The second part of a pessimistic take on AI. Focused on post-obsolescence.

There are two stages in the process of obsolescence. A ‘before’ and an ‘after’ . The ‘before’ entails a strange existence of role distortion. Your job might still exist, but it is flattened. It is automated around the edges. Your expertise both is and is not required: ‘is’ in the sense that you still need to steer what the AI does, and ‘isn’t’ because something far greater than what your expertise will ever be is right there, outsourced, black boxed. Why bother with skills and expertise, if a person, untrained and naïve, can just retrieve it? I suppose the future role will be in the interpretation of the generated data. That is all we will be: a civilisation of post-editors in some form or another.

The ’after’ is when we are finally obsolete. When this happens to billions of us, as portrayed in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, what are we supposed to do? Are we just supposed to amuse ourselves to death, as Neil Postman warned? What does this entail? Do we take the advice from Joe Rogan literally: train by day, watch Joe Rogan by night? And we watch as they talk about mushrooms, MDMA and stupid conspiracies, and we laugh along, temporarily believing ourselves as an active participant in the conversation – because we are so isolated and so, so lonely. Then what? Are we supposed to each set up our own podcast? Are we just supposed to copy this, just as teenagers (used to) emulate their music heroes in their garage bands, back when music was something we venerated? What if I am rubbish at podcasting and any engagement of that sort? What do I do then? (I whisper in horror) OnlyFans??

Earning money worries aside, what do we do about the tedium? Busy doing nothing for the rest of our lives? If we are lucky, there might be a major calamity, one caught live on camera, if not the event itself, then the aftermath. In the monotony of our obsolete lives, where feeling anything is numbed, we develop a fetish for doomscrolling and gore. We and our doom-spiral Reddit ‘friends’ sharing images of the victims, writing their obituaries, opining about their good or bad characters.

Side note: Whatever you do, don’t die in the public gaze, especially if you do not leave a beautiful corpse behind. You will be photographed, filmed, shared, immortalised, analysed, spoken about until the next awful thing to hit someone’s feed (around 24 hours later). Believe me, I know this first hand. I witnessed something in Manhattan once that was sheer trauma to me, but was shared around by other witnesses for sport. People do this because they are so bored and irrelevant. By capturing and contemplating a death, it makes them more alive. And it makes them feel important: look at this awful thing that I chanced upon today. It might bring ‘likes’ and validation to an empty soul.

In the post-obsolescent world, gazing at gore helps with the brain-fog, by now constant, but with this input it clears for a little while. Endorphins, maybe. After 8 or 9 months, you become completely untethered from your mores, unmoored from your integrity and adrift in your plain of reality. We had tiny glimpses of the very beginnings of this happening during the pandemic lockdowns. And after years of this, we are utterly, irretrievably, lost.

Once in a while we think about what we used to know. It’s too taxing to think about what we were and too painful to remember who we were. Now it’s like we are just those shadows cast on walls, of people and objects, that the two atomic blasts left behind. Sometimes we might recall the comment Mark Zuckerberg once made when, acknowledging that AI would lead to job losses, that, hey, it means people can be freed up to do “crazy stuff”. That is what he said. Perhaps what he had in mind was the notion of ‘otium’, the diametric opposite of ‘tedium’. It means productive idleness, unending leisure, people being freed from work and time obligations to do what we want. But in a state of distress, poverty and mental anguish, this cannot be achieved. Neither can it be realised by the pursuits we are nudged towards: gorging ourselves on online garbage. A diet that leads to ‘infobesity’, overconsumption of bad quality information that overwhelms, confuses and mentally paralyses us.

An obsolete person is not just about displacement, but disfigurement: of the person and of society at large.

 What if our obsolescence catches us at a really vulnerable time, like being mid-mortgaged or not quite having our children’s college funds topped up? After all, we’ve dipped so heavily into it while we try to reorient our careers, on courses, life coaches, lead generators and similar snake oil. After a while we estimate that we might have maybe three weeks’ survival money left. What is the plan? Where do we go for help? Does anybody step in? If it is happening to millions of people, at what point do our governments intervene?  Is there debt amnesty? Is there a stimulus package like in Covid? At what point do the AI overlords redistribute the trillions as universal income? We might see none of it.

In fact, we will see none of it. I know because I have seen obsolescence before, as industry was dismantled in the UK in the 80s. I’ve seen what happens. People do not amuse themselves 24/7. They engage in heaping social distress on each other, like baboons; hierarchies quickly emerge from alpha and his posse down to the numerous omegas. Not too different from Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies, only with grown-ups. Angry grown-ups. Deaths of despair surely follow, but only very slowly.

Would there be civil unrest? Would we rise up? No. We will be docile. Medicated. Infotained. And those that do gather in public to express discontent? Well, that is what sonic weaponry will be for. It will be cheaper than bullets. Or batons. Or tanks.

 An alternative reality could be that the launching of AI tools has just been a massive ‘come-on’. They get us to use it, to love it, to integrate it into our work and personal lives, become dependent on it. Then, they suddenly take it away from us and start charging us a crazy amount each month – 5-6000 dollars a month, just for what it does now and promises of further iterations later. Any takers? The AI debt crippling your monthly budgets on top of mortgages, college funds and medical debt? Which of these could you do without?

And those that do not accept this, could we build back?

Could we reclaim the land back from the sea?

Maybe, but not by waiting for anyone to rescue us and not by pretending the water isn’t already seeping through our shoes. The tide will not turn because we order it back or declare war on it like Caligula or try to stop it like King Knut. It will not turn because we ignore it, pretend it is not happening either. No government or benevolent overlord is going to build us a boat. The latter will look on as indifferently as Mars or Venus regard us from their orbits when  we come into view. The governments, meanwhile, will delight in turning the screws on our distress. Their bailiffs will soon be hammering on your door.

This is how I see it:

So, here we are, those of us still in mid-career, mid-mortgage, mid-obligation. Still on our feet, battered but not yet swept away like what has happened to the writers and the translators. This is about facing the moment when the water is at our ankles and we are wondering how long it will be before it is at our knees and our chests.

From this vantage point, middle-aged, bills in plain view, the stakes are not theoretical. The mortgage still looms. The children’s college tuition still needs paying. Some of us might have medical debt. Some of us might have alimony. Some of us might be in tax arrears or need to pay for our parents’ care homes who may have complex needs. But just as it looked like all this was well managed and stability seemed within reach, AI comes bounding over the hill like the chimera of folklore that threatens our jobs, our balance sheets, our households and our sense of identity.

We have seen this before, though many knowledge workers didn’t really pay much attention.

When heavy industry collapsed in the UK, the US and beyond, the knowledge workers thought they were safe. When robotics replaced factory hands, knowledge workers nodded about progress while politicians blamed others; China was the scapegoat of choice.

Now it is our turn. Our fields are as porous as the limestone. The water seeps in, edges first, then the middle, until the coastline is redrawn.

It is tempting to panic. But this is what I have learned, quite recently: the fear of the wasp sting is far worse than the sting itself. And it is the same with the fear of obsolescence or fundamental change. The sleepless dread, the imagined collapse, the wolf at the door. It can be more paralysing than the actual sting. And when it comes? It hurts, it disrupts but sometimes you find yourself moving faster than you thought possible. And doing things you never thought you could do. And having conversations you never thought you would have.

We will need this agility because the era of the single secure career is finished.

Welcome to the age of the multiple hustle.

We have seen this before too: in Spain’s pluriempleo, where people held several jobs to make ends meet. To us in northern Europe, where the job for life was the norm, this seemed strange. But to the average person in Spain at the time, it was just survival. Immigrants in big cities like New York, London and Paris live this rhythm now: a guitar teacher who is also a student who works as a food delivery driver, then an Uber driver at night and a small-time eToro trader when he cannot sleep. This is really how millions of people live. Not comfortably or luxuriously but just getting by. And they never fail to send remittances to their mothers each month.

If and when AI hollows out our core roles, we will have to face a choice:

Join the crowded stream of service refugees all rushing to the same shrinking archipelago or pivot to something entirely new.

Do we mourn the old map, the old coastlines until we drown? Or do we start sketching a new one while treading water? For many of us, 2025 is about precisely that: treading water. We have a period of grace. But what is our plan?

Courage does not mean that the sting does not hurt. Courage means embracing complete change. It might mean teaching part-time while freelancing, while retraining, while picking up shifts… at a warehouse… or an abattoir. But it might also mean honing skills that AI cannot yet mimic: complexity, ambiguity, empathy and embodied presence. Courage might mean accepting that prestige is unstable, that dignity will have to come from craft and adaptability rather than fancy titles and reputation.

None of this is romantic. All of this is horrible. It is hard. It is tiring. It could be humiliating: imagine asking the team you were made redundant from, the team that you managed, if they prefer ‘this sized coffee’ or ‘that sized coffee’? This is a far cry from the “crazy stuff” that Zuckerberg said AI would free us up to do. Your hustles will be your survival. Survival builds skills and skills build a platform, a trampoline that can springboard you onto a higher plane. And by diversifying our work, we lower the risk of a single AI tool wiping us out. We build redundancy into our lives the way engineers design it into critical systems.

The water is still rising. The machine will keep humming. You might be looking on at the world of work through padlocked gates.

You may need to take radical action. You may need to downsize, cut cloth, take work that bruises your pride. But you will still be alive. You will still be moving. And movement, in a disaster, is everything.

Movimiento es vida.  

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson, Leeds, United Kingdom

Easter 2025