The vibecode economy
Jobs, automated work and the prestige problem
The first time I did work experience on a national newspaper in 2016, I spent most of my time there transcribing.
These were long conversations with actors and scientists and economists. I would sit for two, maybe three hours per interview, pausing and unpausing, meticulously re-listening to any sections that were muffled, typing up a few thousands words of transcript.
That same year, two computer scientists in Palo Alto called Sam Liang and Yun Fu launched a company known at the time as AISense. It specialised in voice intelligence, combining speech recognition and deep learning to build a product that could understand human conversation. Later, the business would adopt the name of its star app: Otter.
By the time I was a reporter for a national news wire a couple of years later, I was uploading any interview I did into Otter. It saved hours of time.
That was my first experience of work – not exactly gratifying or exciting work, but work nonetheless – being automated out of existence.
I thought about this a couple of weeks ago when I came across Lawrence Lundy-Bryan’s Substack post, Young People Can’t Get Jobs. Now What?
“Any task that is digital, routine and legible to AI will go, and soon,” he warned. “Youth unemployment is going to spike, and unless we do something urgently we will have lost a generation of talent and millions of disillusioned young people with no stake in society.”
Lawrence is an investor at Lunar Ventures, where he backs computing hardware at pre-seed and seed stage. But his interests span many topics, and lately he has been particularly focused on education, jobs and training.
“Unless you’re really on the frontier, ie in a big lab, in a startup or investing in them, you really cannot see 6-12 months ahead,” he tells me on a call, explaining why he wanted to sound the alarm with his piece. “That’s not to say people are stupid; people are busy.”
What has been slowly happening with entry-level tasks and jobs like my transcription example is now about to speed up, he projects, as white-collar industries start slashing new hiring.
“When I speak to people in education, or when I speak to graduates, most people are acting like it’s business as usual,” he says. But in his view, that is decidedly not the case. The jobs are already gone.
What particularly drew me to Lawrence’s piece was that he didn’t just identify the problem, but had a go at outlining some possible solutions. Perhaps unsurprising, given that in a past life he worked in policy.
One idea would be a new bootcamp that gets aspiring young professionals to essentially vibecode three micro-businesses into existence in the space of 18 months. Under this model, much like some of the bootstrappers I met last week at Ramen Space, independent hackers may be able to put together income streams for themselves without the need for a traditional graduate job.
Another idea is to fund “fast builds”, giving young entrepreneurs £20,000 to build a real local business, with minimal bureaucracy. These could include construction, care work or food production – something that exists in the physical world.
Finally, he suggests a scheme to offer accelerated apprenticeships in skilled trades, with generous equipment loans and starter grants.
The problem we quickly land on as we talk through these ideas is prestige. We have a culture that positions certain knowledge work roles as a sign of achievement, shorthand for being smart enough to do well in school and go to a good university. But what we are looking at now is a possible future with far fewer of these roles available.
Lawrence sums up the cultural change needed. “How do we make what is now low-status high-status in the eyes of new graduates?”
Money is clearly not the answer: plenty of graduates continue to opt for jobs that would pay them less than becoming a plumber. To change the attitude, you have to change the story.
“Nobody is telling the story of a 27-year-old person who left school and set up a roofing company and lives a very happy life,” says Lawrence. “There seems to be a lack of cultural excitement [around] these professions.”
What if, he proposes, we could give the trades the same treatment as tech founders have had over the past few decades? Build excitement and prestige by getting Matt Clifford or Demis Hassabis on the board of an accelerator for artisans, he says, and you would see culture start to change.
There may be an especially acute challenge in the UK, given the history of the class system and how it still shapes attitudes today. Lawrence understands how that shapes young people’s ambitions; his own father is a tradesman, but instead of following in his footsteps, that same desire for prestige took him on another path.
The running thread in all three of his proposed workstreams is that they seek to expand the cultural ideal of what it means to be a founder, sharing the riches of the kudos that is afforded to those who have raised large amounts of venture capital. Whether your business is a bootstrapped mini-app or bricklaying, you should get a bit of that entrepreneurial glow as well.
Lawrence is keen to hear from others thinking about this topic, so do give his post a read and get in touch if you have ideas.
Teatime scroll Each week I share links to writings, events, tweets and other conversation-starters. If you have something you think should be in here, feel free to email or DM me.
👷♀️ The government evidently has its eye on the subject of today’s newsletter too, yesterday announcing a shake-up of the apprenticeship system aimed at getting more people into skilled jobs from carpentry to care work.
📋 Teams from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and The Entrepreneurs Network have put together a data wish list website, which tracks opportunities where opening up public data could solve problems.
(As this is a post from the archive, I have removed links to events that have already happened)