Should AI alarm us?

But I've also been thinking about my own experience with AI, particularly while building Your Life, Your Call, and I've started looking at the question from a slightly different angle.

I've had ideas for websites and digital projects before. The difficult part was rarely having the idea. It was getting what was in my head into something that actually existed. That usually meant finding a developer, trying to explain what I could see, waiting for something to come back and then discovering that perhaps we hadn't quite understood each other.

Sometimes it was time. Sometimes cost. Sometimes what I wanted sat outside the original scope, or the person I was working with simply didn't have the capability to do it. None of that necessarily meant they were doing a bad job. There was just this gap between what I could see in my head and what somebody else understood when I tried to explain it.

For someone like me, that's quite frustrating. I tend to work things out by doing them. I might think I know what I want, but then I need to see it before I realise that actually, no, that's not quite right. Or seeing it gives me another idea, and suddenly I'm heading somewhere I hadn't expected.

AI has changed that for me.

While building Your Life, Your Call, I've been able to have an idea, try it, look at it, change my mind, pull it apart and try something else. Sometimes I've realised an idea wasn't very good. Other times something quite small has grown into something much bigger because I've been able to keep exploring it.

What I find interesting is that AI didn't give me the idea for Your Life, Your Call. The purpose behind it, the coaching, the experiences I've had with people and the kind of space I wanted to create were already there. What AI helped me do was get more of what was in my head out of my head.

And that has made me think about one of the biggest concerns surrounding AI: jobs.

We often hear that AI is replacing people's jobs, and I'm sure in some cases it is. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But when I look at my own experience, I find myself asking a slightly uncomfortable question.

Was there actually a job there to replace?

If building Your Life, Your Call had meant finding a development team, writing a large specification, going backwards and forwards for months and committing to the sort of budget a project of this scope might traditionally have required, I'm genuinely not sure I would have done it.

Perhaps the idea would still be sitting in one of my notebooks.

Instead, I've been able to build it, test it, change it and gradually turn an idea into a company.

And that's where this gets interesting for me, because if Your Life, Your Call grows into what I hope it can become, it won't just be something AI helped me create. There could be coaches working through it, people contributing their knowledge and experience, organisations using it and, who knows, perhaps jobs that don't exist today.

I'm not suggesting that somehow balances the books on AI. I don't think any of us really know what those books are going to look like yet. There are things about AI that concern me too, and I think there are questions we're going to have to keep asking as the technology develops.

But my own experience makes it difficult for me to see AI simply as something that replaces.

Sometimes it enables.

There's something rather strange about looking at Your Life, Your Call today and knowing that so much of it started as thoughts scribbled in notebooks, conversations I've had, things I've experienced and ideas that were floating around in my head.

Perhaps without AI, some of them would have stayed there.

And that leaves me wondering how many other ideas are sitting in people's heads right now, not because they're bad ideas, but because until recently they were simply too difficult, too expensive or too complicated to bring to life.

I don't know what AI will ultimately take away.

But I'm becoming increasingly curious about what it might allow us to create.

Stefan