You Don't Have to Keep Up with AI

You wouldn't be able to even if you tried, so maybe we can all relax a bit?

You don’t have to keep up with AI, you know?

Back online after a week on a meditation retreat, I saw a predictable explosion of AI news in my inbox: Claude 4! Google I/O announcements! OpenAI Codex! AI Creator Pack for people whose full-time job is to try new AI tools!

This meme that you’ve already seen on social media isn’t even funny; it’s just true.

My first intuitive response is, of course, FOMO — fear of missing out. I need to read everything, download everything, try everything… but then I also don’t.

This isn’t because I don’t think AI isn’t important (it’s the defining tech of this decade and maybe the next one, too). And yes, you must use AI all the time to even understand what the tech is about and have a qualified opinion about it.

But it’s not the same as keeping up with everything. You really don’t have to.

First of all, it’s impossible. Whether you dedicate 4 or 40 hours a week to keeping up with AI developments, you’ll miss most of what’s going on purely because there’s so much happening. If you think you even have a chance to keep up with what’s happening, you’ve already lost. It’s like trying to keep up with new videos on youtube — good luck.

Second, it’s accelerating. More people are building more cool stuff faster. The implications are becoming more dramatic and more impossible to ignore week by week. Even if you feel you can keep abreast of what’s going on in your part of AI world today, you surely won’t keep up tomorrow.

But most of all, maybe it doesn’t matter.

What is it that drives you to keep up with AI? The sense of incredible opportunities? The fear that it’s a threat to society? Intellectual curiosity? Social pressure?

Nothing wrong with any of these — these are my personal top four, I guess — but it doesn’t matter if you don’t follow everything that’s going on. It’s like trying to read all the good books: there are more exceptional books than you’ll ever have time to read.

Besides, if staying professionally relevant in the AI world is a bit like as staying a competitive labourer after the invention of forklifts, as I argued earlier in the essay below, all manual labourers will lose to forklifts, regardless of how strong they are or how hard they work.

Being human in the age of AI

By all means, learn about AI. Ignoring it is like refusing to be literate these days. But being literate isn’t the same as learning everything there’s to know, right?

Plus, it’s not even “late”, as some people who haven’t even tried ChatGPT yet might feel. It’s like telling someone in 1997 they’re late to the internet. No, it’s only just beginning. Join the party when you feel like, it won’t be late.

It’s Sunday today. Read a good book. Meditate. Debate the nature of consciousness with your friends without any hope of reaching a conclusion. Do a yoga class. Read something interesting about AI because, well, it’s interesting.

But please don’t feel like you’re behind and have to keep up with all the AI news.

You don’t. We’re all figuring it out as we go — with AI and in life.

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