The common sense of a fence post

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #23

I don't know about you, but I can't stop thinking about what AI is going to do to (and for) all of us. To our jobs. To the way we live. And yes, to the consulting business you and I are in.

This spring, Eric Schmidt stepped up to give the commencement address at the University of Arizona. Former CEO of Google. One of the men who helped build the world those graduates were walking into. He started in on the bright future of artificial intelligence... and found himself on the business end of a heckling and booing crowd of upset grads.

He kept going. He told them AI "will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have." The boos got louder. He even said the quiet part for them, that they feared "the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating." Then he told them their class had the power to shape how it all turns out. Unconvinced, they booed that too.

Think about that for a second. One of the architects of this whole era, standing in front of a few thousand twenty-two-year-olds in caps and gowns... booed off the stage for promising them the future.

I'll be straight with you on this. Like everybody else, I've spent months thinking hard about what AI means. For me. For how I serve my clients. For all of us, my kids and my grandson included. I don't have it all figured out. Anybody who tells you they do is delusional or simply full of B.S.

But I think it’s easy to misunderstand what all their booing was about.

It's easy to write those kids off as afraid of the future. That isn't it. Schmidt actually faced the truth... the jobs are evaporating. What he didn't tell them is which jobs go first. They're watching the machine pull the first rung up out of reach. 

The entry-level analysis, the grunt work, the junior jobs that used to turn a green graduate into a seasoned professional... that's now the work the machine does first, faster, and cheaper. And if you can't get a foot (or even a hand) on the bottom rung, how do you ever climb?

You might figure it's their problem, not yours. You climbed your ladder a long time ago.

But stay with me for a minute, because the same force pulling up the bottom rung is doing something to the top of the ladder too. And it changes what your decades of experience are worth.

Here's the trap.

When the machine gets good at the work, the temptation is to race it. Drop your price. Work faster. Pump out the same commodity work, just quicker than you used to. But that's a race you can't win. The machine will always be cheaper and faster than you.

Run that race and you make yourself replaceable on purpose. That's the real risk to a consultant with thirty years of experience and battle scars. The danger was never that AI takes your seat. It's that you climb down out of it.

Most companies are asking the wrong question. They want to know how to use AI to replace human intelligence and cut payroll. The real question is how to use AI to amplify human intelligence without making yourself stupid in the process.  Those are two different roads, and almost everybody is on the wrong one.

I tell my clients to picture what they're actually working with. Artificial intelligence is a genius-level assistant. An IQ of 160. It has read every book ever written.   And it has the memory of Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates (which is to say, none) and the common sense of a fence post. Brilliant beyond measure. But in many ways, it wakes up every morning with no idea who you are. No taste. No judgment. No clue what actually matters to the person across the table from you.

That assistant will do the bottom rungs of the ladder better than any human alive. It cannot reach the top rung. The judgment rung. The one you spent your whole career climbing to. 

That's why your value doesn't drop as the machine gets smarter. It concentrates.

Look at what happens when people forget this. A team at MIT found that of the thirty to forty billion dollars companies have poured into AI, ninety-five percent of it produced no measurable return at all. 

The St. Louis Fed found that across the whole workforce, AI is saving people about one and a half percent of their hours. Not fifteen. One and a half.

A study of nearly six thousand executives found more than eighty percent of their companies saw no real impact on profit.

All that promise, and almost none of it showing up in the work. Why?

Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review call it "workslop."  It's the report that looks polished on the surface, clean formatting, confident headers, but it's hollow and void of nuance and context, and in many cases plain wrong.

AI is the ultimate gaslighter.

The thinking never happened. The machine made it, no human checked it, and the work got shoved downstream to whoever has to fix it.  According to the study, it means two hours of rework, every single time one lands on the downstream person's desk.

That's what it looks like when people hand the thinking to the machine. They let the fence post do the deciding, and everybody downstream pays for it.

Getting it right is simpler than it sounds.

Steven Kotler, who runs the Flow Research Collective, has a rule for this, and it's the best one I've heard. Humans go first. Never start with the machine.  You do the hard thinking yourself, while it's still your intuition and your experience steering.

You wrestle with the problem. You decide what matters. Then, and only then, you put the assistant to work on what it's good at... running the research, pressure-testing your assumptions, surfacing the blind spot you missed, taking the drudgery off your plate.

Do the hard thinking first. Then hand off the grunt work. Reverse that order and all you've done is get faster at being wrong.

This is the part I want you to truly internalize, especially as you advance in life and career. The experts who keep their judgment sharp are worth more in this moment, not less. 

Your clients are scared. They can see the slop piling up and they can't always tell the real from the fake (yet). You can. That is no small thing. We are short on experienced adults who still do their own thinking, and you are one of them.

There's something bigger underneath all of it too.

The booing at that graduation, the unease a lot of us are feeling... it isn't only about jobs. People are protecting something harder to put into words.

I believe it's the specialness of being a human being. The analog in a world going all digital. Nobody wants a machine to win the things that were supposed to be ours. And the experienced consultant sitting across the table, the one with the miles and the judgment and the real human presence, is the thing people are starting to reach back toward.  My friend Ryan Levesque calls it a return to real. His book will be published soon with the same title. As the digital floods everything, the real gets precious. That pull you feel in the culture right now is working for you, not against you.

You don't out-produce the machine. You out-judge it.

Now I want to hear from you. Hit reply and tell me the one call in your work you'd never let a machine make. Just that one. I read every response myself.

Dale 

P.S. AI was my thinking partner with this newsletter. The ideas and rough first pass were mine. Then it did the grunt work, going back and forth with me over the course of a couple hours Monday and Tuesday, me getting up from it to walk the dogs, go sit by the water, let things percolate, all to get it right. I hope you enjoy the final product. I'm always eager to hear from you on how to make it better, so please reply with your input and ideas.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

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👉 She called it running with scissors

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P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...