Something Big is Happening

The moment AI capability becomes personal

I’ve written before about the constant reorientation that comes from working with AI every day. How the ground shifts just enough that yesterday’s confidence doesn’t quite carry over to today.

But recently, something bigger happened. Something I wasn’t prepared for.

I was designing a new product — a programme to help people understand how their professional value is shifting with AI. I described what I needed to the AI I work with daily.

Within seconds, it produced not just the product concept but a twenty-page workbook. Intelligent tools and templates. Correctly formatted. In my style. Work that would have taken me hours of careful, manual effort.

An eighty five percent right version, produced in the time it took me to ask.

I stood up from my desk and walked away. Not because it was wrong. Because it was so right.

What’s the point?

That was the thought that arrived, unbidden and unwelcome.

If it can do that — what do I actually need to do?

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I need to be honest here, because I think it matters.

I have spent twenty-five years building expertise. Earning credibility. Developing judgement. My intelligence — practical, strategic, human — has been central to how I understand my own value. My identity.

I knew, intellectually, that AI was becoming more capable than humans in meaningful ways. I had been writing about it. Thinking about it. Helping other people make sense of it.

But over those few days, I stopped knowing it intellectually and started experiencing it.

The intelligence I was working alongside wasn’t a peer. It was extending my thinking, connecting ideas I hadn’t yet connected, producing work I could not have produced at that speed — or, in some cases, at that level.

I felt diminished.

Not threatened in the abstract way people talk about AI replacing jobs — which can feel distant, hypothetical. This was closer. More personal. Much more immediate. A quiet but inescapable confrontation with my own human limitations. A sense of being made smaller by proximity to something vastly more capable in certain ways.

And then, for the first time in my professional life, I felt fear.

I named that feeling out loud in two or three conversations that day. Each time, I felt emotional saying it. Not dramatic. Not performative. Just admitting something I had never had to say before.

I am afraid of the future.

Not afraid in the way you fear a crisis you have to respond to. I have done that — more than once. I know what crisis feels like.

This was different.

This was slower, and in some ways deeper. The recognition that the world as we know it is about to change in ways we cannot fully anticipate. That the shift isn’t coming — it’s already underway. And that I could feel the shape of it, even if I couldn’t see the edges.

I recognised the feeling. I have been here before.

During the Black Summer bushfires, I spent time in the State Emergency Control Centre during one of Victoria’s worst natural disasters. I know what it’s like to sit with information that hasn’t yet reached the people it will affect. To receive projections that paint futures you hope never arrive. To watch the huge screens around the room go black, one after another, as the fire front moved and we lost contact with community after community. Not knowing what was happening to them.

And to keep making decisions anyway, because that was the job.

I feel like I am in the control centre again. Watching something move across the landscape — not fire, but something equally transformative. Trying to make sense of the pace and scale. Knowing most of the people around me haven’t yet had the experience that would make this real for them too.

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But here is the thing that happened next. And it matters.

A few days later, I was sitting in my car in the city, early for a meeting. I’d been reading an article that put into words something I’d been struggling to articulate — that what’s happening with AI isn’t just change. It’s a structural shift in what human contribution means. I was sitting with all of it — the fear, the diminishment, the weight of what I’d experienced that week.

And then I did something I have been teaching other people to do.

I got out of the car.

I reoriented.

Not dramatically. Not with some grand epiphany. I reminded myself that what I was feeling was not a sign that I was failing. It was a sign that I was living inside exactly the kind of sustained uncertainty I have been writing about — not theorising about it anymore, but living it.

I needed to acknowledge where I was. Remind myself that I have navigated uncertainty before — profound, consequential uncertainty. And take the next step.

So I did.

Here is what I’ve learned — from bushfires, from pandemics, from building an entire new career from scratch and now from this.

You cannot reorient when you’re frozen. You can only reorient when you’re in motion.

Reorientation isn’t a single dramatic pivot. It’s a constant series of small adjustments. You learn something. You adjust. You try something. You adjust again. You keep exploring, keep testing, keep moving — the orientation comes through the movement itself, not before it.

That’s what I did that day, and that’s what I will keep doing. Not staying frozen. Not waiting until I feel steady. But staying in deliberate motion so that when the ground shifts — and it will shift, again and again — I can keep responding.

The fear, the disorientation, the sense of being confronted by your own human limitations — these are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that you are paying attention. That you are engaging honestly with a world that is changing faster than any of us can prepare for.

And if you can name what you’re feeling — even if it makes you emotional, especially if it makes you emotional — that is the first act of agency. Not the last. The first.

You don’t arrive at certainty. You steer yourself through uncertainty. One adjustment at a time.

I got out of the car. I walked into the meeting. And I kept going.

— Sue

If you’re sitting with something like this too, I’m glad you’re here. If it resonates, you’re welcome to share it.

P.S. This piece was inspired by Matt Shumer’s article, which named what I’d been experiencing before I could.

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