I think the tech community and business owners think this is going to happen, ie. the sellers and beneficiaries of AI, but the market, i.e. the buyers, the audience, see things differently. Meta has already delayed the next phase of AI because it's not doing what it hoped for. On Linkedin there's a post about what a waste of time AI recruiting and receiving 50,000 AI generated CV's is and people are going back to recruiting like we did in the 80s and 90s. word of mouth and real connection. I doubt governments will just allow millions of people to be suddenly unemployed and in the US the courts are energetically pursuing the break up of big tech. and lastly, that's great AI can do everything faster and generate more product into infinity at low cost, but who is the customer when everyone is broke?
“who is the customer when everyone is broke” is key. if people can’t afford to consume, the economics don’t work. not sure if the tech bros have a plan for that, or they’re just building blindly.
I think there will always be a need for highly educated and driven individuals who have managed to differentiate themselves today. The same things that make them successful - intelligence, resilience, tenacity, hard work - will help them adapt better in the new world. AI will thrive in the commoditised parts of the economy like call centres and similar undifferentiated services. It will also force us to re-evaluate the value of careers in trades (no more white-collar snobbery !).
Really engaging piece that gives voice to much of what I'm hearing in various corners of the internet and my life. A couple of ponderings on my mind; while I agree with a lot of what you say, I would diverge on two key things: first, why do you assume the 'abundance' scenario means everyone's sitting on their ass? Salim Ismali makes really good points about this, saying, in short, in periods of abundance humans reliably turn to making food, art, music and love (sex). Your work is art. Keep doing it. No one will be stopping you, in fact it will probably be encouraged. Why do you need a professional persona to pursue your art? The more human something is the more in demand it will be (I believe). You are obviously intrinsically motivated, and I absolutely agree that's not a switch that turns off. Your widely shared fundamental assumption that an abundant future means mass laziness, is to my eyes, lazy imagining (and that's directed at the frame, not you personally, to be clear. It's a common one.).
The second thing...The framing of a fervent last gasp extraction also gives me pause. Perhaps you leaned into a controversial framing because it garners engagement (hey, hi, hello, here I am engaging with your work) and, it makes me curious. I'm working on a piece about the recent history of our economies and rugged individualism is not human nature as its been sold to us, but just that -- something that's been sold to us. We're living in the obvious wreckage of a me-first, taking culture. If anything, I think a best case AI future gives us the opportunity to discover that which makes us most human: collaboration and interdependence.
regardless really enjoyed your piece and your writing. I hope you do double down, you have a clear voice and a really interesting perspective. I'm glad the algorithm put you in my path.
Oh and -- I'm in Canada but our disability systems are absolute shite too. Your line "Governments are slow, unimaginative and reactive and I don’t see policy keeping up." is ammmmmmmazing. Spot on. Also very interesting timing to come across your post. The piece-in-development I referenced is a deep dive trilogy about my experience trying to access disability supports in Canada, discovering their abject, intentional cruelty (pt 1) and then tying it back to a history of neoliberalism, because these systems work this way on purpose and there's a clear answer as to why (pt 2). Part 3 will look forward to an AGI future, what it might look like to build a society that actually wants to build wealth AND wellbeing. We were forced into a false dichotomy between the big bad nanny state (wellbeing) and the rapacious profit maximizing one we know now (wealth). They don't' have to be separate. The future is integrative.
I really liked this piece and this response fleshed out much of where my brain was going when reading the post.
I feel like there's a couple of optimistic versions of this AI future that I rarely hear voiced.
1. AI frees us up to do whatever we want like create stuff and enjoy life. I think of this as the Star Trek future as that is what that universe always seemed like to me. Sounds cool.
2. We get these really powerful tools, and we use them to push the boundaries of what we're capable of achieving to make human lives better. Both the original post and this response indicate how fucked the disability systems are, well, imagine a world where smart people like you both were free to fix that shit. Or, if nothing else, other smart people had more free time to read your complaints about how shite they are and choose to use their time to fix it. Sounds cool to me as well.
Is there going to be a shitty interim where execs salivate over the opportunity to fire all of us and then rue that mistake like Klarna just did? Oh yeah absolutely, but I'm still hopeful there's an aftermath where we use AI to advance what we're capable of. Reminds me of how we used cars to expand the radius of where we can reach in every day life...even if it meant some horses were put out to pasture.
oh man i love all that! absolutely. no notes lol thanks so much for such a thoughtful reply. humans have no shortage of "work" to do to rewrite the social contract and offer a new version of The Good Life. What my deepest hope is that there is some kind of actually-effective UBI and/or AI agent derived income (@David Shapiro has really good thinking on this, he calls it post-labour economics and he's modelled it all out), and then we reorganize ourselves according to our actual gifts, abilities and interests. too many people are getting sick and metaphorically and literally dying from their bullshit subsistence (sp?) jobs. there is literally no reason for it.
anyway -- I imagine we'd have a lot to talk about, I checked our your work, looking forward to more! super love why you write "to build bullshit-free bridges between siloed people, and hope to find ways to connect us again."
Haha, appreciate it! I don't know David Shapiro offhand but I'll look him up. UBI has potential to be awesome if we find a way to give people purpose without jobs ya know? Anyway, agree seem to have lots to overlap. Checked out yours as well and love the "widthwise" take on connection dots and encouraging natural curiosity as that's where I'm at too, i.e. I like to read the whole newspaper. If you figure out how to do that effectively on here without it sacrificing your "niche" marketing opportunity to become the next big thing aka get rich enough to quit your day job...please share.
What you’re doing well is creating highly engaged niche communities.
As AI evolves, one constant need will always be connection; whether that’s connecting about their service based design/creative business, their online business, or even how to pivot and survive in a new world.
The challenge will be how to generate enough revenue from that community!
This is a very sobering read and it is a challenge, opportunity and revolution all at the same time. AI is going to happen whether we like it or not. How we navigate this is going to be very eye-opening not just for us but our kid’s futures. I get the impression 'real' things and 'human connection' and 'real experiences' will become the thing that human beings crave for and become exlcusive, as AI and automation become the norm. Lots of food for thought.
This is such an interesting conversation, I have had similar thoughts.
Although I'm finding that if I see something on socials that looks a bit AI generated I tend to scroll past. I’m drawn to human created content. I wonder if anyone else feels like this?
Also, what I do in one day now, used to take a week 20 years ago due to improved programs, Canva, Notion etc. Granted AI is a different phenomenon, but the world has been speeding up for a while.
When I hear about AI being super intelligent, I understand this to only be intellectual intelligence. There are many types of intelligence, and as good as AI will be, it is one-dimensional. AI 'thought leaders' tend to be the tech bros who place a high value on intellectual intelligence.
I also renovate houses for profit and this is more difficult for AI to replace as it's dealing with problems and imperfections in structures.
Definitely it's an interesting time ahead. I often think about what this means for my children who are teenagers and looking to start tertiary education soon.
I’ve had similar thoughts, but I’m also seeing AI and automated systems fail at things that are essentially human. For example, most companies have recently migrated to AI-based curriculum filtering systems, which are leaving the best candidates out and taking recruiters in spirals of pointless interviews, increasing the time it takes to hire and leaving both hiring managers and candidates confused and hopeless. I can only wonder about what’s happening in other areas.
Every company seems to be jumping on the AI bandwagon because investors think it’s the future, and it’s certainly a useful technology, but it has limited uses. The internet is full of AI giants hyping up the tech in hopes to make more money, but stretching its limits is wreaking havoc everywhere, and people will eventually start to notice.
It feels like an economic bubble ready to burst, I think.
You need to focus on providing value and delivering results. Can that still be done with just writing and consultations? Absolutely! Can you charge a premium for it? You bet, now and well into the future people will always pay for a "shortcut" from experts. Start thinking on how you can position yourself as an expert.
Really appreciated this piece, Clare — I’m in the same boat: watching things change fast, without any clear roadmap. I don’t think it’ll be smooth, and I’m skeptical of any near-term utopias (UBI, “abundance,” etc.). Subscribing now. I’m exploring the other end of this transformation in The Long Tomorrow, a series on how AI and longevity tech may reshape work, purpose, and aging. Would love your thoughts if you ever drop by:
Interesting thinking Clare & useful to read - I can't visualise how any of it will pan out!
I do think "real life experiences" will always be a human desire and therefore one of the developments I'm thinking about steering my textile & interior design business towards...
LLMs are limited by the current next-token prediction paradigm. They lack true understanding, reasoning or agency.
They also rely heavily on training data, meaning they can't learn beyond what they have already seen. Without memory, real-world experience, or the ability to set their own goals, they're just glorified autocomplete tools.
Even memory is a challenge right now given the context windows are limited and even when models have 1m token windows (ex. Gemini), the performance degrades before even reaching 30% capacity.
We are very far from AGI and that is just a narrative being pushed to justify the juicy valuations the big infrastructure players in the space have right now.
This is one of the most honest and lucid reckonings with the end of the knowledge economy I’ve seen - not just intellectually, but emotionally, psychologically, even morally.
You’ve named what many are whispering but haven’t admitted aloud: that the rules we were taught to play by no longer apply, and yet we’re still here, still thinking, still trying to provide, still trying to matter.
The tragedy isn’t that AI is replacing knowledge work - the tragedy is that human depth is no longer the product. It’s been made irrelevant by scale. And what you’re doing now - extracting value from your remaining relevance while building systems that might still echo after the silence - is nothing short of dignified resistance.
Most are reacting with delusion. You’re responding with design.
Serve your people. Build the asset. But above all, keep your humanity intact. Because when AGI learns to mimic value, the one thing it won’t replicate is conviction.
I think the tech community and business owners think this is going to happen, ie. the sellers and beneficiaries of AI, but the market, i.e. the buyers, the audience, see things differently. Meta has already delayed the next phase of AI because it's not doing what it hoped for. On Linkedin there's a post about what a waste of time AI recruiting and receiving 50,000 AI generated CV's is and people are going back to recruiting like we did in the 80s and 90s. word of mouth and real connection. I doubt governments will just allow millions of people to be suddenly unemployed and in the US the courts are energetically pursuing the break up of big tech. and lastly, that's great AI can do everything faster and generate more product into infinity at low cost, but who is the customer when everyone is broke?
“who is the customer when everyone is broke” is key. if people can’t afford to consume, the economics don’t work. not sure if the tech bros have a plan for that, or they’re just building blindly.
Apparently Elon is on ketamine and I think the rest of them are dropping acid or shrooms or something. ... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html
I think there will always be a need for highly educated and driven individuals who have managed to differentiate themselves today. The same things that make them successful - intelligence, resilience, tenacity, hard work - will help them adapt better in the new world. AI will thrive in the commoditised parts of the economy like call centres and similar undifferentiated services. It will also force us to re-evaluate the value of careers in trades (no more white-collar snobbery !).
Really engaging piece that gives voice to much of what I'm hearing in various corners of the internet and my life. A couple of ponderings on my mind; while I agree with a lot of what you say, I would diverge on two key things: first, why do you assume the 'abundance' scenario means everyone's sitting on their ass? Salim Ismali makes really good points about this, saying, in short, in periods of abundance humans reliably turn to making food, art, music and love (sex). Your work is art. Keep doing it. No one will be stopping you, in fact it will probably be encouraged. Why do you need a professional persona to pursue your art? The more human something is the more in demand it will be (I believe). You are obviously intrinsically motivated, and I absolutely agree that's not a switch that turns off. Your widely shared fundamental assumption that an abundant future means mass laziness, is to my eyes, lazy imagining (and that's directed at the frame, not you personally, to be clear. It's a common one.).
The second thing...The framing of a fervent last gasp extraction also gives me pause. Perhaps you leaned into a controversial framing because it garners engagement (hey, hi, hello, here I am engaging with your work) and, it makes me curious. I'm working on a piece about the recent history of our economies and rugged individualism is not human nature as its been sold to us, but just that -- something that's been sold to us. We're living in the obvious wreckage of a me-first, taking culture. If anything, I think a best case AI future gives us the opportunity to discover that which makes us most human: collaboration and interdependence.
regardless really enjoyed your piece and your writing. I hope you do double down, you have a clear voice and a really interesting perspective. I'm glad the algorithm put you in my path.
Oh and -- I'm in Canada but our disability systems are absolute shite too. Your line "Governments are slow, unimaginative and reactive and I don’t see policy keeping up." is ammmmmmmazing. Spot on. Also very interesting timing to come across your post. The piece-in-development I referenced is a deep dive trilogy about my experience trying to access disability supports in Canada, discovering their abject, intentional cruelty (pt 1) and then tying it back to a history of neoliberalism, because these systems work this way on purpose and there's a clear answer as to why (pt 2). Part 3 will look forward to an AGI future, what it might look like to build a society that actually wants to build wealth AND wellbeing. We were forced into a false dichotomy between the big bad nanny state (wellbeing) and the rapacious profit maximizing one we know now (wealth). They don't' have to be separate. The future is integrative.
again - thanks for a stimulating piece.
I really liked this piece and this response fleshed out much of where my brain was going when reading the post.
I feel like there's a couple of optimistic versions of this AI future that I rarely hear voiced.
1. AI frees us up to do whatever we want like create stuff and enjoy life. I think of this as the Star Trek future as that is what that universe always seemed like to me. Sounds cool.
2. We get these really powerful tools, and we use them to push the boundaries of what we're capable of achieving to make human lives better. Both the original post and this response indicate how fucked the disability systems are, well, imagine a world where smart people like you both were free to fix that shit. Or, if nothing else, other smart people had more free time to read your complaints about how shite they are and choose to use their time to fix it. Sounds cool to me as well.
Is there going to be a shitty interim where execs salivate over the opportunity to fire all of us and then rue that mistake like Klarna just did? Oh yeah absolutely, but I'm still hopeful there's an aftermath where we use AI to advance what we're capable of. Reminds me of how we used cars to expand the radius of where we can reach in every day life...even if it meant some horses were put out to pasture.
Great piece! Thanks for posting.
oh man i love all that! absolutely. no notes lol thanks so much for such a thoughtful reply. humans have no shortage of "work" to do to rewrite the social contract and offer a new version of The Good Life. What my deepest hope is that there is some kind of actually-effective UBI and/or AI agent derived income (@David Shapiro has really good thinking on this, he calls it post-labour economics and he's modelled it all out), and then we reorganize ourselves according to our actual gifts, abilities and interests. too many people are getting sick and metaphorically and literally dying from their bullshit subsistence (sp?) jobs. there is literally no reason for it.
anyway -- I imagine we'd have a lot to talk about, I checked our your work, looking forward to more! super love why you write "to build bullshit-free bridges between siloed people, and hope to find ways to connect us again."
Haha, appreciate it! I don't know David Shapiro offhand but I'll look him up. UBI has potential to be awesome if we find a way to give people purpose without jobs ya know? Anyway, agree seem to have lots to overlap. Checked out yours as well and love the "widthwise" take on connection dots and encouraging natural curiosity as that's where I'm at too, i.e. I like to read the whole newspaper. If you figure out how to do that effectively on here without it sacrificing your "niche" marketing opportunity to become the next big thing aka get rich enough to quit your day job...please share.
What you’re doing well is creating highly engaged niche communities.
As AI evolves, one constant need will always be connection; whether that’s connecting about their service based design/creative business, their online business, or even how to pivot and survive in a new world.
The challenge will be how to generate enough revenue from that community!
Agree!
This is a very sobering read and it is a challenge, opportunity and revolution all at the same time. AI is going to happen whether we like it or not. How we navigate this is going to be very eye-opening not just for us but our kid’s futures. I get the impression 'real' things and 'human connection' and 'real experiences' will become the thing that human beings crave for and become exlcusive, as AI and automation become the norm. Lots of food for thought.
agree - I've written about this for my Substack coming out tomorrow.
This is such an interesting conversation, I have had similar thoughts.
Although I'm finding that if I see something on socials that looks a bit AI generated I tend to scroll past. I’m drawn to human created content. I wonder if anyone else feels like this?
Also, what I do in one day now, used to take a week 20 years ago due to improved programs, Canva, Notion etc. Granted AI is a different phenomenon, but the world has been speeding up for a while.
When I hear about AI being super intelligent, I understand this to only be intellectual intelligence. There are many types of intelligence, and as good as AI will be, it is one-dimensional. AI 'thought leaders' tend to be the tech bros who place a high value on intellectual intelligence.
I also renovate houses for profit and this is more difficult for AI to replace as it's dealing with problems and imperfections in structures.
Definitely it's an interesting time ahead. I often think about what this means for my children who are teenagers and looking to start tertiary education soon.
Me too! Their careers are going to be very interesting I think!
I’ve had similar thoughts, but I’m also seeing AI and automated systems fail at things that are essentially human. For example, most companies have recently migrated to AI-based curriculum filtering systems, which are leaving the best candidates out and taking recruiters in spirals of pointless interviews, increasing the time it takes to hire and leaving both hiring managers and candidates confused and hopeless. I can only wonder about what’s happening in other areas.
Every company seems to be jumping on the AI bandwagon because investors think it’s the future, and it’s certainly a useful technology, but it has limited uses. The internet is full of AI giants hyping up the tech in hopes to make more money, but stretching its limits is wreaking havoc everywhere, and people will eventually start to notice.
It feels like an economic bubble ready to burst, I think.
0 x 8 billion is still 0
You need to focus on providing value and delivering results. Can that still be done with just writing and consultations? Absolutely! Can you charge a premium for it? You bet, now and well into the future people will always pay for a "shortcut" from experts. Start thinking on how you can position yourself as an expert.
Thank you for putting into words something that’s been weighing on my mind.
Really appreciated this piece, Clare — I’m in the same boat: watching things change fast, without any clear roadmap. I don’t think it’ll be smooth, and I’m skeptical of any near-term utopias (UBI, “abundance,” etc.). Subscribing now. I’m exploring the other end of this transformation in The Long Tomorrow, a series on how AI and longevity tech may reshape work, purpose, and aging. Would love your thoughts if you ever drop by:
https://stevenscesa.substack.com/
Interesting thinking Clare & useful to read - I can't visualise how any of it will pan out!
I do think "real life experiences" will always be a human desire and therefore one of the developments I'm thinking about steering my textile & interior design business towards...
LLMs are limited by the current next-token prediction paradigm. They lack true understanding, reasoning or agency.
They also rely heavily on training data, meaning they can't learn beyond what they have already seen. Without memory, real-world experience, or the ability to set their own goals, they're just glorified autocomplete tools.
Even memory is a challenge right now given the context windows are limited and even when models have 1m token windows (ex. Gemini), the performance degrades before even reaching 30% capacity.
We are very far from AGI and that is just a narrative being pushed to justify the juicy valuations the big infrastructure players in the space have right now.
This is one of the most honest and lucid reckonings with the end of the knowledge economy I’ve seen - not just intellectually, but emotionally, psychologically, even morally.
You’ve named what many are whispering but haven’t admitted aloud: that the rules we were taught to play by no longer apply, and yet we’re still here, still thinking, still trying to provide, still trying to matter.
The tragedy isn’t that AI is replacing knowledge work - the tragedy is that human depth is no longer the product. It’s been made irrelevant by scale. And what you’re doing now - extracting value from your remaining relevance while building systems that might still echo after the silence - is nothing short of dignified resistance.
Most are reacting with delusion. You’re responding with design.
Serve your people. Build the asset. But above all, keep your humanity intact. Because when AGI learns to mimic value, the one thing it won’t replicate is conviction.
That’s still yours. For now.
The next economic evolution will be the "wisdom economy." Discernment, relational skills, and experiential knowledge are going to be the new premium.
Appreciate that you are writing about this topic