📨 Weekly digest: 09 2025 | The AI illusion: when progress becomes peril
Unmasking the dissonance between innovation and disruption | AI this week in the news; use cases; tools for the techies
👋🏻 Hello legends, and welcome to the weekly digest, week 9 of 2025.
recently invited me to share my views on the future of AI.
You can listen to the podcast episode: AI beyond the hype: Building for the future.
Following my discussion with Michael, I share a few more thoughts.
We stand at a precipice.
A chasm is widening between the utopian narrative of AI as a mere tool of augmentation and the stark realities unfolding within our enterprises.
The entrenched belief that AI will enhance existing workflows, a comforting fiction, is being brutally dismantled by irrefutable evidence: the seismic shifts in labor markets, the volatile fluctuations in operational costs, and the unsettling erosion of traditional skill-based value.
This dissonance, a strategic myopia bordering on willful ignorance, is not a theoretical exercise. It represents a profound failure of foresight, a collective refusal to acknowledge the disruptive forces already reshaping our competitive landscapes.
We are, in essence, sleepwalking into a future in which our assumptions become liabilities and our perceived strengths become vulnerabilities.
This isn't merely a 'potential' blind spot; it is a glaring, self-imposed blindness that threatens to render our current strategic frameworks obsolete.
The relentless acceleration of AI is not a distant threat; it is a present reality, carving deep fissures into the foundations of skilled labor.
The once-stable day rates for elite engineering talent are now a volatile barometer, reflecting the turbulent currents of a market in flux.
Whispers from the front lines—the anecdotal accounts of coders and engineers—are coalescing into a chorus of unease, a stark testament to the undeniable erosion of job security within the sectors we once deemed impervious to technological disruption.
The hyper-competitive race for AI dominance has effectively rendered regulatory frameworks obsolete, leaving us adrift in a sea of technological change.
We are relegated to a perpetual state of reaction, scrambling to mitigate the consequences of AI deployment rather than strategically guiding its trajectory.
This reactive posture is not merely inefficient; it is a surrender of control, a tacit admission that we are no longer masters of our own technological destiny.
The cornerstone of conventional wisdom—the belief in automatic compensatory job creation—is a precarious edifice built on increasingly irrelevant historical analogies.
While past technological revolutions have spawned new industries, AI integration's unprecedented scale and velocity present a paradigm shift.
The assumption that the market will magically self-correct is a dangerous gamble, a leap of faith unsupported by empirical evidence.
We are facing not a mere adjustment but a potential systemic shock.
This necessitates a brutally honest reckoning with the prospect of profound labor market restructuring.
We must confront the uncomfortable truth: AI's immediate impact will likely be disruptive, shattering established employment paradigms and demanding a radical overhaul of our economic and social contracts.
This is not a call for incremental adjustments; it is a mandate for fundamental transformation.
We must reimagine our educational systems, redefine the nature of work, and fortify our social safety nets to withstand the coming storm.
Ignoring these realities is not prudence; it is a dereliction of our duty as stewards of our organizations and communities.
What are your thoughts on the potential impact of AI on the labor market? How can we proactively address the challenges ahead?
I am looking forward to reading your thoughts in a comment.
Yael.
This week’s Wild Pod episode
Frontier science: quantum chips, AI biology, and AI co-scientists
Stay ahead of AI innovation: your weekly Wild Intelligence brief
Yael on AI:
Sharing personal views and opinions on global advancements in AI from a decision leader perspective.
🦾 AI elsewhere on the interweb
Ilya Sutskever’s ‘Safe Superintelligence’ (he was the OpenAI Chief Scientist) is raising $1bn pre-product. [LINK]
Mira Murati, formerly OpenAI CTO, went public with her new venture, ‘Thinking Machines Lab’, with many other OpenAI people and (apparently) a target fund raise of $1bn, pre-product as well. [LINK]
50 generative AI use cases in marketing. [LINK]
The NY Times is all in for AI tools. “Can you propose five search-optimised headlines for this Times article?” [LINK]
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📨 Weekly digest: 08 2025 | The AI-driven abstraction era: Redefining knowledge work
👋🏻 Hello legends, and welcome to the weekly digest, week 8 of 2025.
📨 Weekly digest
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