Around three years ago I wrote this post:
Once again, history is repeating itself, like always.
But this time it’s much more intense.
Oftentimes, when things are about to drastically change for us, we get to experience some subtle signals before it happens. This time we are experiencing in real time a flood of signals that just can’t be ignored.
The other day I was checking this visual statistic about jobs that are actively being replaced by AI, and boy is this terrifying. Sometimes between me and myself I enter a fight-or-flight mode and my brain spirals into a whirlpool of possibilities and what-ifs. Have you been there?
I wonder how come do we have to stomach the fact that maybe JUST 3 years from now, there probably is a computer program that’s going to carry out your job to the dot. Time flies, and 3 years is NOTHING. In tech, 3 years means right now. If it happens ‘in 3 years’, this means it already started happening.
In what world would we have woken up in 2018 thinking that soon enough we won’t be able to keep up with AI news, let alone how to use it? If you blink for a week, you probably miss a good worth of interesting ‘AI tools’ headlines. An AI that does this, an AI that does that. I can’t help but wonder, isn’t it inevitable that entire jobs are going to be ruthlessly replaced? How and why is this a light thought? Why aren’t more people taking more action?
Like, since capitalism, at what specific part of history did corporate moguls think: “we definitely wouldn’t cut labor because they have homes to support”?
I think the next wave is going to be merciless, and the wealth gab is going to be unprecedented. Millions of normal people who used to be *very good* at what they do are going to suffer. In this climate you’d rather take reckless bets that have a few % of winning than play it safe. Because the next wave of ‘how we do work’ is not going to be about safe anymore. It’s going to be about survival.