For 30 years, ever since the Web was spun, technology has been dominated by what Richard Florida called the Creative Class.
Artists, writers, managers, and programmers, most highly educated, earn six figure salaries employers must pay.
The biggest social struggle for the back half of this decade will be the slow fall of this Creative Class at the hands of AI.
Listen to goons like Sam Altman and Elon Musk closely. AI will replace writers, they say. It will replace coders, they say. Management will snap its fingers and things will be done magically. From the boss’ mind to reality, it’s just a thought. No one pays for thought if they can manufacture it.
The last year has seen the biggest exodus of talent from tech in a generation. This is underreported because many of these people are baby boomers retiring or told to retire by their bosses.
Supply and demand are shifting under the feet of the coming generation. University jobs are impossible to find. Engineers are being told to get in the office, now, 5 days a week. Office workers are seeing technology tied to their movements, to their keystrokes, because bosses know they can get away with it. The gains and protections of the pandemic era are being systematically stripped away.
Techbros Are Not Your Friends
Meanwhile, techbros who started life on third base and think they hit triples are saying college is irrelevant. They’re suggesting your kids learn auto mechanics. This is the most asinine career advice of the century. Fixing stuff has always been a dead end job. What they seem to mean is that it’s factory work that now demands superior skills, as opposed to office work, and to an extent they’re right. Blue collar and white collar are no longer descriptions of economic value.
Jensen Huang, who rebuilt the clouds at Nvidia, now sees armies of humanoid robots as his future market. I don’t think robots have to look like people. We’re just one possible machine design. But he’s right, that new combinations of computer intelligence and mechanical design can transform how we live and work in the next decades. Get out your slide rule.
I know that I’m early in spotting this trend. I have been that way all my life. It’s possible I’m being an alarmist. I have been accused of that, too.
But on the general trends that have defined my time, ever since the 1970s, I’ve been right. Economic leadership has passed from oil to technology. The Internet I began covering in the mid-1980s now dominates the world.
It’s all about to shift. The next generation of technology will involve mechanics, biology, and complex systems built using cloud intelligence. What follows will look nothing like what has come before.
It’s time to talk about it. We can’t let the Techbros define the rest of us out of the equation.
