When AI Moves Faster Than Imagination: Rethinking Work & Purpose in the Age of Automation

Explore Benjamin Mann's insights on AI, job disruption, skyrocketing talent prices, and how meaning, adaptability, and mission will define work in the age of automation.

The world has always been slightly obsessed with predicting the future, usually with results as reliable as British weather forecasts. But in the age of artificial intelligence, we find ourselves not so much pondering tomorrow as struggling to keep pace with a technology that gallops past our expectations before we’ve even put the kettle on.

Leading technology giants are discreetly tossing $100 million job offers across the table for a handful of top AI researchers, while elsewhere in the same economy, there’s relentless news of looming layoffs and warnings about jobs at risk of automation. It’s an era when a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm could nearly do your taxes, write your resignation letter, and then convince you to send it—whether you intended to or not.

Ben Mann

, co-founder of Anthropic—a company at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence—who in a recent conversation with

Lenny Rachitsky

didn’t mince words. “Twenty percent unemployment is inevitable,” he declared, not with fatalism, but the resigned cheer of a man who’s glimpsed the script for the next season before the rest of us.

His assertion isn’t empty sensationalism: it’s rooted in both economic logic and sobering technical reality.

You’d expect the purveyors of AI to sell virtue with evangelistic zeal, assuring us the machines will only take on the drudgery while humanity ascends to creative nirvana. Instead, Mann’s message is simpler and more radical: no one—no matter how clever, credentialed, or even complicit in building the future—is immune from the coming wave. The real challenge, then, isn’t just to survive the disruption, but to find something deeper and more enduring as the ground shifts beneath our feet.

So: if the game of employment is being rewritten, what’s the new prize? Is it still about money, security, or an algorithm-proof career, or are we being called—perhaps dragooned—into searching for meaning and mission in the age of machines?

You can access the complete podcast and post on

Lenny's Newsletter

:

Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night | Ben Mann

or watch on Lenny’s Podcast on YouTube:

In this issue of Brewed for Work, we will explore what the market’s wild rewards for AI talent really mean; what happens when 20% of us—maybe more—are surplus to requirements; why, against this backdrop, purpose and mission have quietly eclipsed money as the foundation of career security; and finally, how to raise not just more adaptive children, but whole organisations and societies capable of staying buoyant when the waters rise.

There is, paradoxically, hope—if we know where to look for it.

Today’s Issue at a Glance:

• Chasing the Market Price of Genius: $100 Million and the Talent Gold Rush

• The Dawn of Inevitable Unemployment: Automation as the New Norm

• Mission vs. Money: The New Career Calculus

• Resilience, Adaptability, and Raising the Next Generation

• Becoming Indispensable with AI: Tools, Tactics, and Transformation

So grab your favorite mug, and let's get brewing!

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Artificial intelligence does not wait for us to get comfortable.

Unlike the agricultural, industrial, or even the digital revolutions—which at least had the courtesy to play out over generations—AI barged in, upended a few tables, and now threatens to redraw the landscape of work before most have finished rewriting their CVs.

While spectacular advancements like ChatGPT and game-playing AIs get the headlines, it’s the subtler economic tremors that may well change the story of work itself.

This is where the recent podcast discourse between

Ben Mann

and

Lenny Rachitsky

seizes relevance. Mann, co-founder of Anthropic, isn’t given to hyperbole for its own sake. In his hands, the story of AI’s rise reads less like a Silicon Valley fairy tale and more an urgent memo from the engine room: priorities must change because the ship is being refitted on the fly.

At its heart lies a tidy paradox. As Meta’s nine-figure offers for AI prodigies surface—eye-watering sums that self-respecting billionaires might blanche at—so too does a rising anxiety about whom, and which skills, are headed for redundancy.

Mann threads the logic directly: AI has already started outperforming humans at the critical ‘money-weighted’ jobs—the sorts that underpin economies, societies, and self-worth all at once. We now face what he calls an “economic Turing test”: when machines can generate more economic value than half of us, the disruption isn’t theoretical—it’s at the gates.

What continues to astound is the pace. Over the last decade, every assumption about the limits of AI has evaporated. The computer scientist Andrew Ng once likened AI to electricity, expected to sweep through industry; Mann’s view is more kinetic, portrayed as a sudden flood with little high ground.

What’s most discomforting, perhaps, is that the people orchestrating this revolution—the Manns of the world—admit their own jobs are hardly safe.