The rise of the AI-native employee

Elena Verna—oh how I wish I earned as much as you do for having a job title like "Growth." I think that there are some good points, I should know since I am living in a company re-org to prioritize AI native SAAS. I totally agree that the book Abundance, by Ezra Klein, is really applicable to big tech. The dependency on bureaucracy and meetings are the death of productivity. I have had a total of 3 or 4 hours of actual work during a 20 hour work week because I have had 18 hours of meetings this week. It sucks. But I think that's where I stop agreeing.

Firstly, this article just comes off as a paid sponsorship. In a short article about employees, you gushed about your company Lovable TEN times. This might be overly critical, but it seems the target was marketing instead of critical thinking.

Here, when someone wants to build something (anything) - from internal tools, to marketing pages, to writing production code - they turn to AI and... build it. That’s it. No headcount asks. No project briefs. No handoffs. Just action.

Just "building it" is also racking up months of tech debt and monoliths of unmaintainable code. You need thought for architecture and systems design to build maintainable code. You can't just throw something together and expect it to work long-term. Yes, surprise surprise that an extremely small 35 person company can ship small products fast. That will not translate to enterprise companies that aren't startups and aren't in Silicon Valley.

Joe Rogan asking about a form of intelligence that we can't control is so funny. Very on brand for him. But then Jensen Huang is so careful about how he responds, trying to simultaneously keep that dream alive while not saying that AGI will not happen. The claim that 90% of knowledge will be AI generated in the future is actually so insanely not possible. Not only is that vastly underestimating the breadth of the human experience, but also the tool cannot create alone. It's just combinations of preexisting knowledge. The guy who made "every music passage ever" by brute force also cannot make new music in my opinion.

Some other things that Huang says is interesting to me because of the context of IBMs famous manual. "A computer cannot be held responsibile. So therefore a computer must never make a management decision." And in a weird application, Jensen Huang is sort of seperating himself from the rest by saying his job is not replaceable. Despite every job responsibility he names being easily automated. Emails, info synthesis, diagrams, communication. All of it. The real reason that it isn't replaceable is because of the decision making. I agree with his sentiment in that regard. But it is uncomfortable how flippantly they talk about the loss of jobs. I agree with the idea about jobs that are a task are the ones being replaced with automation. That has generally always been the rule of history. The way in which they talk about it equates the human as their job-and that is where I take issue.

My Curriculum

The most important traits for anyone to learn have remained: critical thinking, pattern recognition/connecting topics, and communication. Topics will be understanding technology and systems oriented thinking. I would drop nothing. I think humanities especially are more important the more that automation replaces roles. Disruption remains a constant, but humanity topics are not replaceable. And broader connection-focused systems thinking could be the most important thing to understand.