I Spent 8 Years Preparing People for AI. I Wasn't Prepared Enough.

Matt Shumer's (@mattshumer_) viral post said what I've been trying to say for years. Here's what I'd add...

There's something I've been wanting to say to the people in my life for months. Not the people who work in tech. My wife's uncles. My friends from the town I grew up in. The parents I run into at my kid's daycare.

The people who hear "AI" and think of chatbots and robot movies.

I've been trying to have this conversation for eight years. Most people nod politely and change the subject. Then Matt Shumer's post went viral, over 40 million views and counting, and suddenly the thing I'd been saying to half-empty rooms was everywhere.

Matt described what he sees from the inside. I want to talk about what happens to the people on the outside. The ones who won't read his post, or who'll read it and think it doesn't apply to them.

The most dangerous thing about AI right now is the disconnect between what people like me can see happening and what most people think is happening.

That disconnect is enormous. And I know from personal experience what happens when it gets wide enough.

My family immigrated from Pakistan in 1998. Several of my relatives drove taxis in New York. They saved for decades to buy taxi medallions, the permits that let you operate a cab. Owning a medallion meant you weren't working for someone else anymore. At their peak, a single medallion sold for over a million dollars.

Then ride-sharing apps showed up. The medallion market collapsed overnight. Life savings, gone. The Taxi Workers Alliance started printing the suicide hotline number on their letterhead.

Here's what I need you to understand about that story: the technology wasn't the problem. Uber and Lyft made transportation better and cheaper for millions of people.

The problem was that nobody told those drivers what was coming. Nobody sat them down and said, "The world you built your life around is about to change, and you need to prepare." They did everything right by the rules they knew. The rules just changed without anyone telling them.

I was young when this happened, and I watched it up close. People I loved lost everything. Not because they were careless. Because they didn't have the information.

That was one industry, in one city, over a few years.

What's happening with AI is every knowledge worker, every industry, everywhere. And it's moving faster.

When AI started gaining real momentum, I couldn't sit still. In 2017, my brother Hamza and I put up $5,000 of our own money and started a nonprofit called AI For Anyone. We went into high schools across New York City and taught kids about AI before most adults had even heard of it. Over the next few years, we reached thousands of students in person and tens of thousands more online.

The whole idea was simple: close the information gap before it's too late.

I’ve spent eight years on that mission. And what I'm trying to tell you is that the gap right now, between what insiders see and what everyone else believes, is wider than anything I've ever seen.

Let me show you what I mean.

My company builds software. Real enterprise software, the kind corporations pay serious money for. We spent six months building it out. Hired engineers. Sold it to companies you've heard of. Six months of late nights, debugging, testing, iterating. That's a normal timeline. That's how software gets built.

A few weeks ago, two of our engineers sat down and tried to rebuild the entire thing from scratch using AI. They started on a Monday.

By Wednesday, they had rebuilt the entire product.

This isn't just my company. A friend of mine built a successful software company over many years with a full engineering team. He told me recently that with today's tools, he and a handful of engineers could rebuild the entire thing in a few months. I keep hearing the same story from founders across the industry.

Imagine a contractor renovates your kitchen. Six months of work. Then someone shows up with a new set of tools and redoes the whole thing in a long weekend. Same quality, maybe better.

Now ask yourself: what happens when that kind of compression comes for your work? Whatever you do. The reports you write. The analyses you run. The plans you put together. The emails you spend an hour carefully drafting.

Here's the thing most people outside tech don't fully grasp yet: previous technologies automated physical tasks. Machines replaced muscles. Calculators replaced arithmetic.

AI automates thinking. Analysis. Writing. Planning. Problem-solving. Judgment calls. That's what most white-collar jobs are made of. And for the first time, there's a technology that's getting better at all of it simultaneously.

A year ago, I'd spend hours going back and forth with AI tools, guiding them, correcting mistakes, babysitting every step. Now I describe what I want and walk away. When I come back, the work is done. Finished work. Often better than what I would have produced myself.

I showed my wife's uncles an early version of this technology at a family gathering in 2022. Even then, before any of the recent breakthroughs, I watched their faces change. That technology is ancient history compared to what exists now.

When I tell people this, I usually get one of three responses. I've been hearing them for eight years, and they're all wrong.

The first: "It's going to plateau."

I've heard this every single year. Every year, serious people make the case that we've hit the ceiling. And every year, the ceiling shatters.

Here's why the plateau bet keeps losing. Humans think in straight lines. We expect tomorrow to look roughly like today. AI doesn't work like that. Each model helps build the next one. The tools that write code are writing better tools that write better code. Instead of flattening, the curve steepens.

Last year, respected researchers said that AI "agents," tools that handle complex tasks on their own, would be a letdown. New models came out and blew past those predictions so fast the entire conversation reset overnight.

The question isn't whether AI eventually hits a ceiling. It's whether it hits one before it reshapes your industry. Based on everything I've seen, we're nowhere close.

The second: "I tried ChatGPT, and it wasn't that impressive."

If you tried it a couple years ago, you're right. It made things up. It felt like a parlor trick.

That was a completely different technology from what exists today. The free version of these tools is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on the free tier is like picking up a flip phone and deciding smartphones are overrated.

The best models available right now can write working software, draft legal briefs, build financial models, and handle projects that would take a professional hours or days. And they're getting meaningfully better every few months.

The third is the one that keeps me up at night: "Things will work out. They always do."

It feels safe to assume the world will adapt the way it always has. AI breaks the pattern.

Previous technologies disrupted one kind of work while opening doors elsewhere. Factory workers became office workers. Retail workers moved into logistics. There was always somewhere to go.

AI is improving across so many domains at once that the usual playbook, leave one field and retrain for another, doesn't work the way it used to. Some hands-on, physical work will stay insulated longer.

When millions of knowledge workers get displaced, though, the economic ripple effects reach everyone. Housing, spending, tax base, job markets. No industry is an island.

This won't hit every industry on the same day. Some sectors will feel it this year. Others will feel safe for a while. That's actually what makes it dangerous. The unevenness creates a false sense of security, the same way taxi drivers felt fine right up until they didn't.

I grew up on a poultry farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Small high school, blue-collar community. I know what life looks like in the parts of the country that aren't plugged into Silicon Valley. AI might take longer to reach those places. It will reach them. And when it does, the people who weren't paying attention will be the most exposed.

You cannot coast through this. Ignoring it isn't a strategy. It's a gamble with your family's future. The earlier you engage, the more options you have.

I have to be honest about something. When I was teaching those students, I told them computer science was one of the safest career paths in the age of AI. I had a slide for it. The logic was clean: AI needs people to build it, so learn to build.

Coding turned out to be one of the first things AI mastered. Not because anyone was targeting programmers. The labs focused on code because AI that can write code can improve itself. It was the key that unlocked everything else.

CS still matters for people at the very top of the field. For most people who pursued it thinking it was a guaranteed career, the landscape is shifting under them right now.

One thing we got right: we told every class the humanities were becoming more important. Critical thinking. Clear communication. Making sense of ambiguity. The real dividing line in the years ahead won't be who can code and who can't. It'll be who can think critically and who can't. The tools are going to be available to everyone. Knowing what to do with them is a different thing entirely.

After eight years of running workshops, I can tell you the single biggest thing that separates people who adapt from people who get left behind.

It's agency. The willingness to take one step forward instead of waiting for someone to tell you what to do.

Every other major shift in your lifetime, you could afford to sit it out. Social media, crypto, the metaverse. Waiting was a perfectly fine strategy.

This is the exception.

The good news: you don't need to become an expert by next week. Most people reading this are somewhere around a one or two out of ten. The goal is to get to three. Then three to four. One deliberate step at a time.

Start by using these tools on something that actually matters to you. If you're an accountant, hand it a client's messy tax situation and ask it to find what you missed. If you're a teacher, give it your lesson plan and ask how a master educator would improve it. If you run a small business, describe your biggest operational headache in plain English and see what comes back. You'll develop an intuition for what this technology can do that no article or video will give you.

Do this with intention. Build a habit of working with these tools in your actual life, on real problems. The fastest progress I've seen doesn't come from the most technical people. It comes from the ones who keep showing up and trying things.

Get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, but basic resilience matters more now than it did a year ago. Build savings. Be cautious about debt that assumes your current income is permanent. Give yourself room to maneuver.

Rethink the playbook you're handing your kids. "Get good grades, go to a good school, land a stable professional job" points at the roles most exposed right now. I have a three-year-old and a five-month-old. I can't give them a career roadmap because the roads are being redrawn. What I can teach them is curiosity, adaptability, how to think for themselves, and how to build things.

I know this is overwhelming. In every workshop I've run, the people who feel the most paralyzed are the ones convinced they're too far behind to catch up. They're wrong. I've watched people go from terrified to excited in thirty minutes. The barrier is almost never knowledge. It's the anxiety of starting.

It's like standing on a diving board for the first time. Your brain gives you every reason to climb back down. The only way past it is to jump. And on the other side of that fear, every single person I've worked with describes the same thing: it's liberating.

The anxiety only grows the longer you wait. Take the leap.

Here's the thing I want you to hear above everything else.

All of that advice is for you. The single most important thing you can do right now isn't about you.

If you've read this far, you now understand more about what's happening than most people in your life. Your parents probably aren't reading posts like this. Your friend who manages a dental office, your brother-in-law who does accounting, your cousin who teaches third grade. They have no idea the ground is moving beneath them.

You need to tell them.

Not the watered-down version. Not "yeah, AI is getting pretty wild." Sit them down. Show them what these tools can actually do. Send them Matt's post. Send them this one. Have the uncomfortable conversation, even if they roll their eyes.

I watched people I love get financially destroyed because nobody told them what was coming. I've been working to make sure that doesn't happen again ever since. I can't reach the people in your life. Only you can.

Don't let them be the taxi drivers.

I don't want to end on fear. I want to end on what I actually believe.

There is real upside here. The cost of building things has dropped close to zero. People are starting businesses, creating tools, solving problems that would have required a full team and a year of runway eighteen months ago. New kinds of work are emerging. The people who engage with this, who stay curious and take that first step, are going to find opportunities their parents couldn't have imagined.

If this hasn't touched your world yet, you're not behind. You're early.

My family came to this country with nothing. They built a life in a place where they didn't speak the language, didn't know the rules, and didn't have a safety net. That kind of adaptability is exactly what this moment requires.

I have a three-year-old and a five-month-old. I'm not writing this out of fear for them. I'm writing this because I believe that if enough of us pay attention, they're going to grow up in a world with more opportunity than any generation before them. That's the future I see. It just requires more of us to be part of the conversation.

If you have questions or want help getting started, hit reply. I mean that. And send this to one person who isn't paying attention yet.

That's the future worth building.

Until next week,

Haroon

PS - if you want to share this post with others, you can share my original post here: https://x.com/haroonc/status/2021709233218068820