Is Your Job Doomed?

In this thirteen-minute Episode 34, Brick Thompson and Ed Daniels discuss a new trend of CEO’s warning their employees that they need to learn how to use AI. Brick and Ed discuss Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman’s letter to his employees about AI. 

Brick reads a quote “If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I am not trying to scare you….I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry. Are we all doomed? Not all of us, but those who will not wake up and understand the new reality fast, are, unfortunately, doomed.” 

https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2025/04/fiverr-ceos-stunning-letter-to-all.html

Ed advises employees, “You gotta be ready, you gotta be nimble, and you gotta have a Plan A, a Plan B and a Plan C for your career.” Brick and Ed discuss the likely short term future and the impact of AI on employment and career choices. Brick says CEOs must set aside a certain portion of each day to study AI and learn about new AI trends and innovations. If possible, CEOs should assign one or more employees to just stay on top of AI developments. 

To wrap it all up, Ed and Brick say, “You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.” (Or if not you, your job.) 

The name of this podcast, Beyond Electric Sheep, is a reference to the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. That novel is the source for the movies Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). It explores the themes of artificial intelligence, empathy, and reality in a dystopian future where humans and androids coexist. The novel raises the question of whether androids can dream or feel anything at all, and whether they are different from humans in any meaningful way. 

In our Beyond Electric Sheep podcast we go beyond the novel and the movies and discuss the broader implications and applications of artificial intelligence in our personal lives and in our businesses. We explore the pragmatic as well as the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from creating and interacting with intelligent machines.

Beyond Electric Sheep is also available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYg2J0jET_BPCKSnsxz8mleEmYogYJZhn

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Welcome to the Beyond Electric Sheet podcast. I'm Brick Thompson. And I'm Ed Daniels. Ed, we wanted to talk about one more topic today. We've done a couple episodes for our last episode. We wanted to talk about something that happened over the last... six, eight weeks, where we started to see letters from CEOs, memos from CEOs to their staff about what's coming with AI and what people need to be prepared for. I think the one that you raised over an email was the Fiverr CEO, Kaufman, Micah Kaufman, I think. It was a pretty stark email. memo about, hey, it's not going to, you know, is it going to wipe out all our jobs? Well, not all of them. The people who get with it and start using AI well can do well, but the ones that don't, yeah, it's going to wipe

SPEAKER_00: 0:53

theirs out. There's a nice, concise, one-page email to all of the employees, and he knew it would get out, of course, beyond the company, and that was fine.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04

Yeah, he did. He said, this is going to leak, so I'm just going to put it out. One of the first thoughts I had, and I just expressed to you before we started recording, was Two years ago, last year even, we were talking about that statement that became a cliche, which is it's not AI that's going to take your job. It's someone who's good at using AI or better at using AI than you that's going to take your job. I think that's changed. I think AI is going to take a lot of jobs. That doesn't mean you won't have a job, but if you're not good at using AI and you're not good at pivoting and being able to be adaptive and figure out how to add value to these using these tools to the company you're working for, it could be a problem, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49

Right. So it's still a good idea. We wouldn't be doing these podcasts if we didn't think that our listeners should learn about AI, get better at AI, start to use AI in their jobs. But what we're saying is that AI capabilities are accelerating so fast now that they're really going to be able to take over a lot of jobs in their entirety, even People that know AI aren't guaranteed of anything. So we all need to be on our toes. We all need to be learning constantly and figuring out how we can apply AI in our jobs, in our potential jobs, in our daily lives.

SPEAKER_01: 2:30

Yeah. Here's one of the things Kaufman said. I was paraphrasing. I'll just read you his quote. He said, if you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. Months. Are we doomed? Not all of us, but those who will not wake up and understand the new reality fast are unfortunately doomed. It's a pretty stark way of putting it. I mean, you know, I think he's doing what a lot of us are doing, even in my small company, which is trying to get people to understand, okay, this is happening. We need to embrace it. If we don't, we're going to be left behind. None of us knows exactly how to do it, but we all need to be being creative and pivoting and be flexible and figure out how to bring value out of these things. He says your value will decrease before you know what hit you if you don't know how to use generative AI. I think that's right.

SPEAKER_00: 3:28

And it's a scary thing, you know. I don't know about your situation, but I know in most companies you have a huge proportion of the employees that are looking for security. They're looking for knowing that the next day and the day after that, when you show up for your job, you're going to have a job that there's some predictability about what you're doing and that you have a path towards ultimately retiring and being able to have a nice job. a nice nest egg set aside. To pay for your robots. Yeah, right, all those things. So those people, they need to awaken and think about what's coming.

SPEAKER_01: 4:16

It will vary a lot from company to company. My company, at least in the near term, is in a great spot because we deal with data. And data is really important to having AI be able to do its job as well. So we're good at extracting data and cleaning it and governance and creating metadata and documentation around the data so that AIs can interact with it. Well, great. We'll do that. But other companies do that, too. So we better be using these tools to do that really well. At some point, AIs may be able to do all of that. And then where have we switched? Where do we fit in the value chain? Well, we'll figure that out. But we have to be really flexible. This is not a time where you can say, no, I'm just going to do this for the next 10 years. You can do this for the next couple of years. Make sure you're still being flexible and bringing the tools to bear, but keep your eyes open for what's happening.

SPEAKER_00: 5:09

You know, we won't talk about this in this conversation, but that means a lot of... therapy, if you want to call it that, for employees to understand what the situation is and to deal with the anxiety. Most people, you know, maybe you and I are a little bit of an exception because we've always lived sort of on the knife edge of technology and what the implications are, right? And, you know, it doesn't always work out, but people are going to need to come to grips with this and, you know, it's not going to do anybody any good to sort of fall apart and have anxiety attacks and not be able to get up in the morning. So we're going to have to deal with that.

SPEAKER_01: 5:52

It seems unlikely there's a scenario where everybody is suddenly on the street and has no ability to fend for themselves. I don't think that's going to happen, but you could feel some dislocation if you're not paying attention and skilling up around AI. We're not going to do that here. I've been pushing it since ChatGPT, actually well before that, but with ChatGPT I really sort of the light bulb went off saying, okay, we better start figuring out how to leverage this. And I've been pushing that internally, and my team's done a great job, all my employees, of embracing that. So I think we'll be fine with that. However, there will be hard dislocations still to come that we're going to have to adjust to again, I'm sure of it.

SPEAKER_00: 6:34

Right. And so that means that for the, you know, people, the listeners to this podcast, that means you got to be ready. You got to be nimble. You got to have plan A, plan B and plan C. And you need to be, you know, if you're able, you need to be contributing to your company's direction and be forthright and be willing to. And I think he says that in the email that you mentioned, you have to be willing to come up with ideas and suggestions for your company and your boss, your immediate supervisors, your peers, and not be afraid to make suggestions. And, you know, as with any suggestion, they're not always going to be accepted or taken or may not fit. But the idea is you've got to be thinking about where you and your company need to be going next. I think

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

that's right. You made me think of a saying. I think it's a military saying. Planning is good. Plans are not. So that effort of thinking about that and doing that planning.

SPEAKER_00: 7:35

No plan survives the first engagement. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01: 7:38

I mean, obviously that's a bit hyperbolic and extreme because your planning does lead to things that end up being good. But just realize that, okay, do planning. That's valuable. And as you start implementing the plan, be ready to be really nimble about it, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 7:54

And, you know, you're not being compassionate to your employees or your subordinates or your peers if you're not honest with them about what's happening and what's coming right around the corner. You may think that, you know, just— Keep calming them down and helping them accept the status quo is a good thing, but it really isn't. They need to understand the big changes that are right around the corner.

SPEAKER_01: 8:19

Yeah, I mean, you're right. You're not... You're not being fair to them, but you're not being fair to yourself either. I mean, if you're running an organization or part of an organization and you're not embracing this, you're not going to do well probably.

SPEAKER_00: 8:33

You're

SPEAKER_01: 8:33

going to struggle. Other people will be more competitive than you, I think, other organizations.

SPEAKER_00: 8:39

Yeah. So what proportion of CEOs do you think sort of get what this is all about and are taking the next step in communicating with their teams about this?

SPEAKER_01: 8:52

I don't know. It would be a complete guess. I do speak to people who are aware but not worried. They've got bigger problems solving this quarter's delivery problems or whatever. They'll deal with that later. So there's a certain percentage that maybe aren't realizing it's as imminent as I think it is and as a lot of people think it is, like Kauffman and a lot of other people. There are a lot that are getting it. I think there are a lot that aren't quite sure what to do. There's a bit of paralysis. Like, I don't know what to do. Every time I start to do something, it changes. How do you navigate that, I think, is a whole different world. Because it used to be that some new technology would come along, you could master it, and you could do business on that for at least the next five years, sometimes 10, sometimes 20. This is going to require us to shift every few months,

SPEAKER_00: 9:43

probably. So it's not as prescriptive as situations that... many CEOs encounter, right? You're not saying we're going to close this manufacturing plant and open a new one over here, or we're going to do a, you know, change our product line in this way or that way. It's much more tenuous or uncertain than that, but yet it's still as critical to let people know. I

SPEAKER_01: 10:11

think it is. I mean, you think of historical things like the famous one, the buggy whip manufacturers, right? You can have a great buggy whip business. Here comes the horseless carriage, automobiles. If you didn't pivot to making upholstery for automobiles, you probably went out of business. But 100 years ago when that was happening, if you did that pivot, you had a good business now for the next 50 years potentially, maybe longer. This is different, I think. You're getting something equivalent to that change from– horses to the horseless carriage is happening frequently, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 10:51

Right. So that means, I mean, it's important to understand the industry that you're in, the business you're in, the company that you're with, how you can help that company transition and how you can help with that process, but also to be personally prepared for Potential dislocation changes into some completely different industry or a different situation than you were in. And it means being ready to pivot and deal with it and mentally to be able to deal with a change in what might have been the most important thing in your in your life or your work is now. gone and now you have to deal with something different.

SPEAKER_01: 11:35

I think what CEOs of mid-market companies, probably any company, need to be doing is just paying attention every day, literally. Spend some portion of every day reading or watching videos or listening to your podcast, whatever, to stay sort of on top of what's happening. You can't stay perfectly on top because there's so many things happening. You need to make sure either you, if you're a small company, or someone on your team is really invested, and their job is to think about this and to problem solve and come to you with strategies around it. If you're in a smaller company like me, that's kind of my job right now. I have really smart tech people working for me as well. But I need to be carrying the torch sort of at the conceptual level. And I think some people are not doing that right now. Maybe they're not that interested. I'm sort of a tech nerd, so I'm interested in it. So it's fun for me to do that. For some people, that would just be a chore a bit. I still think they need to do it. And then find someone in their organization who it's not a chore for.

SPEAKER_00: 12:35

So you could say, you know, you might not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you. I like

SPEAKER_01: 12:44

that. We should have Sora do a good meme for that one. Yeah, I'm sure that's actually AI doesn't care. It doesn't know you're there. It

SPEAKER_00: 12:52

might be interested in your job, though. Right, yeah. At least the people running it.

SPEAKER_01: 12:58

Okay, well, good discussion

SPEAKER_00: 13:00

again. Interesting times we live in. Definitely. All right. Talk soon.

SPEAKER_01: 13:05

All right.

SPEAKER_00: 13:05

Bye.

UNKNOWN: 13:06

Bye.