“Will AI take my job?” assumes a clean binary: employed or replaced. The reality is messier. Roles are being hollowed out, restructured, and redefined in ways that never surface in the unemployment figures. In fact, the parts of your job that have already changed tell you more about where this is heading than any forecast of full automation.

The forecasts, meanwhile, keep getting louder. Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman gives the technology 18 months to reach human-level performance on most professional tasks. The evidence sits some distance behind the confidence. A Thomson Reuters report found lawyers and accountants using AI for narrow work like document review reported only marginal productivity gains, and a METR study found AI made experienced developers’ tasks take 20% longer rather than less. Even Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who spent last year warning that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs, has since walked the prediction back.

That apocalyptic framing has hardened into the default assumption, repeated by Geoffrey Hinton and Kai-Fu Lee alike. Scale AI’s Jason Droege pushed against it at the Semafor World Economy conference, arguing that executives are using AI as an excuse to dress up ordinary cost-cutting as visionary restructuring. The Economist makes a similar case, tracing the current tech jobs bust to familiar causes: interest-rate rises since 2022, accelerating offshoring to India, and a correction after the 2020-21 hiring binge.

Both things can be true at once. Most layoffs probably are not really about AI, and displacement is still measurable where it counts. Full-time employment for graduates in the most exposed fields, including computer and information science, fell from nearly 70% to 55% in the three years after ChatGPT launched, while undergraduate enrolment in programming dropped 26% in a single year. An Epoch AI and Ipsos survey found that 20% of full-time workers say AI has taken over tasks they used to do, against 15% who say it has created new work for them. In India, the retailer Dukaan replaced 90% of its support staff with chatbots; a year on, query resolution has collapsed from hours to minutes and the chief executive calls it vindication. But while the metrics work, the social ledger is harder to read.

Two harms get far less attention than the headline question, and both are already here. The first is surveillance, a theme I explored in a feature for Acumen on what it means to work alongside AI colleagues. A third of UK employers now use AI monitoring tools, and Meta has floated tracking employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train its own models. As Nazrul Islam writes in The Guardian, plenty of jobs will survive, but they will be more pressured, more fragmented, and less human. The second harm hides in the supply chain. The annotators who label the data these systems depend on are often unemployed graduates on precarious contracts; Karen Hao’s reporting on America’s AI sweatshops finds 86% struggle to meet basic financial obligations and more than one in five have experienced homelessness.

As a curriculum developer, I’ve seen that the difference between effective and ineffective design is rarely the content. Instead, it’s the clarity of the specification: what, exactly, should someone be able to do afterwards. The AI tooling executives Andrew Lau and Tariq Shaukat describe the same shift in software, where describing what to build has become harder than writing the code. The skill that holds its value is the ability to say precisely what you mean. No wonder the hottest hiring category in tech right now is writers and communicators, with Anthropic tripling the size of its communications team and OpenAI posting comms roles paying above $400,000. It seems that when everyone can generate text, the people who can think through what to say grow more valuable.

So we have time, as the Economist concedes in its cover leader. The open question is what we do with it. Spencer Greenberg maps the things people intrinsically value, among them achievement and connection, and notes that achievement takes the hardest knock when a machine outperforms us at work we once took pride in. So the danger is subtler than mass joblessness. It’s that we could spend the time we have optimising for efficiency until we have quietly automated the humanity out of work that used to mean something.

It is, as John Irving writes in A Prayer for Owen Meany, a matter of nerve:

“If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.

“Before you get to work, it’s worth deciding which hat you’re being asked to wear… pursuing the possible or optimising the certain.” ~ Possibility vs. certainty

Learn more: Know Decide Act 

“Do work that matters for people who care.” ~ Building blocks of marketing

Learn more: How to Find Fulfilling Work

“Find and focus on the projects that take insight, guts and a tolerance for risk. The projects that involve significant human connection and effort.” ~ Finding the difficult work

Learn more: Betting on You

“Getting more boxes checked simply leads to having more boxes checked. If we’re here to make a difference, we often get there with better, not with more.” ~ Winging it

Learn more: The Art of Less 

“Human work is any work an AI can’t do (yet).” ~ Hallucinations and human work

Learn more: The Remix 

“If all that’s needed is the push of a button, we can find someone cheaper than you to push it.” ~ The AI effort gap

Learn more: Key Person of Influence 

“If it’s really important, choose a path that involves less luck.” ~ Seeing the lottery

Learn more: The Science of Intelligent Achievement

“If tech helps you finish your task faster, the time saved is yours. Take the rest of the day off (at least until the boss recalibrates the task expectations.)” ~ Tasks and projects

Learn more: Leisure

“Imposter syndrome is real, and it arrives whenever we’re doing important work.” ~ Notes to myself

Learn more: Trust Yourself 

“In the ideal world, credentials would be awarded to all experts, and withdrawn from all charlatans. But they don’t always line up as neatly as that.” ~ Expertise and credentials

Learn more: The Unspoken Truths for Career Success 

“One of the best career choices you can make is to hire a great boss. A great boss will support you as you encounter worthwhile challenges. They’ll engage you and pay you fairly. They’ll help you build a career at the same time they teach you about the work that needs to be done.” ~ Good-boss friendly

Learn more: Managing Up 

“Overdelivering on smaller promises is a shortcut to trust, loyalty and resilience.” ~ A little ahead (vs. a little behind)

Learn more: The Thin Book of Trust 

“Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.” ~ Agency and contribution

Learn more: The Element

“Spending your days, day after day, not caring is a tragedy. They might not deserve your focus and effort, but you do.” ~ “They’re not paying me enough to care”

Learn more: The Passion Paradox

“There’s always room for someone who is willing to work harder and be kinder than just about everyone else.” ~ Hard work and goodwill

Learn more: How to Be a Star at Work 

“Waiting for trouble means that you’re going to spend your days dealing with trouble.” ~ Organising for urgent

Learn more: One Second Ahead 

“We do the work because we can, because we have the opportunity to contribute. If appreciation results, that’s nice, but it’s out of our control.” ~ Overappreciated

Learn more: The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace 

“We expend effort. We create value. It’s easy to get confused about which one we’re going to ultimately be compensated for.” ~ Effort and value

Learn more: Nine Lies About Work 

“We’re not machines, or even cogs in a machine. When we are at our best, we’re fully human.” ~ Seeking yoyu

Learn more: 52 Weeks of Wellbeing 

“What’s the attainable, practical and generous thing you haven’t done yet? What will it take for it to become a priority?” ~ Projects left undone

Learn more: Moral Ambition 

“When we bring humanity to the work in a way that others demand, labour is honoured and valued.” ~ Productivity, AI and pushback

Learn more: Work Life Well Lived 

“Work is an expression of ourselves, and a chance to find meaning as we make a difference and earn a living.” ~ What sort of success?

Learn more: The Good Enough Job

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Palantir CEO Alex Karp said at Davos that AI will destroy humanities jobs. His solution: vocational training and neurodivergence. Not every executive agrees. Daniela Amodei of Anthropic argues that communication, empathy, and curiosity become more valuable in an AI world, and McKinsey is actively recruiting liberal arts graduates as sources of creativity to escape AI’s linear problem-solving. But the disagreement itself is telling. It seems that the people building AI cannot agree on what skills survive it.

Meanwhile, the creative industries are already living through the consequences. In The Guardian, artist Molly Crabapple describes watching AI-generated imitations of her work flood the internet after image generators scraped her entire portfolio without her knowledge. She frames this as the greatest art heist in history: billions of images taken without credit, compensation, or consent. What makes her account particularly striking is her observation that even journalists who publicly championed AI privately conceded it would eliminate writers.

The impact extends across borders and mediums. Rest of World reports that voice actors in Brazil, India, Mexico, South Korea, and China are mobilising as studios replace human performances with AI dubbing. In India, voice actor Ganessh Divekar discovered his voice had been mixed with another actor’s using AI, with no recourse. In Brazil, Fabio Azevedo warns of “cultural pasteurisation”: the loss of local idiosyncrasies that make dubbed content feel genuinely Brazilian, or Indian, or Korean.

Some artists are adopting the view if that you can’t beat them you might as well join them. But When Megan McArdle mentioned on X that she uses AI tools in her work, the response was ferocious. In a Washington Post column, she drew a line I recognise from my own practice: AI helps with research and steelmanning opposing views, but it never touches the writing itself. The Economist’s column on the “Shy Girl” controversy pushed further, cataloguing the tics of machine prose while warning that the real threat is AI writing that mainstream readers will happily accept.

I keep returning to a distinction that Richard Beard draws in Aeon. LLMs, he says, are “cliché machines” trained on our weakness for generating maximum content with minimum effort. What they cannot do is surprise. They cannot access what Beard calls “the electric shorting between inner lives” that makes writing matter. So while comedian Joel Beasley used AI to analyse his sets and landed a 20-date tour, the comedy was his. And while photographer Boris Eldagsen works exclusively with AI image generators after 30 years with cameras, the knowledge and instinct behind his choices remain stubbornly human.

I recently profiled two African filmmakers, Milisuthando Bongela and Akuol de Mabior, for a feature called Voices of African Cinema (PDF). Both are creating work that AI could never produce: films rooted in personal memory, cultural healing, and the kind of embodied experience that no training dataset can replicate. As Bongela puts it: “When a story is able to be itself and wear its own spirit, it can say, ‘we are actually very, very profoundly okay as a people.'” That is not a sentence a language model will ever generate on its own.

The answer, then, is not to reject AI entirely or to surrender to it. The answer is to stay close to the things that make your creative work yours: the stories only you can tell, the perspective only you have earned, the surprise that comes from a life lived attentively. It’s much like Joyce Carol Oates writes in Blonde (also available on Audible):

Life is just material for your art. Life is what fades; art is what remains.

For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.

A surgeon in the middle of an operation should probably not experiment with an untested technique. But a writer, a leader or a musician can make that question part of their craft. ~ That might be the wrong question

Learn more: The Creative Shift

Change the tools (and their distribution) and you change the future. ~ Tools and the long tail

Learn more: The Alchemy of Us

Creativity is a craft and a skill. ~ The second time through

Learn more: Playful

Curiosity is a skill, and it can be taught. ~ Why and how

Learn more: Lateral Thinking for Every Day

If you want to do artistic work, you’ll need to give up the certainty that comes with a reliable prediction. Part of the deal. ~ Hard to predict

Learn more: The Shape of Things Unseen

If your project is about making things better, organising the disorganised, connecting the disconnected and building community, you shouldn’t wait until the conditions are ideal. ~ Rainy day surfer

Learn more: Platformland

In a long tail world filled with browsing, it’s easy to confuse ‘popular’ with ‘great.’ It’s more productive to aim for great. ~ Your best work

Learn more: Lit

‘Obvious’ closes the door to inquiry. ‘Perhaps’ opens it. ~ Obvious vs perhaps

Learn more: Sapiens

Perfectionism is not related to quality. ~ Notes to myself

Learn more: No Fear, No Failure

Significant division and strong opinions (and widespread skepticism) don’t cause great ideas, but they’re often present when they arrive. ~ Important breakthroughs

Learn more: What’s Our Problem?

Successful outcomes often follow unpredicted actions. If we allow ourselves to do things that might not work, we’re far more likely to discover the things that do. ~ Repeat happy accidents

Learn more: Seeing What Others Don’t

The hard part might not be the idea – it’s in creating the conditions for others to participate. ~ The magic of the commons

Learn more: Origin Story

The hard work of innovation or the creation of revolution involves imagining what others consider unimaginable and speaking up with the unspeakable. ~ The unimaginable and the unspeakable

Learn more: Innovators

Time spent on a hobby feels like time well spent. Obstacles and setbacks aren’t a tragedy, they’re simply part of the journey, the things that make it interesting. ~ Hobby mindset

Learn more: A Year of Creativity

When we set out to create, it helps to understand who our collaborators are and to choose them wisely. ~ Movies, books and paintings

Learn more: The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

When we use a new technology as a shortcut to replace our judgment, we’ve handed over the human part, and it won’t work. The magic disappears. But when we use new technology to provoke and amplify, when we use it for tasks instead of projects, we’re doing what we’ve always done – creating something for the people we seek to serve. ~ The writer’s room

Learn more: The Illusion of Innovation

While many institutions suffer from too much rigor, just about all of them would benefit from more curiosity. ~ Rigor and curiosity

Learn more: The Shape of Wonder

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I say that as someone who has learned a lot from taking almost 300 online courses in the last nine years. And while some might be worried about how the decline in reading books is making us dumber or that we live in a post-truth world, I’m excited about how the education system can change for a better future, much like Rumi writes in Mathnawi (also available on Audible).

Wisdom and knowledge serve to guide the wanderers; were there but one road, wisdom would be needless.

To keep growing, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.

“Education is distinct from learning. Organised education is a form of indoctrination and certification. Sometimes it leads to learning, but not always.” ~ Bringing goodwill to the conversation

Learn more: The Education of Millionaires

“Focus on the hard part.” ~ Notes to myself

Learn more: The Busy Brain Cure

“If you fail to show us the facts, it’s difficult to accept your analysis.” ~ Analysis = Facts + Interpretation

Learn more: Pragmatism

“If you want to clarify our understanding, it helps to be specific.” ~ Specific

Learn more: The Reading Mind

“Learning is hard. It creates tension. It takes time. Most of all, it requires a commitment to becoming someone else, a bet we’re making that might not turn out the way we hope.” ~ Education is free, learning is expensive

Learn more: Productive Failure

“Logic is symbolic. Learning requires handholds to help us understand the symbols, but it’s the logic that remains.” ~ Seeking metaphor

Learn more: Liminal Thinking

“Once you find software that’s worth the time to learn, learn it.” ~ The use (and design) of tools

Learn more: Hyperefficient

“Sooner or later, we are all self taught.” ~ Aha!

Learn more: Limitless

“The job of the teacher is to create the conditions for the student to explore their incompetence long enough to learn something useful.” ~ Don’t steal the revelation

Learn more: Uncommon Sense Teaching

“The more experience, assets and privilege we have, the less excusable it is to do stupid things. And at the same time, the more useful it is to announce that we’re not smart (yet).” ~ Not smart vs. stupid

Learn more: Wisdom Takes Work

“The most difficult part of adult learning is choosing to learn.” ~ Honesty about better

Learn more: The Little Book of Talent

“The number of people reading a post or following an account is not a useful indicator of whether or not the ideas within are made up or not. Act accordingly.” ~ The Weekly World News version of the future

Learn more: Principles of Human Knowledge

“The place you went to school or the number of followers you have online are credentials. If they help you create value, that’s great. But they’re not the same as expertise.” ~ Expertise and credentials

Learn more: Mastery

“Upskilling is the path forward.” ~ “Use your best judgment”

Learn more: Microskills

“When we choose to learn, our active participation makes a difference.” ~ What the world teaches us

Learn more: Primal Intelligence

“Wonder is a choice, and we can find it if we look for it.” ~ An eroding sense of wonder

Learn more: How to Fall in Love With Questions

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But even though dealing with other people means dealing with conflict and complications, it’s worth the cost, much like James Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room (also available on Audible):

Not many people have died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour, for the lack of it.

For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.

“A convincing argument works when the recipient is convinced, not you.” ~ A convincing argument

Learn more: The Art of Persuasion

“Annoyance is the inflammation that occurs after a mild emotional injury or wound. Like a physical inflammation, if it’s not cared for it can become infected.” ~ Annoyed

Learn more: The Relationship Cure

“Culture works hard to maintain its status quo, and persistent community action can change our standards.” ~ Uncomfortable/unspoken

Learn more: Tribal

“Division is satisfying in the short run, and it might even draw a crowd. But the only useful reason to disconnect is if it opens up the chance to increase connection somewhere else.” ~ Division is easier than connection

Learn more: Collaborating with the Enemy

“Even at a distance, we can sometimes tell if someone is educated, rich, powerful or physically attractive. But that doesn’t always correlate with smart, kind or honest.” ~ Confused by signals

Learn more: Reading People

“Everyone who disagrees with you is right to do so – based on who they are and what they see.” ~ Building blocks of marketing

Learn more: I Respectfully Disagree

“Freedom, liberty and independence are human rights. But they depend on responsibility. Responsibility to others, to our future, to the community.” ~ Refocusing

Learn more: The Secret of Our Success

“If we want to change how others respond, we need to change their circumstances and how they see their options.” ~ Under the circumstances

Learn more: Mindwise

“It’s really difficult to please everyone. Which means that we have to figure out which someone we’re here for.” ~ Here to please

Learn more: Boundaries

“Making a point doesn’t take very long and it can be gratifying in the moment. Making an impact happens over time, and rarely brings the same sort of short-term glee.” ~ Making a point

Learn more: The Small BIG

“Our biggest commitments, the things we are most dedicated to, rarely pay us back in equal measure. That might be the point.” ~ Reciprocity

Learn more: Real Love

“Real gratitude requires empathy. Everyone is under the circumstances. Everyone does the best they think they can with the options they think they have.” ~ Gratitude and empathy

Learn more: Atlas of the Heart

“Selfish brutality might work in the short run, but it always breaks.” ~ “Get outta my way”

Learn more: Not Nice

“Someone else’s trauma doesn’t diminish yours. In fact, when we can find the space to see that others have their own mess to deal with, it opens the door for forward motion.” ~ Worst possible

Learn more: How to Be an Adult in Relationships

“Someone will always be opposed to the change we seek to make. And there’s always someone who wants to help.” ~ And when it breaks?

Learn more: The Power of Discord

“Starting from the place that we’re all imperfect makes it easy to find empathy, for others and ourselves.” ~ We are all goofballs

Learn more: How to be a Friend (In an Unfriendly World)

“Status shows up whenever humans do, and it is the invisible underpinning of our culture.” ~ Status (and the grass tax)

Learn more: Status Games

“The benefit of the doubt creates connection. When we exclude people based on surface judgments, we penalize each other.” ~ Agency and contribution

Learn more: Supercommunicators

“The first things humans invented, before fire, the wheel or baked brie, was trust.” ~ Scams at scale

Learn more: Trust Matters More Than Ever

“There’s a lesson in every interaction, if we want there to be.” ~ What the world teaches us

Learn more: How to Listen

“There’s usually an opportunity to be of service.” ~ Notes to myself

Learn more: Kind

“When we win by having someone else lose, we set up a conflict. It’s clear, direct but not generative. But when we win by confronting our fear, everyone benefits.” ~ Two kinds of confrontations

Learn more: From Conflict to Courage

“When you’re about to offer advice, ask a question or blurt out a response, wait five seconds. That pause shifts the way what you say next will be perceived.” ~ The power of a pause

Learn more: The Pause Principle

“While it can be fun to change someone else’s position, it’s also a gift to learn enough to change ours.” ~ How to win an argument with a toddler

Learn more: I Never Thought of It That Way

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No matter what your plans are for 2026, it pays to dream big, much like Pau Auster writes in Moon Palace (also available on Audible):

Once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances.

For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.

“Become the self you’d be proud to be. Hang out with people and ideas that help you become that self. Act like that self every chance you get.” ~ “Be yourself”

Learn more: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

“Consistent, gradual and persistent are the unsung forces of cultural change.” ~ The thing about pressure

Learn more: Make Change That Lasts

“Easy isn’t the point. Better is. Challenging the status quo is difficult, and worth it.” ~ Lulled

Learn more: The Charge

“Going forward requires skills, attitudes and belief. A rare combination.” ~ The biggest thing you bring to the project is forward

Learn more: Get It Done

“If you’re always demanding a few more than whatever you have, you’re signing up for a journey that never ends.” ~ Infinity is not a number

Learn more: The Success Myth

“If you’re serious, say, ‘yes.’ And if it’s not for you, walk away. But endlessly reconsidering opportunities without forward motion is a place to hide.” ~ “No” is an option

Learn more: Ready Aim Fire!

“No one is coming to pick you. Today’s a great day to pick yourself.” ~ Ject!

Learn more: Who Better Than You?

“Often, people will point to the velocity of the change they’re making without pausing to consider the direction of that change.” ~ What sort of progress?

Learn more: Switch

“Our actions become our habits, and our habits attract others. That becomes our community, and our community builds systems. Those systems feel awkward until they become normal, and then, once normal, they become the status quo.” ~ Our practice

Learn more: Ritual

“Spend enough time inventing possible futures in your head and you won’t have any time to build the future we will all share. Time to get to work.” ~ Daydream fatigue

Learn more: Build, Don’t Talk

“Start where you are. Start with what you’ve got. Start now.” ~ Act now!

Learn more: Get Momentum

“The future unfolds, with or without us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bend it in a useful direction.” ~ Memo to the future

Learn more: Winners

“The hard part isn’t finding proof before you begin. The hard part is beginning, knowing you might not succeed.” ~ The opposite of a good idea…

Learn more: Tiny Experiments

“The simple life hack is to lower your expectations, regardless of what you’re entitled to. Create the conditions for the outcome you seek, but leave yourself room if it doesn’t arrive.” ~ Expectations

Learn more: Effortless

“There are countless things we can do today to change tomorrow.” ~ The future

Learn more: Make Today Count

“There is no perfect moment to begin.” ~ Notes to myself

Learn more: Skip the Line

“We can’t change the past. But the future might be up to us.” ~ Time travel

Learn more: What’s Your Dream?

“When we get hooked on what we get next instead of focusing on what actually matters in the now, we sign up for a crash.” ~ Getting to next

Learn more: The Motivation Myth

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