The AI displacement wave is here (and it's not what you think)
"Just put it in ChatGPT."
That's what Annabel Beales overheard her boss say about her copywriting work. Six weeks later, after being told her job was "safe," she was fired.
She's one of five people The Guardian profiled last week who've lost work to AI:
→ A Polish radio journalist replaced by AI avatars interviewing dead poets
→ An Indonesian illustrator whose commissions dropped from 15 to 5 per month
→ A voice actor in San Francisco who heard his character say a line – but it wasn't his voice
→ A graphic designer let go after 6 years as his company's only designer
Reading these stories, I remembered a conversation with a friend over pints in London two years ago. We couldn't see an outcome where we don't eventually need UBI.
But here's what's happening right now: Four people have reached out to me this week asking about career planning. Four. These aren't abstract future scenarios - this is happening to skilled professionals today.
LinkedIn's Chief Economist recently wrote in the NY Times that "the bottom rung of the career ladder is broken." These stories show why.
The graphic designer in the piece nailed the immediate reality: "Learn as many skills as possible. You have to be prepared."
But honestly, I think people are underestimating what this actually means. It's not just about learning AI tools (though that helps). It's about building work that's harder to replicate:
→ Deep human connection and cultural understanding
→ Creative problem-solving in complex, messy situations
→ The ability to facilitate, coach, and guide others through change
These sound like buzzwords, but I think we really have to think about what it means to get good at these things.
The future belongs to people who can dance between domains - who understand both the human and technical sides of their work. If not, I really do worry.
Yes, I know there are lots of posts suggesting this kind of thing, but the Guardian piece is REAL. Real people, with real skills, in deep uncertainty.
Do you see what I see? Or - like an LLM - am I hallucinating?
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