Meaningful Work
What is the future of meaningful endeavour?
Alignment of purpose is the hardest and most critical element of any plan to make meaningful progress.
Man is driven by meaning
Related
Purpose
Explore the future of establishing meaningful work in a world that is run by AI and fuelled by Crypto incentives.
Predictions
A universal deep intelligence will create the world of interconnected villages that won't care about what is online except to connect through playing games.
The future of work is a decentralized marketplace where people connect to level up at their Zones of Proximal Development. Social glue is the most powerful force for influencing human behaviour.
AI Impact
- AI will lead to flatter organizational structures with fewer managers.
- People will need to become more multidisciplinary as AI takes over some specialized roles.
- Rise of gig economy with quality real world experiences priced at premium.
- People will need to become more multidisciplinary as AI takes over some specialized roles.
- Education will be transformed by AI teachers reaching millions globally.
Limitations
- AI still struggles to fully capture individual writing voices and styles.
- Open-source efforts by large tech companies may pose challenges for AI startups.
- There are concerns about job displacement as AI becomes more capable, particularly for white-collar jobs.
Engineer positive collisions that make meetings matter
Teamwork
What are the most important human capabilities to focus attention on, that will compliment working with AI teammates?
- Do you select players for positions, or create positions for players' potential?
- What core competencies are demanded across all team members?
- What is the optimal mix of specialist capabilities and responsibilities?
- Is the one person billion dollar company something worth celebrating?
- How much money is enough to live happily?
See Human Capabilities and teamwork for more detailed analysis.
Great organisations have soul because they are filled entirely by people that genuinely give a fuck - Nate
Connection
AI will enable anyone to be coached by a better version of themselves. So what is the true value of finding resonance with another human?
Some people will go full immersive, but others will long for authentic human connection. Creating space for providing positive human interactions will be priced at a premium. Crypto incentives can be engineered to coordinate positive collisions.
Better connections lead to better decisions
Core Roles
Predict that organisations will be flat, with fewer managers and more cross-disciplinary roles. Primary roles in the future of work:
Business Operations
Analyse key deliverables to determine opportunities to run Business Operations as a Service.
Identify how much time is spent on value-creating activities versus administrative tasks.
Engineering
Determine best practice protocols for using AI coding agents to build software at a fraction of the cost of employing humans.
Identify key activities and protocols for best practices across each unique discipline.
SaaS vs JTBD
Roles where horizontal AI Products can be employed to run a specific function.
- UX Researcher (maze / hotjar / usertesting)
- UX Designer (v0 / playground / galileo ai)
- Product Manager (productboard / aha / airfocus)
- Market Researcher (exploding topics / trendhunter / sparktoro)
- Product Validator (validately / userfeed / prelaunchhero)
- Programmer (cursor.ai / replit / claude 3.5)
We are all software engineers and we are all investors now
Roles by Industry
Tomorrow's engineers must have cross discipline expertise; time spent learning to code should instead be invested in expertise in industries such as farming, biology, manufacturing and education - Jensen Huang
AI Use Cases
Actionable use cases for practical day-to-day productivity gains with AI.
- Automating coding tasks
- Building entire web applications with unfamiliar technologies
- Converting programs to more efficient languages (e.g. C or Rust) for 10-100x performance improvements
- Simplifying and trimming down large codebases
- Writing initial experiment code for research papers
- Automating monotonous tasks and one-off scripts
- Accelerating learning and skill acquisition
- Teaching how to use new frameworks and technologies
- Replacing web searches for setting up/configuring new packages and projects
- Assisting with debugging error messages
- Enhancing productivity
- Improving coding speed by 50% or more
- Automating boring/repetitive tasks to allow focus on higher-level problems
- Replacing time-consuming web searches with direct AI assistance
- Rapid prototyping and development
- Quickly building proof-of-concept applications
- Iterating on designs through conversation with AI
- Research assistance
- Generating initial code for experiments
- Analyzing and visualizing results
- Task automation
- Automating data processing and analysis workflows
- Creating scripts to automate repetitive tasks
- Code optimization and refactoring
- Identifying opportunities to improve code efficiency
- Suggesting refactoring to simplify complex codebases
- Documentation and explanation
- Generating code documentation
- Explaining complex code or algorithms
See AI Business Models for more detailed analysis and Engineering for how to build your own agents.
Earning Money
Ways to make money across business, investing and technology.
- Traditional employment:
- Full-time or part-time jobs
- Seasonal/temporary work
- Internships
- Self-employment/freelancing:
- Freelance writing, design, programming, etc.
- Consulting
- Tutoring/teaching
- Virtual assistance
- Entrepreneurship:
- Starting a small business
- Developing and selling products
- Offering services
- Online/digital:
- Blogging and affiliate marketing
- YouTube channel monetization
- Online courses/coaching
- Selling digital products
- Print-on-demand merchandise
- Dropshipping
- Web design/development
- Social media management
- Online surveys/focus groups
- Microtasks on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Sharing economy:
- Ride-sharing (Uber)
- Home-sharing (Airbnb)
- Task services (Fiverr)
- Delivery services
- Investing:
- Stocks and bonds
- Real estate
- Peer-to-peer lending
- Cryptocurrency
- Selling items:
- Selling unused items online
- Flipping items for profit
- Craft/handmade good
- Yard sales
- Gig economy:
- Food delivery
- Pet sitting/dog walking
- Babysitting
- House cleaning
- Landscaping
- Rental income:
- Renting out Real Estate
- Renting equipment or vehicles
- Passive income streams:
- Dividend stocks
- Rental properties
- Royalties from books/music/patents
- Affiliate marketing
- Miscellaneous:
- Participating in clinical trials
- Donating plasma
- Mystery shopping
- Focus groups
- Cash back apps and credit cards
Attachments
Related
- AI Automation
- Job Hunting
- Capabilities
- Teamwork
- Predictions
- Jobs to be Done
- Business Operations as a Service
Links
What is the most important question you could ask yourself to make progress?