Someone alive today will be the last professional writer. Not the last person who writes. People will always write. But the last person who makes a living primarily by arranging words on behalf of others. That person exists right now. They might be in their twenties or thirties. They might be starting their career as I type this.
And they will be the last.
This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, I think, probably true. The economics of professional writing have collapsed, and AI is accelerating that collapse to its conclusion.
Go look at job boards. Filter for junior or entry-level developer positions. Notice anything?
There are barely any. And the ones that exist have requirements that would have been mid-level a few years ago. Two years of experience for an entry-level role. A portfolio of shipped projects. Knowledge of seventeen different technologies. The junior developer job, as a category, is disappearing.
We have not admitted this yet. Bootcamps are still selling the dream. Universities are still churning out CS graduates. Everyone talks about the skills shortage.
For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later.
Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it.
The new skill is prompting. Not in the narrow sense of writing clever queries to ChatGPT. In the broader sense of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answer. The people who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who can extract value from these tools. Credentials are becoming less relevant by the day.
I am going to be bleak for a moment. You should probably sit down.
AI is going to take a lot of jobs. Not in some distant science fiction future. Soon. Maybe not your specific job in the next twelve months, but within the next decade, the employment landscape is going to look radically different. And I do not think we are ready.
This is not doomerism. This is observation. The capabilities are improving faster than anyone predicted. The economic incentives are obvious. The companies building this technology are not doing it for fun. They are doing it because automation at scale is the most valuable thing in human history.
Mark Zuckerberg bet his entire company on the metaverse. He renamed Facebook to Meta. He poured tens of billions of dollars into Reality Labs. He did interviews in virtual environments with cartoon avatars that haunted my nightmares. He insisted this was the future of human interaction.
Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted this. The metaverse was not a response to demand. It was one billionaire’s science fiction fantasy imposed on the rest of us.
Crypto has been around for over fifteen years now. Bitcoin launched in 2009. Ethereum in 2015. We have had a decade and a half of innovation, billions of dollars of investment, countless startups, multiple boom and bust cycles, and a generation of developers working on blockchain technology.
Name one problem crypto solved for regular people.
Not hypothetical problems. Not problems that might exist in authoritarian regimes. Not problems that only crypto people have because they got into crypto. Real problems. The kind normal people experience and would pay to fix.
I’ve been in thousands of meetings over my career. Most of them could have been an email. Some of them could have been a Slack message. A disturbing number of them could have been absolutely nothing at all.
The modern workplace has a meeting addiction. Got a problem? Schedule a meeting. Need to make a decision? Meeting. Want to share an update that affects three people? Better book a room for twelve and block out an hour. It’s reflexive at this point, like reaching for your phone when you’re bored.
Every email client on earth has made it trivially easy to commit one of the most devastating acts of workplace communication: the unnecessary reply all.
One click. That is all it takes. One click and suddenly forty-seven people who did not need to be involved are involved. One click and an email thread that could have died quietly explodes into a cascade of responses, counter-responses, and people asking to be removed from the thread, which of course they send as a reply all.
Every few years someone publishes a “how I work” post and I read it thinking yeah, that’s nice, but do you actually do all of that or did you just describe the idealised version of yourself? The version that wakes up at 5am, journals, meditates, drinks a green smoothie, and has inbox zero by 9am.
I’m not that person. I never have been. Here’s what actually happens.
I wake up sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 because my kids have decided that’s when the day starts regardless of what I think about it. There’s no alarm clock. There hasn’t been one in years. Children are the most reliable and least snooze-able alarm system ever invented. I make coffee. Strong, black, no sugar. This is not a personality trait. It’s a dependency.
You have a meeting on your calendar. It is thirty minutes long. There are six people invited. The topic is something that could be summarised in two sentences. By the time everyone joins, exchanges pleasantries, gets distracted, and finally discusses the actual subject, you have burned three person-hours of collective time.
That meeting should have been an email.
But wait. You sent an email. It was three paragraphs explaining a decision. Nobody needed to respond. Nobody needed to discuss. You just needed people to know something. Now six people have another email in their inbox, another thing to read, another context switch in their day.