By Russell Moore –
You can do little about what artificial intelligence is doing around you, but you can do something about you.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
You don’t have to seek God’s will for your career anymore.
I’m mostly joking, but not entirely. We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about to change dramatically. It’s not God or his will that’s changing but the world as we’ve known it—and with it, the outmoded way we’ve thought about “career.”
My teenage years brought with them a series of decisions as I wrestled with “What am I going to do with my life?” and “What is God’s will for me?” As with most of us, a huge part of that was calling. For me, it was a calling to ministry. But as many of us have emphasized and reemphasized for the past 30 years, a calling is not just into full-time Christian service but more generally to a vocation. The stakes of figuring out precisely what that calling was were rather fraught because it determined a cascade of other questions: Should you go to college or trade school or enlist in the military or do something else? If college, what major? If trade school, what discipline? If the military, what branch?
Those decisions determined the scope of your life—even if you pivoted and chose something else later. You felt that that if you got this wrong, you would be wasting your life or ruining your future. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a 17- or 18-year-old. That was the world all of us lived in, as did our parents and our grandparents. But we’re entering a different world now.
Last week, the essay “Something Big Is Happening” hit 60 million views on X within a matter of days and just as quickly became a focus of controversy. The essay, by artificial intelligence industry researcher Matt Shumer, argues that we are in the equivalent of February 2020, paying little attention to the virus that news reports told us was spreading across China. The world, Shumer wrote, is about to change dramatically—with a sea change of job losses and mass unemployment, especially in entry-level positions and among white-collar “knowledge workers.”
Many dismissed Shumer as an alarmist “doomer” or found legitimate problems with some of his predictions. But let’s set all that aside. What should get our attention is not what’s contested in Schumer’s piece but what is not. Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, recently wrote a memo warning the world about what’s coming, including, as Axios summarized after interviewing him, his belief that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years.”
Note that this is not Paul Kingsnorth or another tech skeptic. This is someone who has articulated one of the most hopeful views of the possibilities of AI for a better future for all of us—and even wrote a manifesto called “Machines of Loving Grace.” Amodei still believes in the promise of AI—after all, he’s in charge of one of the most important AI companies in the world. In an interview with Ross Douthat, Amodei explored even more in depth what he sees coming. It’s worth it in the long run, he believes, but the upheaval will be massive.
At the same time, an Anthropic safety researcher published an open letter telling the world he was quitting—and heading to the United Kingdom to write poetry. The letter did not end with “Good night, and good luck,” but that was the feel.
As you know, I have definite views about where I think this is headed, and I have stated and restated my alarm that the church (and Christian ministries and media) seem unwilling or unable to prepare. But here’s one piece of all the ways AI is changing the world that will definitely be the case, regardless of whether the AI doomers, the AI boosters, or those of us in the middle are right: The old pattern of choosing a career and spending a life pursuing it is about to be over.
In some ways, of course, it already is. My father worked for essentially two places for his entire life—the FBI and the Ford Motor Company—and he had a more varied career than many of his peers, who started at a company and retired in the same place. That has shifted. Virtually no one expects a career so stable that they’ll be with the same employer for a lifetime.
But most people thought that even if employment is not that stable anymore, a sense of vocation still is and always will be. If you are a computer programmer, you might go from working at a hospital to working at a law firm. If you’re an accountant, you might go from working for a paper company to working at a county parks-and-recreation department, and so on.
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