In this day and social-media age where anyone can pick up a device and blast themselves into the minds of potentially millions while also having a chance to make money doing it, many have decided to take technology up on that offer. What has resulted is a bunch of uncredentialed gurus telling us what we need to do. I’m talking parked car advice giving gurus, makeup-applying story time telling gurus, sitting on the living room couch dishing gurus – you name it! Next thing you know, they’ve amassed a large enough following to start making appearances on shows, getting speaking engagements, while somewhere along the way getting the title expert.
Take Sinead Bovell for example. If you haven’t heard of her and you’re interested in where this new AI era is taking us, perhaps you will very soon – like starting now. Branded as an AI and future of work expert among other similar titles, she says that “most of the jobs that we see today will either go away or be radically transformed” due to the onset of AI.
From what I can tell, she is becoming a rising voice on how AI is shaping the future of the workforce. The only thing is, I call bullshit on much of what I’ve heard from her thus far.
But I’m no techie. I just think I’m right. So, I set out to do a little bit of research to prove myself right. I, after all, love to be right.
Before the proving begins, let me rehash, right quick, how I came to know of her. About a month ago I saw her on Jenna & Sheinelle doing a segment on AI. Jenna asked Sinead a question about AI and I thought her answer was indirect and hard to follow. She didn’t come across to me as someone who was an expert on the subject.
A few weeks later, I saw her again – this time on my Insta feed via a clip from Oprah’s podcast. Once again, as I listened to what she was saying, I was like what? I was like how does someone who sounds like she’s just firing off talking points and making shit up appear on two high profile media outlets?
In this clip, before going into a word salad, she uses the phrase “the data shows” without citing a data source – a typical talking point grifters use to sound official. Like what data is she referring to? Did she collect it and analyze it herself? What was the research methodology? All that information is important for the listener to properly digest what she’s talking about.
After watching, I went straight to the comments to gauge how other people were feeling. The initial comments I came across seemed to take her at her word and discussed the future of the workforce based on what she said. But as I kept scrolling, it wasn’t long before I landed on a comment that said, “She actually said nothing at all.” That’s when I was like, okay, so it’s not just me.
There’s a quote credited to Albert Einstein that goes: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That immediately came to mind after listening to her answer to Oprah’s question.
I think there’s a lot of people running around on social media, presenting themselves as experts and getting others to buy in on it as well, when really they are just another person with an opinion — an often well thought out and presented opinion, but still just an opinion nonetheless. Furthermore, I have no problem with anybody and everybody giving their opinion. I just think there needs to be a clear distinction between what someone believes and what actual studies show. But even in the case where studies have been done, there needs to be some clear indication regarding how accurately that study can be extrapolated to the general population. In this new social media age, I think that is a fundamental truth that has been ignored. I think the danger in that comes when opinions are masqueraded as fact, and that’s how misinformation spreads. That’s what I was detecting from Sinead.
And so, my research to prove myself right began.
I wanted to find out what makes Sinead an expert and why we should be listening to her. I started with her education. A first generation Canadian born to immigrant parents from Ireland and Guyana, currently living in New York, she holds a bachelor of business administration in finance and chemistry as well as an MBA in strategic management. Impressive, but not exactly tech majors like computer science or engineering. She did, however, later obtain a certification in AI ethics from MIT.
In fact, it doesn’t even appear that she’s ever worked in tech at all. According to an essay she wrote in Vogue magazine back in 2020, she worked at A.T. Kearney, a consulting firm in New York City. At some point, she was also scouted to be an ecommerce model. When that took off, she ditched her burgeoning yet unfulfilling consulting career for the more creative pursuit of modeling instead.
And then AI got a little too close for comfort.
I’m not sure how far along she was in her modeling career when that occurred, but according to her aforementioned Vogue essay, a couple of AI models started booking jobs and racking up social media followers. That seems to be the point where she decided to pivot and start her organization called WAYE, Weekly Advice for Young Entrepreneurs. From there she started to get invited to prestigious speaking engagements. Next thing you know, she’s on Jenna & Sheinelle and Oprah.
Even if Sinead Bovell never becomes a household name, the message that she spreads that millions of regular jobs – that is jobs that are not in upper management – will likely no longer exist because of AI is a harmful one. She suggests that the resulting economy will consist of entrepreneurs contracting out their skills on a short-term basis instead.
In the example she gave on Oprah’s podcast, she mentioned this happening with financial analyst jobs. However, if an AI bot can do a financial analyst’s job faster, cheaper and better than a human, what skills are these former financial analysts supposed to be selling in this new short-term contractor market? What entrepreneurial endeavors will they be able to take up – opening a lemonade stand?
I think that’s the missing link in these conversations – the human factor. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everybody. I’ve seen a number of stories on Instagram of people who left their 9-to-5 for entrepreneurship, but once doing their own taxes, and chasing down clients for payments, and volatile income got a hold of them, they were happy to run back to corporate and sit in someone’s cubicle.
Entrepreneurship should always be an option for those who can and want to hang with it. But if everybody who once had a regular job gets thrusted into an open short-term contractor market, it seems to me that would result in chaos and lawlessness. Providing jobs and having a strong and accessible middle class is not only good for the economy, but I think it would help sustain law and order.
About a decade or so ago, I saw this documentary called Freakonomics – it’s also a book. In the documentary, they discovered a correlation between the passage of Roe v. Wade (aka the right to an abortion law) and a reduction in crime. It was interesting because before they came to that conclusion, they checked several other factors to figure out why the crime rate had gone down, yet none seemed to pan out like legal abortion.
That’s that human factor that would be hard if not impossible for AI to compensate for. Even as a pro-lifer, I can’t help but reconcile with these findings that unwanted children not being born benefited from the greater society.
Even though Sinead makes these bold statements about what the future of the workforce will look like, she also peppers her assertions with claims that there are also a lot of unknowns. But are they really? I mean I have no doubt there are for her and the general lay population, but AI is not some natural event that can sneak up on us like a California earthquake. This thing is man made, so the people that make it and the companies that adopt it know what they want to do with it, where they want to go.
To prove her point about the unknowns, she uses social media as an example, stating that 10-15 years ago it wasn’t a thing. But while social media wasn’t as big of a thing back then, media was. Social media is just an expansion on an existing structure, it’s not entirely new.
There is a difference between creating a new form of media that the user of the old form of media can also participate in and creating something new where the old user becomes obsolete as the new thing does it better, faster, cheaper.
One time I was working at this company, a large international company – I was a temp there. One day they called everybody in a meeting to discuss the company’s impending restructuring. Some departments, like the one I was temping in, would no longer exist as they were being absorbed by other departments. Some people’s titles would change. They were getting a new building, so on and so on. They had made considerations for the projected future of each person who worked there and their roles at the organization including the temps. I wasn’t there long, so perhaps that was all bullshit to not scare people while the restructuring began before a bunch of layoffs rolled out. But my point is corporations are not making big decisions like this on the fly. Companies that decide to incorporate AI into their business model have an expected outcome in mind. So, there shouldn’t be all these unknowns. At least not regarding whether or not a job will exist in five years. If the job of a financial analyst no longer exists in five to 10 years, it’s because companies are planning for its extinction right now.
Just as I thought I was doing a pretty good job of proving myself right – plot twist — there was an announcement that Disney would be laying off 1,000 employees. And then I saw this post:
What he was saying in this post seems to echo exactly what Sinead was saying on Oprah’s podcast. It’s essentially that the laid off employees were being replaced by contractors.
But as I read more articles about the situation, particularly Disney’s Marvel unit, there was mention of how several of Marvel’s more recent superhero movies had underperformed, losing the company money. Now that throws a curve ball into this plot twist because that begs the question: are these people losing their jobs because of AI or are these people losing their jobs to clear up some overhead and get Disney back on budget?
Another quick story. I used to work for Disney – a totally different division. But back when I worked there, I was told, by a guy who worked in the office near the marketing department that pretty much the entire team was let go. This happened around 2007, 2008 during the recession, before the fear of AI taking jobs was a thing. He said they gathered them all in an auditorium, had them make an appointment to come back and get their things, before they had security escort them out. Now obviously this story is hearsay, but my point is, in times when companies are losing money, layoffs are nothing new. George Clooney even did a movie about it back in 2009, based on a book that was published in 2001. Layoffs are typical corporate behavior not evidence of an AI takeover.
While I’ll take Sinead’s thoughts about the future of the workplace with a grain of salt, a better lesson she has taught inadvertently is the art of the pivot and the power of confidence. After all, this is a woman, who had only worked about a year in the business world before shifting to modeling, and somehow, with that background, still managed to become an in-demand speaker, on of all topics, the future of AI in the workforce. That is the more interesting storyline to me. Tell me more about that. I imagine she saw the men at that consulting firm she worked at successfully blustering their way through deals or whatever they said and said if it’s good for the goose it’s good for the gander.
Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for – finding out whether or not I proved myself right. After the sparse research I’ve done, I have to say the results are inconclusive. That was, after all, a frivolous pursuit.
Nevertheless, there are some key takeaways from this whole thing, and they are as follows:
- Now more than ever, with any and everybody having access to give their two cents to the rest of the world, about anything as if they were an actual expert, citing sources is key. Even simply saying “it’s my opinion” will do a world of good at lessening the chance of someone thinking people are speaking on more authority than they actually have. This is how we clamp down on misinformation.
- The effects of AI on the future of the workforce are not a mystery. Those who create it and companies who incorporate it into their business model know exactly where they want to go with it.
- Everybody doesn’t want to be, nor can they be, nor should they be an entrepreneur. While no job has guaranteed stability, especially at-will jobs, entrepreneurship is an especially volatile career choice. As such, we don’t need regular jobs to become extinct.
But of course, that’s my opinion.
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