Resonance: AI at Work and in the Classroom
Voice is one thing. What comes back to you is another.
Last week was week 4 of life post-MAS. (Links to week 1, week 2, and week 3). Fewer conversations. More teaching, which is a different type of conversation altogether.
The familiar. A group CDO at a bank, also exploring what’s next. Someone I met during my last career break, who has been running a community at the intersection of data and AI. A colleague who coached me when I took up a leadership position who has become a friend. A senior consultant who I have been working with for a while.
New connections. A reporter covering the intersection of AI and finance, as well as AI and work. Folks from all walks of life doing their core module on databases for a Masters. Tech and data folks from healthcare learning deep learning. Founders of a risk x AI startup from Australia setting up in Singapore.
The threads through these conversations were quite different. But they converged on something I didn’t expect.
Resonance. And what happens when you start tuning for it.
Aligned Observations
The reporter was young but has had a singular passion, unlike the wandering me, to be a journalist for a long while. We talked for two hours, mainly about the impact of AI on work.
What struck me was that her observations from months of reporting resonated with mine. The unevenness of AI impact. That messy middle I wrote about. The gap between awareness and action. The hype not matching reality on the ground. She was seeing the same patterns from a different angle. With a more skilled eye than me.
But she saw something I knew was lingering, but never thought much about. The fears. That perception of AI as the boogeyman, coming for work that some might feel was more easily replaceable. That fear of not being able to get a job because of AI. Whether real or just perception, that’s going to shape behaviors. Could be good, as people choose to upskill or prepare. But I have learned that the perception of scarcity drives behaviors that inevitably skew towards the bad.
Interestingly, just a day later, I read a piece on the AI job market by Nathan Lambert from the Allen Institute for AI. His take from the inside. Agents push the humans up the org. chart, he wrote. For folks with experience and judgment, perhaps it works out. But for junior workers without what he calls a “fanatical obsession” with learning, they are “almost replaceable with coding agents (or will be soon).”
It may sound hyper-productive. But is that the world we want to live in? Running towards an ephemeral goal? For what, to build the next useless social media network for AI agents?
Finding the Frequency
I taught two very different classes this week.
Monday and Tuesday. A mixed class of adults. Databases. Part of a stackable Masters programme. Bank staff, a marketing expert, a policeman, a coach, people who teach AI themselves. The syllabus said spreadsheets, Tableau, SQL
I sensed I was boring them. So midway through, I pivoted. Set them up with their own database in Supabase. Connected it to the outside world. Something they could take back immediately. The room shifted. Energy changed. Hopefully, I managed to save my course feedback.
Thursday. Deep learning. CNNs and RNNs. Healthcare workers. The class of 11 split cleanly, young data scientists on one side, CIO and heads of data on the other.
I sensed that talking about deep learning math was getting too abstract. So I went off-script again. Shared my “Thinking in AI” philosophy. How I decide between Gen AI and traditional ML. What I saw in real life. Why I thought it was good they were learning fundamentals instead of just prompt engineering. That seemed to work too. But differently. Less about the tool. More about the frame.
A director I met in week 2 said something that stuck: a course should let the learner take something back to work. Immediately. Not theory. Something usable. This was my attempt at testing that.
Personal Resonance
Midweek, I woke up to news that I was now a LinkedIn Top Voice.
The timing felt strange. I’d only been writing seriously for six months. 3,600 followers. Probably lack a few zeros at the end. I spent years letting my art speak for itself. Posting images with no context, no story. Turns out I needed to learn to speak too. And perhaps it resonated slightly.
Quite an interesting alignment of events. A badge about having a voice, arriving the same week I was rediscovering my voice in the classroom.
And on Saturday, I met my ex-colleague and coach. Passed her a watercolor of her old family home in Joo Chiat. We had breakfast right next to her old family home. I realised that nostalgia is a form of resonance. The current us, connecting to the past.
Still Tuning
Four weeks out. Slightly clearer.
Resonance isn’t about more. It’s when the frequency matches.
What’s resonating for you right now?
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