With recent articles about current and future AI job losses, a lot of students, parents, and career professionals are rightly concerned about their future employability. I am too! It’s a fight for jobs with AI.
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 onto what will not or cannot change. 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 could take 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. We’re already seeing AI job displacement.
While no one knows the future (especially AI advancements), I believe 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 not be replaced by AI, let’s look at the hardwired physical advantages human brains have over neural networks. Then, as if training for a marathon, lean into activities that work and strengthen your brain in unique areas AI cannot get better at. If you don’t train for the race against AI, 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. Yet using AI in the wrong way can cost you your job, too. There’s a difference between using AI to support human intelligence and replace it.
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. As an example, I noticed my attention span shrinking due to digital media. I’ve returned to reading long books before bed to build back up that capability.
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 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 race to AGI 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 for energy at 2.9 kWh. Your energy use for the report is half a banana, while ChatGPT would use enough energy to power a light bulb for 5 days. New power plants are being built just to power AI data centers.
Environmental concerns aside, LLMs are charging per query and token. Someone who doesn’t use AI for everything gets work done more efficiently. Plus, 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 Jungle; AI is a 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. Jeff Lichtman’s work, we know your brain is a mess of 86 billion neurons, each one connected to thousands of others in a chaotic, three-dimensional web.
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’re facing 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 innovative new ideas.
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 over a jump. My body learned a thousand things about speed, gravity, and the texture of the trail. That’s embodied learning. We learn with our hands, our skin, our whole being. AI learns from a dataset. It can read every book on Earth, but it has never felt the sun on its face or the 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 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.
Your “data” is the entire world, not a text file. This 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 that lightning is followed by thunder. But it has no deep understanding that lightning causes thunder. You do. You build mental models. You ask, “Why?” This is causal reasoning. Some studies indicate AI systems can mimic some 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.
Thus, 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 it works and design a whole new strategy based on that human insight. You’re the 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 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 – 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. An AI can fake it; it 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 jungle architecture thrives on diverse, weird inputs. That’s how you come up with ideas that no AI, trained on predictable past patterns, could generate.
- Learn How to Learn, Fast. Your ability to learn from a single example is your superpower. Be a rookie, over and over again. Your value isn’t in the one thing you know now, but in your infinite capacity to learn the next thing. Be a lifelong learner.
Surviving and thriving in the AI revolution won’t be easy or fast. It will take some 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” idea. 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 ChatGPT 40 to generate the graphic.
