EP 1: Will AI Take Your Job?

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Will AI take your job? Probably. So that's one of the things that I wanted to talk about on the first ever episode of Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson. I am the host of Everyday AI. I'll get a little bit more into my background here in a minute, but I want you to Give me about 14 and a half more minutes to go over that question. Right. I just came out right away and said, well, will AI take your job? Yeah, it probably will. So let me explain that. But before I do, what is Everyday AI? What is this? This podcast, this, this background? I'm live here, so if you see anything that's. That's me shifting in my chair. So Everyday AI is a daily newsletter, a daily podcast, and a daily live show as well, all focused on helping every everyday. People like me and you use AI to leverage their career and to grow their everyday life. That's what this is all about. So real quick about my background. And FYI, if you're listening to this on the podcast, in the future, I'm gonna be having other guests. I may be taking some questions live as people ask them. So if you are watching this on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, not sure what else this is on. If you're watching this live, feel free to drop a comment. And in the future, there will be other guests. But today I just wanted to take this first opportunity to explain even why why I'm starting this podcast. And why now? Why now more than anything. And also answer that question. Right, no, no clickbait here. I'm going to answer that. Will AI take your job? All right, so let me explain real quick my background before, you know, you start to second guess or, or judge what I'm saying. So again, my name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the founder of a boutique digital strategy agency here in Chicago called Accelerant Agency. And that's, that's an important part of the show. So notice that I did not say I am an AI professional. I'm not. And if you're not either, that's okay. Then this show is for you. Have I been using AI software for a couple of years? Absolutely. Have I used hundreds of them? Yes, we use a lot of software. However, I am not a highly technical person. I'm not out here coding new applications. I am an everyday person. I'm an everyday marketer, strategist, whatever you want. To call it. So if you're listening and you don't know anything about AI, that's okay. That's what this daily podcast and this daily newsletter is here. It's here for you. Because I do think that this technology is going to start causing some huge problems in the workforce. So yes, AI will take a lot of our jobs, but that's okay. That's something that we're going to be focusing on over the next couple of weeks and months. Okay, so one other thing about me, I get thirsty a lot, so I'm going to be taking drinks. Right, there we go. All right. So my background real quick, and this is important because, you know, throughout the course of this show, I'm going to be drawing on things and I want you, the viewer, to understand my background. You know, sometimes if, if I'm not experienced in, in a certain field, I'll tell you that. But you know, even though I'm, you know, 37 years old, I've been in marketing and communications professionally for 20 years. Yes, I did that math correctly. So I started as a full time journalist at 17. I was a junior in high school. I was working 40 hours a week at my daily newspaper. So I've been writing even before that, but I've been writing professionally since I was 17, you know, and even before that, like I said, I was building websites, creating projects as a teenager, but I really started my professional career as a journalist at age 17. So one thing, even with with me personally, I always feel like I've been frustrated at whatever industry I've been in, I've always felt has been a little slow to adapt. And in newspapers, you know, that, that goes without saying, but I was, you know, even early on, so what, I started probably in 2002, 2003, I was pushing for things on the website. No one understood. Why would we, you know, really put, you know, full stories on the website. And I said, you know, let's do video, let's do this. So, you know, throughout my time as a journalist spending that, you know, six or seven years, I was always pushing, pushing the boundary. The Chicago, Chicago Sun Times where I my last stop on kind of my reporter journey. I was pushing video, I was pushing audio slideshows, had the first, or maybe not the first, but the largest ever live chats in Chicago Sun Times history at the time, you know, kind of live blogging, so to speak. You know, Governor Rod Blagojevich's in impeachment proceedings. So I feel that I've always been a little ahead of Industries. Not saying that in a, you know, kind of a braggadocious way. Right. Just that I feel whatever industry I've been in has always been a little behind the times. So again, after seven years, I kind of got out of that and transitioned into working at a nonprofit. It was actually a weird story. I met this, this guy playing basketball when I was still working as a journalist. I kind of told him, hey, I'm, you know, I was actually taking some kind of some time off. So I, for, in November, December of that year, I was a Pulitzer fellow. So I traveled to Africa, did some multimedia reporting. Fantastic experience. But when I met this guy, he said, all right, come back, work for me. So that's my second leg of my career journey. So, so I came back and worked for 10 years at this nonprofit working with at risk youth. But the last five years, and this is relevant here, we essentially just became an activation agency for Nike and Jordan brand. So I spent five years essentially, you know, a lot of traveling the country, you know, so going out to their world headquarters in Oregon and you know, going to New York City a lot, Louisiana. So we were going all over just doing activations for Nike and Jordan. And so that's where I really sharpened, I guess you could say, my agency skills. So after 10 years at the nonprofit, kind of my third leg is starting Accelerant Agency. So that kind of brings us to where we are today. So I started Accelerant in, gosh, what's it been now? Four, four and a half years? So late 2018, I think full time in 2019. So here's the thing. When I made my business plan back in 2018, I wrote down, I didn't want to do, you know, marketing deliverables forever because even at that time I, I went back last night when I was kind of preparing for this first show and I, I wrote in my business plan then that, you know, marketing deliverables were going to be short lived. I knew that, you know, websites, writing, photo video, all of these things, how they happen, were going to drastically change, you know. So in my business plan I said, hey, you know, by year five, gonna make a pivot into, you know, owning smaller companies. That's what I thought at the time. Still, still working on that by the way. So that's kind of where I'm at now. So I actually just last week started working with my attorney to get Accelerant Ventures up, you know, so investing in small companies. But you know, what I'm actually most passionate about is what, you know, our team now is going to be spending a lot of time on, and that is this daily podcast, this daily newsletter. Because even at the time when I created that business plan, I knew, I didn't know it was going to be, you know, this GPT technology or, you know, Runway ML. I didn't know any of that. But I knew, you know, at least in my field of, you know, marketing, communications, digital strategy, that things were going to completely change. So just, just to recap, because I'm going to get to this, this, this question, will I take my job? So I just want to recap with, with my weird background of 20 years I spent about. I'm looking at my notes here because I updated this about 12,000 hours writing for major publications and big brands. So, you know, even with accelerant, you know, we've been, you know, whether it's ourselves or through kind of other partners writing for brands that you experience, read about, see on the TV every single day. So I've spent roughly about 12,000 hours writing for major publications and big brands, probably 6,000 hours designing websites, a lot of web design. You know, that's going back to, you know, when I was a teenager, about 5,000 hours editing photo and video. Been doing that for a long time. You know, the first five years of the nonprofit was doing just everything in the marketing realm. About 4000 hours doing research and data analysis. A lot of, you know, what I was doing a year or two ago, data is everything for a digital strategy company. About 4,000 hours doing brand strategy and identity. About 4,000 hours doing graphic design, and probably about 10,000 hours doing other miscellaneous tasks. Here's the thing. All those hours, thousands, you know, in the case of writing more than 10,000 hours, I guess that's what you have to do to be considered an expert in something with air quotes, right? All of those things that I've spent 20 years of my life, half of a professional career doing. I'm telling you, AI does all of those things better than me. I'm not one of those people that's going to go out on Twitter and LinkedIn and, and say, oh, this AI, it's, you know, I'm better than it. I'm not. I am. I am confident enough in my skills and my background and seeing where the technology is heading to know. And I've already experienced this. AI already can write better than me, right? And let's not even talk about the output, which is probably 30, 40x. It can write better than me. If I spend time to train a model, it will write better than me. And if you're new to AI, don't worry, I'll get back and let you know what all that means. Photo, video. I mean, we'll be talking on the show about things like Mid Journey, Dolly, Runway, ML, photo and video. It's fantastic, you know, you know, research and data analysis. We'll get into this. But now you have, you know, most of you have heard of chat GPT, but now you have these things called baby GPT, auto GPT that are fantastic for research and analysis. It's, it's wild. It's, it's essentially you having employees that work very fast, around the clock, you know, working, working with each other, you know, and then we go into brand strategy, design. I'm not going to go through all these things piece by piece. But it's getting to the point where, if you haven't noticed this already, the best AI programs and companies and advancements out there are outperforming the professionals. And again, I'm, I'm fine saying that. Hey, great example. Last night my wife handed me her phone, two pictures. I'm sure you've seen these on Twitter. It was two pictures of, of a cheetah. She said, hey, one's AI, one's not. Again, here's, here's a little something about me. I would love to be a full time safari photographer. I would love it. You know, one on a couple, a couple of years ago. So I've taken photos of cheetah. So, you know, I'm like, all right, you can't fool me. I, I said, all right, this one's AI. I was wrong, right? So it is crazy. What, knowing what program to use, how to use it, can give you better results or comparable results that even to a someone who is in the field, you know, like myself, I told you, I've spent thousands of hours shooting and editing photo and video. I couldn't tell. So I think you've seen the pattern here. All of these different skills, all of these different job types. We didn't even get into things like, you know, CPAs, you know, see your accountants, your lawyers, even some of those other jobs that maybe are out of the creative field. AI is going to massively disrupt the economy. I don't know what that means yet. We'll be talking about that a little bit on the daily podcast and in the newsletter and bringing in guests who probably know a little bit more than me. But I do want to talk about one thing here, quick on that. It's a quote from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. So on a podcast, you know, in the spring of, of this year, 2023, I'm going to read his quote. He even said this in his quote that people weren't paying enough attention to it. But I'm going to read his quote. So he said, the current worries that I have are that there's going to be disinformation problems or economic shocks or something else at a level far beyond anything we're prepared for. And I don't think that gets enough attention. Economic shocks, that's what I want to draw on. Yes, AI will be replacing many jobs. So the same way that in the. This is probably a little bit before I started working, so apologies if this is wrong. So in the 90s, I think when, the most part is when companies really started to accept, you know, being on computers and making computers a part of the workflow. And then in the 90s, you know, kind of getting on the Internet, that process took you could say a decade or more. And I think that changed the workplace from maybe like a 1 to a 2 or 3. Right. This is changing where we're at from a 1 to a 100 and it is happening fast every day. When you think that you understand what's going on in the, in the AI space, something incredibly large happens. So will we be working for robots? Are we all going to be unemployed? No. I did write a post last week on, on LinkedIn, so look me up. Jordan Wilson on LinkedIn. So about, about Blockbuster, right? And I hope this point illustrates it because I'm not going to go on for too much longer. We said 15 minutes, so block. Blockbuster at its height employed about 85,000 people. And we all know what happened. They didn't adapt. The industry said, okay, you're done. So you know, you had companies, Netbox, Netbox, I combined two there, Netflix, Redbox I think were two of the first companies. So you know, Netflix, excuse me, at its height employed 13,000, couldn't find great numbers for Redbox, it was a couple thousand. So you know, going from 85,000 at Blockbuster to 13,000 at Netflix. Did tech innovation kill 70,000 jobs? No, because tens of thousands of jobs were created because of that. So you had hundreds of content studios that didn't exist before because when you give consumers more ways to consume content, when you give consumers ways more way or just more content options, you know, you had again hundreds of now good sized studios. Those, those jobs didn't exist before. You know, there was way fewer production companies because there were fewer outlets for it. So you know, you can make the case that in, you know, streaming, for video streaming, it probably created a lot more jobs. We didn't lose those 70,000 jobs. You know, you could say it was a one to one disruption. So here's the thing with AI and I'll leave you with this. If you aren't using AI right now, if you're not learning AI right now, there is a chance that whether it's, you know, in three months or three years, there's a good chance that your job could be at risk. You know, this isn't not trying to, you know, instill fear in you. That's the reality. We're already seeing plenty of stories, you know, Fortune 500, you know, doing tests with AI in the workplace at a pretty high rate, you'd be surprised. So what I'm trying to say is you need to learn how to work with AI the same way how, if you have a desk job, there's no such thing as a desk job now without using a computer. Right. I do think that's going to be the case sooner than you might think. We're talking maybe months, but probably a couple of years where there's not going to be many desk jobs where you're not leveraging AI. So that is what I want to leave you with. Will AI take your job? Maybe. But as long as you are using AI, you have a great chance to grow your career and also grow your personal life as well. There's so many applications for AI, we're not going to get into them today. I'm going to wrap up this show now. We said, we said 15 minutes, but it's the first one. It's the first. So we went a little long and if you're still listening, that's fantastic because I want you to go to your everydayai.com we are giving away two year long subscriptions for Premium Chat GPT. You know, I see on Twitter a lot of people just say like, oh, I'm not going to use it. You know, the paid version, it's, it's too expensive. I'll keep using the free version. I'm fine. If it's slow, you should be using the premium version. So go on there. Sign up for the newsletter. We have information about that giveaway in the newsletter. Please do that. Thank you for listening. As a reminder, we'll be here every day live on these streaming platforms and your favorite podcast provider as well too today. So Spotify, Apple Music, Google, wherever else podcasts go, we're gonna be there. I can't thank you enough for, for tuning in today, for to listening to this podcast. It, it means so much, you know, you know, like I said, pivoting away from, you know, had a successful business model at Accelerant Agency. And I'm pivoting a way to be here every day for you, for, for you readers, for you listeners. If you're watching this on a stream, doing this for you because I feel with, with, with my background, you know, our crazy talented team at Accelerant, I think we're very well positioned to be a resource for everyday people like yourself who are trying to use AI. So with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Can't wait to talk to you tomorrow.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.