There is great chaos under heaven

As Joni observed 55 years ago, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

Photo by Yuyang Liu on Unsplash

Video summary

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are already reshaping the freelance job market, slashing employment opportunities and pay for workers across all skill levels. Even top freelancers – those with the strongest track records – are suffering the greatest setbacks.
INFORMS Organization Science Study, 4/3/25

If AI is like that — if you have a few superstar companies and a few rich countries using it to their advantage, while everyone else languishes — then the result of AI could be low long-term growth coupled with massive inequality.
Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 8/3/25

I think it’s time to think seriously about AI-induced job displacement.
Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring, (12/3/25)

We see companies raking in billions in revenues slashing 5-15% in workforce, while increasing bonuses by 200% (again looking at you, Meta)… Others, are starting to cut middle-management (PwC, Unilever a while back) including Amazon, making waves with its plan to cut 14,000 managerial roles by early 2025, aiming to save up to $3.6 billion annually. CEO Andy Jassy wants to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%, pushing the company toward a leaner, faster, and more agile structure.
Andy Spence, Workforce Futurist, 12/3/25

Evan Ratliff, a journalist who cloned his voice with AI, attached it to an AI model, and had it talk to friends, family, and even a therapist… Ratliff says his voice bot conducted an interview with a tech CEO, and the bot was able to obtain better information than he, the human journalist, could.
Alex Kantrowitz, Big Technology, 7/3/2025

There is great chaos under heaven — the situation is excellent.
Chairman Mao (attributed)

Imagine, dear reader, that I’ve just finished building a time machine. I crank the dial to five years and one month in the past. I then wander the streets of Sydney, or perhaps Auckland, London, New York or Toronto, trying to convince people that a world-changing global pandemic is about to break out.

For the sake of the exercise, let’s imagine some passers-by are willing to stop for a minute and listen to my unhinged rantings. I inform them that, following the lead of the CCP, Anglosphere and Western European governments will put their citizens under house arrest for months on end. That prominent institutions will beclown themselves, further eroding the public’s lack of trust in (once venerated) institutions. And that after a very brief period of common-enemy unity, the Right and the Left will soon be at each other throats, with the former arguing the ‘plandemic’ is a Big Pharma beat-up and the latter insisting societies remain shuttered indefinitely lest the lifespan of some morbidly obese, emphysemic 90-year-old be shortened by a few days.

Even if I could point to my whizbang time machine parked nearby, I don’t imagine anybody would believe me. But what if I somehow managed to convince a Sydneysider, Aucklander, Londoner, New Yorker or Torontonian that I really was from the future and dropping legit truth bombs?

Let’s say I convinced a fellow Sydneysider that much of Greater Sydney would be locked down for the next two years. I suspect foreknowledge wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It’s not like anybody could have done anything much to avoid the lockdowns.

At least I could have told my 2020-dwelling interlocutor that the pandemic would eventually pass and things would, kinda sorta, return to normal.

I have no such reassurances to offer regarding AI collapsing the market for human labour.

My dark but kinda liberating epiphany
I’ve spent much of this week trying to organise interviews for an article. I’ve been cold-calling/emailing various individuals and organisations to see if they can supply some quotes.

I’ve been doing this kind of thing for over three decades now.

Most of the individuals and organisations I’ve been emailing have been perfectly polite and professional. But some have not. Not for the first time, I found myself growing impatient at the regal rudeness of some potential interviewees, or at least their ‘Media Relations Adviser’ gatekeepers.

(It’s an uncharitable thought, especially given many fine ex-journos now work in these roles. But I’ve long wondered if those with a media degree who either never got to work in the media, or have been abruptly expunged from it, derive a certain dog-in-a-manger satisfaction about making those who are still living the journo ‘dream’ jump through endless hoops before belatedly sending that ‘Sorry for the late response, but we don’t have the bandwidth for this right now’ email.)

Anyway, the pertinent point is I was growing frustrated with my lot in life. But then it occurred to me that (a) My client presumably only farmed out the article to a freelancer because they knew it would involve organising multiple interviews (i.e. it’s not content that can be generated by punching a few prompts into Claude) and (b) In the not too distant future – we are talking months not years – humans won’t even be creating the fiddly, emotional-intelligence-requiring content.

By the end of 2025, it may be standard practice for a Journo.GPT to contact a Media Relations Adviser.GPT and set up an interview with a Company Spokesperson.GPT. The interview will then be sent to an Editor.GPT, which will publish it on the appropriate platforms in the appropriate formats. (Text-based content for the news site, an automatically generated video of the news site article for YouTube, a podcast version for Spotify, and so on.) This entire process will probably occur in the space of a couple of minutes, possibly a couple of seconds.

If you’re in the content-creation game and are currently rolling your eyes, I recommend reading Mr Kantrowitz’s article. Here’s the most dispiriting passage:

I’d long assumed that our [journalists’] work — obtaining new information and disseminating it — would insulate us from AI automation. It’s a job that requires building relationships, eliciting information from sources, and communicating it effectively. That was supposed to be as human as it gets. But Ratliff’s bot showed otherwise.

The typical rebuttal here is that AI still can’t fake personality, but I am sorry to report that it can. Last year, Google released NotebookLM, a product that generates lively podcasts hosted by AI voice bots from just a few links or documents. The podcasts aren’t perfect. But as AI practitioners say, they’re worse now than they’ll ever be. And they’re really not bad today. Already, multiple members of my podcast audience have asked me if I rented my voice to Google for the project. I did not. But the insinuation is unnerving.

I doubt this stops with our profession. Sales and customer service are directly within AI’s reach, with more fields to follow. Sometimes loudly and sometimes in a hush, tech executives tell me that AIs in these fields can be more patient, more knowledgeable, and better listeners than humans. And as the technology advances, it’s getting easier to build and integrate the applications.

The shifting official line
The initial official line about AI was that it would augment rather than replace human workers. That narrative remained widespread for 12-18 months after the first iteration of ChatGPT dropped in late 2022.

Around mid-2024, I noticed the first ‘Let’s be realistic here; AI is going to replace some jobs’ articles appearing. From memory, this was also when the phrase, ‘You’re not going to be replaced with AI, but you will be replaced by someone using AI,’ started being thrown around.

Things were still somewhat hopeful at this point, with the suggestion being that humans could remain employable/hireable if they adapted adroitly to the new game-changing technology. There was still a belief – sincerely held in most cases, I imagine – that humans still possessed, in marketing jargon, some USPs (Unique Selling Points).

In recent weeks, the narrative has shifted once more.

It’s become increasingly evident that AI can, and very soon will, do everything humans now do. Even worse, AI will complete tasks far more quickly, cheaply and reliably than humans presently do. The ‘AI will never replace humans because it can’t do X, Y and Z’ articles are currently drying up as it becomes ever-more apparent that AI can now do X, Y, Z. Or at least will be able to do X, Y and Z in the eminently foreseeable future.

We’re now entering what’s presumably the final phase of AI’s ‘narrative journey’. I imagine we are about to see a rash of articles, especially in the business press, advancing the following thesis: “Yes, AI is going to take your job within the next couple of years. But there’s absolutely no need to worry because our just and wise rulers will undoubtedly ensure the AI bonanza is equitably shared around!”

Stopping to smell the roses in a pre-AGI world
I’m not sure how much use this counsel of despair valuable life advice will be. Particularly for those who aren’t approaching their mid-fifties while trying to balance the demands of parents reaching the end of their lives and children approaching the prime of theirs.

But here goes…

The older you get, the more you see how omnipresent and irresistible the Circle of Life is. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t, for instance, do everything possible to prevent the emergence of a techno-feudalist society. But it does mean, to paraphrase the Serenity Prayer, that many things are out of your control and that you’ll be calmer if you graciously accept this fact.

I’m trying to remain serene, in the “give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed” sense. Rather than focusing on irritants, like unhelpful media relations advisers, I’m choosing to focus on the quiet joys of my work while it is still available to me. Knowing you are likely in the final months of your career imbues the most mundane work tasks – even cold-calling people who aren’t much interested in hearing from you – with a certain poignancy.

*In entirely unrelated news, Sydney’s Murdoch tabloid introduced ‘NewsGPT’ in recent days. “It’s a tool to enhance your capabilities, not replace them,” News Corp Australia’s CTO insisted in an email to staff. I’d suggest any (putatively cynical) journo who believes that hasn’t been following Uncle Rupe’s business career for the last seven decades.