I’ve been chatting with a lot of folks across industries lately who are afraid of losing their jobs or have already lost them. Meanwhile, I’ve also had interesting chats with folks new to their industry, with zero training, who are using tools like AI to fill the entire gap in their knowledge and expertise.
It raises interesting questions for me.
Is a dentist still a dentist if they don’t have a drill, needle, pliers, or X-ray machine?
I hope that’s a ridiculous question. Tools do not make us who and what we are. They can help us get the job done, certainly, but they aren’t what makes us.
On the flip side, if a practicing dentist doesn’t have the tools required for the job when a patient comes in needing a crown, they’re likely to struggle to help. They’re still a dentist, though. Access to the right tools for the job can be necessary in many situations. Dropping the dentist analogy, I find in my line of work that as AI and other tools interject into the process, some of the best contributions many of us more seasoned folks make are actually our knowledge, expertise, principles, and so on. Not the tools.
We are not our tools.
Is someone with no training who has a drill, needle, pliers, or X-ray machine a dentist?
I hope this question is just as ridiculous as the last. The thing is, I keep having encounters, both online and in real life, where people get upset by this type of question. They think that, since they’re “vibe-coding,” they must be a developer, designer, product manager, or whatever else. Ask these folks what they’d do in certain situations, when encountering particular types of business problems, and they turn to an AI agent for the answer.
A person who prompts an AI agent, whether effectively or not, is not innately a designer, developer, product manager, or any other profession. If anything, they are a prompter.
We may not be our tools, but our tools also do not make us professionals, experts, and specialists.
Is the dentist who uses a foot-pedal-powered drill or the one who uses an electric drill more effective?
While we shouldn’t let our tools define us, we do need to recognize that certain tools can make us more effective. The folks I’ve seen who initially resisted AI are now struggling. Some of that is the hype from their stakeholders, employers, and buyers simply not being interested in folks who offer solutions that don’t use the shiny new thing. Others are more legitimate, however, where the use of new tools like AI is making folks more effective or efficient.
A person who is reluctant to let go of old tools or to learn new ones is going to struggle or fail. Unfortunately, this can be a realm of vast privilege, since tools cost money, take time to learn, or have other barriers to access. Many of the more senior folks I know in their industries who have been able to hang in there with this big wave of change have done so because they’ve been open and accepting of change, been able to learn the new fangled thing, and been able to adapt their wealth of skills and experience into multiplying the impact of that new thing.
While tools shouldn’t define us, we do require them to get much of our work done effectively, and if there’s one inevitable thing in the world, it’s change.
So, who and what are we?
Recap:
- We are not our tools.
- Our tools do not define us or make us experts.
- Change is inevitable.
With this in mind, I think who and what we are professionally in this strange world is most determined by:
- Being open and adaptable.
- Our behaviours and principles, and how we apply them.
- Our experiences and how we use them to bring wisdom and intuition to situations.
- How we treat people.
- Who we align ourselves with.
If anyone with access to an AI can call themselves a developer, designer, product manager, or anything else, then what’s really going to make the difference, pitting people against each other professionally, I think, is these things.