Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

What’s the point of a degree?

Discover how a degree builds a strong foundation for your life and career, enhancing growth and opportunities beyond immediate employment.

A degree is worth it regardless of leading to direct employment. Helps your life and career in medium and long run. For career, esp short term, prob not. With a couple years experience, you can already get hired somewhere.

To me, a degree forms a broad, deep foundation for living and growing. That’s a big deal. It’s the foundation for *every* job. It *alone* needn’t get you a specific job. That’s what work-study, contract work, and internships are for. All those together, that’s a solid education.


Featured writing

When your brilliant idea meets organizational reality: a survival guide

Transform your brilliant tech ideas into reality by navigating organizational challenges and overcoming hidden resistance with this essential survival guide.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

AI as Coach: Transforming Professional and Continuing Education

Transform professional and continuing education with AI-driven coaching, offering personalized support, accountability, and skill mastery at scale.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

The bully pulpit: why AI slop only matters to people who write about AI slop

This article exposes how the 'AI moral crisis' narrative is amplified by the very people who control media—and why the 90% of workers actually using AI don't share the panic.

Why your job matters more than mine: the selective morality of job loss

This article reveals the uncomfortable pattern behind which jobs get moral protection and which get called 'market forces'—and what that means for everyone outside the creative class.

AI in writing: the end of a professional monopoly

This article reframes the AI writing debate: the panic isn't about creativity—it's about a professional class losing control of the systems they've gatekept for a century.