkward.
I felt like I didn't fit.
I felt like my professional skills were rusty because they'd never been used.

Every time we learn a new skill, it's like that.
Every time we begin again, it's like that.
And it's especially painful because that is the moment our dreams are in flux.
That's the moment our dreams have to change because we learn the realities of the professional workplace.
We learned the bitter reality that if you were in a particular product management role for a while, there's no guarantee above senior PM that you are really going to progress in your career.
This is, you know, I'm in product, right? Like this is something I know very well.
I talked to a lot of other PMs about and so I can share.
But you'll have similar ceilings everywhere.

And the thing that AI enables us to do in this world that has been hard at every other point in human history is it enables us to dream differently.
It gives us more flexibility on our dreaming.
It gives us the ability to stretch our wings in new areas very easily.
It's an incredible teaching tool.
Yes.
It's also a tool that enables us to practice our skills confidently.
We can practice our interview skills if that's what we're working on.
We can practice our coding skills if that's what we're working on.
We can get someone to help us read a new book and learn a new skill set from that book.

If you want to learn the why machines learn textbook by Anneil right here, you can do that.
You can literally take a picture of a complicated diagram that you don't understand and you can get AI to help you learn it.
And that's just one example.

I know that Red Bull gives you wings as trademarked.
I know we can't say AI gives you wings, but that's the vibe.
That's the vibe.

And one of the things that I would like us to be able to do is to be honest about the fact that even though AI gives us a lot of flexibility, it gives us a lot of upside.
It does mean a different world.
It means our dreams are going to be different because the world around us is changing so fast.

I do not expect product management to be the same discipline in a year, two years.
It's already changing really, really fast.

People are looking for builders of all kinds and they are increasingly less looking for particular defined roles that have particular defined expertise chains in a particular job family and that is leading to a lot of confusion and heartache.
That is why major companies can say AI automation engineers can apply to literally any job in the company.

The new world is a confusing place.

And so my encouragement is if you have a Josh in your life, find a way to gently ask if they're open to having a conversation about the idea that they might be welcome, useful, loved, their passion is important, but their dreams might need to shift.

And ask yourself that too.
Where do your dreams need to shift?
Because AI is coming for us all.
Not coming in the Skynetut sense, but coming in the sense of changing everything we everything we work at.
Changing how we interact in our personal lives.
Changing how we are able to get from where we are today to where our dreams might be and along the way changing where those dreams end up.

This is this is the trade-off we live with.
We've taught the sand to think, but because the sand thinks, everything is different now.

And so, it's up to us to figure out how to turn that revolution into something that we can all participate in and all enjoy and all live with.
And if that sounds really kumbayan, that sounds really cheesy, feel free to roll your eyes.
But it's a real conversation that we need to have.
And the more we roll our eyes and step away from it, especially with the Joshes of this world, the more we create a society where some people feel really left out on AI and really angry about AI.
That is not a society I want to live in.

So talk to the Joshes in your life.