For most of my career, I have been a lawyer. There was something reassuring about how legal expertise worked. The more I practiced, the more I knew.
But after years in a demanding job, I burned out. It’s not that I stopped enjoying law. I just needed a change.
About two years ago, I started shifting my career towards AI because I thought it was the future. I didn’t want to wake up 10 years later and realize that technology had changed my job without me.
It seemed like the smartest career move I could make. Now I’m not so sure.
Joining the AI boom early seemed like a perfect career move
I made the transition while the AI boom was still gaining momentum. Ironically, I landed a job at a legal tech company through a conversation with ChatGPT. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine my experience with my growing interest in technology.
My role was to test the most advanced models, compare their capabilities and explore how they could be used in legal work. I felt like I was ahead of a major change rather than trying to catch up.
I also became the go-to person for all things AI among my family and friends. People asked me what tools to use, whether AI would replace their jobs, or what I thought about the latest developments. I loved being the person who seemed to understand something that everyone was suddenly talking about.
But this feeling didn’t last as long as I hoped. Little by little, I began to realize that this was not just a new technology. It was something that was evolving at an almost frightening pace. And being close to it didn’t necessarily mean being able to follow it.
What initially seemed like an advantage gradually became a source of pressure.
Things that took me weeks to learn or build became obsolete almost overnight.
New cutting-edge AI models and companies seemed to arrive every few weeks, each promising capabilities that the previous ones lacked. Just as I began to understand one model, another would appear, forcing me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about what AI could and couldn’t do. He barely had time to breathe before “the next big thing” arrived.
What frustrated me most was how quickly my own work could lose its value. I spent weeks developing solutions to problems that a newer model could suddenly solve in minutes. Things I had carefully learned a few months earlier became useless after just one product was announced. It was strange to put so much effort into something only to find that the technology had already passed me by.
And this constant learning didn’t stop once the job was done. AI was everywhere. It was in the news, on social media, in conversations with friends, and in almost every discussion about the future of work. Sometimes, after spending a whole day testing models, the last thing I wanted to hear about was another breakthrough.
Yet I still felt compelled to read about it, fearing that missing a single development would leave me further behind. I was starting to get tired.
Accepting uncertainty has become the only way forward
For years, I measured my professional progress by my knowledge and confidence in my abilities. AI completely disputed this. I began to wonder if being good at my job meant knowing the latest developments or simply knowing how to adapt as everything changed. It was uncomfortable to accept that experience and hard work didn’t always bring me the certainty I was used to.
I also began to question how much of my personal time I was willing to sacrifice to stay relevant. I didn’t want every conversation, evening, or weekend to become another opportunity to learn or talk about AI. I started making a conscious effort to unplug after work, even if it meant missing an announcement or falling behind on the latest developments. For the first time, I chose not to know everything.
I don’t regret switching to AI, but I’m not as sure of my decision as I was before. Technology is not going to slow down. All I know for sure is that we are living through one of the most significant inflection points in recent history, and perhaps that is what makes this so upsetting.
Gn tech
