It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
The same technology feels like opportunity to some people and fear to others. I think both are right, for a while.
Everyone knows how A Tale of Two Cities opens. Fewer people know how the sentence ends. Dickens says the period was so like his own that its “noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
He was making fun of people who think their moment is the most extreme one ever. I’m about to be one of them.
We now have technology that can do creative and intellectual work. Intelligence on tap. I work in tech, and I write most of my code with it now. Even this post was edited with its help. For me, one can say, it is the best of times.
At the same time, I see a lot of people struggling to find work they like. Good people, laid off, or sending applications into silence. Some don’t know yet what these tools can do. Some don’t feel they can do anything about it. It wears them down. For them, it is the worst of times.
Not the French Revolution
Dickens set his story in the French Revolution, but that’s the wrong comparison. 1789 was about bread prices, debt and a rigid class system, not machines.
A better one is England in 1811. Textile workers, the Luddites, smashed the new machines that made their skills worthless. Historians have a name for what came after: Engels’ pause. For about fifty years, Britain’s output grew while workers’ real wages barely moved. In the long run the machines made almost everyone better off. But the long run took a working lifetime, and the gains went first to the people who owned the machines and knew how to use them.
That’s my guess for us. In the long run, we’ll probably be fine. In the short to medium term, I expect chaos and upheaval.
Same news, two feelings
Why does the same event feel like opportunity to one person and fear to another? I think a lot of it is slack. If you have savings, time and some say over your work, a big change is something you can experiment with. If you’re stretched, the same change is only a threat.
I’m lucky. I have the slack, so I get to feel curious. The fear isn’t foolish. Losing a job hurts more than learning a new tool helps.
What I’d do
Put your head down and skill up, as much as you can. Use these tools every day, on real work, until you know what they’re good at and where they fail. Not because any of this is fair, but because it’s the part you control.
The Stoics got there almost two thousand years ago. Epictetus opens his handbook with it: some things are up to us, and some are not.