AI will help remind us what is actually important and it is a much needed reminder

Last week we discussed that anything “human made” will potentially become more valuable in a world where everything will be mostly generated and automated by AI. An interesting follow up thought to that is another big question that is on the minds of many: jobs.

The WEF's Future of Jobs Report 2025, published on January 7, 2025, says that job disruption will affect 22% of global jobs by 2030, with 92 million jobs expected to be displaced due to macro trends including technological change, geo-economic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts, and the green transition. While the report does not isolate AI's exact contribution, it highlights AI as a key driver, with 86% of companies expecting AI to transform their operations by 2030. This suggests a significant portion of the 92 million displaced jobs can be attributed to AI automation.

The numbers vary widely, with Statista mentioning 82 million possible jobs lost and Goldman Sachs going all the way up to 300 million possible jobs lost by 2030. Conclusion: it is hard to pinpoint exactly, but that there will be impact is a given.

One of the interesting sides of this impact is that it is quiet the opposite of what people expected innovation would change. When you would ask most people, 10-15 years ago, how technology would change jobs, people would quickly flock to robots taking over blue collar work. Aka truck/taxi/bus drivers, factory workers, human labor in general.

Fast forward to 2025 and we see the complete opposite is true. Robot tech is still in development but a lot harder than what people initially thought, meaning it is taking way longer to take form. Let alone for mass adoption. Did you know OpenAI, in the early days, had a focus on robotics as well? In a podcast with Lex Fridman, Sam Altman said: “As a small company, we have to really focus. And also, robots were hard for the wrong reason at the time, but we will return to robots in some way, at some point.”

On the other hand, we got Generative AI in the form of LLM’s, Image and Video models and oh boy.. Talking about mass adoption, last week OpenAI shared they reached 400 million active users for GPT. That is a crazy number, on the other hand it is “only” 4.94% of the world’s population. In contrast, Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp) has 3.35 Billion daily active users.. insane! So yes, AI has still a long way to go and yes we are still early.

But what I want to talk about today is not the potential job losses because of AI, but what about the other jobs? How will the job/work landscape evolve in general? What will become more valuable when intelligence becomes a commodity? It is pretty aligned with the previous newsletter, which is why I thought about this for this week too. The answer: Human connection.

Let’s dive into a good example of this. Early last year I was interviewed by London University to discuss how AI would potentially impact the educational system and how that would change the role of teachers. Let me share with you my thoughts. Please keep in mind, I am no expert on the current educational systems around the world so this is just some of my own thinking and speculation.

I think in general schools should, somehow, focus more on soft skills, general life skills than anything else. What I mean by “general life skills” is learning how to learn? This might sound strange but I think will be very relevant, today and in years to come. The landscape moves so quickly that people need to constantly adapt and learn new things in order to thrive. But how? Where do you find the right materials, what do’s and dont’s, etc? Additionally, with possibly school time freeing up we could also have time for things such as how to live a healthy life, taxes (I mean it sucks but I wish somebody would have told me this before), investing and more.

Soft skills are the other part of it, although I am not 100% certain how you teach people soft skills but they will be so important. In theory we need to double down on everything that makes us human, as the rest will be all AI. Can we teach kids about communication, relationships (in all forms), people, reading a room, purpose and more?

Some people might think that teachers will become obsolete because of the technology. Although I do think that every kid, person, will have a personalized AI tutor that can help them teach anything at their own pace, I still see a very valuable role for teachers. Even better, I think it will have a positive effect on the job of a teacher. What if teachers finally get the room, time to focus on the most human element of their job? Actually working with kids personally, getting to know them, helping them understand the world around them, thriving on a true one-on-one human connection. Will teachers become more like therapists?

A general shift in what we value most in terms of labor will probably happen. The jobs that now are sometimes undervalued, will actually become the most valuable. Think of people taking care of our elderly, kids daycare professionals and other jobs that need true human connections. In one of the earliest books I read about AI, called “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order” by Kai-Fu Lee in 2018, the writer ended with some of these ideas as well. He for example proposed that we maybe should start paying people for voluntary work. It seems like a win-win-win.

AI is coming for the jobs we now consider as knowledge work and that has been something unexpected. It is very hard to think about what this will, or could, turn into. There will be jobs that we now can't think of that will become the most normal thing in the world. People 30 years ago did not expect social media managers, podcasters, gamers or vloggers to become actual jobs either. They couldn’t even imagine. It is crazy to think that something like that will happen, again!

There is some people, like Elon Musk, who go even further and think nobody will ever have to work again eventually.

And that is a big question not many people talk about, I might have mentioned it before in earlier newsletters. Many people will still need a sense of purpose. For many people, if you ask them who they are, they will start talking about their job and/or career. (You should try it 😉). “Hi my name is XYZ and I am an creative director at XYZ”. - If you now think about it, you might even answer this question in a similar manner. For many, their job is very closely linked to their identity, it is who they are, it is who they have always been.

What happens when you take that away?

Big questions. A lot of people probably have to find themselves, which is a healthy thing in general in my humble opinion. Your job shouldn’t be your identity.

My apologies, I kinda went on a tangent here but that is how the brain works I guess. In general, to close this off, it is exciting to think about all of this. Just like with content, with craft, anything human will become more valuable, I can’t come to a different conclusion than human connection will have a same rise.

Another example. Coffee, one of my biggest loves. There will 100% be coffee shops (aka Starbucks?) that will be fully run by robots and AI. Something that I have no problems with at all. Because if I go to a Starbucks, that means I just want a quick coffee and if a robot delivers it to me absolutely perfect and super fast, I am all for it. They are already experimenting with it in South-Korea, where this Starbucks operates the whole building it is in with 100 robots. Although people still make the coffee, they get delivered all over by robots:

Now, do I think that every coffee shop will be like this? No. Because if I am on a lazy Sunday walk, I enjoy sitting down at my favorite coffee shop, greet the baristas and have a great cup of coffee. In a world where both are available, both serve different situations and I would happily pay more at the “human serviced” coffee shop than I would at the quick robot Starbucks. Wouldn’t you?

There is so much fear about AI, so much big questions. What does it mean to be human? I understand the fear and I think it is relevant. But, as you know, I am a glass half full kinda guy and I think a lot of potential good is overlooked. Yes, jobs will disappear. But, new jobs will be created and we will start to revalue things that are actually important: human connection.

The point of singularity is near?

Elon Musk tweeted an interesting (but maybe disturbing) message on X.

What is singularity? The term comes from the world of physics where it describes a point in space-time—such as the center of a black hole—where density becomes infinite, and the laws of physics as we know them break down.

Quick side note to share my enthusiasm about black holes: The reason why black holes are sooooo fascinating is that everything in our world and universe is explainable with mathematical equations, meaning everything is calculable—until you get to a black hole, where everything we know breaks down. This is known as the point of singularity. Why does this break the brains of our smartest minds? Because if our understanding fails at a singularity, it raises a scary question: What if our entire framework for reality is incomplete? If black holes reveal gaps in our knowledge, what else might be beyond our comprehension? 

Ok, back to innovation.

Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near (2005) made the term popular in innovation and AI discussions. He used it to describe a future where AI surpasses human intelligence, creating an unpredictable and transformative shift in the world. According to Musk, this moment is already getting very close. Musk is also known for unrealistic time projections but I do believe a lot of people are feeling similar. Who can still confidently talk about how the world will look in 3-5 years? I certainly can not.

I do think it is fun, good and important to wander about how things will change. Just for the sake of opening your mind to these changing times. That is also exactly what I am trying to achieve with this newsletter and sharing my thoughts on all that is going on. I feel that for many it is hard to think beyond what we know, think 2, 3, 5 steps ahead.

A way bigger challenge is our legal frameworks. Going back to one of my (our 😉) favorite topics, AI Agents. Who will responsible for their actions? Whatever they will create, develop, generate, who owns that? Will AI Agents be taxable? Or will the person be who created it?

We know that our legal, political and tax frameworks already follow (and therefore lag) instead of anticipating developments.

What will happen if things speed up even more, nobody knows what will come next?

We have to keep faith in the ingenuity of our species, I am certain we will figure it out but I wouldn’t be surprised if we are heading for some bumpy next few years..

Here are some of the latest announcements and other things that I found interesting this week (underscore means clickable!):

• Already mentioned it last week, it is “new model” season in the world of AI! Last week we got Grok-3 and this week we have Anthropic’s new model. Interesting is that they combine the reasoning and regular capabilities in one model. Something Sam Altman also promised for the future. This means that the capabilities of, for example, “general” GPT4o and reasoning model o3 are combined in one. Which is great! Anthropic’s Claude is well known for being the best coding LLM out there. He is an example of someone generating a completely functioning website with just one prompt: click.

• For anyone with a paid GPT account, you can now utilize their new “Deep Research” mode. It is very powerful so definitely try it out.

• Lovely tweet from the founder of Binance about the current “crash” hahah! Hang in there people!

• As discussed in a previous newsletter. In a blockbuster trade, Luka Dončić got traded (against his will) to the LA Lakers. Dončić felt betrayed, hurt and looked super disappointed about it all. He is slowly but surely accepting his new reality though and right before his game vs his old team Dallas starts, Jordan Brand (which he has a shoe deal with) dropped a lovely little clip 🔥. (Oh and the Lakers won, Dončić got his revenge 😉)

  

  Had the cut the gif to get it under the 10mb limit but you can imagine that the numberplate he took of was a Texas one 😉 

• More impressive Gen AI work from China! Alibaba just dropped Wan 2.1 and the results floating around the internet are impressive. Oh, and it is open source!

• For people who saw the attached video going viral on LinkedIn/X and all the AI influencers claiming this is “the end”. The video is pre setup. The developers (Anton and Boris) pre-coded the logic for recognizing when both parties in a call are AI and then switching to a more efficient data-over-sound communication method using the ggwave library. I repeat: The AI agents did NOT autonomously “come up” with the idea of switching to ggwave. For more depth, see the original X tweet below!

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^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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