With AI predictions currently taking up big chunks of the news and social media, the word on the street – especially among copywriters – is roughly split between optimists and pessimists, winners and losers.
Among the downcast, concerns will congeal around ‘downward mobility’. Jobs will go and futures will nose-dive – or so they say. For those in the sunlit uplands, life will continue much as before in a Teflon-coated bubble of relative affluence.
In other words, the brave new AI world will have big, visible and measurable divisions, cleanly sliced by serendipity. The luckless will have to cry into their beer (if they can afford it!), whilst the blessed can continue to idolize new technology.
And yet, this is nothing new. Recent history is chock-full of examples of unfortunates who found themselves on the wrong side of ‘progress’.
The Long Game
The most glaring example of resistance to economic development was that of the nineteenth century Luddites, English textile workers whose livelihoods were under threat from new-fangle mill machinery.
Changes to established lifestyles will always stoke fear. New processes that de-humanise productivity and creativity go to the very heart of who we are.
The list is long and includes notable milestones such as Margaret Thatcher’s closing of British coal mines in the 1980s, and on to the more recent strikes of the Hollywood Screen Writers’ Guild who objected to the introduction of AI for movie production.
How we view the impact of AI in 2026 depends almost entirely on whether or not we’re directly affected – especially at a personal level. Most people can appreciate the time-saving benefits and potential breakthroughs in science, medicine and so on. Until, of course, our job and way of life are tossed into the shredder.
The Beginning of History
From a copywriting and marketing point of view, AI can be seen as part of the technological continuum that started with the impact of online marketing at the end of the twentieth century.
Many are saying that the effects of AI will go deeper and wider than anything we’ve seen so far – and they may well be right! Having said that, far from being ‘victims’ of AI, we humanoids have an uncanny knack of evolving and adapting to new realities. Nothing stays the same, to wit:
- As already mentioned, the nature of work is continually changing. Think ‘Industrial Revolution’ and mechanization; PCs replacing typewriters; desk-top publishing; online marketing; SEO and so on. With every development, however, the one constant always comes back to the central question as to whether it will improve the human condition!
- With this in mind, there can be little doubt that AI is already ‘the-next-big- thing’. Billions of dollars are being invested by the big-tech players in technological know-how and data centres whose high-performance computer servers will be ushering in a future of artificial intelligence with capabilities we can only dream of today.
- Interestingly, the world of knowledge that a person of average intelligence can take in is finite. By extension – in the future – even the most formidable computer will still be juggling with what will then be the world’s finite information – albeit in potentially infinite formats. AI in the year 2050, at current rates of ‘progress’, will have awesome capacities of factual retention, but Mister Average Joe will still have his biological and intellectual limitations!
- To sum up: tech ‘experts’ will still be tweaking the status quo for delivery to ‘ordinary’ individuals who can adapt our current state of knowledge and expertise to simplify and accommodate the powerful new technologies. At heart, therefore, everything that is perceived as ‘new’ will ultimately need to have a recognizable human face. How else could new developments in AI fit into the future history of the workplace?
AI and Tomorrow… Is It ‘Game On’?
Let’s face it: ‘project fear’ has been circulating around the workaday world since the potential of AI to ‘rock your world’ became apparent.
Yes folks, it looks like AI is creating history. We’re creating ‘history on the hoof’; new ways of working; creating a new definition of ‘efficiency’.
Outside the world of work – as we currently know it – entire peoples will learn to grapple with the demands of ‘worklessness’. Vast wealth will collide with cohorts of a new ‘lumpen proletariat’ who were denied opportunities to pull up their own boot-straps. Uncertainty will become the norm in a newly-ordered world.
And yet, uncertainty can also be the mother of invention! Vacuums are there to be filled. Roaming hordes of the great unwashed won’t be satisfied with gathering nuts and berries.
That’s the current state of play with AI my friends. And tomorrow has to be looking rosy. Because, like it or not, we’re in a game where there’s no going back.