We need to change our attitudes to AI

The professional classes have always been rather good at inventing reasons to feel superior. Until recently, their favourite was dismissing automation as something that happened to other people - factory workers, taxi drivers, anyone whose job involved actual physical labour. How ironic that artificial intelligence has chosen to target precisely those who spent decades smugly explaining why their particular brand of cognitive supremacy made them irreplaceable.

Walk into any Irish law firm, accounting practice, or marketing agency, and you'll find highly educated, well-compensated professionals experiencing what can only be described as an existential crisis with a silicon chip at its heart. These are people who survived the Leaving Certificate, conquered university, climbed corporate ladders, and accumulated impressive LinkedIn profiles. Yet here they are, lying awake at night wondering if ChatGPT is coming for their corner office.

For decades, the professional classes have been the evangelists of technological progress, cheerfully automating away blue-collar jobs while reassuring themselves that their particular brand of cognitive labour was irreplaceable. The accountant who implemented software that eliminated bookkeeping positions never worried about his own spreadsheet mastery becoming obsolete. The lawyer who digitised document review felt secure in his analytical superiority. The journalist who watched print circulation plummet still believed in the sanctity of the byline. The graphic designer (yours truly in a former life) shaping the aesthetics of business communication and publicity literature.

But artificial intelligence, it turns out, is rather more democratic in its disruption. It doesn't distinguish between the calloused hands of the factory worker and the manicured fingernails of the management consultant. It simply asks: Can this task be reduced to patterns, predictions, and probabilities? And disturbingly often, the answer is yes.

The psychological impact has been profound. Therapists across the world report a surge in what they're calling "AI anxiety" – a condition that manifests somewhere between impostor syndrome and technological vertigo. These aren't the worried well; these are accomplished professionals suddenly questioning whether their years of education and experience amount to little more than sophisticated pattern recognition that a machine could replicate in milliseconds.

Consider the plight of the modern solicitor. Once upon a time, legal research required human intelligence, institutional knowledge, and the ability to synthesise complex arguments from disparate sources. Today, AI can scan thousands of case files, identify relevant precedents, and draft preliminary briefs faster than any human could open a law library door. The solicitor's expertise hasn't diminished, but the mystique surrounding it certainly has.

Marketing directors are discovering their own version of professional vertigo. The campaigns they once crafted through years of studying consumer behaviour and cultural shifts can now be spat out by systems that have digested every successful ad, every focus group recording, every demographic study ever commissioned. What took a career to master, a machine learned over a weekend. The creative spark that professionals prized so highly turns out to be somewhat less mystical than they imagined.

My design sensibilities had already been diplomatically relegated to "heritage status" – a polite way of saying I was about as relevant to Instagram as a fax machine at a startup. Now, artificial intelligence has arrived like some digital house renovator, tidying away entire generations of creative expertise with ruthless efficiency. My carefully cultivated aesthetic, once merely unfashionable, has been permanently retired to the same graveyard where outdated copy machines go to die.

The age gap tells its own story here. Young professionals who've never known life without touch screens are getting their first taste of technological humility. Their fluency with apps and social platforms - once their professional superpower - proves about as useful against AI as knowing how to operate a typewriter. Growing up digital doesn't mean understanding the mechanics any more than driving a car makes you a mechanic.

The senior ranks face their own peculiar humiliation. Partners who built empires on institutional knowledge now watch 25-year-olds casually outsource complex tasks to chatbots. Decades of accumulated wisdom suddenly feel quaint when a graduate can generate in minutes what once took teams weeks. The pecking order has gone topsy-turvy. Veterans who once commanded respect through accumulated wisdom now question whether their years of experience mark them as dinosaurs rather than experts.

People have reacted exactly as you'd expect. One camp has adopted full-scale denial, waving away AI as Silicon Valley snake oil that could never grasp the delicate complexities of real professional work. Others have swung to the opposite extreme, frantically enrolling in online courses and desperately trying to become AI experts overnight. The middle ground - a measured approach to understanding and integrating these tools - seems remarkably difficult to achieve.

This anxiety reveals something profound about how the professional classes have constructed their identities. Professional cachet has always rested on the hoarding of secrets. A barrister's encyclopedic recall of obscure cases, an accountant's intimate knowledge of Byzantine tax loopholes and the consultant's proprietary methodologies, these weren't merely job requirements but membership cards to an exclusive club. Knowledge was currency, and scarcity drove up the exchange rate.

AI has blown open the vault. Specialised knowledge that once required years of training now sits behind a chat interface, available to anyone who can frame a decent question. The professional gatekeepers find themselves guarding empty towers while the crowd streams through holes in the fence.

But this panic might be entirely misplaced. The real value was never in memorising case law or tax regulations - any competent search engine could handle that grunt work. What clients actually pay for is wisdom: knowing when to bend rules, reading between the lines of human motivation, crafting solutions that account for pride, fear, and all the other irrational forces that drive decision-making. Machines excel at processing information; they're hopeless at understanding why people do stupid things for smart reasons.

The successful barrister doesn't just know the law; she understands how to read a jury, when to press an argument, and how to distil complex legal concepts into compelling narratives. The effective marketing director doesn't simply analyse consumer data; he grasps the cultural zeitgeist, anticipates social shifts, and creates emotional connections that transcend demographic categories.

These distinctly human qualities become more valuable, not less, in an age of artificial intelligence. The challenge for professionals isn't to compete with machines on their terms, but to double down on what makes them irreplaceably human.

This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about professional identity. Rather than defining ourselves by what we know, we might need to define ourselves by how we feel, how we connect, and how we create meaning from information. It's a more challenging proposition, but ultimately a more human one.

Today's professional panic serves a purpose - it's the awkward adolescence of a changing workplace. The Victorians had to figure out what humans were good for once machines started doing the heavy lifting; now we're wrestling with the same question about thinking. The unease will pass, but not without leaving a few scars and forcing some uncomfortable conversations about what we're actually worth.

The historical record offers some comfort for the anxious. Every disruptive technology has triggered apocalyptic predictions that proved laughably wrong. Gutenberg's press was supposed to kill the oral tradition - instead, it spawned novels, newspapers, and mass literacy. E-commerce was meant to murder high street retail - it just taught shops how to reach customers in their pyjamas. AI will likely follow the same pattern: not wiping out white-collar work, but scrambling the job descriptions beyond recognition.

So I've retreated to my first romance - actual paint, actual brushes, actual canvases that don't require Wi-Fi. There's something wonderfully defiant about working with materials that obey physics rather than algorithms, where the worst crash involves dropping a palette knife rather than losing three hours of work to a software glitch. The scratch of bristle against linen, the reek of turpentine that clings to your glad rags for days - these aren't Instagram moments, they're proof of life. Let the machines master pixels; they'll never quite crack the stubborn alchemy of pigment refusing to behave precisely as you intended.