»A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.« For me as a sailor, that’s more than just a great quote. It’s almost a truism. But as the son of a civil servant, raised on stability and security, in a family where permanent jobs and predictable career paths were seen as the sensible way to do things, it’s also something I didn’t live by for a long time.
Sometimes, life scares me. The decisions I can make, or have to make. Not the ones where the risk is reasonably easy to calculate. What will this cost me? How much time will it take? What happens if it goes wrong, and can I deal with the fallout? Those aren’t the decisions I mean. I mean the ones where getting it wrong could have serious consequences. The ones that could put relationships at risk, or destroy them. That could affect my health for years to come. The ones I might look back on years later and realise that this decision got in the way of living a fulfilled life. Those are the decisions that scare me.
Until recently, companies at least had to make the same mistakes independently. One organization might overvalue prestigious universities. Another might mistake confidence for competence. A third might quietly screen out unconventional careers. Their judgments were often flawed. But they were flawed in different ways.
We all knew AI would eventually generate fake citations. That was almost the boring part. The more interesting question is why so many of them passed through systems designed to evaluate knowledge in the first place.
The first time I spent an entire afternoon working with AI, I closed my laptop with that strangely satisfying feeling of having done hard intellectual work. My brain felt cooked. I had compared models, refined prompts, rewritten outputs, tested workflows, chased better phrasing, discarded entire approaches. It felt intense. Dense. Productive.