The Layoffs That Aren’t Coming
AI slop ruining a Tim Ferriss essay, Ozempic linked to fewer violent impulses, and a snack-budget cure for collapsing morale – everyone’s reading the signals wrong.
Dear Friend,
The other day, at the amazing EMBRACE Festival in Berlin, I had a conversation with a participant after my session, “The Turbulence Lab: Turning Disruption into Your Unfair Advantage,” about the main culprit in failed experiments. Of course there are many – but one of the most undervalued ones (from my perspective) is the fact that all too often we run our experiments on assumptions which bundle just too many variables into one. Experiments become too big, too complex, and too intertwined to yield meaningful results. Instead, next time you are thinking about testing a hypothesis, try to break it down into its most atomic unit and figure out the quickest, cheapest way to test it. You’ll find that by doing so you will not only get better results, but ultimately also move much faster.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
The Canary in the Coal Mine. The prevailing narrative at the moment is that AI is coming hard for software engineering jobs (from mass layoffs to recent graduates not being able to find a job and everything in between). Turns out, the data doesn’t actually support this narrative. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor explored this topic in a thoughtful post on their “AI as normal technology” Substack. The reason is what Narayanan and Kapoor call the “decide-execute-deliver sandwich” – of which AI compresses the “execute” part but doesn’t budge on the other two.
Across 100,000 developers on GitHub, the researchers found that AI agents led to an eight-fold increase in the number of lines of code written, consistent with the idea that AI almost completely compresses the Execute layer of the sandwich. But this led to only 30% more releases, strongly suggesting that human bottlenecks (the Decide and Deliver layers) remain in place.
In my eyes, this has pretty far-reaching implications for other professions – as the two authors also point out:
In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned.
Highly recommended reading.
━━━━━
AI Slop Is Coming Even for the Best of Us. This is pretty funny – Tim Ferriss (of “The 4-Hour Workweek” fame) writes a long post about “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future.” It has some interesting insights and data points, and you might want to read it. But… it is also, likely, written (or co-written) by AI… ;)
Some telltales (unless Tim has adapted his writing style to sound like AI now):
My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago.
But, let’s be honest: one quarter doesn’t make a trend. So let’s zoom out and look at my full catalog over a few years.
And my personal favorite:
Let that sink in for a minute.
The problem (for me at least) isn’t that Tim is (or isn’t – who knows, maybe his writing just sounds like this) using AI to write his blog posts – it’s that, due to the fact that I must have read the “Let that sink in for a minute.” line a million times by now (as it’s a staple of AI-generated slop), I am just so much less engaged with his article. Which is a shame – as it does make a good point (or so I believe, as I couldn’t get myself to do more than skim it…).
━━━━━
Using Ozempic to Prevent Violence? This reads like a bad joke from a dystopian novel – but scientists in the Netherlands found a (so far unconfirmed) link between GLP-1 drugs and the suppression of violent tendencies.
Scientists at Rutgers University examined nationally representative survey data that compared former and current GLP-1 users. In people currently taking GLP-1s, they found, the link between being impulsive and being more prone to violence was noticeably weaker. Though the team’s findings are far from certain proof that GLP-1s can reduce violent behavior, they do warrant follow-up research, the authors say. […] To do so, the team turned to data collected last summer from a nationally representative survey of 7,521 U.S. adults. They specifically looked at 821 people who reported ever having taken a GLP-1, including 597 people currently on one. People were asked questions about their alcohol use and level of impulsivity, such as whether they would enjoy being in a high-speed chase or a fistfight. They were also asked (with a guarantee of confidentiality) if they had taken part in various violent crimes sometime in the past year. Sure enough, the researchers noticed a sizeable difference between people taking a GLP-1 and people who used GLP-1s in the past but are no longer taking them.
If history is any indicator, you can already see the overeager politicians who are going to mandate widespread GLP-1 use for anyone “on the spectrum” of turning violent…
What We Are Reading
Three Ways to Think About AI and Jobs AI won’t kill all jobs equally. Here’s a smart framework for figuring out how safe yours really is. @Jane
Allbirds Names New CEO and Changes Name Again Not an April Fool’s joke: After making the pivot from a shoe company to an AI company, Allbirds once again rebrands and changes its name. @Mafe
Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original The history of “multiple discovery” further supports the argument that a breakthrough idea may really depend on someone first framing a sufficiently precise question or problem to be solved. @Jeffrey
When Employees Are Drowning in Change I’ve heard a common thread in leadership discussions lately: the challenge isn’t identifying what needs to change or how, it’s that managing the volume of change people are being asked to absorb has reached a tipping point. @Kacee
How Not to Use “AI” (Workshop) A wonderful antidote to the “AI is inevitable” narrative and the resulting “you better get on the bandwagon” movement. This one is from a professor of (of all things) “AI, Language Diversity, and Communication Technologies.” @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
😱 You seriously can’t make this up: Meta CTO reports employee morale is near historic lows, prompting leadership to propose boosting workplace snack budgets.
🪓 You might have heard me tell the tale of the two lumberjacks. It’s the little extra story in the GYSHIDO book. And now you can chop some wood right in your browser. Quite frankly – as utterly useless as it is – it’s wonderful to see people make useless things just for the heck of it.
🙂 Did you know that new emojis are being proposed and then accepted (or not) by a committee? Here is a wonderful pile of rejected proposals. My favorite? The “Angry Pile of Poo.”
☕ If you know me, you know that I am a coffee fanatic. Researchers in Australia found a completely new way to make the magic brew – by using ultrasonic sound waves.
🧑🚀 Follow along the amazing journey of Artemis II on this wonderful photo and sound timeline.
↗ Dive into the deep end: Access our complete collection of 2,800+ radical links.
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.