Episode Details

Good Sunday to you,

In case you missed them, I put out two articles this week. Here they are.

By now I am sure you will have stumbled across Matt Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening, which has gone bananas viral. Eighty-one million views on X alone. That’s even more than We’re All Far Right Now.

Shumer describes how AI capability is improving exponentially, meaning that most screen-based jobs face imminent and major disruption. By that he means all but disappearing. His advice is blunt: get good at using AI now; assume much of what you do will be automated, and thus your doing it will soon be redundant; and start saving up, there’s economic upheaval coming.

It’s perhaps the best articulated essay there is describing this bleak view of what is coming.

From my own little vantage point, I’m not nearly so pessimistic. I use AI a lot, and I use it more and more. Its rapid improvement over the last six months has been obvious, though it still cannot recognise humour, let alone write it - humour that’s actually funny, anyway. So it’s rather like the BBC comedy department in that regard.

EDIT: Having written that last paragraph, I just watched this. It is a perfect Frat Pack joke. I’ve now watched a load of other clips made with AI movie generator Seed Dance 2.0 from Byte Dance (parent company of TikTok), and I’ve a mind to short Disney first thing on Monday morning. The content is breathtaking, even the comedy.

I use AI as a sounding board, for legal and regulatory questions, bureaucratic procedures, personal advice, career and business advice, videos, images. I use it to proof read copy, in the case of PR which I hate writing, I use it to actually generate copy; it helps me with titles, SEO summaries and research. I am not at the point where it writes my articles for me, and I like to think I would not let that happen, but I know others are: I am increasingly reading pieces in respectable broadsheets that are clearly written by bots.

That represents a lot of work I might once have given to other people.

On the other hand, if I had needed to pay someone proper money to do it, I probably would not have done it at all.

In that sense it is not so different from the democratisation of media that followed the turn of the 21st century, when filmmaking, podcasting and publishing suddenly became accessible to anyone with a laptop.

From a personal point of view I know I have lost a shedload of voiceover work to AI, and what used to be my main source of income no longer is. More annoying, my voice, with the countless documentaries, promos, trailers and ads I’ve voiced over the years, has been harvested, modelled and copied like mad. Not a lot I can do.

But the net result to the world is more content, better content, produced faster and at lower cost.

I’m not sure quite how end-of-days it all is. But Shumer’s finger is on the pulse in a way mine is not.

Let’s assume he is more right than I am. What then?

Two things follow.

First, AI is deflationary. Services get cheaper. Productivity rises. Labour loses bargaining power.

Second, governments will not sit back and watch demand collapse. If employmen