Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I’m grappling with the impact AI is having in my industry and what it means for my career. I feel wildly lucky to have found a line of work I love, one that brings a lot of meaning and fulfillment to my life (I’m a journalist and author). So far I’ve been able to mostly pay the bills, and crucially, it feels invaluable to get to use my brain in this way every day and to have the sense that my skills and human experience are somehow useful in the world.
But like other knowledge workers, I’m suddenly wondering if I may soon truly not be adequate for this job that AI will be better equipped to do than I, with my meager meat-brain and physical constraints like needing to sleep and take my kids to school. Am I being self-indulgent — or worse, reckless — if I think I can keep doing this sort of work that I love for the next two or three decades?
I hear tech leaders proclaiming that the future of professional and financial security is in the trades. And I do have a mortgage to pay and children to raise. Should I start planning a full career switch to something less AI-replaceable, even if it might not fill me up in the same deep way my work does now?
Dear Irreplaceable You,
I hear you — these are anxious times! So much so, that a couple of researchers recently proposed a new psychological clinical construct — artificial intelligence replacement dysfunction (AIRD) — to describe the existential distress that more people may start to experience as AI systems automate their jobs.
“Workers may present to mental health professionals with symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, depression, or identity confusion symptoms that may reflect deeper fears about relevance, purpose, and future employability,” the researchers write. Sounds a lot like the worries you’re feeling.
And the worries make sense. AI won’t leave journalists or authors unscathed. It’s already changing newsrooms. One higher-up at the Associated Press straight-up told staff recently that when it comes to AI becoming part of the writing process, “resistance is futile.”
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I think that’s an overstatement — by participating in a union, for example, workers can win some meaningful protections. And I don’t believe all journalism or writing jobs (or all white-collar jobs for that matter) will disappear. Human creative input is the lifeblood of AI systems; without it, they’d have no idea what’s going on in the world.
But I do think there will be fewer jobs out there for knowledge workers like us. Probably a lot fewer. The market will incentivize cash-strapped employers to automate whatever they can. And in the near term, I doubt we’ll get a genuinely livable universal basic income, because companies would likely resist the mass redistribution of wealth it would require. So it does make sense to think ahead and be pragmatic.
Does that mean you should panic-switch careers right now and become a plumber or electrician, as so many leaders in AI are recommending?
Not so fast. AI is developing at an unbelievable pace, but disagreement persists over just how quickly it will transform the real world.
Skeptics argue that the tech won’t diffuse as broadly or quickly as the AI leaders say it will; in their view, retraining as a plumber now would be premature. Meanwhile, believers in a fast AI takeoff argue that even plumbing, which so far isn’t automatable because we don’t know how to build really good robots, will get automated pretty fast if we build superintelligence (because surely the superintelligence will figure out how to build the really good robots). Either way, it’s not at all clear that it’s worth ditching your career right now and taking a few years to retrain as a plumber.
And then there’s the question of meaning.
Having enough of an income to raise your kids and pay your mortgage is obviously important. But you know what else is important? Feeling a sense of purpose in your life.
That is not a luxury, the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues in her new book, The Mattering Instinct. Every human being has a need for meaning. We are, per Goldstein, “matter longing to matter,” and we each undertake different “mattering projects” that give us our raison d’être.
When our efforts to pursue a mattering project are frustrated for too long, “the result is psychologically disastrous, the kind of rupture that is described as an existential crisis,” the philosopher writes. “At its most extreme, a person can fall into that death-within-life that is called persistent depressive disorder.”
Not everyone has to find their “mattering project” in their job. But everyone has to find it somewhere. Goldstein identifies four different types of people, each with a different type of mattering: transcenders, socializers, heroic strivers, and competitors. She locates them all on “the mattering map,” which gives you a sense of what each category is like:
I love this kind of map. (And not just because it reminds me of the kind that appear in books like The Hobbit!) Looking at it can help us each think afresh about the broader category of stuff that makes us feel a sense of meaning, so we can consider additional types of work that could form a satisfying “mattering project” for us in the future.
To illustrate, I’ll tell you what I see when I look at the map. I immediately gravitate toward the island of “heroic strivers,” because intellectual and artistic pursuits are the primary way I make meaning in life — that’s why I became a journalist and a novelist. (A dead giveaway: The fact that the water nearby comes labeled with a warning — Beware of the Shoals of Perfectionism — made me feel extremely seen.) But I think where I really live is on a bridge, not pictured on this map, between the island of heroic strivers and the island of socializers. Because I’ve never been fully content to just write an article or a novel in a vacuum. I want my work to actually help some community of people, too.
Zooming out from my current career and considering the broader type of mattering it fits into is helpful. It shows me that if I can no longer work as a writer one day, the best alternative for me is probably not to become a plumber. To be clear, plumbing matters immensely — my bathtub was clogged just last week, so this feels very salient — and I can easily imagine someone deriving a sense of mattering from that profession; maybe they inhabit the island of “socializers,” where they help “non-intimates” every day. But I don’t think I’m well-suited to it, either temperamentally or physically. (Something the “learn a trade” recommendation often overlooks: Physically based work can be hard on the body. And I’m already cursed with bad knees.)
If I’m fortunate enough to get to choose, you know what I think would be a good alternative career for me? Being a rabbi. I was lucky to get an in-depth Jewish education growing up, and I think lots of people will continue to want their spiritual life mediated by humans, not robots. As someone who loves using intellectual and creative means in service of helping a community of people, retraining as a rabbi could be a great fit for me if I need to change my work at some point.
What about you? When you look at the mattering map, can you identify the broader category of pursuit that tends to fill you up, and see what else, aside from your current job, might be an expression of that?
If you want a fallback option for the AI era, my suggestion would be to develop that — even as you continue to happily work in your current career now.
And as for your current career, I want to caution against buying the premise that, as you put it, “I may soon truly not be adequate for this job that AI will be better equipped to do than I, with my meager meat-brain and physical constraints like needing to sleep and take my kids to school.”
It’s precisely your physicality that allows you to get out into the field and report, to cultivate trust with your sources so you can draw out that perfect quote, to build a personal relationship with your audience. And it’s precisely your meat-brain that allows you to exercise the sort of judgment that will actually serve the interests of your human readers — to ask the questions that you believe ought to be asked right now, not just the ones AI determines are statistically most likely to be asked.
Rather than assuming you’ll soon be totally replaceable, lean into these aspects of your career, where your humanness is an obvious benefit. Once you feel confident about what you bring to the table, you might even feel more psychologically open to using AI in ways that can actually augment your work — like sifting through gargantuan troves of data so you can hold powerful people to account. That is a genuinely helpful use of AI in journalism, and one that we shouldn’t be fearful of embracing.
It might take your industry years to realize what we should outsource to AI and what we should keep for us humans. But understanding the difference for yourself now can help you maintain your sense of mattering, or as you beautifully put it, “the sense that my skills and human experience are somehow useful in the world.”
Bonus: What I’m reading
There are some fields where most people prefer a human touch — think child care, nursing, and performance art — and I suspect they’ll be more protected from automation, at least for a while. This Atlantic article about the triumph of piano players over player pianos highlights that ray of hope. Mind you, eventually the cheapness of robot nursing relative to human nursing may become so hard to resist that only the wealthy opt for the latter. The human touch may become a luxury good.
By far my favorite episode of the Dwarkesh podcast is this recent interview with Ada Palmer, probably the most entertaining Renaissance historian ever. She made me want to somehow make “Renaissance historian” a part of my own mattering project.
As I mentioned, I am aulde, with bad knees. So I loved learning, from Shayla Love’s piece in the New Yorker exploring how we define the stages of life, that according to the ancient Athenian philosopher Solon, adulthood doesn’t start until age 42! Apparently I am still a youth.
