Predictions and Positions
The world is rapidly changing.
The way you earn a paycheck and live your life tomorrow will look very different than it does today.
That change will transform how we organize ourselves socially, politically, and economically.
Itâll change how countries are governed, how the rule of law is applied, where capital flows, and what our social contract looks like.
Technological change isnât just about the novelty of robots or artificial intelligence. Everything about life as you know it is about to come undone.
While none of us can forecast exactly what the future holds, there are things you can anticipate in the coming years. Being prepared today will help you navigate uncertainty tomorrow.
Predictions & Positions
These predictions and positions offer a framework to help you evaluate the future moving forward.
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On Work
đĄ Entry-level work is going to be eliminated.
Everyone needs a first job to begin climbing the corporate ladder. But what happens when that first rung on the ladder no longer exists?
Junior workers will no longer have an entry point into the economy. The administrative work theyâre typically assigned to do will be automated.
For employers, thereâs no longer a return on employing young people. Todayâs young people complain about the state of work. They demand high wages for fewer hours and arenât willing to go the extra step to learn new skills.
On top of that, companies have to hire mid-level managers just to manage junior workers. All of this amounts to more overhead costs than companies are willing to bear.
At its current state, AI is no different than a college intern. If you can teach a 20-year-old how to do something, chances are you can teach an AI how to do it too. But unlike an intern, AI wonât complain, demand a raise, or be late to work.
Read:
đĄ College degrees are worthless.
The elimination of the first rung of the career ladder means it will be increasingly difficult to earn the necessary return on investment to justify a college degree. Unless you get into an elite school â like Stanford â that is a direct pipeline to the career you want to pursue, college is worthless.
Instead of going to college, young people should obtain skills. This can be done by attending trade school, becoming an apprentice, or self-education. YouTube is a wealth of free knowledge. All you have to do is start learning.
The most valuable skills are ones that are essential to human existence and are in short supply and high demand. Farming is one example. Even though AI tools can make the production of food more efficient, AI itself cannot grow food.
The average age of a farmer in the United States is 58 years old. With more farmers entering retirement and an insufficient number of younger farmers replacing them, skills related to food production will become increasingly valuable in years to come.
Read:
Walmart Wants to Pay You $500K to Manage Their Stores -- Could That Be a Better Path Than College?
If the American Dream is Viable, Why Does Everyone Keep Falling Down?
đĄ Work itself will be restructured because most white collar knowledge work is non-productive busy work to begin with.
Sending emails and attending meetings may be important to your job but that doesnât mean it is economically viable. With greater AI adoption on the horizon, more and more CEOs are looking for ways to increase their companyâs economic viability.
Human cognitive labor is expensive. Companies need to offer benefits, plan for paid time off and vacations, and account for limits on human mental and emotional bandwidth.
AI can work around the clock with little overhead. While AI will need to be managed, AI itself doesnât require sick leave or a 401(k). This makes return on employing an AI worker far more profitable than a human.
At the end of the day, you are a data point in an Excel Spreadsheet, not a person. The MBA running your company doesnât care about you or your family. Itâs up to you to be proactive about your employability now and in the future.
Auditing your time utilization is a good place to start. Begin by figuring out where you are wasting time and how you can better utilize it to increase your economic viability. Learn a new skill or start a side hustle. Take the initiative to create your own safety net.
Read:
Your Job Might Not Justify a Full Workweek â Hereâs What Smart Employees Are Doing About It
Knowledge Workers Aren't Engaged in Activities That Provide Economic Value -- That's a Problem
Knowledge Workers Need Transferrable Skills -- Here's Why They Don't Have Them
đĄ The economy isnât adding new jobs and hasnât done so since the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered the United States out of the depths of of the Great Depression. He did so by providing employment opportunities through public works programs and the creation of the military-industrial complex.
These actions fundamentally changed the role of government in the American economy. Since then, the government â rather than the private sector â has become the primary source of employment for millions of American workers.
Deindustrialization and the Global Financial Crisis left more and more people out of work while the growing bureaucracy created new opportunities. This created a guise of prosperity that has finally come to an end.
The current administrationâs efforts to rout out inefficiencies within the federal government, combined with a fiscal imperative to reign in our national debt, means the government can no longer be Americaâs primary employer.
This will create massive labor displacement alongside technological job disruptions induced by AI adoption. But unlike the Great Depression, there might not be a slew of government programs to bail workers out this time.
Read:
The Latest Jobs Report Shows the Economy is Doing Much Worse Than You Realize
I Used to Be a Bureaucrat â Hereâs What I Think About DOGE
đĄ Women will be disproportionately affected by AI-related job displacements.
Many of the jobs women do are administrative or programmatic in nature. According to LinkedIn, 60% of marketing jobs in North America are held by women. This isnât because women are relegated to the realm of marketing â they self-select for this kind of work.
Marketing is one example of a line of work that will be impacted by AI adoption. Tasks like developing marketing campaigns and evaluating the results can easily be done with the assistance of an AI tool. Over time the value of human cognitive labor will wane, reducing the demand for marketers. This means womenâs cognitive efforts will be in direct competition with AI.
Women who are currently employed but lack in-demand skills putting them at the greatest risk for displacement. Unlike previous economic transitions, there wonât be anywhere in the economy for them to go, except of course, if they decide to pull up their sleeves and become plumbers.
The most viable option for women will be to return to the home. With birth rates declining globally, motherhood is now in higher demand than ever before. The challenge is that moms are not revered the same way as girlbosses in todayâs society.
Women who choose to return to the home may find they have greater freedom than their grandmothers. Thanks to the internet, itâs now possible to run a successful company from the comfort of your own home. Women who aspire to have a career and a family can now have both, without reporting to a corporate employer.
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đĄ Ideological homogeneity limits access to jobs and stymies opportunities for innovation.
While diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives were supposed to increase opportunities for historically marginalized groups, they decrease opportunities for everyone else.
The political climate within the United States has become so polarized that hiring managers and recruiters are more likely to hire someone whoâs political beliefs align with theirs. To mitigate unproductive conflict that may arise between employees due to political differences, political bias will become an increasingly important part of the hiring process.
This will create ideological homogeneity within companies and industries. The absence of a diversity of opinions and perspectives will stymie innovation, limiting opportunities for growth.
Read:
On Artificial Intelligence
đĄ Humans are creating a new form of life, becoming gods in their own right
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally different from previous innovations like the steam engine. While AI will augment the workforce and do cognitive work more effectively, that isnât what itâs about.
Silicon Valley tech elites are obsessed with their own deification. Transhumanism is a philosophy/religion that argues humans can surpass the limits of biology through innovation. While AI represents the cognitive frontier of these limits, there are other companies that are developing advanced healthcare solutions and bionics that will transform humanity as we know it.
Two new species will emerge: inorganic, technologically augmented humans and artificial intelligence transposed into humanoid robots.
By becoming creators, humans are playing god. This is a very dangerous game to play and it might not be a game worth playing at all.
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On America & Freedom
đĄ De facto censorship undermines free speech.
The First Amendment protects your right to say whatever you want. While the government canât deny you the right to say what is on your mind, the institutions and companies that control information distribution channels can.
When the media rejects the veracity of news events â such as the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hunter Biden laptop story â it weaponizes free speech. Deplatforming an individual effectively nullifies the protections enshrined in the First Amendment, becoming a form of de facto censorship.
The establishment of acceptable narratives concentrates power within established centers of power. Independent media has emerged to challenge traditional media. However, given independent mediaâs dependence on platform distribution, they are the most at risk of de facto censorship.
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đĄ Existing institutions are unable to reconcile irreconcilable differences, increasing the likelihood of civil war
Americans no longer disagree on banal things like taxes. They disagree on more fundamental issues like what the definition of a woman is or what a citizen is.
These political differences have become dogmatic. In the absence of religion, politics has become religion.
Existing institutions like the court system and the electoral process cannot reconcile these differences because doing so would require apolitical civil servants to become political. In turn, this erodes the efficacy of institutions and the trust the American people have in them.
Divergent views that cannot be reconciled through existing institutions will turn violent. The most logical outcome is a civil war that establishes one set of values as dominant over the other.
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On The World Order
đĄ China seeks to displace the Western-led world order by 2049
In 2049, China will mark the centennial of the founding of the Peopleâs Republic of China. This has historical significance and is symbolic in Chinese society.
China was a superpower for four thousand years before the Europeans showed up. The last dynasty was conquered through opium in what the Chinese refer to as a Century of Humiliation.
China seeks to restore itself to itâs proper place in the world order. It plans to do so by subverting Western institutions and eventually supplanting the United States as world leader.
Recent history tells us that a change in the global world order of this magnitude would follow the outbreak of a world war. If China cannot accomplish its objective through other means â economic, psychological, biological, or cyber warfare â it may resort to direct engagement with the United States.
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On Money
đĄ Money doesnât actually exist.
The first coin was minted in Lydia in the seventh century BC. Its purpose was to facilitate commercial trade within the Greek economy.
Money is the means of exchange within an economy. Similar to how a thermometer measures the temperature and can tell you the difference between hot and cold, money is a way to measure value between goods and services. The dollar value assigned to something is how you determine whether it is affordable or expensive; the cash you exchange for it is a physical representation of trade.
Increasingly, money has become a series of debits and credits calculated in digital spreadsheets. Money as you know it doesnât physically exist.
If the global financial system collapsed tomorrow and you couldnât access your digital bank account, you wouldnât be able to engage in transactions. What then, would the purpose of a digital record of your money provide if it canât be practically used in the economy?
Prioritizing the acquisition of something that isnât real â as most workers do â is futile. Youâd be better off exchanging your time for something more valuable than money.
Reading Recommendations
đĄ Money is created from debt.
Money exists as a way to measure trade within an economy because money â dollar bills and coins â represent an IOU between the issuer of that money and the user.
In the past, dollar bills could be exchanged for gold. They represented value that was backed by an asset. The government who issued the dollar bill was in debt to the public who used that dollar bill for the equivalent value it represented in gold.
Today dollar bills â or data points in a digital bank account ledger â donât represent anything. The financialization of the economy has increasingly put banks in charge of manufacturing new money. They do this when they charge interest on credit.
As more money has entered the market, the cost of exchange for goods and services has increased â inflation. More and more economic participants are required to use debt â credit cards â to purchase items, turning debt into a new form of money.
The relationship between the creation of money from loan interest and the utilization of credit cards as money means money itself is a function of debt. Once the debt is repaid, it no longer has any value and ceases to exist.
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đĄ Thereâs no point to trying to become wealthy.
Wealth is the abundance or surplus of money. To obtain wealth means to hold the debt of others.
You cannot take your wealth with you when you die. And the majority of wealth is lost by the second generation.
Whatâs the point of spending your life trying to obtain wealth?
The alternative to wealth is enough. This is the point where you can meet the needs and desires of your life without excess. Enough gives you the freedom to say no to exploitative economic practices while saying yes to things that enrich the quality of your life.
đ Key Skills to Navigate the Future
1. Learn how to learn.
The ability to learn will make you incredibly valuable in the years to come. It means you are emotionally aware of your limits, can successfully perform a gap analysis to come to that conclusion, and know how to design a learning plan to obtain the skills and information you need to fill that gap.
Become a world class learning.
Read more books
Watch educational documentaries
Challenge yourself with exposure to different viewpoints that invalidate your assumptions
Other Substacks to check out:
2. Learn how to manage your time.
Time is your most valuable asset â not money. The more control you have over your time, the more leverage youâll have to deploy it against high-value activities.
Build a second brain to implement systems and processes that allow you to strategically allocate your time
Other Substacks to check out:
3. Live how to live within your means.
The pursuit of more is your kryptonite. Lower your expectations.
Quantify what âenoughâ looks like for you. The less you need to earn to maintain your quality of life, the less susceptible you will be to economic disruption.
Become world class as managing your money. Treat your personal budget as itâs the balance sheet of a Fortune 500 company. You are the CEO of your household, start acting like it.
4. Learn how to be consistent.
Rome wasnât built in a night.
Whatever you hope to achieve in this life will take time.
To write a book, you need to write the first page.
To run a marathon, you need to run your first mile.
To lose the weight, you need to lose the first pound.
Do one thing everyday to work toward your goal. Overtime, your consistency will compound to produce the results you want to see.
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