Journalist Ira Glass, who hosts the NPR show “This American Life,” is not a computer scientist. He doesn’t work at Google, Apple or Nvidia. But he does have a great ear for useful phrases, and in 2024 he organized an entire episode around one that might resonate with anyone who feels blindsided by the pace of AI development: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”
Coined by science journalist Alex Steffen, the phrase captures the unsettling feeling that “the experience and expertise you’ve built up” may now be obsolete – or, at least, a lot less valuable than it once was.
