Here we are at issue #2. Yesterday I introduced myself and this newsletter. Today, I want to dig into the question that has been on more people's minds than almost anything else I talk about. Honestly, it has been on mine for a long time too.
Will AI take my job? The simple answer is no. But your job will take AI.
Let me explain…
When I was a kid, using a computer meant programming in “machine language”. Actually arranging ones and zeros in the right order so the machine could understand what I wanted. You had to think like the computer, on the computer's terms, in the computer's language. My neighbor spent weeks teaching his computer not to lose at tic-tac-toe, feeding it rules and logic one instruction at a time. Even back then, something about that felt significant to me. Humans were teaching machines to think like us. That process just took about fifty years to reach its destination.
A while ago before everyone was talking about AI, I decided to run a small experiment. I typed this sentence into Perplexity AI: "Write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe game, complete with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript." That's it. One sentence, plain English. A few seconds later, I had working code. I pasted it on the bottom of my blog and now anyone with a phone can play it.
My son, Samuel, looked at it and said, "Dad, maybe you should let the player choose whether the human or AI goes first?" So I went back the next day, typed that exact request, and Perplexity updated the code. I did not write a single line of code myself. Not one.
Jensen Huang, the founder of NVIDIA, said something last year that I keep coming back to: "It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence."
Everybody. Including you.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking, because I have thought it too. This is moving very fast. AI is writing code, summarizing legal documents, drafting marketing copy, and reading X-rays. Seedance2 is all over X pitting Superman against Thanos. (much to the chagrin of Hollywood, as you might expect.) I’m running an AI-powered agent on my MacBook that texts me when it is finished doing real work for me. (More about OpenClaw in a future article,) The speed of change in just the past few months has been genuinely startling. It is okay to feel a little dizzy.
The fear of machines replacing people is not new, and it has never been foolish. In the 19th century, the Luddites did not just break looms out of anger. They were skilled craftsmen watching their expertise get commoditized overnight, and they were scared. Math teachers pushed back hard against calculators in the 1970s and 1980s, genuinely worried that students would stop learning to think. Those fears were real. The people who felt them were not stupid.
And yet, society kept moving, new roles appeared, and the skills that mattered shifted. That is not a comfort for people in the middle of a disruption, and I will not pretend it is. But it is a pattern worth knowing about. MRIs exist because computers do. Your iPhone was created by humans now talks to satellites placed into space by still other people. And so on.
Here is the frame I keep returning to. Steam engines and electricity did not replace human ambition. They amplified it. They let us build things, move things, and make things that were simply impossible before. I believe the Digital RenAIssance we are living through right now will do something similar for our minds. AI is becoming a multiplier for what people can think, create, and accomplish.
The tic-tac-toe story is small. But it points somewhere big. A kid in a village with a phone and an internet connection now has access to a kind of creative leverage that used to require years of expensive education. That changes things in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Your job has changed. You are now a programmer. You speak human.
So here is what I would genuinely love to know from you. When you think about AI and the work you do or the life you live, what is the thing that worries you most? Or, if you are not worried, what are you most curious about? I want to tackle your fears yet, more importantly, ignite your imagination and keep you informed about the way that AI will impact your life.
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
See you next Thursday,
— Steve