AI-driven obsolescence

This post on WIP got me thinking real hard about the future relevance and defensibility of my current products:

stop customer support agent contractor work, who did great work for last 3 years but we automated everything and we need to get hyper lean to prepare for future where people use ChatGPT instead of #nomadlist, and don’t post jobs on #remoteok but just write an AI agent, and where #photoai and #interiorai might just be replaced by Midjourney next, eg AGI, and invest all $$$ into that; that means we’re now except for one DevOps person keeping server alive, and me as a dev, 100% ran by AI agents

What happens in a near future where people ask Devin to build plugins or a directory site instead of using my Carrd plugins and Lists Kit; talk to a speech-to-text AI to draft and edit their 100 words a day and chat with AI commenters about the post instead of using Lifelog; and speak to a super smart, near-AGI level ChatGPT 10 instead of design consultants like me to design great UX for their customers?

Maybe AI can empower me to make anything I want in the near future, but that also means a lot of what I can make is also accessible to others to make on their own. Practically speaking, “When everyone is super, no one will be.”

What gives then?

You can say in that case maybe marketing and storytelling will be the key differentiators. But a big part of those work can soon be done by AI too. So the only things truly left for us humans is stuff that presumably AI won’t be able to do as well, like:

• creativity
• strategy
• market opportunity
• ethics
• authenticity
• empathy
• H2H interactions

But even these qualities can be mimicked to some degree.

So I don’t know.

Now that is the real challenge of an AI future… the uncomfortable uncertainty and volatility.