Background:  Twenty or so years ago, workers would train their human replacements in Asia or some other part of the world.  The company would say something like we’re expanding offshore, but your job is safe.  We will keep and retrain you for a higher paying job such as calibrating equipment or coding robots.

OK.  Seemed good.  The plant was built in China.  Human workers were trained.  US workers were fired.  We understand this trope because we’ve seen it over and over again.

New trope:  What’s the new business trope?  People are now training machines and AI to do their jobs.  The result is the same.  They can lose their jobs.

Great BBC story:   BBC had a great story (AI Took Their Jobs, June 16, 2024) about a company with 60 writers and editors that published blog posts and articles.  One day management came by and said they wanted to use AI to format the articles.  Humans would edit the pieces to make them seem human.

What happened?  Phase II automation was ChatGPT would write the entire article.  What about the human workers?  All but one got fired.

Is this the future of media?  What about all those news rooms and journalists.  Do you need a real person on TV reading the news?  Why not an avatar?  Do you need news rooms?  Do you need journalists?  Anyway, you get the point.

What about the 1000’s of communications grads and English majors?  At the University of Oregon, communications is the #1 degree in terms of the size of graduates.

Hard lesson earned:  According to the BBC article, the American Writers and Artists Institute’s #1 class by far is AI for its members.  If you can’t fight them, I guess join them.

What’s your plan?