You may or may not know this about me - I've been a professor at a naturopathic medical college for many years. I’ve seen the college and education go through many changes and let me tell you, whenever AI as a tool comes up, there’s palpable tension in the room.

Medical education has to be careful, and rightfully so. You don't want to move too fast with things that affect patient care, especially since in a year from now, what we thought is the best option might in fact turn out not to be. Or vice versa - what we thought wasn’t effective turns out to be.

But with AI - what I've been watching has moved past caution into something that feels more like dread. AI is forcing people to look at all those years of knowledge acquisition and what they were actually for.

Myron Golden has a framework that describes this well. He talks about a hierarchy of value: at the bottom is doing the work, then managing it, then leading it, then designing it, and at the top - the highest level of value a human can bring - is imagination. Solving problems nobody has solved yet.

Most of us built our whole professional identity in the bottom half of that ladder - doing, managing, leading - because that's what got rewarded. Your reputation got built on being the person who could be counted on to do it well. And doing became the whole of your identity without you really deciding that.

AI moves rather quickly through the bottom of that ladder. When the thing you spent years becoming good at starts getting done without you, the question sitting underneath the resistance is more than job security. 

It's whether you know who you are, and what value you provide, when you're not the one doing.

When the wooden printing press was invented in China, then changed to metal in Korea, then mechanized by Gutenberg in 1440, the scribes who copied manuscripts by hand didn’t just feel “job security” resistance - it was existential. They had built an identity around mastery of something specific, something that took years to develop and carried real status. 

A German abbot wrote an entire treatise arguing that scribes should keep copying by hand even though printed books now existed, because a world where their craft no longer mattered was too disorienting to accept. The tool changed faster than the sense of self built around using it.

When I first started learning to prompt AI, I was comfortable because I was still the one deciding what to do with it. But when AI could be automated entirely, without me in the loop at all, something changed. When I heard someone in my mastermind describe what they'd handed off completely - processes running without them, things happening while they slept - I felt a tightening in my chest that was a mix between a sense of dread and an itch that couldn't be itched.

I had spent real time building processes I was proud of, getting efficient at things that used to take longer, developing a way of working that felt like mine. Handing those off felt like losing something I hadn't agreed to let go of.

If these processes can run without me, what am I actually controlling? The efficiency mattered, but what I was holding onto was the feeling of knowing what was happening, why it was happening and most importantly…I was the one making it run.

I suppose it’s a bit similar to using a calculator to do math, when we used to have to do it in our minds. Or letting a GPS make navigation decisions you used to have to make yourself. Or trying to remember important phone numbers. Each time a new tool for efficiency, the same calculation - is what I'm gaining worth what I'm handing over? 

The “handing over” becomes easier if some part of you believes there's something worth becoming on the other side - that you'll be different, and that difference is okay. That takes believing that whoever you are when this all settles is still going to matter.

The scribes who adapted had to believe their value wasn't only in the copying - that there was something underneath the craft that would still matter when the craft changed. A lot of the resistance I see with AI, and most of what I felt, isn't really about AI at all. It's about whether people believe in who they are and the value they bring when the thing they were most known for gets replaced by a machine.