The Fear Is Justified, I Just Keep Building

The conversation about AI is split between panic and policy. Most of us just want to work and get things done.

Last Friday, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house at 4 in the morning. Two days later, there were gunshots. A 20-year-old guy flew from Texas to San Francisco with kerosene, a lighter, and a document about AI causing humanity’s extinction.

Altman posted a photo of his family. He wrote that the fear and anxiety about AI is justified. Then OpenAI published a 13-page paper proposing a robot tax and a four-day workweek.

I read all of this on my phone while my kids were eating breakfast.

I don’t know what to do with any of it. Not really. I work in tech. I’ve been in this industry for over twenty years. I use AI tools every single day. I manage a team that creates content about authentication and security, and half of our workflows now involve some form of AI. I’m not a bystander watching this from the outside. I’m in it.

And I think most of you are too.

The anxiety is real. I feel it. Not the Molotov cocktail kind. The kind where you’re reviewing your team’s work and you realize the thing that took someone three days last year took an afternoon this week. The kind where you’re good at your job, you’ve been good at it for a long time, and you can feel the ground shifting under you in ways you can’t fully predict.

And honestly, I don’t even need to think twenty years out. I can’t tell you what the market looks like in three. But I have kids. Young kids. And when they were eating their cereal while I was scrolling through photos of a firebombed gate, the thing I felt wasn’t some abstract concern about the future of work. It was simpler than that. I want them to grow up in a world where they can contribute something, where they can find work that means something to them, where they can live a decent, healthy, happy life. That’s all. And I can’t promise them that right now. The parent version of this fear sits different. It’s quieter and it doesn’t go away when you close the tab.

The only thing I can actually do for them is not freeze. So I keep building.

That’s always been my move when things get uncertain. When I was at Siemens and the optimization team I was on got restructured, I kept building. When I started a side project that grew to 100,000 readers a month and then I shut it down, I kept building. When I moved my family across continents and had to start over in a new country, I kept building.

But here’s the part I don’t say out loud very often: every other time, the pace of change gave me room to adjust. I could see the restructuring coming months out. I chose when to shut down the project. Moving countries was our decision, on our timeline. This time the ground is moving and I didn’t set the speed. Nobody did.

The conversation right now is split between billionaires proposing policy papers and people who are so afraid they’re lighting things on fire. And in between those two extremes, there are millions of us going to work. Figuring out how to use the new tools without losing the instincts we spent decades developing.

I manage people who are excellent at what they do. When I think about what I owe them, it’s not a grand theory of AI. It’s honesty. And the honest thing is that “I don’t know” used to feel like humility. Now some days it feels like I’m running out of time to figure it out.

I don’t actually believe that. Most days. But the feeling visits, and I think if you’re being honest with yourself it visits you too.

Altman says the fear is justified. Okay. I believe him. But he also has security guards and an $852 billion company. His version of “justified fear” and mine are not the same thing. Mine looks like updating my skills at 40, like writing this newsletter on weekends because I want to have something that’s mine outside of any employer, like watching my industry change faster than any period I’ve lived through and deciding, every single week, that I’m going to stay in the game anyway. Not because I’ve calculated that it’s the right bet. Because it’s the only bet I know how to make.

I’ve been doing this for twenty years and I plan to do it for thirty more. I don’t have a framework for navigating what’s coming. I have a disposition. Show up, do the work, pay attention, adjust. It got me this far. It might not be enough this time. But the alternative is to stand still, and I’ve never been any good at that.

The world is figuring out what AI means. People are scared. Most of that fear isn’t making headlines. Most of it is just sitting quietly in the chests of people like you and me, who read the news, take a breath, and open their laptops.

But it’s Sunday night as I write this, and Monday doesn’t care about any of this.