AI-isms: Uncertainty | Liz Fosslien | How to calibrate Uncertainty in AI-times

At the heart of anxiety is uncertainty. There's research that when your brain has full certainty about what's coming, even if what's coming is an electric shock, you feel calmer than when you don't know. Now look at where we are. AI everywhere, no real playbook, a dozen versions of the future arriving at once. Of course we feel uncertain and anxious. In this episode of AI-isms, I sit down with Liz Fosslien to talk about what AI is doing to how we feel at work. Liz studies human emotions at work. She's the author and illustrator of the bestsellers Big Feelings and No Hard Feelings, her work has run on NPR, TED, and Good Morning America. She and her co-author Molly Duffy recently concluded a study on how AI is making us feel at work. The idea that stayed with me is ambivalent anxiety, two opposite emotions in the same body at the same time. I'm scared this ends my job. I'm relieved I might not have to do the part of it I hate. Both, at once. And most of us are performing 'calm' over the top of it.What we get into:• Why "uncertainty" has outgrown the word, and the research on why we'd rather know a bad thing is coming than sit with a fifty-fifty chance• Ambivalent anxiety: holding fear and relief at once, and the quiet tax of performing calm at work• The early-career squeeze, when the first rung is the first to get automated, and the human skills that travel across any industry• Chasing curiosity instead of fear: peer learning, skills swaps, and how to move when nobody hands you a playbook• Why pretending to have it figured out is the biggest mistake leaders make right now, and why the honest questions create more clarity than fake answersChapters00:00 The uncertainty under the anxiety01:36 Meet Liz Fosslien02:36 We need a new word for uncertainty03:26 Why humans hate uncertainty07:25 Enter AI: ambivalent anxiety and performing calm12:57 Case 1: early career and the "AI slop" moment17:37 AI-isms for early career, and the mid-career squeeze20:38 Chasing curiosity: peer learning and skills swaps23:11 Not everything catastrophic will happen26:35 Leading a transformation with no playbook30:31 The illustration: ambivalent anxiety on a swing34:04 How Liz processes her own emotions35:54 The AI-isms I took from this oneThis is AI-isms, human rhythms in a synthetic world. If you're leading people through this shift, what are you feeling underneath the calm? Tell me what you see.Topics: AI and emotions at work, uncertainty and anxiety, ambivalent anxiety, the future of work, early career and automation, reskilling and peer learning, leadership in uncertainty, performing calm, Liz Fosslien, Big Feelings, No Hard Feelings