Being an Employee is a Dangerous Business..
It's also a relatively new habit historically speaking and there is plenty of time to break it.
Climate change just cost me my job - I'm serious.
This summer, I was working outdoors with a waste management company when the North American summer fire season forced me indoors, and there was nothing I could do about it.
That got me thinking, if I had my own profitable business (YDFM will be profitable someday!), that wouldn't have happened. I might not have even been in North America.
History of Employment
Strange as it sounds, being a career employee is a relatively new development in economic history.
Until the age of Transoceanic Exploration, which began to blur into the industrial revolution (roughly 1750-1880), almost everyone owned their own small business. They may have been primary goods producers (farmers/miners), secondary producers (bread makers/tool smiths), or merchants, but everyone was a member of the business community. Society was just too small to allow for anything else.
Only when mass migration to the cities took place did people start trading their time for money.
Why they thought working outdoors on a farm had a lesser quality of life than ruining their bodies over work benches is a question that still puzzles me.
As businesses grew in profit and scale, they needed a clerk/managerial class to ensure the continued implementation of business processes.
This system continued to grow and develop and worked fine until machines began to automate manual labor. This started in earnest when automated cloth weaving technology began to replace certain types of specialized weavers who would stitch the same pattern hundreds of times per day. Thus began the cost-savings vs labor dignity fight that continues to this day.
Now it's the knowledge workers being replaced.
As a result of computers, machine learning, and now artificial intelligence, people who are paid to specialize in the same repetitive task are once again about to be unemployed.
As a rule of thumb, if you can perform your boring job on autopilot, a computer is already standing by to take it from you.
How Are We Going To Make Any Money??
Fact: In a very short period of time, the only way to make money is to be hyper proficient at solving new problems and then automating those solutions.
This means starting a business. Let me explain why.
In the world of LLMs (Large Generative Language Models, the subject of a future edition), anything can be automated, including human interaction. ChatGPT and Google's Bard AI have long passed the tests to fool humans into thinking they were conversing with other humans.
Assuming there are no major changes to legislation (Europe is working on AI regulation, but the rest of the world is staring blankly at the oncoming train as usual), AI will continue to develop faster than we will be able to control or wield it to its full effect.
Therefore, as an employee, you will be constantly and increasingly at risk of having your skills made redundant. Continuing education will not solve this problem, as machines will always be able to learn more and faster than you can.
The only way to avoid being made redundant is to be in full control of your work and your income, and that means taking full ownership over the value you deliver.
The average machine will always be able to perform specialized tasks better than the best human trained to do the same job. This is a universal law.
Where Does Human v. Machine Race End?
If a broad swath of the population ever develops a tendency to form connections to machines the same way they do with other humans, then we are officially redundant as beings. However, this is unlikely.
Otherwise, the race ends when we finally accept that in order to live a good life, we as humans must develop and use our boundless evolved creative capacity and leave any and all tedium to robots. This is likely, and it is good.
How Do I Deal With This?
There are two things that you need to decide: First, what do I possess that has the greatest economic value (this could be skills, character traits, or assets)? Second, who needs it the most and how do I get it to them?
These are the two fundamental questions of business. AI enables us to deliver on the answers to these questions rapidly and in a very short period of time, with minimal friction.
Consider the following example:
David creates great stories. He recognizes that movie studios are in dire need of them. Normally, David would require himself and a team of people to develop a narrative, characters, a story world, and fill in all those details - not to mention the research involved if he cares about making it realistic and culturally appropriate for the setting.
Because David understands AI, he uses tools like ChatGPT to assist him in generating ideas, iterating on them, writing dialogue, and filling in the gaps in the world he is building.
The time to produce has now been reduced from 1-2 years to a matter of weeks, and it can all be accomplished by one person.
Final Thoughts.
While I can't predict the future, I'm very good at reading the writing on the wall - the wall in this illustration being job boards.
The entry-level positions that were once the first rung on the corporate ladder for every university-educated person now require experience and skills that new graduates are unlikely to possess simply due to their limited years of existence.
So, why even bother trying?
We have so many existing and developing problems on this planet, such as resource crunches, fresh water shortages, and political upheaval, that there is ample room for everyone to find their niche. That's what I'm doing here with YDFM. I'm financially educated, I enjoy philosophy, and I like discussing how to live well—topics that are often neglected in our schools, universities, and even on the internet.
Let me know in the comments what your next or first business venture is going to be!