I’ve Seen This Part of the Movie Before

Being 54 right now comes with a particular kind of memory. I’ve lived through multiple waves of technology that didn’t just change how we work, but quietly erased entire categories of work almost overnight. Not in theory. In real rooms, with real people, doing real jobs.

In high school, we had a word processing lab. Then the Mac lab opened, and the word processing classes simply stopped. One semester you were learning a skill that felt practical and solid. The next semester, it no longer existed. I don’t remember anyone asking us how that felt, or what it meant to realize that something you had just learned to do well no longer mattered.

It was my first lesson in how quickly the ground can move.

I remember the first time I saw an iPhone in the wild. Late 2008, at my dojo. The screen didn’t feel like glass yet, more like textured plastic, responsive to the heat of your finger. He opened Maps. Actual maps, right there in his hand. I remember standing there, watching him zoom in and out, and feeling a mix of awe and disorientation. It wasn’t just impressive. It felt like a line had been crossed. We had gone from phones to handheld computers, whether we were ready for that shift or not.

Earlier in my career, I worked in implementation and operations and traveled for work. I spent time inside large-scale media reproduction environments. Rows and rows of VHS machines, staffed by dozens of people. Tapes loaded, recorded, ejected, labeled, boxed, shrink-wrapped, shipped. It was repetitive, physical, and precise. It was also honest work that supported entire households.

A few years later, I walked into a similar facility. What had once been dozens of production lines was down to a handful. DVDs had taken over. Fewer people. Different skills. More automation. Soon after that came Blu-ray, and then not long after, streaming. Outside those buildings, people were arguing loudly about job loss and blame and outsourcing. Inside, what I saw was quieter. Work hadn’t vanished out of spite or malice. It had simply changed shape. And people who had done everything right were left trying to figure out what that meant for them.

That was the moment I really understood that stability is conditional, even when you do your job well.

This is why I’m not particularly afraid of AI.

That doesn’t mean I’m dismissive of disruption. I’ve felt it in my body before. What experience taught me is that technology rarely replaces judgment. What it replaces is friction. Steps. Lag. Certain kinds of manual repetition that once required whole systems of labor to support them.

The people who struggled most in past transitions were not lazy or incapable. They were the ones who were told, or told themselves, that learning the new tool meant surrendering their value. The people who adapted were the ones who treated technology as something to understand, not something to fight.

That’s how I use AI now. Not as a substitute for thinking, but as a tool that sharpens it. It helps me see patterns, test strategies, and move through problems that used to stall me out. I still decide. I still judge. I’m just working with less drag.

Having watched multiple technological shifts up close, panic no longer feels useful to me. Curiosity does. So does context.

We’ve been here before. Not exactly like this, but close enough to recognize the shape of it. And that recognition matters, especially for people responsible for keeping systems, teams, and processes running while the ground moves underneath them.

Just stuff I think about when I’m remote working and chillin’.