“AI is going to take your job.” You have probably heard some version of that line at least once.
I could not treat it as somebody else’s problem. My job is white collar work.
This blog is the record of what happened after that. I was afraid of being on the side that gets replaced, so I decided I would rather be on the side that uses the thing. The parts that went well and the parts where I tripped over my own feet — I am going to write all of it down, honestly, one post at a time.
If you are sitting there right now wondering whether to give AI a try, this first post is here to give you a small push.
Three things stacked up at once
My reasons for starting with AI are not mysterious. They are not admirable, either. If anything they are a little desperate.
1. One video on YouTube
A video came across my feed by accident: somebody who really knew how to use AI, showing what they could do with it. I was genuinely shaken. “Wait — this is already possible?”
The world had moved this far along while I was still standing there knowing nothing about it. Excitement and a small, uncomfortable urgency arrived at the same moment.
2. Money
This one is not special to me. Things happen, and I had a plain reality in front of me: I needed to earn more. I wanted to start something new and turn it into income. But I had no idea what to touch first. That vague, stuck feeling had been sitting with me for a long time.
3. A quiet fear about my own work
My job is white collar work. Which is exactly why every AI news story landed the same way: how long is this job going to exist?
Paperwork. Data entry. All of it is the sort of thing AI happens to be good at. The worry that it could be taken away from me got a bit bigger every day.
If it might be taken, get on the using side first
When those three things overlapped, I arrived at one conclusion.
Better to jump in myself than to sit here waiting and being scared.
If I am afraid of AI taking my job, I should become someone who can use AI. If I have to earn, I should study how to turn AI into income. If the world is moving ahead, I should chase it.
The logic is simple. Taking the actual step took more nerve than the logic suggests. I am in my forties. I use a computer at work, but I had never written a line of code in my life. Honestly, the “can I even do this?” side of me was the louder one.
I told myself the thing you tell yourself: regretting something you did beats regretting something you never tried. And I downloaded an AI.
And then I met Kuro
What I picked was Claude. On this blog I call it Kuro out of affection — my AI partner Kuro (Claude). The name comes from our black cat at home, but that story belongs to another post.
The first thing I felt after installing it was simple: you can just talk to it, more normally than I expected.
There were no difficult commands to memorize. I could go back and forth in Japanese, my own language, the same way I would talk to someone I was asking for advice. I said “here is what I want to do,” and it started thinking about it with me.
Of course, that is where the real work begins. Once I actually started doing things, plenty went wrong. I got stuck. I ran into a lot of “hang on, that is what happens?” moments. I will write about each of those in the posts that follow.
But that day — the day I brought an AI in and decided, all right, I am going to learn this — that was my starting line.
If you are about to start
If you are hesitating the way I was, there is exactly one thing I want to say.
I did not need any special skills.
I am not a programmer. I am not an IT specialist. I am an ordinary company employee in my forties, doing white collar work, who got worried about his own job. Even so, with AI alongside me, I got to put my hands on all sorts of things. I built a video editing tool. I brought a blog that had been sitting untouched for six months back to life. I wrote a book. All of that is coming in later posts.
You do not need perfect preparation to begin. What you need is the feeling of “maybe I will give this a go.” That is all. The only difference between people is whether they do it or not.
What I am going to do here
From here on I am going to record everything I do with AI — the successes and the failures, one at a time. If it helps somebody who is trying to take the same first step, that would make me happy.
Next time: the very first tool I set up after I started using AI — a voice input program called Aqua Voice. It turned out to matter enormously for making the back-and-forth with AI comfortable, and I will be honest about why.
If you want to read that one now, it is here: Why I chose Aqua Voice for voice input. And if you would rather see what an absolute beginner can actually build with AI, start with how I restored a blog I had left alone for six months.
