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Groundshift
Staying upright in an AI world
Can you feel it?
The shift started small. While we argued about fake news, an algorithm helped drive 700,000 Rohingya from their homes.
By 2018, the shift became a rupture. DeepMind's AlphaFold cracked the structure of nearly every known protein in months. Decades of hard graft vanished overnight, turning cutting-edge careers into footnotes.
March 2023 delivered the break. GPT-4 launched on a Tuesday; by Wednesday it was drafting legal briefs, debugging code and acing K12 essays. Knowledge work: our supposed sanctuary, no longer off-limits. GPT-5 will supposedly arrive this summer.
Now the ground beneath every profession shifts monthly. The World Economic Forum calculates that 39% of today's core skills will expire by 2030. LinkedIn reports employers filtering candidates by verified skill stacks rather than degrees. Your university transcript from two years ago carries less weight than last month's portfolio.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, places a 50% chance on human-level AI arriving within the next decade. Your children may enter a labour market where their colleagues learn faster than they do.
Between 2018 and 2024 the gap between breakthrough and mass use halved twice. We now stand at the intersection of five converging revolutions, each one amplifying the others.
Five Forces, One Moment
Artificial intelligence has crossed the threshold from tool to agent. Large language models set their own sub-goals, write their own code, and increasingly operate without human oversight.
Work itself fragments into project-sized tasks routed by algorithmic marketplaces. Job titles lose meaning when roles dissolve and reform weekly.
Skills decay accelerates to an industrial pace. Technical knowledge spoils within three to five years whilst industry demands quarterly updates.
Demographics reshape the possible. Ageing economies court global mid-career talent through digital platforms as skills-visa applications spike.
Foundations crumble whilst we build higher. The OECD records falling adult numeracy across eleven wealthy nations precisely when machines begin thinking for us.
These five forces operate against a backdrop of simultaneous revolutions across every scientific frontier. Clean biotechnology redesigns manufacturing from microbes up whilst renewable energy reaches grid parity. Quantum computing threatens current encryption whilst enabling drug discovery breakthroughs. Space technology democratises through reusable rockets whilst gene editing shifts from experimental therapy to preventive medicine.
Never before in human history have so many foundational technologies matured simultaneously. Each breakthrough accelerates the others in an unprecedented cascade of change.
The Barbell Future
Project forward to 2030 if nothing shifts.
The labour market forms a barbell: heavy at both ends, thin in the middle. At one end, orchestration specialists who top out at 5% of roles oversee fleets of models and robots. They speak both human and machine, translating strategic intent into executable instructions. At the other end, most workers trade micro-skills on task exchanges, bidding for hours of work against global competition and increasingly capable automation.
Real wages stagnate for anyone who hasn't refreshed their skill portfolio within eighteen months. Skills passports replace CVs. Interviews begin with "show me the artefact you've built." Your GitHub commits matter more than your degree classification, if you have one.
Technical knowledge expires in thirty-six months. Pay rises flow to people who combine numeracy, structured writing, and ethical reasoning with smart tools. Continuous learning budgets move from corporate perk to contractual requirement.
Personal AI assistants triage your messages, draft your code, and propose your deals. Humans spend eighty per cent of their cognitive energy on ambiguity and ethics. Burnout rises wherever management matches human tempo to model release cycles.
Five cloud alliances dominate global inference capacity. Safety boards appear independent yet rely on shared investor pools. Nations that fail to agree audit standards lock down data flows, fracturing the internet into competing territories.
Synthetic companions flood social feeds. Live, accountable gatherings become the new luxury. People pay for evenings where no phones are allowed. Trust becomes scarcer than data.
Three Levers We Still Hold
This future arrives by default unless we act. But three levers remain within our grasp.
Technical stewardship means tying incentives so transparency and safety scale with capability. The companies building tomorrow's AI need skin in the game for tomorrow's consequences. Reward structures that prioritise short-term performance over long-term stability create the conditions for catastrophic failure.
Institutional trust requires drafting shared guardrails before one bloc's values hardwire the rails. The window for collective governance narrows with each model release. Once the technical infrastructure solidifies around particular assumptions about privacy, autonomy, and control, changing course becomes exponentially harder.
Personal mastery builds portable human capacities that machines augment rather than replace.
The Necessary Response
Past upheavals created generational gaps. The printing press divided medieval scribes from Renaissance scholars. Electrification separated craft workers from industrial operators. The internet split people who could code a web page from people who couldn't.
This time the gap appears within a single school year. Children starting secondary school this September will graduate into a world transformed beyond recognition. Traditional solutions lag by design. Curricula update annually, corporate training follows budget cycles, policy trails public outrage.
We need a different approach. One that acknowledges the pace of change rather than fighting it. One that builds human capabilities that strengthen rather than weaken when paired with artificial intelligence.
That approach is SuperSkills. Next year, I'm publishing a guide that maps the portable human capacities that thrive alongside artificial intelligence. The ground will keep shifting. The question is whether we learn to move with it or get buried beneath it. Your footing matters. But so does helping others find theirs. The future belongs to those who can navigate uncertainty whilst helping others do the same.
What You Can Do This Week, Before SuperSkills Arrives
You have agency today. My book comes next year, this newsletter lands every week, but you can make decisions about your future every hour. Let's be practical.
Open a fresh document right now.
Audit: Run a 90-Minute Skill Check
List ten tasks you completed yesterday. Check your calendar, scan your sent messages, reconstruct your actual work. Create a concrete, personal task log that reveals where your time actually goes.
Mark each task with one letter: R for routine (large language models already handle this), C for collaborative (requires human partnership), or H for high-judgement (ethics, strategy, trust-building). This effort map of sorts shows where you spend time and where machines already encroach.
Tomorrow, shift one R task to an AI tool. Draft your next status update in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Claude. Even if you don't know the perfect solution for your R task, taking this first step helps you define what you need and where you can improve. Once you've taken that step, you won't be able to stop. You'll realise you can shift your world.
Fifteen minutes saved. Be concrete about it. Imagine those minutes accumulated and allocated to higher-order tasks over a month, a year. Re-invest that time in a postponed H task. Call a client you've been meaning to reach, mentor someone junior, sketch a new idea that's been waiting. Refocus your brain to grow: read a book that challenges your thinking, tackle a problem that pushes you beyond your current limits. Build momentum where machines cannot lead.
Pulse: Set Up Skills Monitoring
Bookmark one live labour data source. LinkedIn Workforce Insights or Indeed Hiring Lab both track skill demand in real-time. Schedule fifteen minutes every Friday to scan for the top three rising skills in your sector.
Pick one article, podcast, or tutorial about the number one riser. Nothing more. Consuming information about trends matters less than understanding which capabilities command premium wages today.
You see the wave before it breaks instead of reading the memo after.
Partner: Start an Accountability Pact
Choose a colleague or friend who also feels the shift. Swap your effort-maps from step one and agree on one experiment each for the next seven days. Meet for ten minutes on day eight: keep, tweak, or drop the experiment.
Micro-commitments plus social friction beat solitary good intentions. Change requires witnesses.
Upgrade: Strengthen One Foundation
Pick any baseline capability that algorithms cannot replace. Anything!: reading stamina, numerical agility, logical reasoning. Take a free diagnostic. ReadTheory tests comprehension, GCHQ puzzles measure logic, or find maths skill assessments. Something simple to push you to use your brain and make your brain grow.
Set a micro-goal: ten per cent improvement in four weeks. Track progress with a single number on your phone wallpaper. Hard skills age rapidly. Foundations compound endlessly.
These moves require under two hours total. They reclaim time from routine tasks, surface blind spots in your current skill mix, and tilt effort toward irreplaceably human work. The mindset SuperSkills will deepen and scale.
The shift beneath your feet is real. These steps help you find your footing. But the deeper truth is this: developing our humanity will help us survive what's coming. SuperSkills maps that path forward.
History rarely sends a calendar invite; this is it.
Forward this issue to one person who still thinks AI is hype.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Here are my recommendations for this week:
One of the best tools to provide excellent reading and articles for your week is Refind. It’s a great tool for keeping ahead with “brain food” relevant to you and providing serendipity for some excellent articles that you may have missed. You can dip in and sign up for weekly, daily or something in between - what’s guaranteed is that the algorithm sends you only the best articles in your chosen area. It’s also free. Highly recommended. Sign up.
Now
AI-ification of Education - I think we are witnessing the AI-ification of education in real time? Research shows 66% of students use ChatGPT for coursework. US teen usage went from 13% to 26% in one year. 47% of Cambridge students admit to using AI. Also Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.
The Benefits of Raising Conscientious Kids - Being conscientious will serve kids in the long run. Here are some tips to help them learn that trait
Why US chocolate tastes weird to the rest of the world - Chocolate is popular almost everywhere. But tastes vary depending on the continent. While some regions like their chocolate sugary sweet, others prefer more fruity or nutty notes.
ChatGPT Is Helping Women Get Pregnant - They’re changing their conception plans based on the AI's advice — despite some privacy concerns
Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity - Study Shows That Even Experienced Developers Dramatically Overestimate Gains
Next
AI metrics- With every platform shift, we want to measure the growth but we’re confused about what to measure. That’s partly a problem of data and definitions, but it’s really a question about what this is going to be.
Hertz Deploys AI Scanner ….That's Charging Hundreds of Dollars for Tiny Scratches on Rental Cars. Ugh.
Longevity Is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF - DNA analysis predicts likelihood of age-related conditions such as heart disease and cancer
BYD’s Five-Minute Charging Puts China in the Lead for EVs The world’s largest EV maker now has the world’s fastest DC charger
Meta Superintelligence – Leadership Compute, Talent, and Data
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