Now and then I gather random thoughts into one column. Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about.
I enjoy getting press releases, which probably makes me a bit of a nut. These are the sometimes-breathless emailed announcements about “news” ranging from innovations in carpet cleaning to an up-and-coming hair-extension expert (true examples). In most cases, I can’t imagine why they think a careers column fits their content, but I usually glance at the release anyway. You never know.
Which is beginning to be a point of contention for me: I never know.
In years past, the releases were written by public relations folks hoping to get a plug for their client or product. But now I’d say about half of my daily harvest is bot-written. Phoebe B and Claudia E (never any last names) are probably my most faithful correspondents, sending me dozens of irrelevant pitches each week, always with the same wording but a different story idea.
I’ll stop short of calling this spam, at least for the moment. But having written hundreds of press releases in my early career, I’m sorry to see the craft so denigrated. There’s an art to a good press release, that starts with appropriately targeting your audience and then creating hooks to entice further engagement. Learning the craft takes more than sending templated mass emails to random recipients.
What I can’t decide is whether it matters. While I miss collaborating with skilled press agents who could help me flesh out an article, I can’t say they’re irreplaceable or even instrumental for my work. I just hate to see another outlet for skilled writers getting gobbled up by the giant AI machine.
Phoebe and Claudia? Just so you know, I’m never going to click on your Google docs “reports.” Good grief.
Speaking of press releases — one of the perennial pitches I receive is to write about jobs that are AI-proof, or from organizations claiming dubious statistics about how many jobs AI will eliminate in the near future. I have no doubt artificial intelligence has been and will continue to uproot entire fields of work; I just don’t think we have very accurate measures yet. In any case, I’m more concerned with the actual jobs being touted as AI-proof than I am in the statistics.
For example, one study likes the odds for social work staying on the human side. I could go for that, if I wasn’t aware of the ferocious efforts to cut costs in the programs usually served by social workers. And these days, cost-cutting frequently goes hand-in-hand with AI workflow streamlining. In the field of social work, that could mean a cut in human employees, assuming that activities such as client check-ins or initial levels of crisis resolution can be turned over to bots.
My point isn’t that AI will take all the jobs one way or the other. I truly don’t believe that, for a number of reasons I’m still trying to articulate. I promise to provide more depth once I get the words nailed down.
At the moment, my only real point is that workers need to consider carefully before choosing a career based on its AI resilience. More than I’d like, I think AI’s impact on jobs is guess work rather than analysis and prediction right now.
I’ll end with a positive story, even though it’s not about jobs or AI. I was eating out this week in one of my many St. Paul breakfast haunts. This time it was Capitol View Café, which I admire for being family-owned and for having a terrific fried egg sandwich (best with the chicken sausage).
I was tucked away in a back booth savoring my sandwich when I noticed two St. Paul police officers getting ready to pay up and leave. Noted and quickly forgotten, except for my idle curiosity about how much those equipment-laden belts must weigh.
Twenty minutes later, it was my turn to pay up — which I was told wasn’t possible. Why? Because the officers had paid my tab, including the tip. Why? Because someone ahead of them had paid their tab and they wanted to pay it forward. I should have done the same but the only table occupied by then was a four-top and that was out of my budget.
I’ll watch for another opportunity to pay someone’s tab, but for now I’ll settle for saying, “Thank you, officers.” You know who you are, but in case you don’t — one of you is recovering from knee surgery. That was kind of you and a great way to start my day. And a most welcome reminder that human interactions are still the best.
