Duolingo made waves as it announced its AI-first changeover, stating it would begin terminating its contracts with human workers. Shopify’s CEO instructed its employees to ask whether an AI could do the job before asking for more headcount. Klarna, a financial company, has also eliminated a sizable portion of its workforce, especially in areas like customer support. The list goes on. 

Optimists respond by pointing out that new technology never wipes out existing ones. Bank tellers, switchboard operators, and elevator operators, for example. They purport that AI will create as many new jobs as it eliminates. 

I’m not so sure. Tasks that required 10 people to complete may be able to be done by a team of one or two. Employees who will be most affected, most quickly, are those with entry-level jobs. Rresearchers, junior staff, social media and graphics folks might find their jobs completely automated. Can all these positions be filled by AI-prompt writers?

While there is no silver bullet to create an AI-adjacent job, it’s time for companies to look at career trajectories for their workers that can fit into an AI-first schema. Now that we’ve moved from the experimental phase to the operational phase of AI adoption, I prepared a manifesto on how companies should be thinking about moving their staff into the AI age by fostering a workplace that is both AI-forward and human centric. I prepared a manifesto on how companies should be thinking about moving their staff into the AI age by fostering a workplace that is both AI-forward and humancentric.  Read about it at IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing.). 

Intuitively, we all know that housing your most important memories and contacts on sites you don’t own and don’t control is a fool’s errand, but we still do it. Those old enough to have watched platforms and personal data disappear know what I’m talking about (looking at you Picassa, Yahoo!Photos, Friendster, Skype and MySpace). Thanks to Neil Weitzman for his LinkedIn post that reminded us to make backups of LinkedIn contacts part of data hygiene. 

Here’s how: 

1. Click the ‘Me’ icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Select ‘Settings & Privacy’ from the dropdown.
3. Click ‘Data privacy’ on the left pane.
4. Under the ‘How LinkedIn uses your data’ section, click ‘Get a copy of your data.’
5. Select ‘Want something in particular?’ Select the data files you’re most interested in.
6. Select ‘Connections’ or download the full archive.
7. Click ‘Request archive.’
8. You'll receive an email to your primary email address that will include a link where you can download.