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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ A Sober Conversation about AI and Employment (2026-04-26)
What is worth paying a human for?
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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ A Sober Conversation about AI and Employment (2026-04-26) :: View in Browser
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The Big Plugs
So many new things!
3️⃣ A free 25 minute webinar Katie and I did on GEO - even though it says the date is past, it still works and takes you to the recording.
Content Authenticity Statement
100% of this week’s newsletter content was originated by me, the human. You’ll see me working with Gemini and Claude in the video version. Learn why this kind of disclosure is a good idea and might be required for anyone doing business in any capacity with the EU in the near future.
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What’s On My Mind: A Sober Conversation about AI and Employment
This week, let’s have a sober conversation about AI’s impact on employment. This is a topic that I’ve talked about in the past, but after the events of this week, it’s worth revisiting.
Part 1: What Happened This Week
This isn’t big industry news or politics or a reaction to so-and-so being on so-and-so’s podcast. This is a reaction to me deploying Hermes Agent.
For a few months now, we’ve all been playing with various agentic systems and hearing about many more - OpenClaw, NemoClaw, etc. But Hermes Agent, from the Nous Hermes research team, is the first one that I’ve really gotten to do some pretty incredible things.
As a reminder, agents like these live at Level 4 in the Five Levels of AI Enablement. They’re mostly fire-and-forget - you set up a great project plan with a clear measure of success, and then it just goes off and does its thing. You’re not an active participant after launch.
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During one of the morning walks with my partner and dog, I was lamenting the sorry state of my town’s local paper. It’s a compilation of slop - recycled news stories from regional or national publications and ChatGPT-fueled local news because the paper is down to, like, an editor and an intern and that’s it. It’s unhelpful, and like too many journalistic outfits that need to pay the bills, filled with sensationalist crap needed to attract clicks.
So I said to myself, this is the perfect test for a truly agentic AI system, a system that can generate my own newspaper, in the style I want it, with the news I want.
What news do I want? I want to know what’s going on in the local community. The town police have a daily police log. The library has a calendar of events. City Hall keeps a calendar and a newsroom. Local venues have their own calendars and press rooms.
So I sat down and used the 5P Framework by Trust Insights™ to craft a 13-page project plan for the agent to implement. I handed it off, and two and a half hours later, the first issue of my paper dropped into my Discord server as a PDF.
And it met the requirements I set out for it. It’s a local paper. There are some quirks and bugs that I’d need to tune up if I wanted to make this available to other people but for the most part, it’s ready to go.
An AI agent made me a local newsroom, filled with all the stories you would expect of an actual local paper. Earth Day celebrations and food trucks at the town common this weekend. A cornhole tournament at the local park next weekend. A couple of local breaking and entering reports plus some public drinking arrests in the police log.
What’s notable about this paper is that there’s no editorial judgement of what’s newsworthy in the sense that it’s going to attract clicks or sell ad space. None of those are concerns because there’s a subscriber base of one and no employees at all, so commercial considerations about what will sell are irrelevant. There are no advertisers to please.
And if I wanted to? I could have the agent bundle up all the skills it made, all the code it wrote, and publish that code so that someone else could add it to their agent and get my take on a local paper.
Think how many people used to work at local papers in the days before the Internet (because the Internet itself is what killed local papers, especially early services like Craigslist that wiped out classified ads revenue). At a minimum, you’d need a reporter, ideally an editor, a salesperson for advertising revenue, and someone who knows how to do gaphic design and layouts. At my state’s minimum wage levels, that’s USD 160,000 per year gross at state minimum wage, 40 hours a week, to run a local newspaper.
Or an AI agent, a dedicated computer that cost USD 300 (one time purchase, and it runs multiple agents), and a monthly coding subscription (I use Minimax for this) that’s USD 17 a month. And if I can produce a paper for one person, I could obviously produce it for other people at no additional costs because it’s a digital good. One person or a million, it’s more or less the same cost to produce.
Which brings me to part 2, about where the tech is.
Part 2: Where AI Is and Where It’s Going
We can’t have a meaningful discussion about the effect of AI on employment and jobs without first understanding where AI itself is. Many people are mentally stuck in 2024 - the golden age of basic ChatGPT usage. Sit down at your browser, start chatting, get responses, copy and paste, etc.
And from late 2022 through most of 2024, that was the dominant use case. And that was the best use case because the technology was still evolving. It took two full years before web search was a standard part of generative AI tools.
It’s only really been in the last 16 months that we’ve seen generative AI models explode in capabilities. At the start of 2025, they were still more or less face-rolling idiots at a lot of task