Summary: The transformative potential of the current AI revolution creates unique career opportunities. More important, the joy and self-realization benefits from early engagement in AI-driven innovation are immense, as shown by parallels with previous technological paradigm shifts.
Want to be the next Steve Jobs, minus the turtleneck obsession? Now’s your chance.
If you want personalized mentoring optimized for your specific circumstances, use ADPList. But I have broader mentoring advice that will apply to a large percentage of my subscribers, so I’ll give it here.
We’re currently living through one of the rare episodes in human history where technology changes dramatically, and you have a chance to build a new world. Take this chance! This is particularly true if you’re younger than 40, because building this new world will become your formative experience that you’ll look back to in awe and envy for the rest of your life. Building an AI project now can be the defining moment of your career. Doing exactly the same in 20 years will be a mundane everyday project, defined by drudgery rather than excitement. Similar to the difference between designing a website in 1997 and 2017.
(Older people can certainly contribute, but it won’t be as life-changing and intense an experience for them. They’ll still have great fun, and maybe that’s enough to recommend joining the revolution.)
Which way to turn? In later years you’ll regret not going for the once-in-a-career excitement revolution. (Leonardo)
I personally remember being at the center of the hurricane during the dot-com bubble, being a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer in charge of defining Web usability when the Web was just taking off and growing by 300,000% in a year. At Sun, we had a good slogan (“The network is the computer”) and a bad slogan (“We put the dot in dot-com”). Both were true, and Sun was the absolute center of the Internet revolution. I worked for a short time on Java, but I spent most of my time defining website usability. Even though I probably worked with higher-IQ people at Bell Communications Research, my time at Sun was the best in my career.
Creating at a big but focused company was a better match for my personality, but most people tell me that working at a startup is an even more intense and life-changing experience. A good compromise is joining a small, separate group within a larger firm, like the team that built the Macintosh. Former members of that team all say that working for Steve Jobs was brutal, but also that creating the Mac was the best time in their lives, despite the 70-hour work weeks. (More like 90 hours during crunch times.)
The joy and satisfaction from thinking back to an intensely creative experience when you broke new ground should not be underestimated. It’s one of the purest cases of Maslow’s Pyramid of Need’s highest level, self-actualization. (Midjourney)
Of course, the intense satisfaction is even better right in that “Eureka” moment when you solve a fundamental problem and create a new world. I’m advising joining the AI revolution both for the sake of future-you and for the sake of present-day-you. (Midjourney)
I find it rewarding to be part of the AI revolution. It’s finally making me excited about the future of UX, which had been rather stagnant the 10 years prior to AI Year 1 (2023). But I’m too old to join a startup and build a new product.
However, most of my readers are at exactly the right age for the startup experience: 20-40.
Trust me and my dot-com experience. Trust the people who invented the early web. Trust the people who built the Mac or the revolutionary early PC software products like VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet). Even trust the people who built the IBM 360 or the first minicomputers. Trust all of that experience from earlier technology revolutions: when a new world opens up, get in on the ground floor and build!
The 3 main technology revolutions were the personal computer, the Web/Internet, and AI. Other revolutions include computers in the first place (the original mainframes) and mobile computing, but as big as these two changes were, they didn’t reach the heights of the PC/Web/AI trifecta. (Leonardo)
You will regret it forever if you sit out these first exciting years on the sidelines and work on legacy products. In 20 years, you won’t look back in nostalgia on the time you spent drawing one more beautiful journey map. But if you build a groundbreaking new AI product, you’ll remember those years fondly.
(If you’re still in doubt about whether AI is a revolution or mere hype, read my article from June 2023. I still believe those arguments, and the additional research data since then only confirm my conclusion: AI is real because measurement studies show that even the primitive AI we have now creates major gains in productivity, creativity, work product quality, empathy, and employee satisfaction. It also narrows skill gaps, bringing low-performing staff closer to their high-performing colleagues.)
For sure, the AI revolution won’t be the last techquake, but it’ll probably be the only one while you’re young. Consider the dates for the major revolutions:
PC: 1976 (Apple I)
Web: 1993 (Mosaic, the first GUI browser)
AI: 2023 (ChatGPT 4)
Many years pass between each tech revolution. Much changes. (Ideogram)
We run roughly 20-30 years between major shakeups. If you don’t build a pioneering AI product now, there will probably be another huge shift around 2050, but by then most of my readers will be too old to really be one of the pioneers of that Next Big Thing.
This article has been about the personal joy of deep immersion in a tech revolution that changes the world. Being a pioneer. Building beyond the mundane and everyday incremental progress that honestly dominates tech work. (Most projects have to be mundane since we can’t lurch from one drastic change to the next every year. Stability has great value in itself. Most technology projects should focus on making the darn thing work and polishing existing design ideas.)
In Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, most of your career planning may be targeted at improving the middle levels (since the bottom levels are already ensured for people in rich countries). Joining the AI revolution now will do that, leading to higher compensation and prestige in subsequent years as you join the elite of staff with more AI experience than most others. But my main point in this article is the jolt you’ll get at the very highest level, from being an intense creator during a turning point in world history. Self-actualization at its finest! (Midjourney)
There’s a second point: securing your career in the long term, after the joy of the revolution has subsided. 5 years from now, AI will be old hat, and 10 years from now, it’ll be the natural way everything is done. Everybody will be using AI to do their jobs by then. But only people who start with AI now will have 5 years of experience using AI by 2029.
The only way to get the 5 years of AI experience that will be required for all the good jobs in 2029 is to start building AI products now. (Leonardo)
As an analogy, many of the people on the original Macintosh team went on to great achievements in GUI software and GUI hardware in subsequent years. They benefited from having many more years of experience building GUI-PC products than anybody else.
Opportunity knocks. AI beckons. Pioneers wanted. Experience the revolution. Shape the future. Secure your legacy. Time is now. Act or regret.
Opportunity knocks in 2024. Let it in. (Midjourney)