Accepting it's over might be your best survival plan

ALSO: Microsoft's future of work researcher explains where we're going now

It’s hard to deny that last week was a hugely significant week in the story of AI and work. In the ‘AI 2027’ predictions that I mentioned last month one of the more unsettling elements as the timeline advances is the relentless cadence of AI making a year’s progress every week. How can any of us ever take stock when the advances are unceasing? Last week felt like one of those weeks.

New announcements from Google and Open AI moved AI capabilities on substantially. The most visible change was the announcement of new video creation engines by Google, especially as they have been able to overcome one of the biggest challenges of subject consistency (allowing you to place the same characters in different video scenes).

I can’t have been alone soundtracking each of these videos by shaking my head and muttering ‘it’s over’. @DreamingTulpa the author of an AI art newsletter that I subscribe to found themself wondering what the point of their newsletter was when ‘these models will become so good at simulating reality that there won’t be a need for other custom models and pipelines anymore’. Some of the examples of videos are truly dazzling (example 1, example 2, example 3) and to my mind they make tangible the progress that is happening here. The idea that colleges will use AI detectors on homework is clearly fanciful, you can’t tell AI content from the real thing today, let alone in another year or two.

Strangely though right now, the world of work seems to exist in two parallel universes. I recorded a live podcast at a conference last week and all of the attendees who came to speak to me afterwards wearily told me that their organisations were doing nothing at all with AI. All of them. Nothing. Alongside those reluctant hostages to corporate inactivity I also hear from plenty of others who bleat talking points anchored in 2023 about hallucinations or about AI being creativity inert. (Even when there are stories like that they say more about the person receiving them than the technology.)

But in the other camp, to the people following this, there is a growing sense of inevitability. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to state that for many of us we now feel like we’re in a fight for our jobs. A year ago people were saying ‘it’s not AI that will steal your job, it’s someone using AI that will steal it’. It’s pretty clear that was just comfort talk, there’s a good chance AI really is going to take your job. (The idea that AI will do 95% of your job and you can charge the same for the last 5% is the sort of thinking we’ll look back and laugh at).

Certainly AI replacing us is the conviction of those who are creating the leading edge models. Here two researchers from Anthropic say that even if there is no technological advance from today the current level of technology is capable of automating all knowledge jobs before the end of the decade. Yes that automation will require human calibration but once it’s in place it will perform a person’s whole job.

Original tweet

And a drumbeat of job cuts is continuing, Microsoft announced major cuts two weeks ago. Last week there were headlines of redundancies in the media and technology sectors at ITV and at Group M. While no one is naming AI as the culprit it certainly seems like AI is taking the air out of the graduate hiring market.

This post summarises some of what is coming to knowledge jobs. Cuts are coming everywhere, and there’s no confidence that these roles will come back. As the writer says, ‘if you’ve built your identity around being useful, impressive, or indispensable at work? What’s coming next is going to hurt.’ As she observes, in many industries that have collapsed, no one sees the collapse ‘until it was already over’.

I don’t want to contribute to a sense of collective angst but we should all be acutely aware that there’s a chance that a lot of us might lose our jobs in the next five years. There’s an old adage: ‘beware the busy manager’. A kind of you can’t see the wood for the trees for bosses. I think it goes further: ‘beware the busy organisation’. If your organisation isn’t willing to create space right now then it will certainly get swept away. It’s one of the reasons why I drone on about too many meetings so often, if you’re too busy being busy you’ve got no time to actually prepare for the future.

The most important thing for all of us right now is to take this onboard personally, ideally bringing that sense to our organisations. On the podcast this week I chat to Alexia Cambon, who leads research at Microsoft on the future of work. Alexia is an optimist. She’s convinced that there’s a positive future ahead where humans work alongside machines, but she’s also clear that we need to embrace far more disruption than we’re preparing for right now. Her model of a ‘Frontier Firm’ does not look like your company today.

According to Accenture, 94% of workers want to develop new AI skills, but only 5% of firms are providing organisation wide training. Research from the Marketing AI Institute says that most organisations aren’t providing any training or development on AI at all. Most people upskilling themselves are doing so in a personal capacity.

In the past year I’ve dealt with a few organisations that have totally disengaged cultures. Workers have checked out. Of course there’s lots of things that these firms can set in place to try to re-energise how they’re working. But there’s also something on us. If we’re committed to learning, improving and keeping pace with a dizzying pace of reinvention then it’s the best way to prepare for a future where a lot of us won’t keep our jobs.

Right now, accepting it's over might be your best survival plan.

The first of two episodes going deep on how AI is going to impact work - and therefore workplace culture.

This week’s discussion is with Alexia Cambon from Microsoft. Alexia is Head of Research on Copilot & Future of Work. Last month her team released the Work Trend Index Annual Report. It’s one of the most important pieces of insight into how our jobs will change. Their previous reports have been interesting going deep into how people are experimenting with AI but this year’s is different. It articulates a version of work that most of us aren’t yet ready for.

Listen: Website (with transcript), Apple, Spotify, YouTube

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• Two great reads from other Substacks. Firstly Laetitia Vitaud drew my attention to ‘the housing theory of everything’ and the ‘new geography of work’. As housing scarcity goes up in cities there is a '‘spatial mismatch’ where lower paid workers are forced to live further and further away from where they work. Understanding the plight of modern workers begins first and foremost by looking afresh at the housing challenges they experience

• Secondly Eliza Filby gives five charts that draw on similar themes - showing why work (and life) is worse for younger workers than previous generations. Here’s one:

From Eliza Filby’s Inheritocracy Substack

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