Black Box // Drop 004 // Your Personal Wake-up Call

Good morning,

Not a fun one this week. But a necessary warning.

I’m being purposefully fully dramatic in the next few paragraphs, might be reality isn’t all that bad (perhaps it’ll be much worse).

Imagine standing on the shoreline, watching a dark tide roll in. A wave of silicon inevitability, humming with code and calculation, stretching from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen.

I regularly scour all kinds of forums and digital meeting places to try to take the pulse of this new technology. We highlighted the skeptics, the believers AND the doomers in this newsletter. They all make valid points. But what is REALLY happening?

From a job perspective - it’s looking grim.

This week’s drop is a Reddit thread called “I lost my business to AI. Who else so far ?”

The thread reads like a funeral procession.

Copywriters. Coders. Translators. Tutors. People who thought they were safe because they had skills. People who spent decades mastering their craft, only to find that craft scraped up and served by some bot that doesn’t eat, sleep, or bill by the hour.

If you feel that tightening in your chest, you’re not alone. One user wrote: “Lost 50% of my clients in a month. The rest are asking if I can match ChatGPT’s rates.” Another said their translation business—built brick by brick over a decade—collapsed in weeks.

The avalanche has started, and no one’s coming to dig us out.

This is the beginning of the end of “knowledge work” as a stable class. We used to joke about robots replacing truckers. Now it’s poets, strategists, and logo designers sitting on the curb with a cardboard sign.

You might think, “I’m special. I’m strategic. I think outside the box.” But you’re still in the box. And the box is shrinking.

So what do you do? How do you not fall victim to this wave?

You get dangerous. You adapt or you drown. You use these models harder, smarter, faster than the people replacing you.

You read up on AI news ;)

You build something AI can’t do alone—community, narrative, trust.

Or you ride the beast into new territory entirely, where no one else has the guts to go.

You pivot to a field where human interaction is important.

The time that the smart kids go into maths and STEM are over. Smart kids go into Humanities.

Just don’t stand there hoping it’ll slow down. Because it won’t. It’s not personal. It’s just the machine. And it’s knocking at our doors.

Like my personal hero Hunter S. Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”:

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Turn pro.

You have been warned.

See you on Friday.

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