A modest proposal for how the tech industry can redeem itself

My one-point plan for getting the masses to fall in love with billionaire tech bros all over again

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“Everyone is focusing on cost efficiency, reductions in staffing levels, the greater use of technology and AI … you are seeing in almost those white-collar areas, a pressure on reducing numbers.”
Lendlease chairman and Westpac director Michael Ullmer, AFR, 8/2/24

Four years ago, I wrote an article for an industry publication noting that the future of the print media didn’t look bright and that journalists may wish to plan their next career move with that unfortunate reality in mind. While the reaction to my piece wasn’t universally adverse, let’s just say I received a goodly amount of what Kevin07 used to refer to as “free character analysis” for baldly stating the inconvenient truth.

As much as I’d now like to revel in a sense of self-satisfied bemusement at all the ‘The legacy media is facing an extinction-level event’ media reports I’ve been seeing this week, I can’t. That’s because I’m once again facing a career-vapourising event myself, as I fear many other white-collar workers might soon be.

More on that momentarily, but first consider the following timeline.  

A technologically disrupted life
While my life trajectory is of no particular import, it does intertwine neatly with some interesting historical events, so bear with me here for a hot minute:

1971 – I’m born. What’s now ‘the internet’ emerged out of ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). As it happens, ARPANET, the first wide-area packet-switched network, became operational during 1971, resulting in the first email being sent that year.

1992 – In the final year of my undergraduate degree (1992), I start hearing about “The Internet”, some sort of sci-fi phenomenon facilitated by computers that allows you to communicate for free with people all over the world. At no point during the rest of the 1990s do I think to myself, ‘This worldwide web doodah will change the course of all our lives and careers in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend.’

2012 – I cease to be a print journalist, as do many other print journalists. But the internet giveth as well as taketh away. Many erstwhile journalists find jobs – often better-paid and less stressful jobs – creating (mainly) digital content in non-traditional settings. (I was at pains in my 2020 article to emphasise journalists had transferrable skills and could potentially follow in the footsteps of those out-of-work vaudevillians who prospered in 1920s Hollywood.) Others, like me, start content-provision micro businesses. And some create substantial content agencies.

For “The Internet” (shorthand for ‘internet companies’, specifically Google and Facebook) has both laid waste to the old-school media and created a situation where “Every company is now a media company”.

But not every journalist seamlessly transitions to a second, better-paid career. Many struggle, especially if they are on the wrong side of 50.

Late 2022 – I start hearing about ChatGPT. During my post-wage slavery freelancing, I’ve become a tech journalist/content provider, so I’m familiar with both AI and the Gartner Hype Cycle.

I initially assume I’m experiencing the standard ‘Peak of inflated expectations’ hype. Then I put ChatGPT through its paces. This time, I do think to myself, ‘Generative AI will likely change the course of all our lives and careers in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend. And much faster than the internet did.’

I soon realise that most tech industry heavy hitters – all far more intelligent and vastly better informed than I – think the same thing. And that they are investing accordingly.  

Early 2023 – The arrival of ChatGPT almost immediately results in a collapse in demand for human content creators. Panicked, I slash my prices by over 60 per cent in a desperate, last-ditch effort to remain competitive. A potential new client informs me that if I want to charge the ludicrously high rate of $0.40c a word, I better be able to guarantee the copy will “end up on the front page of the Australian Financial Review”; otherwise he’ll just “go with a guy in Vietnam with a laptop and ChatGPT”.*  

I consider contacting Michael Stutchbury and attempting to bribe him with half of the $320 I’ve been offered to write an 800-word article.* I think better of it and, just like many of my long-time freelancer peers, opt to return to wage slavery. Not that wage slavery necessarily offers a long-term solution to my dilemma, as I’ll get to shortly.

2039 – The year I’ll be eligible to retire. (If the retirement age isn’t raised in the meantime. Which it may well be.)

My dilemma, and possibly yours too 
Plenty of white-collar-worker-heavy businesses have shed staff since ChatGPT dropped on 30/11/22. Obviously, that’s not only because of generative AI. Also, given the tight labour market, nobody has been paying too much attention. But as Silicon Valley sage Scott Galloway recently noted, C-suiters are developing an insatiable appetite for ‘corporate Ozempic’:

“My thesis is that firms (notably tech companies) have also discovered a weight loss drug and are also being coy about it. Recent financial news features two stories: layoffs and record profits. These are related. There’s no mystery to the surface narrative. A company lays off 5%, 10%, or even 25% of its workforce and, 6 to 12 months later, after severance pay and expenses are flushed through the P/L, its operating margin hits new heights… All told, tech companies fired 165,000 people in 2022 and 260,000 in 2023, and they’re on pace for 270,000 in 2024… Overdone pandemic hiring was a reasonable explanation for the tech layoffs in late 2022. But 18 months later, there’s been sufficient time to reduce headcount… There is something else going on… What’s really going on? I believe AI is playing a larger role in layoffs than CEOs are willing to admit. There have been hints: IBM’s chief said the company plans to pause hiring for positions that could be replaced by AI, and UPS acknowledged that AI factored into its recent layoffs. But as a general rule, expect a CEO to be reluctant to state on an earnings call that the fastest-growing technology in history is already giving her “the ability to lay off people without any impact on the top-line”… Nvidia is valued at nearly $2 trillion, up 16% after reporting its earnings on February 21. Put another way, in the 60 minutes following its earnings release, Nvidia added the value of Ford, Ferrari, and GM to its market cap. Maybe even more impressive, the company has added the value of Tesla in the past six weeks. Nvidia GPUs are legal performance-enhancing drugs for corporations.”

And it's not just knowledge workers in the US who have reason to be nervous.

As the aforementioned AFR has noted, the following Australian companies (or branch offices) trimmed their workforces in 2023: Accenture, Amazon, Atlassian, Australia Post,  Bunnings, Crown, Fortescue Metal, Goldman Sachs, IBM, KPMG, Lendlease, LinkedIn, Meta, McKinsey, Microsoft, NBN Co, PwC, Star Entertainment, Telstra, Twitter and Xero. I suspect many Australian businesses that didn’t embark on a slimming regime last year at least did introduce a formal or tacit hiring freeze.

Especially if the soft landing suddenly turns bumpy, I wouldn’t be surprised to see many businesses make significant cuts throughout 2024.  

Scenes from the Singularity
I don’t have much to add to the commentary around generative AI other than to observe people are getting so worked up about one remarkable tree that they risk failing to see the foreboding forest.

Regardless of how the generative AI “revolution” ultimately plays out, it would appear that we are approaching the Singularity, the point where the exponential ‘human progress’ curve that started trending significantly upward with the first industrial revolution turns into a vertical line.

Especially if you are a ‘the Singularity is nigh’ type, it’s worth recalling that Ray Kurzweil predicted that by the 2020s computers would be capable of autonomously learning and creating new knowledge. It’s also worth noting that Kurzweil nominated 2045 as the year the Singularity would take place. That’s a mere 21 years away.

Even if you’re a Singularity sceptic, you’d still have to concede the fourth industrial revolution appears to be reaching an inflection point and that the world will likely vault into the Jetsonesque future during the 2020s. (Think widespread commercial drone use, the belated arrival of self-driving vehicles, the metaverse, unimaginable pharmaceutical breakthroughs facilitated by quantum computing, etc.)  

As extraordinary as current developments appear to be, it’s not like the West hasn’t recently experienced a broadly equivalent economic and social transformation. Many millions of Anglosphere manufacturing workers were thrown on the scrap heap in recent decades. You can argue all day about whether their (well-paid, union) jobs were automated away or shipped to low-wage Asian nations, but the fact remains they no longer exist.

Some manufacturing workers, especially those who were young when made redundant, went on to find alternative employment and lead decent lives. But, as both those on the Left and Right now accept, Anglosphere governments, of both political persuasions, fumbled the ball when it came to looking after those displaced by globalisation and/or automation.

That’s had many unfortunate consequences, both for the individuals directly impacted and the societies they are part of.

(Now the shoe appears to be sliding onto the other foot, white-collar workers may like to ponder if the events of 2016 would have occurred had the winners of globalisation demonstrated more empathy towards the losers. Rather than taking a devil-take-the-hindmost, learn to code approach.) 

A new New Deal?
White-collar workers possess far more self-regard and societal clout than their blue-collar counterparts. Given that reality, it’s probably politically unfeasible for the world’s C-suiters to progressively cull their human workforces into non-existence, even if they wanted to. (And given what we’ve witnessed across the past four decades, we can all guess what a C-suiter would do if given a choice between 10/100/1000Xing their compensation or keeping tens of thousands in a job.)   

As an aside, this is likely to become a grimly gripping tragedy of the commons drama shortly. Every CEO will want to slam down the corporate Ozempic. All the while fearing that all their counterparts will do likewise, thereby causing the body politic to convulse uncontrollably.

Let me suggest an alternative to the Brazilification process emerging technologies threaten to accelerate.

A critical mass of the West’s tech industry billionaires join forces and form some sort of ‘Giving Pledge’-style working group. This group will collectively issue a mea culpa for the tech industry’s past regrettable behaviour. The ‘move fast and break things’ crowd will also solemnly announce they have now seen the error of their ways and realised they “need to bring people along for the digital economy ride”.

I now don’t have much space to get into what bringing people along for the ride will look like. But I’d expect it would involve lots of tech industry heavy hitters lending their considerable intellects and (part of) their incomprehensibly vast fortunes to ensure the fourth industrial revolution proceeds in a manner that benefits all of society, not just those at the tippety top.

One obvious thing that could be done – in fact, which is already being done to a minor extent – is tech companies bankrolling academies and offering free tuition to those wanting to acquire the digital skills that will be required to thrive in the 21^st century. (To make widespread ‘digital economy’ retraining economically feasible, I imagine a generous Austudy-type payment would also need to be offered to those undertaking a 3/6/12 month course.)  

If Marc Andreessen and like-minded tech optimists are sincerely optimistic, they shouldn’t object to a settlement where they get to remain absurdly wealthy, and the rest of us have something more to look forward to other than living in a favela and collecting a UBI payment.

*If I have occasionally been overly harsh in my criticisms of the AFR in these digital pages, it’s probably because I’ve encountered so much grief over the years explaining to clients I’m unable to facilitate glowing and ongoing coverage in that prestigious publication. If you can ignore all the plutocrat-pandering red meat, it’s a paper that proves Noam Chomsky’s dictum that if you want to know what’s really going on in the world, you should read the business press.