I tried to tell you about living in AI Time — this essay nails its harsh reality, and here's why we're not truly screwed

I've been warning people for well over a year that, no matter how they feel about AI, it can't be ignored or denied. It will impact them and their lives in good ways and bad. Putting their heads in the sand and acting as if it's not happening is not a long-term survival strategy. We're living on AI Time, I told them, get used to it. Some have, many have not.

Matt Shumer, CEO and Co-Founder of OthersideAI, gets this. Earlier this week, he penned one of the most important essays of our still-early AI age. Titled simply Something Big is Happening, it carefully explains how the vast expansion and rapid acceleration of AI development and application are unlike anything we've experienced before and how it's set to fundamentally alter society in ways that previous tech epochs, say, the Industrial or Internet revolutions, didn't before.

Yes, he mentions "AI time," as he tries to explain that people who experienced AI hallucinations or errors in outcomes a couple of years ago and may have walked away from AI have no idea how much smarter, more accurate, and powerful it is today. He also makes a smart case for not basing your AI assumptions on the free versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc., since they do not represent the true state of the art.

The turning point for Shumer has been, in part, the release of the models GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic. With Codex, Shumer claims he noticed it making decisions that "felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste."

It was in Shumer's post that I learned that OpenAI's Codex was written, in part, by Codex. AI writing AI. "Read that again," he wrote, "The AI helped build itself."

This conjured images of a robot building its own robot legs, then getting up and chasing me around the room.

If you haven't been paying attention – and Shumer wrote this for those who have not – this is a stunning and terrifying development. It's what we feared all along: AIs that see a better way and, without human intervention, blaze that trail.

I, like Shumer, have been paying attention. As I wrote last year, most of the predictions I was reading about regarding AI development and its impact on various industries and career pursuits were, if anything, "underambitious."

AI naysers often point to the use of AI to create silly memes, like the current ChatGPT one that uses what it knows about your life to build a caricature of you at work. "You're killing the environment," they chide.

It's a fair concern. AI model training and prompt use at scale can consume vast quantities of water and electricity.

That fact, though, will not slow this progress. Now that we have AI that can write itself or take anything you can imagine, from simple legal documents to applications and realistic videos starring your two favorite actors squaring off in fisticuffs and make them real, sometimes in a matter of minutes, the digital horse has left the bar, crossed the countryside, and is galloping around the world.

I appreciate that Shumer is not all doom and gloom about our AI future. Living on AI Time does not have to mean being ruled by it.

His recommendation to embrace the technology, learn it, use it, become an expert, and design your business and world, if not around it, then at least prepared to support and integrate with it, aligns closely with how I've counseled people.

Facing our new AI reality

AI is not the end of every career. It's not the end of the planet. It's a fast-moving and somewhat unpredictable force in life, but I do think we can prepare, we can adjust, we can find new ways of working, and reap the benefits of tools that can outdo our rudimentary work in myriad ways.

Still, there will be casualties. Industries and careers will die. We will meet a reckoning on the resources front that I am only just hearing about, and how some AI companies might address it.

That period, which we are entering now, will be difficult, especially for those deeply entrenched in careers (as well as some just starting out) and ways of life. AI might not feel net-positive for the next few years, but I think there's a chance that, in the end, we may feel the benefit, nay, even the gift, of being the first to live in AI Time.

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