Graham Twaddle

Staying 'relevant' in the age of AI

There's increasing concern about the impact that AI is going to have on the job market, especially on ‘white-collar’ jobs.

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Old photo of a woman using a typewriter while in a swimming pool

Try searching “AI” and “white-collar” on Google News to see what I mean: you’ll find plenty of doom-laden headlines. I share this concern.

Why we should panic

In a previous blog post I despaired that, “any task that can be done online is likely to be one that AI will eventually be better at than humans.” Recently I listened to Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel Laureate and the "Godfather of AI” echo this pessimism. He told Stephen Bartlett on his podcast that, "a good bet would be to be a plumber.”

If "learn to code" was the career advice of the 2010s, "learn to plumb" might well become the career trope of this decade.

"Learn to code" seemed like wise advice 10 years ago. I have a friend for whom it was. He took the gamble of leaving his old job, invested in retraining at a coding bootcamp and got in at the right time. The outcome today might be very different. There is all round panic about the impact of AI on entry-level coding and other jobs. Having recently tried out some AI enabled code editors such as Cursor, I can see why.

AI is already replacing or reducing many tasks that people, including myself, used to do for a living. For example, in my own case: internal comms. I used to joke that internal comms was "writing the all-staff emails that nobody else wanted to write". Now Gemini, Claude, CoPilot and ChatGPT can all help make us internal comms specialists. The same applies for marketing and a lot of other 'comms' roles. They might not disappear entirely, but there will be less of them.

Why we shouldn't panic

It may feel as if the pace of AI's progress is unstoppable but the known laws of physics suggest that this is not going to be the case. In a world of limited resources, even exponential growth comes to an end.

I don't know exactly when or how the slowdown will appear, but it could arise from one or more of the following scenarios:

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm saying there will be a slowdown. An equilibrium, not a shutdown. We won't go back to the way things were before. By the time things calm down, some of the things that used to count as “work” will be gone.

When the AI equilibrium happens, we will be better placed to take stock of the things it can't do as well as humans. And I’m pretty sure that there will be plenty of areas of intellectual activity where humans can still add real value.

Until then, it's a matter of holding our nerve, optimising our options, and not allowing ourselves to become de-skilled. Coders need to keep coding. Thinkers need to keep thinking. Writers need to keep writing.

One of the reasons I am writing this blog post the old-fashioned way is that I don't want to lose my ability, albeit modest, to express myself in writing.

What new skills will we need?

It's not just about holding on to existing skills; we need to be committed to developing new ones.

The answer to “what new skills do I need to learn to remain relevant in the age of AI” is going to be different for everyone. So I don't think the talk about "learning to plumb" or pursuing other types of 'blue-collar' work is particularly helpful. It will lead to bandwagons and I don't think it's helpful talking about white-collar' or 'blue-collar work' any more. We're not living in 1950s America.

Here's the thing: manual work is the original digital work. It's Digital 1.0. Even our word ‘digital’ comes from the Latin word for ‘finger’. What if the "killer app" that gave homo sapiens our edge is not so much our brain size but our dexterity?

If this is the case then the space where knowledge work breaks away from the computer screen and into the real world is the one to be in. What spaces do our own interests and aptitudes lead us into?

That’s my current line of enquiry.

I’m thinking aloud via these blog posts so I don’t have any answers yet. In fact, I'm still working out what I think about AI. I may swing from doom to optimism to defiance from post to post, even paragraph to paragraph and I’m ok with that for now.

Medium-to-longer-term strategies for staying relevant

What I can offer at the moment is a few hunches for strategies that might help to keep people like me relevant for the medium-to-longer term.

Short-to-medium term strategies for staying relevant

For those of us (oldies) who need to focus on a shorter time window, here’s what I am currently considering:

Addendum (28 May 2026)

It's almost a year since I had these thoughts and I largely still hold the same views - although I've decided not to pursue the certification path myself. But I still think it's valid for people who are sure they want to commit to a specific career path at least for a 5 year period. In the workplace I've experimented with a few AI tools over the last year (including a Google Gem I made to assess the retention policy on documents) and while I have found them useful (especially helping me with spreadsheet formulae), I haven't felt they were ready to take over from me! Since originally writing this piece, we have found ourselves in the midst of (an even bigger) energy crisis, so my forecast of an AI "slowdown" may come sooner rather than later.

Thanks for reading 😀