Something Big Is Happening, Now What?

Matt Shumer Sounded The Alarm. What Do You Really Need to Do?

Matt Shumer’s piece is getting passed around for good reason. Most of it is right. The pace is real. The self-improvement loop is real. The disruption is real.

If you haven’t read it yet, the short version: Shumer is an AI startup founder who wrote a long, personal warning for his non-tech friends and family about how fast AI is advancing. He describes models that now write tens of thousands of lines of working code, test their own output, and show something that feels like judgment. He says AI helped build itself. He says 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated within one to five years. He says the people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet.

He’s not exaggerating. And I respect him for writing it.

But there’s a gap in the middle of his piece that nobody seems to be talking about. And I think it’s the part that matters most.

The alarm is real. The advice isn’t enough.

Shumer makes a thorough, convincing case that AI can now do your job. Then his advice is: use the tools harder. Spend an hour a day. Be the person in the meeting who did the analysis faster. Sign up for the paid version. Pick the best model. Push it into your work.

That’s necessary. It’s also not enough.

It’s like telling someone the floodwaters are rising and handing them a better bucket.

Here’s the part that stuck with me. He describes the moment these new models showed something that felt like judgment. Like taste. The sense of knowing what the right call is. He flags it as a breakthrough, and he’s right to.

But then he moves on. He doesn’t ask the question that moment demands: if AI is developing something that looks like judgment, what does human judgment actually mean now?

As AI grows in ability, our role in defining direction, values, and purpose only becomes more essential.

That’s the real conversation. Not whether AI can do the work. But what you’re for once it does.

Acceleration without orientation isn’t a strategy.

His advice is all acceleration and no orientation. Get ahead. Move faster. Learn the tools. But get ahead toward what? Without a clear sense of what you’re bringing to the table that the tool isn’t, you’re just becoming a faster follower of the machine.

Shumer tells you to spend an hour a day experimenting with AI and you’ll be ahead of 99% of people. Maybe. But ahead doing what? If the only skill you’re building is “how to use the current tool,” you’re on a treadmill. The tool changes every few months. He says so himself. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. So the person who built their entire advantage on knowing which buttons to press is starting over every cycle. That starts to look less like adaptation and more like dependency.

You don’t just “use” AI. That’s where the real skill starts.

Here’s what Shumer skips entirely. There is an entire layer of skill between “try AI” and “AI does your job.” And that layer is where the real work happens.

You don’t just use AI. You design how it fits into your work. You learn where it creates value and where it destroys it. You figure out how much to apply and when to pull back. And you stay clear on what remains yours to do, knowing that line will keep moving. That’s judgment, workflow design, and self-awareness working together. Prompting is maybe 5% of it.

Think about a lawyer. The one who feeds a contract to AI and asks it to find risky clauses is using AI. Fine. But the lawyer who understands which types of analysis the AI handles reliably, which require her own review, how to structure the workflow so nothing falls through, and what her client actually needs from her beyond the analysis itself? She’s doing something fundamentally different. She’s collaborating with AI. And that’s the version of the skill that holds up over time.

Capability isn’t adoption. Institutions move at the speed of trust.

There’s another thing Shumer’s piece treats as a given that isn’t. He writes as if the fact that AI can do something means it will be deployed to do it. It won’t. Not at the pace he implies.

AI can draft a brief. That doesn’t mean a law firm will let it. AI can read a scan. That doesn’t mean a hospital will trust the output without a physician reviewing it. Organizations don’t adopt technology at the speed of capability. They adopt it at the speed of trust. And trust involves compliance, liability, governance, culture, and a dozen other things that move slowly for good reasons.

That trust gap actually strengthens the case for human agency. Someone has to understand the technology well enough to know where it’s genuinely ready and where it isn’t. Someone has to earn the institutional credibility to deploy it responsibly. And someone has to own the outcome. The more capable AI gets, the more those roles matter, not less.

Shumer is right that the capability curve is steep. But capability without trust just sits on a shelf. The people who will matter most in the next few years are the ones who can help their organizations move from “AI can do this” to “we trust AI to do this, and here’s how we’re accountable for it.”

What do you bring when the machine can do the work?

That’s the only question that matters when intelligence is abundant.

And it’s not one you answer once. The line between what AI handles and what remains human will keep shifting. It shifted for software engineers over the past year. It’s shifting for lawyers, analysts, writers, and consultants right now. It will keep shifting.

But the work of knowing where that line is today, in your context, for your clients, for your organization? That is the work. Not something you get to after you learn the tools. The thing itself.

Where do you direct AI? What do you hold onto? What judgment and values do you bring that give the output meaning? How do you design the collaboration so both the human and the machine are doing what they’re best at? These are strategic questions, and right now most people aren’t asking them because they’re still stuck on “how do I use this thing.”

The honest picture.

Shumer’s piece is valuable because it tells people the truth about how fast this is moving. I want to add to that truth, not argue with it.

Something big is happening. It’s moving faster than most people realize. You need to engage with these tools seriously and soon.

And learning to use AI is the beginning, not the destination. The skill that matters is understanding how it fits into the context of your work. The judgment that matters is knowing how much to apply and when. What will differentiate you over time isn’t how fast you move. It’s whether you know what’s yours to do.

Shumer wrote the alarm. It’s a good one. But alarms don’t tell you where to go. You have to find that within yourself. It’s part of building what is scarce and valuable when intelligence is abundant and commoditized.