December 2, 2025 @ 12:03pm – Burnley, Victoria, Australia
Will AI take my job?
This is a question that has been hanging over many of us this year. Will AI replace me? Will I no longer be needed? What will I do?
Many of us have been thinking about these questions. They make us anxious about the future because now the future looks different.
For some of us, it’s easier not to think about it. We quickly change the topic or fill our heads with distractions. Others might shout and complain and point fingers, hoping that it helps.
Crying, screaming, hiding, shrieking, and cursing are all options available to us. But they don’t really change anything about the situation. In fact, they usually make it worse.
AI, like any other technology like concrete or wireless networks, exists.
Popular self-help authors encourage us to do what’s in our control to make the situation better. “If you’re scared about it, lean into it.”1 Use your agency and “slurp up all those problems and knowledge, and leave nothing for anyone else to do”2 and “push through (your) own excuses… even when (you) didn’t feel like it.”3 Even if there are layoffs or other acts of fate, you will be in a better position.
This is a helpful way to look at problems, but the reality is, of course our jobs could no longer exist.
Here are some more hard “could be truths”:
You didn’t do a good enough job (for this company at this time). True.
What you were getting paid for can now be done by someone with less training, or for less money.
Someone can do what you do but better, faster. TRUE.
It’s hard to look at these directly.
But of course it could be true.
I think it’s hard to look because there is such a slippery slope from “I’m not actually needed” to “I’m not good.” It’s scattered with guilt and shame and beliefs and all sorts of things. They feel connected.
But I didn’t say, “You are a loser,” “You are a failure,” “You should have done something,” “You won’t be happy again” or “It’s all downhill from here.” No judgements.
If you look closely, you’ll see that there is space between. Of course there’s space. It’s possible to separate these things.
Admitting that ‘I’m no longer needed here’ doesn’t take away your agency or say anything “bad” about you.
It’s difficult and painful but we must be able to recognize that it could be, and might be, one day, true.
We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”
Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
When you have a bad habit, it becomes very easy to do things you don’t want to do, like staying up late watching YouTube.
But when consciously created, a habit can make it easy to do something you want to do, like eat healthier or go to bed a bit earlier.
Habits rewire your brain and eventually even change your identity. James Clear writes about this in his popular self-help book Atomic Habits (2018). You don’t just go to the gym every Monday, you become the type of person who does so.
A habit helps you to show up even when you have temporarily lost interest, motivation or willpower. On a particularly cold night, my swim coach admitted that ‘some nights all that’s left is the habit.’ That could sound a bit sad, but sometimes that’s the difference between sticking at something and giving up entirely.
Habits seem to work so well becausehumans are habitual by nature. When certain brain circuits are triggered, we react the same way again and again. Most of our movements are habitual and automatic. The way we breathe, stand, talk, scratch, itch, whistle. Our preferences repeat too, like which clothes we select to wear or which yoga mat we like to sit on. When so much of who we are, and what we do is a habit, the harder it is to notice.
And so, the danger of introducing new habits, is that although life may get easier and more efficient, we may also become even more stilted, predictable and mechanicalthan we already tend to be.
A man decides to run three times a week. Over the course of year his physical and mental health improve. He finds that he has more energy and a brighter outlook on life. But even this healthy habit can become unhealthy. His unconscious desire for perfection means he becomes irritated and frustrated when the weather is bad or his stats aren’t improving. He denies spontaneous impulses to try out different, more interesting routes. He turns down social invites to keep his streak going. And eventually gets injured after ignoring obvious signals from his body to mix things up or to rest.
We want to hammer our lives like a nail, tag it, stereotype it or cram it into a category.
But life isn’t mechanical.
Iain McGilchrist writes that “The only things in the universe that are machine-like are the few lumps of metal we have created in the last 300 years.”
This might be why mechanical things often fail or break in dreams.
So before you install a new habit, see how it feels to eat your dinner in a different place, at a different time or to skip it entirely. Maybe it’s worth removing a something habitual, before adding more.
When we gain the ability to hold our habits lightly, we find freedom, maybe the most important thing in life, or at least much more important than a healthy meal or some saved time.
A dream where I was engulfed by a giant jellyfish – ‘Imagined with AI’
All dreams are good dreams. They’re giving you information which you need.
Robert A. Johnson
Until you make the unconscious conscious it will rule your life and you will call it fate.
Carl Jung
The main point of any sort of therapy is to bring form or consciousness to what was previously unconscious.
One method to do so is to better understand your dreams, which could be said to contain images, thoughts and feelings that were previously unknown to your conscious mind.
But there are a lot of barriers:
Most people don’t believe there is any value or meaning in unconscious material.
Dreams are not only seen as unimportant, but culturally stigmatized as weird and kooky.
For a number of reasons, it’s difficult to remember and record them.
Dreams are primarily images and don’t spell things out like a business report. So it’s very hard to understand them straight away.
For those reasons, I doubt many people interpret their own dreams. Providing tips in this area feels a bit like writing about the correct nutrition strategy for Antarctic distance running.
And I will admit that interpretation is hard, frustrating and I’m not very good at it. For most of the dreams that I write down, I take one glance at it and never read it again.
But I’ve been experimenting with offloading some of the dirty work to ChatGPT and other AI tools and found it to help, even if it’s just the feeling that I don’t have to do it all by myself!
The process I’ve outlined below is based on Robert A. Johnson’s method he writes about in Inner Work. Johnson was a protege to Jung and really was able to translate and popularize dream work to the masses.
Step 1: Write out the dream
It’s important to have clear source material. Dreams quickly become fuzzy, but if you’ve got a couple of sentences on paper, it’s much easier to interpret.
How AI can help: You could skip the rest of the steps and try and grab an interpretation straight away. For better results, provide some recent events or how you are generally feeling. Eg. I’ve been interviewing for a new job and feeling very disappointed with how I’ve been going so far. You could ask it to visualize the dream (see jellyfish image above) which can lead to some fun results, and is a worthwhile practice in itself.
Step 2: Make associations
What does a dream with lightning in it mean? If you ask google, you’ll get a lot of different, contradicting results. What really matters is less about what some dream dictionary says, and more about your own unique, personal associations.
Take this dream for example: “I’m in a town square in San Francisco where the mayor, a black woman, was waiting for people to show up.”
For me, I associate San Francisco with things like home, America, ambition, freedom, technology, money, business, career. That’s because I’ve lived and worked there and that’s how I feel about it. If you’ve never visited and spend a lot of time on the internet, you might associate it with hell or homeless people. Dreams rely heavily on images to communicate their messages, and do so with “maddening economy. They won’t use two words when one will do. And they leave out connectives like so or therefore.”1 It’s our personal associations that can help us ‘double click’ on these images rather than reading the dream like a linear story, which usually won’t make much sense.
How AI can help: A tool like ChatGPT doesn’t know anything about how you personally feel about red socks or the hamburger you cooked last night, but it can help a lot with bigger, more collective associations. Let’s look at the town square image from that dream. Jung saw the town square as a symbol for the Self, symbolizing the integration of various aspects of the psyche into a cohesive whole. The town square is also the ‘heart of the town’ and is a public space that could represent concerns about public image, reputation etc. These broader associations might not feel right to you, but occasionally can flick on a lightbulb. Humans have been working with symbolic images for thousands of years, and GPT can tap into that vast database and make associations that you might not have made by yourself.
Step 3: What part of you is that?
It’s normal to distance your conscious self from all the images you might encounter in a dream. For example, it’s easy to dismiss the image of a soldier as someone else or simply meaningless. Maybe you’re unable to draw out any associations, personal or collective, that make any sense. But in this step, you want to ask is there any part of yourself, a trait or dynamic, that you might share with that image? For me, I struggle to see anything ‘war-like’ in my life or self, but I could admit there’s a part of me, or a dynamic in my life, where I can blindly follow orders and switch off my critical thinking without questioning a task or speaking up for myself.
Step 4: Interpret the dream
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve got a dream, associations, reflections, and hopefully some insights that have naturally arisen during the process. It shouldn’t be too hard to take a stab at what this dream might be trying to say.
You know you’ve done a good job, when you feel a little shocked, embarrassed, sheepish or even annoyed at what you’re looking at. That’s just your conscious mind smarting as it contacts and understands something it didn’t want to admit to be true.
How AI can help: Your own interpretation will likely be best, but it’s still easy to deceive ourselves and say ‘oh yeah, it’s about work’. But a second opinion from the LLM gods can help you catch anything you missed or unconsciously brushed over. You could ask it to come up with an alternative interpretation or play devils advocate.
For most people, dreams will remain far away from the spotlight of the conscious mind. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or contain useful, practical information that you would probably be better off knowing about. Accurate analysis will likely to continue to be tricky for most of us, and require a good amount of patience and intuition. But hopefully tools like GPT can help with some of the heavy lifting: to amplify associations, research symbolic meaning and look at our psyche from new angles.
Buddha Bike 