AI WILL TAKE YOUR JOB AND GIVE YOU A CAREER. We are in the singularity now. From one day to the next, we do not know what news will come from the exponential rate at which AI is changing things.

Yesterday we had a new model come out, today we learned that recursive self-improvement has begun. Tomorrow, we are told that AGI will arrive and that the solution to it's major problem is recursive self-alignment.

How can anyone begin to think about their future when things move too fast to predict it? If you can't know the probable future, you can't do and become the person who can benefit from how that future will play out right?

The irony is that it is exactly this ignorance that liberates us: What this "singularity" reveals is that the future has never been certain anyway, and that we must create our selves through the present moment.

Take for example the cost of compute at the moment: Every platform like Open AI, Anthropic, Google, and others are running at a massive deficit; They are essentially spending billions on bringing you and I the very expensive service of intelligence at our fingertips. Why? Because they predict they will make trillions in the future.

Who knows? Perhaps their energy demands will not be able to sustain their bet and we will all have to pay enormous amounts to use Chat GPT for simple queries, only 6 months from now. All I know is that in the present moment, I have been able to build a program in 3 months what only 5 years ago would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, many years to develop, and would not have happened at all due to these barriers. And this will last.

You know, at this point I'm thinking about pre-industrial times, when most people did not have jobs. Either they toiled for survival or had trades and crafts that brought them a sense of mastery, purpose, status, and meaning. Their constraints were more so political, religious, and cultural more than anything else.

Today, we have abundance and are ironically enslaved to systems that control our thoughts and entire realities: We are led to believe that we must live a certain way and play a certain game to "make it" in this world. But people and their behaviours are what gives shape to how things play out.

"Desuetude" is "a legal concept where an unbroken habit of non-enforcement and widespread violation causes a law to lose its legal standing". Kind of like how we no longer stone our neighbors to death if they work on the holy day, the reality of how we live is changed by many factors- Technology being the most powerful one.

For example, since messengers and mobile phones, we no longer find it acceptable to "call" people on the phone. We have stopped going out to shop and order our basic necessities on Amazon. The younger generations have in large part turned their backs on education and make a living "creating content".

So why do we believe that we must hold on to jobs? We now have everything we need at our disposal to diligently craft our careers. I understand that not everyone functions that way, however. Some prefer the stability and routine-laden life of the 9-to-5 shift work we call a "job". No worrying about learning new skills, paying the bills, or reinventing one's self. But has that ever stopped one from needing to grow and evolve?

Jobs will always be around because we are the ones who want them. The irony is that the future may well turn out to be one in which it will be your job to make jobs, and this will be more of a career...

The true gold is in the ability to choose which job we want to take on at any given time. Don't want to send emails anymore? Automate that and take on the job of having meetings. Don't like to make videos? Automate that and package your handcrafted goods yourself instead. There are multiple ways that allows us to tailor the kind of life we want, and the only barrier to entry at the moment is the cost of a learning-curve: Learning to use AI tools.

Pretty soon, AI will even automate the job of learning how to use it, and your only job will be having to explore who you are and what has meaning to you. Our "careers" are increasingly becoming our own lives and how we experience them. We must build our worlds, shape other's realities, and play among the infinite possibilities our species has for so long striven to unlock.

Are we ready for it?

James Sirois