24/52: And don't dilly dally on the way
#CapitalAtRisk
The 2010s was the decade of the Entrepreneur.
The 2020s will be the decade of the Investor.
“Have a company where employees treat work as play”
Yvon Chouinard
Is that all you’ve got?
I was listening to a podcast today with a public-markets investor who focuses mostly on AI. The conversation turned, as it often does, to the question of jobs: Which ones will AI replace? And what new ones might it create?
But the answers — especially from a future-facing, optimistic investor — felt... unimaginative.
The framing was all about how AI will take over repetitive tasks, and how new jobs will emerge that still ‘require a human’ — it was almost as if the human would be the co-pilot to the AI.
Fair enough, I almost thought, perhaps we should feel reassured that the human will always be needed to clean up, oversee, or supervise the machine.
But that assumes the future of work is still, well, work. Grind. Tasks. Toil.
Serious play
What if the new opportunities AI unlocks aren’t about what still requires a human, but they’re about what could actually give joy to the human? A challenge, a puzzle, yes, and productive, of course, but in some ways… easy… joyful, a delight.
Maybe the best post-AI ‘jobs’ we’ll create aren't jobs at all…
What might this unlock in you?
“We are conditioned to believe work has to be hard. But what if we could have jobs that are not hard in the traditional sense, but an absolute joy.
“This, we are told, is impossible. So we dilly dally on stuff which is boring.”
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In other news
🍽️ How about another lunch before the summer? As I’ve done a few times before I’ll host a lunch for investors, this time on Thursday 19th June in Soho. If you’re keen just hit reply and ask me for the link.
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