Why It's Still Important to Create in an AI World
I'm calling this phase the Great Redefinition
In a recent NYT article about AI and jobs, titled A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You., Robert Capps quantifies his organized list of opportunities to clearly lean more positively— diverting from other headlines relating dwindling college grad prospects and informal CEO statements to the start of a scary turning point.
The turning point, however, has been in the works for some time. Major social, political, and economic factors globally have shaped this. While AI has been juxtaposed with major jobs-related events and reports, it plays a part, but it is not the single contributing factor.
First, the “growth at all costs” approach where spending and hiring signaled momentum within young companies is dead. It’s riskier nature no longer works in the ‘Great Recalibration’ venture capital environment, where there have been fewer investors, fewer funds, and fewer deals. Tailwind Ventures released their Q3 2024 Market Summary last November, which stated that, “For the first nine months of 2024, the number of active investors decreased 25%, and since the euphoric highs of inexpensive money in 2021, the number of investors has decreased 55%.” This has resulted in extremely risk-averse investors who seek quality when it comes to business models. At the same time, a third of all 2024 global venture funding went to AI (foundation models + AI-related fields).
Second, the normalization of job cuts has all but guaranteed job security is no longer a thing— the allure of the corporate ladder climb has faded, securing a role at a tech firm may have your “performance” constantly being evaluated, and the safety of the public sector has become susceptible to private sector-type “trims”.
You also have the rise of solopreneurship. I’m not the biggest fan of this term, but I find it effective as a category to include entrepreneurs (self-employed and sole proprietors), content creators, small business owners, etc. in one group. Quickbooks called 2024 the “year of the solopreneur” while sharing insights “that a growing share of US businesses have no employees — increasing from 76% in 1997 to 84% in 2020.”
Within each of these trends, AI is showing up— It is receiving the most funding in a changing VC landscape, where investors are carefully balancing risk and reward, it is increasingly a reason for reductions in workforce due to its ability to power and automate a variety of repetitive and generative tasks across functional areas, and it is also helping people start and run their businesses independently with accessible tools. Again, not the single biggest factor, but a factor that more than helps. And according to Capps, it will change the way we think of jobs as we know them today.
The article breaks these opportunities down into three key areas: Trust, Integration and Taste. It then speculates on job title nomenclature based on future needs in the era of AI— “trust director”, “AI ethicist”, “AI translator”, “AI trainer”, “AI personality director”, “integration specialist”, “AI assessor”, and many “designer” types are discussed throughout. If you’re thinking that those don’t exactly sound like industries or specific, tangible skills, you’re right. I would think of it similar to how “knowledge work” came to encompass “white collar work” in a way that defined work more by what the person is able to do with their skills and expertise, rather than by their job type (industrial manufacturing or service sector). Coined by Peter Drucker in his book The Landmarks of Tomorrow, “Knowledge work” at its core has to do with thinking, mainly taking existing information and using it to create new information.
Taking into account “knowledge work”, once a new definition of work, we can begin to articulate what Capps’ categories most likely involve, which is working and interacting with inputs, outputs and robots and helping other people better manage that collaboration (in its simplest form). In an effort to keep this post at an appropriate length and cover the most relatable category to both readers and writers here on substack, I’m going to focus on Taste.
Having taste in an AI world, where individuals and businesses largely have access to the same generative tools will become “incredibly important”, Capp says. Taste will be employed both in the creation of inputs to get the AI to do and come up with what you envision as well as in the decision-making around design of the output and how it serves a purpose for an individual or a business. Someone will need to declare whether it is “good” or fits the desired outcome.
But how do we develop taste as an asset we bring to the table? To me, having taste is an act of both consumption and making judgements and then making choices around future consumption. But how do we know if we have taste? When do we become known for it? When are our judgements respected and by what parameters? The road to developing taste is not only to consume, but to create, first.
The road to developing taste is not only to consume, but to create, first.
NYU Professor, Scott Galloway, in his latest short-form podcast episode, where he answers three questions from listeners, gave interesting advice when asked about whether being provocative helped or hurt a personal brand. He turned the question into how to develop a personal brand instead of answering what works or doesn’t work (like, being provocative)— “Find a subject where you can go really deep and become a mild expert on… Find a very narrow piece of the world and try to own it and then start producing content on it.” He then compared it to investing, noting that the discipline of putting out content on the subject you choose to “own” every day or every week would aggregate and build. In other words, it becomes your brand over time. The way I think of this is that your brand then has a personality and that personality has taste.
Taste is needed to cut through noise. The digital era brought abundance of information. The AI era will multiply that abundance through generative tools. There’s an abundance of content and an abundance of options for everything. One of the reasons I started this newsletter was actually because I felt overwhelmed by AI noise. I simply could not digest it the way I wanted to. So I’m trying to jot down my thoughts, experiences, conversations, observations in the way that I know how to slowly comprehend the meaning of what’s in an article I find here or somewhere else and how it relates to reality— to my reality, to that of certain professionals, to communities, to the world. In that process I am self-publishing content and creating. And in turn, this hopefully makes me a better sense-maker. Or “A.I. translator” or “article designer” or “differentiation designer”, to use some examples from Capps. I like to believe it is preparing me for the future of not just work, but of how I develop myself into an asset and define that— a human with taste, instead of a chatbot with an assignment.
Many seeking jobs in today’s market have developed specific skills and trained in them for years. Yet they aren’t able to get re-hired doing their specific job. There is a sense of needing to redefine ourselves in the air of AI and jobs news. We may be moving away from identifying ourselves by our degrees and positions to identifying ourselves by how we make use of new tools and models around us, to produce something new or make the world a better place, for example.
Scott, at the end of answering the listener’s question returns to the idea of provocativeness, saying, “Be willing, if you believe something, to say something, even if it’s not part of the narrative.” Many say we are entering a world of lots of creation without craft, due to AI, and I think that’s exactly the value of being provocative or cutting through noise by curating or simply creating. Having and employing taste does not come from existing within, working with and producing sameness, but from defining ourselves through how and what we think and doing something with it.