The future is here – and increasingly evenly distributed

Signs of the looming Great Winnowing grow more plentiful by the day

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”
William Gibson, circa 1992

William Gibson is a Canadian-American sci-fi author best known for pioneering the cyberpunk genre with his 1984 novel Neuromancer.

If you inhabit the (overlapping) worlds of sci-fi or tech, you may be directly familiar with Gibson’s work.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for decades, you will be indirectly familiar with it through popular culture. For example, his vision of the future is reflected in films such as The Matrix and games such as Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077.

Almost a year ago, when I was heavily incentivised to leverage AI to research and write a biography, I often thought of Gibson’s quote as I attempted to churn out a book, with my digital helpmate, in a ridiculously short timeframe.

It truly struck me during the book-writing process that AI wasn’t just a useful technological tool; it was The Future.

It was an unevenly distributed future back in November, 2024 when I first moved into ChatGPT power user territory. It remains unevenly distributed as I type this post in October, 2025.

But I’m certain that it is The Future and will soon be more equitably distributed, which will result in profound labour market, economic, cultural and societal changes.

Let me refer to a handful of stories from this week to flesh out what that means.

Creative layoff rates double
I’ve got some runs on the boards myself with Mumbrella articles warning of a grim future for legacy media organisations, so this one about the “redundancy crisis hitting senior employees” in Australia’s media and marketing industries was right up my alley.

I don’t have time to check, but I’d wager there are near-identical articles in industry publications in your neck of the woods, dear non-Antipodean readers.

The tl;dr of the Mumbrella yarn is that a substantial number of media-and-marketing-industry heavy hitters have been shown the door of late.

Older – and this is media and marketing, so that means anyone over 30 – and more expensive workers are getting Logan’s Runned left and right.

Here is the Advertising Council Australia (ACA) CEO:

Every company in Australia is reviewing its business model and operations, seeking efficiencies and automation to navigate global uncertainty, technological disruption, and shifting consumer media and consumption habits.”

The Independent Media Agencies of Australia (IMAA) chair:

“This recent period of extraordinary volumes of redundancies does feel different… we are seeing cuts affecting more senior positions as companies re-evaluate their organisational structures, ripping out senior salaries to improve profitability… the industry is at serious risk of losing deep institutional and media knowledge and experience… these senior people affected are facing serious hurdles as job seekers.”

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) CEO was also blunt.

Where large global platforms once invested heavily in building teams, they are now prioritising capital expenditure in AI, data centres, and advanced computing… the pace of AI investment and globalisation means the shape of future teams will look quite different.

I suspect that what is happening in Australia’s marketing and marketing-related industries is a microcosm of what’s happening in knowledge industries worldwide.

Perhaps those of us who warned ever-more-intelligent Artificial Intelligence would result in the rapid automation of tasks once completed by humans – I speak as a soon-to-be former content generator – and hence a “white-collar bloodbath” were onto something.

A tragic end for the girlbosses, and the boy ones too?
Around half of those in knowledge-worker industries are now women.

Many of them are what used to be called, non-ironically and ofttimes triumphantly, girlbosses.

That is, ambitious, overwhelmingly PMC, bourgeois feminists who rated career success as being as important, if not more important, than partnering up and having children.

Let’s leave aside the issue of whether it’s wise for either a man or a woman to be as obsessively career-focused as PMCers have been encultured to be in recent decades.

Indeed, let’s posit that career success – building a thriving PR agency from the ground up, making partner at one of the Big Four accounting firms, being the creative director at an industry-leading ad agency – is a glittering prize worthy of all manner of trade-offs.

What happens when the status-boosting, fulfilment-providing, luxury-lifestyle-financing role goes away?

Of course, that always happens eventually. Except now it’s happening to a lot more people at a far earlier age than anybody planned for.

It’s one thing to make sacrifices and then receive the life you aspired to. But what happens if, after making irreversible sacrifices, the life you were meant to be rewarded with evaporates because of tectonic technological change?

It’s interesting this Guardian article, about the plight of the unpartnered American woman, went so viral this week.

With the digital Sword of Damocles now dangling by an ever more gossamer thread, could it be that many PMC women and not a few PMC men are regretting putting quite so many eggs in the high-powered career basket?

The best way to predict the future is to create it
This morning, I learnt Satya Nadella has been progressively delegating himself out of his CEO day job.

By my count, Microsoft now has at least three CEOs, apart from Nadella.

Judson Althoff was just made CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business (sales, marketing, operations), joining fellow high-flyers Phil Spencer (CEO of Microsoft’s gaming division) and Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI CEO).

How, you ask, is Microsoft’s titular CEO spending his time?

Here is his official statement:

We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier…

History shows that general purpose technologies like AI drive step changes in productivity and GDP growth, and we have a unique opportunity…

Our success depends on enabling commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate. [By “to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities”, he means replacing the former with the latter…]

This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work -- across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation -- to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift. Each one of us needs to be at our very best in terms of rapidly learning new skills, adopting new ways to work, and staying close to the metal to drive innovation across the entire stack!!
This isn’t just evolution, it’s reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft.

Satya

Of course, Nadella isn’t the only one convinced that we are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift. Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman (who walked away from being president of Y Combinator in 2019 to join a small, non-profit research lab called OpenAI), Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg feel likewise.

Perhaps they’re all wrong. But it may be time to start thinking about what happens if they are right.

Available at all good bookshops
The book I wrote, with the not inconsiderable assistance of AI, was released on Tuesday.

If you have any interest in surfing, self-improvement, the Shire (the one in Sydney, not the gay one in New Zealand) or the tragedy of suicide, you may like to check it out.

The Guardian published an extract, and the first chapter can be downloaded gratis from Amazon, so try before you buy.