9. The Work That Stays Yours

Chapter 9: The Work That Stays Yours, read by Helen

0:00

/1654.0790476190475

1×

What People Tell Us

A copywriter says that after fifteen years building a craft—a client list and a reputation for a particular kind of voice—that in the space of a week her biggest client moved everything to a model that produced eighty percent of what she did at a fraction of the cost. Not the good eighty percent, she said, but enough. She wasn't angry, she was grieving.

The graphic designer where AI had killed her will to stay in her industry. She could still do the work but could not find a reason to keep doing it in a market that had decided the work was worth a tenth of what it paid two years ago.

I want to be careful with what I say next, because I don't think these people need a framework. They need someone to say that what happened to them is real and it is not their fault. A future they had every reason to expect was available to them is being discounted, in the literal sense, by the people building and pricing these systems. That is a loss. Mourning it is the correct response.

Years ago, sitting around a fire, our kids asked us what they should become in a world where machines could do so much. That question turned out to belong to everyone. So let me talk to you, the adult who already has a career and a professional identity and a growing fear that both are being priced out from under you while you watch.

In this chapter I'm going to tell you what a decade of research found, because I think it changes what to be fearful of and what to be hopeful for.