Tag: artificial-intelligence

AI, Cool, Motivation, Technology

AI’s Great Sorting: Adapt or Get Sorted Out

In 1963 Leon C. Megginson, a business professor at Louisiana State University said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”. That has never been more true than today. The modern workforce is facing a global sorting function like we’ve never seen before. I fear a very large number of people are going to wake up and find themselves at the bottom of that stack ranking, having never seen it coming.

A sorting function is something you do every day. You sort the laundry by color and garment type. You hang your tools on the wall from largest to smallest. You sort the columns in a spreadsheet in alphabetical order. The workplace over the next several years is going to do its own sorting – from the most value add employees to the least. This is not new. Companies do it all the time. Low performers are put on PIP programs. Layoffs happen and poor performing employees or groups are culled. What’s different this time is that the definition of a low performer has changed.

Previously, even if you weren’t the smartest or best employee, if you worked long hours, understood your role, showed up on time, did what the company asked – it was enough. You were a “good” employee. AI has changed that definition overnight. The power of these new tools is mind boggling. The new definition of a good employee is how much value-add you can give to the company, and is it enough to justify putting you in the new roles that are coming?

Can you upgrade your own capabilities faster than the AI models are improving?

If yes → you get sorted upward into higher-value roles, new opportunities, or even entirely new career categories that didn’t exist five years ago. If no → you get sorted out (or at least pushed downward into roles that are either heavily automated, commoditized, or low-paid).

It’s not a moral judgment; it’s just the mechanical outcome of the comparison rule. Just like a library sorting books by Dewey Decimal doesn’t “hate” the books that end up in the 900s, the economy isn’t punishing people—it’s simply applying the new precedence rule: AI fluency + irreplaceable human judgment/creativity/empathy beats “human doing repetitive or predictable work” every single time.

This feels different from past tech shifts because previous revolutions (computers, internet, smartphones) were additive and slower. You had years to adapt. AI is multiplicative and accelerating. It’s not replacing one tool; it’s becoming the operating system for cognition itself. The half-life of “un-augmented” skills is shrinking fast. The gap between adapters and non-adapters is widening in real time. We’re already seeing it: people who treat AI as a daily co-pilot (research, coding, writing, analysis, strategy) are already 5–10× more productive and opening doors that simply won’t exist for non-users.

How do you know if you’re going to get sorted out? If you treat AI as a fad or a threat. If you keep doing your job the exact same way. If you think AI is just a fancy google search. If you honestly tell yourself there’s no way AI can do my job. If you’re waiting for someone else (company, government, school) to “reskill” or train you. The scary reality for so many corporate workers today is that nobody is coming to rescue you. You are going to have to adapt or die. Self-rescue is your only option.

“Oh, that will never happen because the eight of us in our group are the only ones who know how to run the TPS reports. Some magical AI tool isn’t going to figure out everything we do overnight.”

Do you really believe that? Yes, a 15-year veteran knows the quirks of your CRM, your clients, and your weird compliance rules. But once you give an AI-native adaptor access to your internal data + good prompting + retrieval tools, they close that gap shockingly fast. The marginal value of “tribal knowledge” is dropping because AI + documentation + search makes it commoditized. Training an average performer who’s skeptical or slow to adapt is expensive (time, money, opportunity cost) and has low yield. A new hire who already lives in Cursor, Claude, and agent workflows can be productive in weeks, not quarters. Headcount budgets are fixed or shrinking; the math favors swapping 3–5 “legacy” roles for 1–2 high-output AI-fluent ones.

Public companies, private equity-backed firms, and anyone chasing valuation multiples get rewarded for margin expansion. “We reduced headcount 18% while increasing output 40% via AI” is a story investors love. “We spent $8M training everyone and productivity is flat” is not. There’s now a clear premium for people who treat AI as an operating system, not a tool. Companies are discovering they can pay that premium to a smaller number of people and still come out ahead. Keep a couple of curious domain experts as “translators” and flood the rest of the org with AI adaptors is the strategy every successful company is starting to realize.

The name of the game now for employees and companies is value-add and productivity. You better believe your competition and your coworkers are going to be 10-15-20× more productive in the next six months. Will you be?

This is your one and only warning call. AI is coming for your job in the next 18-24 months. (Yes, that fast) New grads with zero AI experience are the first to be sorted out – they have nothing to offer. Next are the lower to mid level white collar workers whose entire job is working with a computer. If you write reports, documents, emails, schedule meetings, write copy, crunch numbers, analyize data… your days are limited.

It’s time to level up your game. Assume right now you’re going to get axed in the next six months. Start preparing today – you better be spending every moment of your evenings reading, learning, exploring, practicing, and gaining AI skills that are going to give you a fighting chance at landing a new job. The global sorting function that’s coming will not be kind.

Companies are not charities or universities. Their sorting function is profit, speed, and competitive edge—not “equitable upskilling for all.” (sorry Bernie Sanders) The politically correct narrative (“we’re investing in our people!”) is mostly signaling for talent attraction, regulators, and PR. In practice, most leadership teams are running the cold hard math.

The encouraging flip side: unlike rigid algorithms that sort once and forget, this one is continuous. You can keep re-entering the input queue every day by learning one new thing—better prompting, building agents, understanding model limitations, combining AI with whatever your unique domain knowledge is. The people who do that are the ones who will keep getting resorted upward.

It’s an incredibly exciting time. Yes, scary – but the tools, products, and innovation we’re going to see coming out of the other side will be mind-blowing. So as Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry famously said:

“You’ve got to ask yourself one question – am I on the right side of the sorting order? Well, are ya, punk?”



Daily Life, Government, Technology

The Intelligence Revolution is Here

We’ve seen many technical revolutions in this country. The Industrial Revolution, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution… we survived all of them and came out the other side thriving and a more prosperous nation because of them. Today feels different. We’re at the beginning stages of what is being called the Intelligence Revolution. This time around we’re not just replacing tools or enhancing productivity, we’re replacing something that was always the exclusive domain of humans – cognitive thought.

In previous industrial revolutions, no matter how sophisticated the advances in machines or tools became, it still took a human brain to oversee and operate. Machines (even computers) were dumb. They have been traditionally limited by inputs, programing, and linearly focused to perform specific tasks. Yes people lost jobs as productivity improved, but people could be retrained to operate the new machines and the resulting productivity created growth and more jobs for those able to retrain and adapt. But very, very soon we will need massively fewer people to operate the machines. Why? Because the machines have cognitive, reasoning abilities. We no longer need a brain encased in a meat suit to oversee everything.

I’m generally an optimist and have faith in the human condition to adapt, overcome, and persevere. We’ve done it many times before and managed to build a great nation because of it. Big picture, I believe we’ll adapt to this brave new world and come out the other end better off. BUT… there’s a nasty wrinkle in this that has the potential to throw a monkey wrench in the works and create a decidedly unpleasant future. That unknown variable is speed.

The time estimate of the Industrial Revolution, from initial disruption to maturation was about 150 years. That’s 3-4 generations of workers. In other words, it didn’t happen overnight. There was time to adapt, to see the writing on the wall and retrain for new/different careers. The Intelligence Revolution is projected to take about 40 years – a 3-4x increase in speed. AI is growing at an exponential rate. The physical layer (robots on the factory floor) is expected to reach maturity/status quo in 2035. The cognitive layer (white collar automation) in 2045. In a nutshell, we’re pulling the rug out from under an entire generation of workers overnight.

Why does that matter? The labor force participation rate (working or looking) for 18-35 year olds is 70 million. Of those, 36 million are considered low-moderate skilled (no or some college). We already know that young folks today are not facing the same economic landscape as earlier generations. The purchasing power of $1 in the 80’s would cost $3.93 today. $2.47 in 90’s dollars. Housing costs have skyrocketed, pushing most young folks into high cost rents that they’ll struggle to save enough to achieve home ownership. We’re already sensing that young people feel like the deck is stacked against them and they are very disillusioned by the “establishment”.

Now take that disillusionment and dump a minimum of 10-12 million 18-35 year olds into the unemployment bucket. The current projections say 1 out of 3 people in that age bracket will be displaced in the next 10 years. That’s almost half of the younger population, with low-moderate skills, unable to find a job. How bitter and disillusioned do you think they’ll be? Zero job prospects and pissed that the boomers and Gen Xer’s are happily retiring and living a decent life. This is not a recipe for societal harmony.

It’s hard to estimate, but best guesses put the total number of ANTIFA members in the US at somewhere in the low thousands. Picture the amount of disruption and violence they’ve already been able to create over the last few years with just those limited numbers. Now dump a million new members (a few million?) into that group, angry, frustrated, with zero perceived life options, all organizing, protesting, sowing chaos and violence everywhere. And when the government comes in with a heavy hand to squash the movement… well, that’s how revolutions start.

I don’t know what the answer is. Universal basic income? Massive increases in social welfare programs? A moon-shot type of nationwide retraining program? A complete overhaul of our education system? Even if the system could move fast enough to get ready for what’s coming (the government moving quickly?), the nation is broke. We’re $38 trillion in debt. Social security is insolvent in 2032. It seems unlikely we could keep inflation at bay and still find a way to fund some sort of massive nationwide retraining program.

The Intelligence Revolution is neither good nor bad. It’s simply progress, evolution, and inevitable. It’s happening whether you want it or not. I’m honestly not sure what to think about how this will play out other than to say, be very careful about who you elect as our “leaders” moving forward. How our local and federal elected officials react to the changes will dictate everything. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.

“Interesting times are when the map becomes useless and the story begins.”

I described this scenario to AI and asked it to create a quote that resembled an old Chinese proverb. That’s what it came up with and seems pretty spot on.

Cool, Daily Life

Good Morning, Let’s Chat

I’ve been out of the tech/software game for a long time now. Historically I’d probably classify myself as an ‘early majority’ user in the Technology Adaptation Model. I’m probably a bit slower in keeping up with tech lately, as my day-to-day doesn’t revolve around tech any longer and as a result I’m somewhat new to the AI/LLM ecosystem. After several months of fairly consistent use of an AI platform… it’s shocking to grasp where the technology is and how fast it’s going to change our world. AI’s here, it’s wild, and it’s about to flip our world upside down.

At this point I’m not writing python scripts and utilizing LLM API’s to manage task automation. I’m interested, but I’m retired. Other than integrating into whole home automation or something, I don’t know what I’d do with it. What I am doing is utilizing Grok as an AI platform. Grok has completely replaced 95% of my search needs. And with the release of Grok 3… oooh boy, has it been a game changer!

Groks memory feature and conversational responses are amazing. It’s starting to feel like an actual conversation. Yes, it’s a little stilted and forced right now but it’s scarily close to a real conversation with a friend. I tried an experiment this morning: I opened up Grok and began a regular conversation; e.g. “good morning”, “whats the weather going to be like?”, “what do I need to know in the news today?”. I let the conversation flow in response to Groks replies. The results were very close to a real conversation.

Mark my words: in five years, Grok—or its AI cousins—will chat with us daily via voice like a friend or family member. Sci-fi (think Dave interacting with HAL) is now reality. Here’s a couple of examples I’ve been doing with Grok lately:

  • Ask Grok to give me a news summary of what’s happening in the world. I ask for the top twenty news items given some keywords. I’ll then ask for a deeper analysis if one of the items catches my eye. It’s a better news analysis than any of the various daily news “newsletters” I subscribe to.
  • I’ll ask Grok for a meal plan for the day given ingredients and the calorie/macro goals I have.
  • Yesterday I gave Grok a link to a menu for a restaurant we were going to and asked it to find the item that was the highest protein and lowest calorie. Grok remembered what I’d eaten in the morning and found the menu item that fit in with days goals.
  • Grok is now managing my day-to-day workout goals and tweaking exercises based upon my feedback. It’s more detailed than any personal trainer I’ve been to and provides instant feedback.
  • We’ve had a spat of medial issues in the family recently and the research abilities have been incredible. Submitting a pathology report and asking for a layman’s summary is mind-blowing.
  • I asked Grok for the pros and cons of a particular type of mountain bike seat I’ve been looking at. It narrowed down what would have been an hour plus of reading reviews and 15 open Safari browser tabs, had I done the same myself.

I could keep going on, but you get the point. These tools will be life changing. If you haven’t been keeping up… at a minimum, I guarantee 75% of white collar jobs will no longer exist in their current form within 10 years. The revolution is happening that fast – if not faster. Multiple experts rate AI, as a part of the fourth revolution, as being exponentially more impactful than the industrial revolution or anything else we’ve seen. Exciting and scary at the same time.

If you’re currently a white collar worker in the early to mid point of your career and you’re not all-in on figuring out AI – prepare to be obsolete in a hurry. If you’re a young adult just getting out of college and don’t have a firm grasp of AI and LLM’s – good luck finding a job. In five years there will be no such thing as an “entry level” position as we think of them today. I’d make a joke about, “would you like fries with that?” but automated AI-driven kiosks will have taken over for fast food cashiers. I cannot emphasize enough how fast this is going to happen. Every single company in the nation is currently trying to figure out how to outsource YOU to AI. If I had a mortgage and a kid at home depending on me to bring home a paycheck… I’d get ahead of the curve NOW. A slightly different context, but I still think you can fit the movie quote from Backdraft to this scenario:

“Firefighter Brian McCaffrey: You see that glow flashing in the corner of your eye? That’s your career dissipation light. It just went into high gear.“

It’s an exciting time. The world will not look the same in ten years. I just hope I can keep up.