The Age of Artists
No matter if you're hyperbolic or cynical on AI, the toothpaste is out of the tube. The advancement of humanity is now inexorably interwoven with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Of course, the effects of this will ripple through everything we do — business, entrepreneurship, relationships, education, healthcare, government.
While we're working out whether this spells our extinction or our immortality, there's a more immediate topic we need to talk about:
The total upending in the purpose of human work.
Ultimately, the machines are going to be able to do everything we can do. But faster, cheaper and more perfectly. Which leads to the obvious question: what do all the humans do now?
Despite the temptation, the answer is not "nothing". Human greed and curiosity will always drives action.w
But moreover, because even when machines can do everything a human can do, better than any human on the planet, there is one loophole that keeps humans in work forever:
Choice.
The question is not what humans can do that machines can’t.
It’s what we choose to leave to humans, even when machines beat us.
Value does not equal utility.
We still buy paintings, despite the invention of photography.
We still put people in charge, even when software could optimise the system.
We still choose Taylor Swift, even when Suno exists.
As long as humans decide where money goes, human work is infinite. It’s just its form, nature, and meaning must change entirely. Almost overnight.
How?
No matter your age, the work you do next that will be most sought-after and highly-paid, will shift from function to art.
And that doesn’t mean (just) paintings and songs.
It means any form of honest self-expression that connects us with other people, through a practiced craft or medium.
Bus drivers who make someone feel seen.
Leaders who build missions bigger than themselves.
Bricklayers who care more about the garden, than the wall they leave behind
The epicentre of value of human effort is going to shift
- from functional labour (speed, scale, accuracy, optimisation)
- to artistic labour (taste, judgment, meaning, care, conviction)
For many, that might sound lovely. But there's a catch. A few in fact :
- Very few of us know how to MAKE art. Let alone EARN from it
- Very few organisations know how to HIRE for it or LEAD it
- Very few systems know how to VALUE it, rather than leaving it as an aesthetic garnish
So yes, we’re about to see a tidal wave of change and job-losses that will be life-altering for so many of us. Work will vanish and certainty will erode. That pain is real. But it’s a symptom, not the cause.
The real story isn’t redundancy. It’s something quieter, slower, and harder to see at first. It’s a migration of skills, identity, and purpose.
This is the great migration...
Toward an Age of Artists.
I’ve spent the last two decades inside boardrooms, agencies, and leadership teams, helping organisations grow, change, and survive. Across wildly different industries, the same thing kept proving true: the work that endures is grounded in real human needs, shaped by taste and judgment, and carried out by people who care.
AI doesn’t just make that more true than ever. It makes it existential.
So I’m writing a series on what it now takes to stay relevant, fulfilled, and economically valuable as humans in an Age of Artists. I’ll try and avoid the usual hype and fear-mongering, and focus instead on clear thinking about what must change when machines can do almost everything.
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