My business, as most of you know, is using storytelling to bump conversion rates.

A lot of people lump that in with content creation. And when you think of the phrase “content creation” these days, the topic “effect of AI” is a mere half-step away.

(“Content creation,” by the way, is a phrase I hate hearing people use for their own stuff, I suspect they are aiming too low, but that’s another story, don’t get me started.)

Because of that tight link between the phrases “content creation” and “effect of AI,” I get asked, on a regular basis, what my take on AI is. Here it is:

First off, there are AI haters. I am not one of them. I love AI. Use it every day.

Okay, that out of the way, here’s my take on it:

In most ways, AI is like the steam engine for white collar workers. The steam engine, and its modern derivatives, made a lot of physical labor go away. But it didn’t make physical labor go away completely. Walk past any construction site, or any factory, and there will be some people operating the machines. Those people are the ones who learned how to occupy the 10% of space the steam engine, and its modern derivatives, can’t claim.

AI is kind of like that, except for white collar workers. So if you’re cool with the idea that you’re going to need to figure out how to occupy the top 10% of the space, you’re perfectly happy to see 90% of the population get killed off.

There’s the issue of AI reaching sentiency, where it knows us better than we do, and yes, there is that danger (I’ll weigh in on that in the next edition a few days from now), but if that happens, humanity is going to have much bigger problems than figuring out how writers are going to make a living.