I used to wish I could see the future. Now I’m grateful I can’t.
Look at any decade of your life: even the chapters that turned out well had moments inside them that would have terrified you if you’d been shown them ahead of time. Lived in sequence, with what came before and after, they fit. Handed to you in advance, without that context, they’d have wrecked you.
I’ve been thinking about that while reading the wave of forecasts on AI and jobs. A recent Economist piece argues AI-driven mass unemployment would be unprecedented in history. New technology has never spread fast enough to put a lot of people out of work for long, and the jobs data right now doesn’t look like the start of a collapse. The economists have a strong case. They probably have it right.
“Probably” doesn’t help you sleep well at night.
The country’s job numbers can hold steady while your particular role gets reorganized underneath you. A historical pattern can be reassuring while your specific quarter is rough. A forecast that averages across millions of workers isn’t a plan for the one career you have. Even if you could see exactly how the next twenty years played out, most of the data points along the way would be unsettling without the context of how they resolved.
Build the practice. Use the tools deliberately. Stay close to the work as it changes shape. Keep the skills that compound regardless of which scenario lands. Those engineers will be fine if the forecast holds and better positioned if it doesn’t. Engineers who wait for the forecast to settle will get clarity—but too late to act on.
Forecasts are useful for the people running policy. For the rest of us, the work is the same either way.