The entire creative class is about to find out what the blue collar people experienced from the 1980’s onwards.

If you remember movies like Gung Ho, On the Waterfront, or The Deer Hunter, you know this. You know who I am talking about. Those movies captured a disappearing American worker. These workers had a nice factory job or manual labor job. They showed that culture of work.

That culture is now gone and was promised to be replaced. Replaced by creative class jobs –

• Software Engineer
• Graphic Designer
• Architect
• Marketing Manager
• UX/UI Designer
• Writer
• Film Director
• Data Scientist
• Musician
• Entrepreneur

We didn’t all get a job in the above. Yet, we were promised that we’d replace backbreaking, hand-hardening work. The promise included getting a nice white collar job or at the very least khaki pants job.

We did what we were supposed to do. Go to school. Get a liberal arts degree. Anyone will do. Just prove that you could show up, sign up for class, commit to the work and finish the work. Then we’ll know you can do that white collar job.

Well folks? We’re all about about to find out about the pain that those blue collar folks felt. Global competition increased, and our high wage union jobs became too expensive. As a result, all the blue collar jobs got shipped out of town. Downsized, got automated or disappeared.

This is going to happen again. Except this time it will be due to the AI revolution and large language models specifically. What used to be the work of three people will become one. What used to be one day of work will be done in hour. Any formatted or standardized writing will be done nearly immediately. Anything with a long history of methodology will be consumed by Large Language Models. Any field with shared knowledge over time will also be consumed.

And that is just for the text based items. Video and images are coming right on the heels of language. The only limit on the capabilities, will be the creativity of the inputs themselves.

This revolution is coming faster than people think. Google for instance has already say that 25% of the code that has been shipped was AI generated. That will only increase.

Coca-cola has already generated Christmas ads with AI generated images.

All the social media you see that has a quick video and a voice over is the SAME voice. Its here and happened FAST.

Why I write this – is because there will be new films (probably created by AI!) that will document this change. Just like we had Office Space, 20 years ago, we will have a film that captures this moment in AI. Not some dystopia-Terminator like thing, but more a work place movie that shows massive layoffs in the face of automation.

There are so many things that are going to change. We have to be ready and not panic. We’re still humans and Shakespeare will still matter. But what our work looks like will be different.