AI Safety Newsletter #1: How not to lose your job to AI
Exploring work & resilience strategies in an increasingly AI driven world.
💡Key Takeaways (TL;DR)
Maintaining agency in an AI-driven world means developing skills that emphasize cultivating taste, long-term thinking & human connection.
This newsletter offers resources & actionable suggestions to help navigate this uncertain future.
It also flags emerging risks that show how fast AI capabilities are evolving.
🧭 What’s on the go?
Events: IndabaXs Meetup (Thursday 15 May, 17:00–19:30 @ Innovation City). Intro talk by Charl Botha + breakout chats on underestimated risks. (CODE = AISAFETY)
Last month’s essay: Post‑AGI Economics Part 1:When Labor Disappears
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Coworking: Apply to join our co-working space here!
🔍Topic Deep Dive
7 ideas that came to mind on the topic “How not to lose your job to AI”
develop good taste
AI is able to generate high quality content at a rate of note. The value humans provide is being able to identify the output that actually lands & resonates.Suggestion: read great writing, study design & avoid listening to music that comes off the top charts. This comes naturally to some, but taste is a muscle you can strengthen through intention & going outside of your comfort zone.
practice long‑term decision making
AI is really good at specific tasks, but struggles when you ask it to think in terms of decisions that require looking beyond the horizon of a couple years.Suggestion: Put yourself in situations where you're in charge of making big decisions. Strategic roles (policy, product, senior ops, CEOs) live here. If you’re a recent level graduate, you’re able to fill into these roles by joining small start-ups.
think about what “makes humans inherently human”
People still connect through story, eye contact, and genuine empathy.
Suggestion: Hone your personal writing style, public speaking & facilitation skills. Learn to read a room without a prompt window. Brand identities grow from these seeds, not from auto‑generated hot‑takes.
physical jobs
Pipes burst, gardens overgrow, sculptures need a steady wrist. People who can solve problems that require physical labour have high job security in the context of AI automation.deploying AI
During the gold rush, sell pick-axes.
People who can code, clean data, and turn an idea into a working AI system stay employable for as long as the process of automation continues. The beautiful thing is: coding in the AI age has never been easier. Learn it ;)
scarce data
When data is scarce, AI guesses or hallucinates. Niche medical records, rural supply chains and climate micro‑data are all opportunities a human who can curate good input and audit the output.strategy resilience
Stay curious. Swap notes with people who are clocked in. Move when the signal says “move”. But most importantly, slow down, sleep, breathe. A clear head and healthy body make every other skill easier to deploy.
📚Recommended Resources
On the topic
The Intelligence Curse (essay series) by Luke Drago: maps incoming crisis of human irrelevance and provides a guide towards a future where people remain the masters of their destiny.
Career Planning for the AGI Era (virtual discussion) by BlueDot Impact: dives deep into how to navigate your career path effectively in the rapidly approaching age of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
General
Demo “AgentVillage” by AI digest: watch frontier AIs interact with the world and each other.
Book “Co‑Intelligence” by Ethan Mollick: the best beginner friendly guide we’ve found to working with AI.
Documentary “OpenAI is Not God” by AIExplained: explores just how much the world got wrong about R1, what motivates the man behind the company, and what's next…
📜 Community Blogposts
“When the Compass Doesn’t Still” by community member Charl Botha: When the navigation tools we inherit prove insufficient for the terrain of modern life, where do we turn for guidance?
“Experts Have it Easy” by community member Boyd Kane: explores how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results.
“What Do I Mean When I Use the Word "Agency"?” by community member Tegan Fayne: attempts to define the word agency in the context of AI & ethics.
👪 Community Spotlight
Below is a message thread from our AISCT Discussion Whatsapp Group
Cam’s Question Prompt
Hey all! Just been thinking and would love some engagement on the following thought:
Where should we focus our learning and education efforts to equip ourselves (and the youth) to work alongside AI (post AGI) as many cognitive jobs could potentially be automated in the future? i.e. What types of thinking represent our comparative advantage as humans in an AI advancing era?
What skills should be pursued by the youth for job security? Is it management? Creativity? Empathic reasoning? Novelty creation? Spirituality? What do you guys think?
Paul’s Response
That’s a tough question to answer in a general sense — I think the real answer depends heavily on your context and where you’re at.
If you’re a sole prop trying to build something from scratch, the skills you need to work alongside AI look very different compared to someone working inside a larger org as an employee. Industry matters too — AI automates a ton, but it’s not a silver bullet, especially for the messy, in-the-trenches tasks that happen inside a business. The nuance lives in the details.
Honestly, I think the real edge humans have in a post-AGI world isn’t in doing the tasks, it’s in navigating the grey areas — ambiguity, ethics, context, emotional nuance. AI will dominate anything repeatable or pattern-based, but it sucks at framing problems, inspiring people, or dealing with real-world messiness. So the real skillset isn’t just technical — it’s adaptability, asking better questions, building trust, storytelling, leading through chaos. Management only survives if it evolves into something more human: coaching, emotional intelligence, systems thinking. If I were advising the next gen, I’d say stop trying to out-AI the AI — get better at being human as hell.
Tegan’s Comment
I think taste, critical thinking and discernment are qualities that can be cultivated but not directly taught. Combine this with motivation to ship and iterate on experiments.
My point is to become adaptable and resilient to change. "Security" isn't so important when you trust yourself to make a plan and you build that trust by doing things.
Interesting perspective
Love this!