On Existential AI Dread & That Matt Shumer Essay

With his recent essay, ”Something Big Is Happening”, about AI’s effect on white-collar jobs, Matt Shumer sparked serious attention, conversation, and a fair amount of existential dread online.

I’m not sure whether this will be a piece that people look back on years from now, but I definitely understand why it hit especially hard among young people.

Not knowing whether the skills you have spent years training will still be useful in the near future is a brutal thought. It doesn’t help you get a good night’s sleep. The possibility of a deep shift not only in information access, but also in reasoning and agency within workplaces, feels unprecedented to our generation. Being given completely different career advice just a few years apart, watching AI improve week by week, and realizing that no one actually has the answers creates a kind of uncertainty that feels new. Or at least it feels that way from where we’re standing.

But there is something important to recognize in the conflicting messages we are receiving. Especially outside of tech, many older professionals simply do not see the speed or magnitude of what is happening. That is not a criticism. It is just reality. We might just be the generation that has to figure this out in real time.

That can be paralyzing. And yet, standing still does not solve it.

Trying to stay curious about these tools as they emerge. Trying to understand them well enough to actually use them. Trying to build things that are valuable in ways that are hard to automate away, and letting your fundamental values drive you. Not because it sounds impressive, but because doing nothing feels worse. I definitely don’t have any grand strategy, but for me, that feels like the only psychologically stable way to move forward. To survive mentally and live with intention.

One of the strongest parts of the essay, in my view, was the call to action at the end: ”share it with someone in your life who should be thinking about this.”

Instead of just amplifying anxiety, it asked you to actually talk to someone.

In the technological moment we are in, the Opus 4.6 and Codex hype cycles and the quiet fear about jobs that sits in the background for many, these things should not stay inside algorithmic bubbles. They should be talked about across generations.

So I sent the essay to my mum.