The most important issue facing Americans is not President Donald Trump’s antics. Nor is it the (now much reduced) antics of woke progressives. Yet that’s what we’re mostly fighting about, while we neglect the single biggest question we have to answer: What are we going to do about AI?

When I ask people this question, the most common response is a blank stare or a shrug. Oh, tech people understand what’s coming - in fact, they understand it’s already here, displacing early career programmers. CEOs are studying how artificial intelligence might help reduce expensive head counts. Professors are aware that students are using it to cheat. Journalists have a natural wariness of any entity that produces faster, cleaner copy than they can.

Outside of those professions, I keep being surprised by the number of successful people who tell me they think AI won’t matter for their industry. Usually, they played around with it a while ago and weren’t particularly impressed, so they stopped using it and don’t know how much it has improved. This leads them to assume it won’t be a threat - at least not on any time frame that will affect them personally.

What that group fails to appreciate is that the AI development cycle is faster than any technology we’ve ever seen. Saying you played around with it a year ago and weren’t impressed is like judging this year’s Tesla models based on having studied a Ford Model T.

So anyone with a job that involves words, data or ideas needs to become an AI prepper. Not in the overhyped doomer sense. (I’m not sure what preparations would be useful if superintelligent machines decided to destroy us.) But in the sense of preparing for how AI will disrupt society and especially work. When the disruption comes, you should have a fully stocked go bag that you can pick up and move to some safer spot.

What goes in that bag will vary by profession. Take my own profession as an example. For journalists, AI presents two basic risks.

First, it is very good at “typing words in a row,” so it will compete with humans for writing articles, making videos and doing podcasts. But it will also compete with news for finite human attention - more time spent chatting with Claude or ChatGPT leaves less time for reading news. For many people, following political news is a hobby, and chatbots are not only a good way to follow current hobbies but an inexhaustible source of potential new ones. This week, for example, ChatGPT has been walking me through the history of late antiquity, a topic I had no idea I cared about.

Given those two realities, what should be in a journalist’s go bag? For starters, the one basic thing that should be in everyone’s bag, the AI prepper’s equivalent of a flashlight and bottled water: skill at using AI tools. It is not enough to use it as a slightly better Google; you need to keep abreast of the latest releases and spend time every week pushing both its capabilities and your own. Trying to make it do your job is table stakes. Try making it write a children’s book, or invent a new game, or solve cold fusion. As with any learning process, the outcome is less important than the effort, because the effort is how you learn not just what it can do, but what you could do with it.

Having gotten some familiarity with its capabilities, you next need to consider what skills complement AI’s infinite memory and prodigious output. I can’t tell you what those skills will be, because I’m not doing your job. Other than mastering AI, I suggest leaning into the parts of your job that involve your physical presence and human relationships and away from the parts that involve analysis of large datasets or bodies of text. For a journalist, that means more work that generates scoops from human sources or develops personal relationships with readers. It means less analysis of government data, corporate earnings releases or the latest social media controversy, because authentic human connection will stand out in a world of proliferating automated analysis.

The third item in your go bag should be a strong awareness that your guesses about the other items might be wrong. I think AI will make authentic humanity more valuable, but perhaps we will discover that authentic humanity is not nearly as engaging as a well-programmed robot. (Disturbingly for my thesis, a new paper about chatbots deployed on Reddit found they were significantly more persuasive than mere humans.) So you have to watch closely, ever prepared to abandon your earlier preparations and scramble a new exit strategy.

My final piece of advice: While you’re using these news tools - figuring out what machines can do and what you can do that they can’t - you should stop to enjoy the new functions, rather than simply assessing the threat. Learn about the Byzantine Empire, or the infield fly rule, or how electrons actually work, and remember that you’re not actually preparing for doomsday, but a world of unprecedented human capability.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist.