The book comes out in January 2027. I have been writing about the argument in this newsletter since April. Now it is time to tell you what is actually in it.
“The Next Rung: Why AI is breaking the career ladder, and how to build the next one.” Five parts, seventeen chapters, plus a prologue that starts with a disclosure.
The disclosure: I am building the loom. I know it. Orca, the product I sell, replaces the orchestration work that a human assistant or junior analyst would do. Enterprise Skills, the EdTech platform I co-founded, measures the eight capabilities that AI does not replicate. I advise agency owners whose conclusion keeps being “you need fewer people.” The book is written from inside the contradiction, not from a safe distance. That is the only honest position I could find.
Part One: The Ground Moves. Three chapters on why this time is different. The historical absorption mechanism, the three pillars that carried every previous transition, is breaking. New task creation, demand expansion, skill transferability: all three failing at once because AI is a general labour substitute, not a narrow tool. Sarah, a marketing director, walks through a year watching her own role dissolve. The four-tier exposure map shows who gets hit first. It is not who you think. AI displaces the educated and well-paid before it touches the trades.
Part Two: The Breaking. Five chapters on what happens when individual displacement becomes a structural problem. The quiet squeeze, where none of the six people in Chapter 4 would describe what happened to them as displacement. The numbers: 3 to 4 million UK knowledge jobs eliminated or hollowed by the mid-2030s. Critical mass, where AI-native firms running at $2.5 million revenue per employee compete against traditional firms at $200,000. The mortgage problem: Tom and Priya bought at 4.2 times joint income, both made redundant inside a year. The world breaking differently depending on coastline: managed, chaotic, authoritarian, collapse. Five flashpoints that turn gradual economic pressure into political crisis.
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.
Part Three: The Reshaping. Four chapters on what comes after the trough. The J-curve and the question of who captures the productivity surplus. Six post-displacement portraits: Leah running a community enterprise for £28,000, Gareth the plumber whose apprenticeship applicants now include ex-accountants, Amara on a three-job portfolio at £22,000, Neil running installations for a community energy cooperative, Naomi making furniture in Margate, Ryan on three platform jobs at £18,000 with no runway and no way out. Five made it through. One did not. What separated them was not talent or effort. It was what was standing near them when the floor gave way. Six new institutions already working at scale somewhere. The classroom of the future, where capability-based assessment replaces the proxy that AI just broke.
Part Four: The Choices. Two chapters. The honest audit: the right question is not “could AI do my job” but “will the economics of my employer make it rational to replace what I do within my working lifetime.” Three positioning tracks depending on whether you have runway, do not have runway, or are building for a community. Five principles. No-regrets moves. The line I keep coming back to: knowing is a feeling. An audit is a number. The distance between the two is where most people hide.
Part Five: After the Ladder. Two chapters that zoom out. The orchestration economy was costing us more than we admitted: 70-hour weeks, burnout at 57 per cent, a genuine progress indicator that peaked in 1978 while GDP kept climbing. We are mourning familiarity. Not the same thing as prosperity. Then the final question: three paths, two of which require deliberate choice, one of which is the default. Neo-feudalism is the default because it does not require anyone to choose it.
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.
That is the book. Two years of writing, six composite characters whose patterns come from hundreds of real conversations, and a question I could not stop asking: what happens when the career ladder dissolves and nobody builds the next one?
I wrote it because I think the argument matters and because I could not keep advising people privately while staying quiet publicly. The honesty is the position. It is the only position I have.