With recent articles about current and future AI job losses, a lot of students, parents, and career professionals are concerned about their future employability. I am too! It’s a fight for jobs with AI and it’s just the first rounds.
I’ve Been Here Before And Made It Through.
As a mid-career advertising creative, I survived and thrived during the 2000s transition from traditional to digital media. How? First, I freaked out, but then I discovered a perspective that focused me on my capabilities that transcended the digital media revolution.
What I learned, explained in this blog post, was that when it feels like everything is changing, grasp on to what will remain. Back then, we thought the digital media experts would replace all advertising creatives because they knew the Internet. Yet knowing traditional media was only a part of our job skills.
We were skilled observers of life whose ideas connected often mundane product features to people’s lives through powerful narratives. We were idea writers who took seemingly unrelated things and put them together into cultural narratives that built brands.
Digital media was merely a new tool for our irreplaceable strategic and creative skills. Knowing how to write a 30-second TV ad didn’t make us valuable. Our intuitive sense of knowing the most powerful story to put into a TV ad or social media post made us valuable. The new employee next to me knew coding and HTML but not storytelling in any medium.
Lean Into What Your Brain Can Do Uniquely.
Now we face a new revolution. One that doesn’t affect one career or industry, but all knowledge workers. Despite the increased scale, we should approach it the same way.
Soon, an AI agent will be “sitting” next to you at your job. What can you do that it cannot? If you’re a student, what skills can you develop in college that AI won’t be able to replace?
Don’t answer these questions, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says you may not have internship and entry-level job opportunities. Mid-career professionals are not immune either. We’re already seeing AI job displacement.
While no one knows the future (especially AI advancements), I see a path forward. It is based on my deep dive into AI over the past 18 months, teaching college students during the rise of AI, and my experience as an ad creative working through a technology revolution.
Rather than list skills that may be replaced by AI, let’s look at the physical advantages human brains have over AI neural networks. Then, as if training for a competition, lean into activities that work and strengthen your brain in unique areas AI can’t get better at. If you don’t train, you can’t expect to compete.
Train Your Brain to Be More Human.
There’s no doubt you can’t ignore AI. Nvidia CEO Jesen Huang says anyone who doesn’t learn to use AI will lose their jobs to people who use AI. While true, there’s a difference between using AI to increase your human intelligence versus replace it. AI the wrong way can cost your job, too.
Use AI for everything, and you could lose your human brain advantage. Working your brain in specific ways, like physical training, is essential to maintaining and strengthening cognitive function. When I noticed my attention span shrinking due to digital media consumption, I added long books to my daily media diet to build back that capacity.
AI is good at many intellectual tasks and will get better. Startup Mechanize is training AI agents on jobs specifically to replace humans. Yet, even AI-first companies recognize unique human qualities.
After going all AI, Klarna is rehiring some of the 700 customer service employees it let go. CEO Sebastian Siemistkowski admits that the “value of that human touch will increase.”
Whether you’re years from retirement or a student looking to enter a field, prepare for the job competition by doubling down on uniquely human brain capabilities. How is our biological brain unique from the artificial neural network (ANN) that powers AI?
1. You Run On A Banana; AI On A Power Plant.
The human brain is much more energy efficient. A human writing a 1,000-word report takes the energy equivalent of 0.02 kWh hours, while an LLM takes 100 times more at 2.9 kWh. Your energy use for the report is half a banana, while ChatGPT would use enough to power a light bulb for 5 days. Entire power plants are being built just to power AI data centers.
Beyond environmental concerns, more LLMs are charging per query and token. An employee who doesn’t have to use AI for everything will get work done more efficiently. Plus, unlike AI your brain never stops working on problems.
When working out or sleeping, your subconscious mind keeps making connections. You have sustainable, all-day-long intelligence versus energy-guzzling, task-specific intelligence.
2. Your Brain Is A Messy 3D Jungle; AI is a Layered Perfect Grid.
An AI’s neural network is organized in neat layers. Data goes in one end, and a decision comes out the other. Based on Dr. Lichtman’s work, we know your brain is a mess of 86 billion neurons, each one connected to thousands of others in a chaotic, 3-dimensional web forming 100+ trillion possibilities.
Your messy brain is a genius at making connections; a clean grid can’t. You can connect the plot of a novel you read a decade ago with a business problem you face today.
This is where true, out-of-the-box creativity comes from. AI is good at optimizing within the grid; you’re good at jumping to a whole new grid, finding the adjacent possible of true innovation.
3. You Learn by Falling Down; AI Learns by Reading the Dictionary.
When I was 9, I learned a lot by crashing my minibike going too fast up a ramp. My body learned a thousand things about speed, gravity, and the texture of gravel. That’s embodied learning. We learn with our hands, our skin, our whole being. AI learns from a dataset. It can read every book published, but it has never felt the sun on its face or shock of cold water.
Humans can also learn from one or two examples. Show a kid a dog, and they get “dog” without seeing a million pictures. A study in Science showed humans can learn a new written character from one example because we understand the process of how it’s made, not just the finished pixels.
You can walk into a new situation and figure it out on the fly because you have a physical, intuitive grasp of how the world works.
You’re adaptable because your “data” is the entire world, not just a text file. This capability is crucial for any job that requires rapid adaptation with incomplete information.
4. AI Knows That; You Know Why.
AI is a master of correlation. It knows lightning is followed by thunder, but has no deep understanding lightning causes thunder. You do. You build mental models. You ask, “Why?” This is causal reasoning.
Some studies indicate AI systems can mimic aspects of causal reasoning, but they still lack the flexibility and adaptability of humans. This allows you to plan for the future, troubleshoot a problem, and imagine different outcomes.
Your strength is strategy, diagnostics, and true problem-solving. AI can tell you which sales pitch is correlated with the most success.
You can figure out why a strategy works and design a whole new one based on that human insight. You’re a strategist, detective, and scientist.
The bottom line? Don’t try to be a better, faster AI. Lean into what makes you a messy, intuitive, creative, and embodied human.
- Get Your Hands Dirty. Don’t just analyze data; go see the real thing. Talk to the customer. Build a prototype. Work with your hands. Connect your brain to the real, physical world.
- Ask “Why?” Relentlessly. Be the person in the meeting who moves past what happened to why it happened. Dig for the root cause – where your true value as a problem-solver lies.
- Master Human Connection. Look people in the eye. Build trust. Inspire a team. Negotiate with nuance and empathy. These skills are a complex dance of our messy, emotional brains. AI can fake it, but can’t feel it. People know the difference.
- Be an Idea-Cross-Pollinator. Read history. Learn an instrument. Talk to people outside your field. Your brain’s 3-D jungle thrives on diverse, weird inputs. That’s how you come up with ideas that no AI, trained on predictable past patterns, could generate.
- Learn to Learn, Fast. Your ability to learn from a single example is your superpower. Your value isn’t in one thing you know now, but in your infinite capacity to learn the next thing. Be a real time, lifelong learner. ChatGPT 4o’s training data cutoff was Oct. 2023. You can train on any new topic today.
Surviving and thriving the AI revolution won’t be quick or easy. It will take training and stamina. In my next two posts, I will provide two training plans to ensure your brain is fit for the competition with AI for jobs. One plan is for mid-career professionals and one for students.
This Was 80% Human Generated Content!
The initial ideas were my own, so were beginning parts of a rough draft. I used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking for my research. Interestingly, I got better results when I asked the model to respond to my prompt again after running 10 miles. Thanks to Christopher Penn for his “Add a Banana” AI principle. I ended up verifying and finding my own research to back findings. Gemini made up some references and others were outdated. I also used Gemini to refine my headline for engagement and SEO. I used Gemini 2.0 Flash to generate the graphic.
