This week, I took Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s MasterClass, AI’s Future—And Yours. I’ve been working in marketing across construction, tech, and finance, and have heard over the last few years how AI is going to take away our jobs and lifestyle or, how AI is creating a “technological utopia.” I can attest to Fei-Fei Li’s claim that every week seems to bring another headline that AI will either solve all of humanity’s problems or replace us entirely. But, she argued that rather than beginning with fear or hype, we should start with agency.
The most valuable lesson I got from her talk was that we are at a critical moment in society to make decisions on how AI is developed, adopted, and integrated into our lives. Here are a few choices we should think about making today to help work with AI, rather than completely ignore it or inflate what it can do.
How can AI increase people’s empowerment?
Too often, conversations around AI focus on existential risks or job displacement. While technology isn’t inherently good or bad, we as developers and as users can determine its value.
Every AI system should prompt us to ask:
- Who does this serve?
- What benefit does it create?
- Who might be excluded or disadvantaged?
Those questions aren’t just for AI researchers. They’re equally important for communicators, business leaders, educators, policymakers, and anyone building products powered by AI.
How do humans learn vs how does AI learn?
Dr. Li discussed the distinction between how AI learns and how humans learn. In comparing how young children learn through images, we can also develop AI in ways that can helpfully assist us. But, she also made a strong distinction. She identified that modern AI is powered by three foundational elements:
- Massive datasets
- Neural networks
- Computing power, particularly GPUs
Machines learn by processing billions of annotated images, words, and examples but, children develop through rich sensory experiences, movement, curiosity, relationships, and exploration. We shouldn’t reduce human learning to simply “feeding data” because human intelligence is fundamentally embodied and social.
That distinction matters as AI becomes more integrated into education.
Is AI augmenting us or automating us?
My favorite segment of the talk explored the difference between automation and augmentation. She brought up the popular question often posed by today’s workforce: “Will AI replace this job?” But, she stated, the better question is: “Which tasks within this job could AI help with?”
Jobs are made up of hundreds of individual tasks. Some tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, or administrative. These are exactly the kinds of activities AI can automate effectively. Other tasks require creativity, judgment, empathy, strategy, storytelling, and human relationships. Those are far harder to replace. So, as a writer and marketer I can ask: Am I doing something tedious that AI can do better, more accurately, and free up my time for other things?
Instead of viewing AI as replacing entire professions, we should think about how it can remove friction so people can spend more time doing the work that actually creates value.
Is AI a collaborator, or a shortcut
By working in writing, researching, and creating content, I often ask myself is AI helping me or making me “lazy”? Is it augmenting my work or am I truly relying too heavily on AI programs to complete my work? Dr. Li emphasized that the key in having a good relationship with AI is good prompting.
Good prompting is iterative: it isn’t about asking AI to write something once and accepting the first output. You ask and it responds and then you refine and it improves. You continue to have a dialogue with AI and reshape the work together. The quality of AI-generated work often reflects the quality of the thinking behind the prompts.
We still have a say in AI’s future
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in healthcare, education, communications, construction, marketing, journalism, and countless other fields, we each have an opportunity to influence how it’s used. We are still in a cultural moment where AI is being learned, integrated in workflows and everyday life at home. We aren’t just simply consuming AI right now, but we can still shape the safety guards around how AI is used. We’re not simply consuming AI but right now we are helping shape the norms, expectations, and safeguards that will determine how it serves society.
One analogy from the MasterClass that stayed with me was Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s comparison to the early days of the automobile. Cars weren’t born with seatbelts, traffic lights, speed limits, driver’s licenses, or road safety regulations. Those systems evolved as society learned how to safely integrate a transformative technology into everyday life. AI is at a similar inflection point.
The technology is advancing rapidly, but the social infrastructure including ethical standards, governance, education, transparency, and responsible use, is still being built.
Rather than viewing AI as something happening to us, we have the opportunity to participate in shaping the guardrails that ensure it benefits people, protects vulnerable communities, and strengthens society as a whole.Not simply by consuming AI.
I’d love to hear your perspective:
Has AI changed how you work? Do you see it primarily as a tool for automation, augmentation, or something else entirely?
