Riot police round the constitutional court in Warsaw. The Polish president turning his plane round somewhere over Spain, on his way to Senegal, and flying home because two bits of his own state were having a very public argument about who’s allowed in the building. It looked like something from the Soviet era. Well, it looked like the bits of the Soviet era I’ve seen on telly, which is probably worse. Then I went on TikTok, because that’s where you see the unfiltered stuff before the algorithm gets hold of it (tin foil hat firmly on), and it looked worse there.
I’m not going to tell you who’s right in Poland. Both sides are completely sure they are, and that’s sort of the point. Two institutions fighting it out in public with the police stood in the middle isn’t a good sign for governance, anywhere.
The UK looks calm next to that. It isn’t, we just do our mess quietly. The national debt went past three trillion pounds this month, first time ever, and we had a Budget on Wednesday that was basically a very long exercise in looking for money down the back of the sofa. And in America, AI is now the number one reason companies give for cutting jobs. Not one of the reasons. The number one reason, and that’s only counting the ones who say it out loud.
So I sat there with my coffee and tried to count what European governments are actually firefighting right now, and I ran out of fingers. Migration on a scale nobody has a real way to manage, and I mean the scale, not the people. When that many people arrive that quickly, you get culture clashes, because that’s what happens when very different ways of living meet in a hurry. That’s human nature, not a ranking of who’s better than who. You get the integration problem, in countries built on thousands of years of their own traditions. And you get the cost, because people stuck in the asylum process often aren’t allowed to work, even when they really want to, so the bill lands on the state whether anyone likes it or not. Infrastructure falling apart after years of austerity. Borrowing their way out of debt, which nobody in the real world would be allowed to do, let alone manage. Borrowing to pay welfare when tax receipts are struggling with the basics. All while being pushed to spend money nobody has on a possible war that people in power seem weirdly keen on, all of it pegged to GDP, which is a made-up number for what a country is worth. Add people so sure they’re morally right that they’ll march and smash up shops, left or right, they’re the same people really. And underneath all of that, quietly, an employment crisis nobody’s talking about yet. That last one’s mine.
So when someone tells me the government will sort out AI and jobs, I want to ask which government. And sort it with what?
I see it all the time on LinkedIn. Talking heads copying and pasting each other’s thoughts, which they nicked from somewhere else in the first place, about how universal basic income is the answer and the government will bring it in. No explanation of how it gets paid for. None. No explanation of how a payment fixes the work problem either. When I ask, the comment gets deleted or I get told what’s wrong with me as a person, which is a fun way to not answer a question. The assumption underneath is that somewhere, someone makes a magic decision that fixes it, and we don’t have any agency to do anything ourselves. I like to think I make my own decisions, personally.
What would it actually take for a government to manage this? Honestly, a New Deal bonanza world tour. Throw programmes at the wall and see what sticks. And they’d have to change how they work, which means overpaid turkeys voting for Christmas, and I mean turkeys metaphorically and, in a few cases, literally. Government would have to become a service, cheaper and judged on results. Not bureaucracy and red tape, and not clever schemes to get at your dwindling money. Put up the minimum wage straight after putting up employer tax contributions and you’ve built a stealth tax. Yes, people should be paid enough to cope when costs go up, of course they should, but costs went up because of poor management, and now employers pay twice and pass it straight on to the rest of us. It looks great in the government report for a while, until the drag catches up. We’re in managed decline, I think. Managed by turkeys.
Everyone, everywhere, is solving yesterday’s problem today, with today’s language and last year’s mental framework. Big workforce cuts look great on the books now and hurt the business later. More welfare now helps now and puts the bill on the few people left paying in. HR is still running skills and training off frameworks from the nineties, so nobody actually gets the skills they need. And the training companies corporates keep paying, because they always have, are slapping an AI label on an old course, or wheeling out a trainer to teach prompting or how to use Copilot. Gross. That’s not training. That’s Dave, who used to teach “digital transformation”, which was actually how to use the CRM and Outlook, jazzing it up with ChatGPT. The people trying hardest to do this properly are too small for anyone to notice.
Here’s what I’m seeing from my own seat. One agency I’ve worked with has made a conscious decision not to hire juniors anymore. They’re training their current juniors up to mid-level and automating the junior work. For them, one business, that’s smart, economically smart. Do that same decision at scale and you’ve got a mortgage crisis, and everything I listed above burning a bit brighter. Another business I’m building a client delivery platform for can now deliver its work faster, to the same very high standard. Sounds great. Until you realise it means double the work, well near enough double, on the same headcount. In the past that extra work would have meant hiring people. It doesn’t anymore.
I’m worried. Very worried, more than I let on when I’m talking to people. Partly because so few people have seen what I’ve seen, and the ones who have bias their way round it. And partly because a lot of the people I know are older and more senior than me, sat in safe seats, nodding at me with that slightly patronising tone while they tell me it’ll all be fine because of the same argument I always get. My worry is that because so few people see it, when the cliff edge gets close, the people building the bridge, or saying they are, the ones we’ve all let get on with it through apathy and not knowing any better, will turn out to be building a staircase to the bottom. They’ll take the gains and everyone else gets f***ed. I don’t think anyone’s coming to save us. I think it’s going to be a long, painful mess.
Look, all of this is me. A neuro-spicy bloke who’s good at pattern matching and spends far too much time arguing both sides of something in his own head. I’ve done a lot of reading, and the things that look separate aren’t separate. I’m not Nostradamus (neither was he, to be fair). So these are ideas, not predictions. I can see the direction really clearly. I can’t see the destination, or how long and bumpy it gets on the way. If I could put money on it, though, I would.
So here’s something you can do on your own, this morning, with your own coffee. Write down who would actually step in if your role went tomorrow. Names, not institutions. Then cross out anyone whose job sits in the same layer as yours. Look at what’s left.
My book, The Next Rung, is out in paperback on 19 January 2027 with Practical Inspiration Publishing. Chapter ten is the one about who gets to build what comes next.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.