The future of skills...

As everyone is rapidly realizing that AI is going to make a lot of jobs obsolete, really soon, I’ve noticed a wave of optimistic musings going around online. Such musings usually go along the lines that, in this age of despicable universal subliteracy, and machines doing more with language than humans can or even want, to, that some kind of return to a golden age of literacy and communication will happen; and that the most important skill in this wildly uncertain future will be literacy, and a certain adeptness in communication.

Whenever a cold and brutal future rears its head, soft-headed commentators will usually invoke some foggy bygone golden past, some trad lifestyle, forgotten about, but still within our grasp should we so choose—and which is the central, perhaps sole, means of rescuing our increasingly doomed species.

Now, as language is being swiftly strangled to death by AI, fantasy refuge is found in a vain hope that in the future, if you’re a good communicator, if you have a way with words, you will magically have some kind of high-powered job, because that will be the rarest, and thus most valuable, skill.

The truth is, of course, the opposite: literacy and communication skills have zero market value, today and in the future, and will never help you get a job. Ever notice how everyone who has a job speaks like either an ape or an alien? Communicating is just about the last thing that anyone who has a job is good at, knows about, or cares about. Communication and language skills/literacy have been so severely marginalized in the workforce, so irrelevant in all facets of employment, that they have become obsolete—things that become obsolete don’t suddenly become highly valuable again. Once something is obsolete—like language itself now is—it doesn’t magically become relevant again. This is wishful thinking.

Communication/language/literacy are being bandied about as the future of skills because the alternative is so unclear—nobody knows what skills will be valuable in the future (and “future” at this point means basically like next year). The establishment had pinned its hopes on coding being the supreme, unimpeachably valuable skill in the future—but AI has already made that skill basically valueless. So out of confusion and sheer desperation, good ol’ fashion language—wordsmithery!—is forecasted as being what employers will really look for going forward.

It is, sadly, a complete pipe dream.

So what skill will be valuable in the future? Basically just one—knowing rich people, having proximity to them, etc. As we descend into a techno-feudal era, all the wealth and power have already been attained—if you don’t have any by now, you never will—and all you can hope for is to attach yourself to the court of some powerful lord, as their jester, magician, etc. So in this sense—of having some special humanistic/occultist knowledge—perhaps language, or facility with history/tradition and language skill enough to explain it to some bored lord—will become a valuable skill. But only if your knowledge aligns with what the lord thinks is interesting—and this increasingly, I think, means occultist/esoteric/mystical traditions. This kind of thinking appeals to bored, lazy, powerful people—the promise of augury and alchemy, of turning base metals into gold—of mysticism, turning one thing into another, presto change-o. It’s no coincidence that these things are regaining popularity as we descend into this neo-(techno)feudal era—they are the concerns of lords, dukes, and kings from the medieval period, and so they will be again.

Establishing some kind of profile whereby you can be positioned as some conduit to special mystical knowledge, and getting funding from some tech idiot for providing this knowledge, is just about all that “communication” and “language” skills will be good for in the future…