I learned coding on my dad’s lap. A kid staring at a blinking cursor, typing BASIC I didn’t really understand, changing one tiny thing and watching the computer do something different. Instant feedback. It felt like magic, and some days it still does.
Then there were the holiday road trips. Paper maps, wrong exits, my dad insisting he was right and my mum being very sure he wasn’t. GPS didn’t just fix the routes; it took a whole category of arguments out of the car. It changed what we expected, too; of course we’d find it, of course it would adapt.
I think about those two things a lot when people tell me AI makes them anxious, because it makes me a bit anxious too.
Over the years I collected a set of skills that felt like hard-won competence: BASIC, how MS-DOS actually worked, getting decent at Photoshop, audio and video editing, the shortcuts and the file formats, all the little rituals that made you ‘the person who can do that’. A lot of that is a button now. Or a prompt.
That changes more than a workflow. If part of how you see yourself is being the one who knows the system and the shortcuts and the right words, and suddenly a machine can draft and summarise and code and design, it feels like someone moved the floor while you were standing on it.
So when I see people at work dragging their feet on AI, I don’t read it as stubbornness or laziness. A lot of it looks like grief to me. They’re mourning a version of themselves that was competent, needed, and respected for it (and they’re allowed to).
If you’re feeling that, my one suggestion is to start with something safe rather than something productive. Pick one harmless, private thing and play with it. No demo, no colleague looking over your shoulder. Change one line and see what happens, the way I did with BASIC.
There’s one thing I’m hopeful about. AI makes interfaces thinner; having a decent question starts to matter more than having the best machine. That could mean a lot for people who mostly use a phone, and for people who didn’t grow up with the access or the time or the hardware I had on my dad’s lap.
I don’t know yet whether that’s how it plays out. I’d like it to. 🌈