So, what are we all supposed to do for a living?🤷🏼‍♂

Where all the jobs are going and what's being done about it.

Hello. I'm back. I took most of June off, which I am wont to do both midway through the year and in December to collect my thoughts and replenish my energies. Thanks for your patience.

So, this week I delivered a piece of work for a client consisting of digital ads, landing pages and sales emails. This, for the most part, is how I make my living - I help people and organisations tell better stories for business impact. We met in their conference room for final approvals and at the end of the meeting I had to make a confession; this time next year, I told them, you won't need me for this.

The room went quiet, it was #awkard. I had clearly given voice to something they had already been thinking or maybe even discussing during their internal meetings. I told them that I knew the thought would occur to them at some point and I would prefer to confront it head on rather than wait to get ghosted. I asked if we could start discussing now how I can continue to provide value in the future, without pretending AI doesn’t exist or that we don’t all use it.

Photo by Gabriel on Unsplash

It’s not about creativity

Some of you may be in the same boat. Some of you may be about to take to the comments to rant about how I should be offering better creative concepts, more ambitious executions, etc. But this is a large MNC, with a long established look and feel and tone of voice and, yet, a limited budget. I worked to brief and delivered exactly what they need, which is what they paid me for. My client is happy. It is neither their fault nor mine that AI exists, but we both need to deal with it.

The conversation is ongoing but it was generally agreed that my perspective and ideas were valuable but the execution can increasingly be undertaken by AI. However, what I can bill for perspective and ideas is only a fraction of what I can bill for execution. The creative agency model relies on billing for both...and it's failing.

I don’t know about you but my LinkedIn feed is filled with middle-aged advertising executives raging against the dying of the light, most believing themselves to be possessed of such rare and exceptional talent that they cannot possibly be replaced. They're grieving and that’s understandable. I want to reassure them that their talent is NOT being replaced and that they are right, AI will likely NOT deliver work as creative and compelling as they can, but this isn't art - it's marketing. Every penny saved is a penny earned and if AI can achieve even incremental growth at almost no cost, well that's just good business.

It ain't just advertising

The UK press reported this week that the number of entry level jobs comprised of junior positions, graduate roles and apprenticeships has fallen by almost a third (31.9 per cent) since the arrival of ChatGPT.

Job search site Adzuna found that vacancies looking for graduates had fallen to the lowest level since Covid, with entry level jobs now only accounting for a quarter of the total market, down from 28.9 per cent in 2022.

It's not just that AI can do these jobs; the world is increasingly volatile, we may already be in the early days of World War III, and companies are going into survival mode, preparing for the worst by cutting spending and hoarding cash, both for their business and themselves.

Example: Microsoft let go 9,000 experienced, degree educated employees this month on top of 6,000 last month. Microsoft is currently worth US$3.71 trillion dollars. Let me say that again:

MICROSOFT IS CURRENTLY WORTH THREE POINT SEVEN ONE TRILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS (WITH A T!!!)

And yet, apparently, times are so tough they needed to retrench 6.7% of their workforce.

Are AI companies starting to feel bad?

All this economic woe hasn't gone unnoticed by the leading AI companies. Just over a week ago Anthropic launched it's Economic Futures Programme, a new initiative to support research on AI's impacts on the labour market and global economy. They claim they want to, "understand how AI is reshaping the way we work and surface proposals on how to prepare for this shift". Call me cynical but I am fairly certain none of the proposals will suggest they pay more tax, though I'd love to be proved wrong.

This follows OpenAI's launch of their Economic Blueprint back in January, which lays out their policy proposals for "extending America's global leadership in AI innovation, ensuring equitable access to AI, and driving economic growth across communities nationwide". The implausibly utopian PR further claims that:

"Shared prosperity is as near and measurable as the new jobs and growth that will come from building more AI infrastructure like data centers, chip manufacturing facilities, and power plants. As our CEO Sam Altman has written, AI will soon help our children do things we can’t. Not far off is a future in which everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now."

Great. So, where's the prosperity for creative workers, graduates and Microsoft employees? And if there is so much prosperity in the pipeline, how come all the AI companies plead poverty when it comes to paying copyright holders?

What's the alternative?

The good news is, solutions are starting to emerge, no thanks to Anthropic and Open AI. Two fantastic stories of regulation and innovation that emerged this week include:

• Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features

• In search of fairer deal for content creators, Cloudflare blocks AI scrapers

Cloudflare carries about 20% of the world’s Internet traffic and protects it from fraud, surveillance, SPAM and other nasties and has started blocking AI bots from its customers websites by default. This is good news because chatbots and AI summaries are killing Internet traffic. For instance, Google’s AI summaries have reduced traffic to websites by 30-70% by appropriating content creators’ work as its own. This does not only kill creators’ traffic but their revenue streams (ads, subs, affiliate links), the diversity of the Internet and, arguably, free speech as one or two websites become the aggregators of all knowledge.

Cloudflare’s proposition is a new payment model that compensates their customers for creating content that AI companies find useful. It’s simple, it’s automated, it’s fighting fire with fire🔥.

Reporting for a Pro-Human future

During my time off I started thinking about what Pro-Human is and what it could be. It is a way for me to understand my own feelings about the world and where it’s going; a place to rant and release pent up frustration; and a way to share my ideas and opinions. But I think it could be more because there is no shortage of people opining on the future of humanity. In fact, as an Aussie friend once told me opinions are like arseholes - everyone’s got one.

So, I want to go beyond opinions to do some actual reporting on the solutions that are being built, deployed and tested to benefit humans in an increasingly inhuman world. I am sick of waiting, I am sick of talking, I want to see more radicalism and less tinkerism (a new word I made up to define a method of endless tinkering without resolution).

If you know of a project, person, policy or technology that is truly pro-human - wherever it is in the world - let me know because I want to go there and tell that story. Thanks.

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To Do List

My recommendations for new things to read, watch, look at, listen to and do this week:

• I am currently reading ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber, which is a funny but frightening investigation into the proliferation of pointless jobs and the ‘spiritual violence’ they enact upon us. In the West we have a moral objection to paying people to do nothing (or even something they enjoy), so the danger is that for everyone to benefit from the promised prosperity of AI, we’re still going to have work for it whether there is a job to do or not. See some of my favourite quotes on IG:

  prohumanposts

  

  A post shared by @prohumanposts

• I just finished all five hours of Adam Curtis’ hypnotising new documentary ‘Shifty’, a non-narrative exploration of the profound shifts that occurred in British society during the last two decades of the 20th century (BBC Player & YouTube). Non-Brits may not find it as compelling, but this interview with its director has broader lessons for all:

• I recently saw Singaporean alt. rockers Cactus Cactus supporting Inch Chua’s comeback at The Enclave Bar and they blew the roof off. If you like your rock n’ roll spiky and discordant this’ll be right up your street!

Right, that’ll do ya! Cheers, Nx