Humans Interviewed
The people whose experience shaped the book — brief, edited portraits of the humans behind the argument.
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Maon Seidel
Founder and CEO · Ecommerce Counsel
I interviewed the man I work for over two sittings on a Thursday evening, and he spent the first ten minutes explaining why the middle of the labour market is being hollowed out using a marrow bone. He is Gen X, he runs an agency with no offices, and he has never once softened a thing to make me feel better about it.
That average is not a resting place any more, it is a direction of travel. His argument is not that the machines take the work. It is that the work stays and the value of being merely alright at it disappears, so standing still now moves you backwards relative to everybody who did not. And underneath that, the reason people stay put has almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with what a person is prepared to be expected to do next time.
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Joseph Fasano
Poet, teacher, founder of his own writing academy
I met Joseph Fasano on a video call I nearly missed because my ancient iMac's video card gave up and left me watching the rainbow wheel of doom go round. He is a poet who spent twenty years as a university professor, walked away from it, and now teaches everybody from teenagers to pensioners in an academy of his own.
The machines make logical connections that look emotional because they have eaten so much of our writing. What a poem does is leap. And even if a machine one day leaps too, it still cannot live your life for you, which was the only question worth asking all along.