Seth Godin has a blunt test for whether a job can survive artificial intelligence. A worker writes down everything the job involves in a day, step by step, as if training a replacement. A stranger then gets the list. If the stranger does the job about as well, an AI system can already do it faster and for less money. Godin raised the test in a conversation with podcast host Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO. “You want a job where I can’t write down what you do all day, and then you’ll be fine,” he said.
Bookkeeping was his example of a job that can be written down completely. A bookkeeper follows set rules for recording and sorting transactions, rules that do not depend on who is doing the job. “I can write down all the rules of bookkeeping and hire a different bookkeeper tomorrow,” Godin said. “That’s something AI is going to get really good at really fast,” he added, “because once we can write down rules, AI knows how to follow them.”
Choosing podcast guests works differently, Godin argued, turning the test on Bartlett’s own job. “Your awareness of the world you’re in, the fact that you have read so many books, met so many people, talked to so many listeners,” he said. None of it, he went on, can be written down as instructions for an AI. That judgment was built conversation by conversation, book by book, listener by listener.
Bosses who skip past this difference reach for the cheapest fix, and Godin has sharper words for them. He says they are “cost reducing as fast as they can” while showing “no imagination.” They treat AI as “cheap, super offshore labor” so they can “get rid of 400 customer service reps.” He calls it “racing to the bottom,” a race won by whoever removes the most people fastest. Even the winner ends up living at the bottom, competing on price against every company making the same cut.
He offers the same bosses a second option. “Some people are racing to the top,” he said. “How can I make this more human?” Choosing guests is that kind of work, built on trusted relationships that are not written down anywhere, which is what keeps them valuable.
