Not This Week
The answer to "will AI replace me" comes with a shelf life, and nobody prints the date on it.
Another one of these tests crossed my feed this week. Will AI Replace You? Ten questions, two minutes, a score at the end. No jargon, no doom, and to be fair to whoever built it, no dishonesty either. The score most people get back is some version of: you’re fine for now, here’s where AI could help you level up.
Which is true. That’s the annoying part. Almost every one of these tests gives an honest answer to the question it was asked.
The problem is the question.
“Will AI replace me” sounds like a yes or no question, so people treat the answer like a yes or no answer. You take the test, you get a decent score, you relax. Job done, quite literally. And nowhere in the process does anyone say the one thing that would actually be useful: come back next week and ask again.
A score like this is a photograph of a moving object. It tells you where the thing was when the shutter clicked. It says nothing about the speed.
And the speed is the story. In March, Anthropic published data on how their AI is actually being used across 800 occupations. Not projections, not expert panels guessing. Observed usage. Computer programmers came out with roughly three quarters of their core tasks already being handled by AI in the wild. Customer service, about 70 per cent. Two years ago those figures would have read as science fiction. Now they’re a dataset on HuggingFace that anyone can download.
The same data holds a detail that should bother anyone with a good score and a degree on the wall. Workers in the most exposed occupations earn 47 per cent more than workers in the least exposed ones. The exposure runs up the ladder, not down it. Which means that the people most likely to take a two-minute test, get a reassuring answer and move on are, on average, exactly the people whose ground is moving fastest.
None of this makes the tests bad, I should say. Any structured look at your own work beats no look at all, and most people have never done even the rough version. My issue is with what happens after the score. Nothing happens after the score. Nobody tells you it expires.
Because it does expire. Any assessment of AI exposure has a shelf life, mine included, because the capability underneath it keeps moving. The models that produced March’s numbers are already not the models people are using in July. A test built in January was measuring a different machine. So the test you took, whichever one it was, wasn’t wrong. It was dated. Those aren’t the same thing, but they end the same way if you treat one score as settled.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.
There’s also a better question hiding underneath the quiz question, and it’s less comfortable. Not “could AI do my job” but “will the economics of my employer make it rational to replace what I do within my working life.” That one doesn’t fit in a two-minute test, because it depends on things no test can see: your firm’s margins, your sector’s adoption curve, what your board read on the flight back from the offsite. In the book I spend a chapter on the fuller version of this, the honest audit. The short version of the argument is that knowing is a feeling and an audit is a number, and the distance between the two is where most people hide.
But even the fuller audit is still a photograph. What turns any of this into something useful is repetition. So here’s the discipline, and it costs nothing.
Take whichever test you like. This one, another one, a task list on the back of an envelope, whatever. Write the score down with the date. Put a reminder in your diary for six months from now to take the same test again. When it fires, take it, and compare.
The first score tells you almost nothing. The gap between the first score and the second tells you nearly everything. That gap is your personal velocity reading: not where the technology is, but how fast it’s closing on the specific things you do all day. And then again six months after that, and so on, for as long as you’re working.
If the score doesn’t move, decent. Genuinely. Some work is less exposed for structural reasons, for now, and it’s worth knowing that with dates attached rather than assuming it. If the score does move, you’ve learned something no single test could ever tell you, and you’ve learned it while you still have runway to act on it. Retraining from stability is a fundamentally different exercise from retraining after redundancy. The people who get caught by this shift will mostly be people who got a reassuring score once and framed it.
So take the test. Honestly, take all of them. Just read the result the way you’d read a weather report from March in July.
Not this week is a fine answer. It just has a shelf life, and nobody prints the date on it.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.