The white-collar, mid-career professional today will be hard-pressed to find himself represented in any of the Seven Ages of a person’s life, as Shakespeare described them in As You Like It. The coder, the corporate worker, the doctor, the journalist, the lawyer — hardly anyone in their 40s and 50s can “In fair round belly with good capon lin’d/With eyes severe and beard of formal cut/Full of wise saws and modern instances… plays his part.” In the age of AI, the middle-aged worker cannot rely on her experience, her wisdom to “play her part” — she must become a student, once again.
A survey and report by Indeed — titled ‘Work Ahead’ — found that 43 per cent of workers across the country feel confident about using AI over the next two-three years, and, significantly, mid-career professionals (aged 35-54) are leading the way in adopting the technology. Over half the people surveyed (56 per cent) in this category are actively seeking AI training, outpacing younger professionals (39 per cent) by quite a margin. There is something admirable about this eagerness, this drive to stay relevant and the manager’s dream — “productive” — at a time people are usually at the top of a career hill, staring down the slope on the other side. But it is also a little sad.
The young know they have enough time to learn, to “upskill”, to make a mark. The old can rest on their laurels, and look back at a life well-lived (or lived, at any rate). It is the middle-aged, middle-career, middle-class worker — paying for kids’ rising costs and hospital bills that only seem to mount, with salaries staying stagnant — who has to learn how to give prompts to a machine that has cannibalised the data created by the same human intelligence it seeks to replace. All the world is indeed a stage — and the play right now is an absurd tragedy.
