In this week’s newsletter, you can try a fun quiz to find out if you are an Artificial Individual at work who could be easily replaced by actual AI. For the weekly recap, I used ChatGPT in Excel to dive into the Q2 labour market data in Singapore, tested GPT-6 Sol, blamed humans instead of AI agents for hacking incidents, wrote some leadership advice for a student, and lamented our local drivers and bus passengers.
Weekly Recap
I was not satisfied with the local news reporting on the Ministry of Manpower’s Q2 labour market report on retrenchments. So I downloaded the raw MOM data and got ChatGPT to work on it within Excel to give me more insights. I encourage you to use ChatGPT or Claude within Excel for any data analysis or building offline Excel tools. It’s more fun than regular vibe coding of web apps.
I tested the latest ChatGPT GPT-6 Sol model by writing a simple skill file which I use daily.
It’s easy to be afraid of AI agent swarms that are now roaming cyberspace and hacking websites. Especially those from OpenAI. But these agents are only doing what the humans asked them to, or allowed them to do.
Leadership advice for one of my students.
I’ve been continuously updating the content of the Advanced Gen AI Masterclass for The Straits Times. The MINDEF folks who attended the latest version experienced a very different workshop from what their colleagues went through a year ago.
This is not AI slop, this is human foolishness. Aka Aidiocy.
Singapore drivers and riders are among the worst in the world.
But hey, why not give a Smelly Feet award to our bus passengers as well?
I’m constantly amazed by how a thin 8-inch tablet today can run the Xbox 360 console games I used to sell.
Sunday Essay
I often get asked which job is most likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence. My usual response is that it would be jobs that do not involve:
- Ownership of strategic decisions that drive profit and growth (CEO, sales leader, sales-oriented marketer)
- Life and death decisions (eg. saving lives, healthcare)
- Managing AI solutions (AI workflows, chatbots, agents)
But I also ask this question – are you in a robot job or working like a robot? If so, then your job is easily replaceable. Just as we buy a new appliance to replace an older model, we don’t feel much sadness when we have to dispose of the latter.
Take this fun quiz to check if you are an Artificial Individual (AI) at work:
- Do you work only when prompted by someone else?
- Do you lack any feelings of concern about your customers’ well-being and satisfaction?
- Do you stop working when a new problem arises and wait for new prompts?
- When you run into an error, do you wait for someone to press “Fix Error” for you?
- Do you wait for someone to upgrade your capabilities with new training and guidebooks?
- Do you fail to question why you are doing a particular repeatable action that nobody cares about?
- Do you like just working in front of a screen to move data around and not talking in person to stakeholders about their concerns?
- Do you believe that your career runs on a logical straight line and the only way is up?
- Do you believe you can do only one or a few types of work which you have spent your life training for?
- Do you work in this role because a fellow fallible person told you that you should?
If you have answered “YES!” to five or more of the questions above, congratulations! You are probably an Artificial Individual and you can look forward to getting replaced by a new 2029 model that will be faster, cheaper, and less troublesome to deploy. Or maybe a 2028 model.
If you are upset by the results of this quiz, I encourage you to become the opposite – the Agentic Individual who exercises agency over his own skills-building, career path, and always demonstrates why his work is meaningful and valuable to others.