The "New" Job Market

Challenges and Solutions

Gonzalo Contento · @GonzaloContento

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Poco después el ferrocarril empezó a prestar sus servicios. Macondo era un pueblo próspero, lleno de caras nuevas, con un salón de cine y numerosos lugares de diversiones. Entonces hubo trabajo para todo el mundo, menos para él. [...] Habló con espontaneidad y hasta con entusiasmo de las magníficas perspectivas del pueblo. Esa mañana oí la palabra por primera vez. Él la dijo:

«Todo esto pasará cuando nos acostumbremos a la hojarasca.»

— Gabriel García Márquez, La hojarasca

© 2022–2026 Gonzalo Contento · v.68 · Sponsored by chalo.ai

Me?

  • X: @GonzaloContento
  • "PhD" from YouTube
  • "Masters" from Instagram
  • 30+ years in the industry
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I'm not a Tourist

Robert Cornelius, 1839 — the first ever selfie.

publicdomainreview.org

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Do We Have a Problem?

"Houston, we've had a problem here."

Apollo 13, 1970 — the actual quote, in past tense. We tend to narrate the crisis after it has already begun.

Photo: NASA (public domain)

© 2022–2026 Gonzalo Contento · v.68 · Sponsored by chalo.ai

What you are supposed to care about

  • Sara Imari Walker — how life emerges from non-life; Assembly Theory as a measure of complexity.
  • Edward Witten — Morse theory, knot theory, and M-theory unifying the string landscape.
  • Nima Arkani-Hamed — replacing space-time with more fundamental structures like quantum geometry.

Important, fascinating, and almost entirely orthogonal to what pays your rent.

© 2022–2026 Gonzalo Contento · v.68 · Sponsored by chalo.ai

What you actually care about

  • Vision — of your future.
  • Jobs — BS jobs, ghost jobs, "investment" jobs.
  • Money — all kinds of it.
  • Social relevance (not social appearances).
  • Emotional connection.
  • Solidarity vs. handouts.
  • Social mobility vs. meritocracy.
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Im dunklen Wald

In der Mitte unsres Lebensweges
fand ich mich in einem dunklen Wald —
den geraden Weg hatte ich verloren.

Ach, wie schwer ist es zu sagen, was jener Wald war,
wild und rauh und dicht —
der bloße Gedanke daran erneuert die Furcht!

— Dante Alighieri

© 2022–2026 Gonzalo Contento · v.68 · Sponsored by chalo.ai

En el medio del camino de nuestra vida
me encontré en una selva oscura,
porque la senda recta se había perdido.

¡Ay, qué difícil es decir lo que era
aquella selva salvaje, áspera y espesa,
cuyo recuerdo renueva el miedo!

— Dante Alighieri, La Divina Comedia (1320)

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Market vs. Economy

We live in a global market, and we must compete not just to survive but to thrive — while the economy we actually live in is stubbornly local.

Your competition is in Bangalore and Bogotá. Your rent is on your street.

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Opportunity vs. Meritocracy

Historical & contemporary context —

  • Yuval Noah HarariSapiens; 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
  • Richard WolffUnderstanding Capitalism; Solidarity
  • Michael SandelThe Tyranny of Merit
  • Scott GallowayThe Algebra of Wealth
  • Jeffrey Sachs — sustainable development and international finance
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Revenge of the Nerd

"If you build it, he will come."

Field of Dreams

The quiet, patient builder has the advantage again.

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Fictions! | Fictions?

  • Stories
  • Myths
  • Agency
  • Corporations
  • LLMs

The things that move the world are almost never physically real.

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Time is (isn't) on your side

You will need not merely to invent new ideas and products — you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

David Brooke Martin / Unsplash — free to use

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Perspective Matters

  • 4.5 B years — Planet
  • 6 M years — Apes / humans
  • 70 K years — Fictive language
  • 12 K years — Agriculture
  • ~3000 BCE — Hinduism
  • ~500 BCE — The Buddha
  • 2 K years — Christianity
  • 1440 — Gutenberg printing press
  • 1760 — Industrial Revolution
  • 1895 — Radio
  • 1947 — Transistor
  • 1971 — End of gold standard
  • 1991 — World Wide Web
  • 2007 — iPhone
  • 2016 — DeepMind AlphaGo
  • 2017 — Transformers (attention)
  • 2019 — GPT-2: too dangerous to release
  • 2020 — GPT-3: language at scale
  • 2022 — ChatGPT: AI goes consumer
  • 2023 — GPT-4, Claude: multimodal
  • 2025 — Agents: from tools to actors
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The 4Cs

An education based only on Skills vs. the 4Cs

  • Critical thinking
  • Creativity
  • Communication
  • Collaboration

Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21, 2002)

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¡Que pase el aserrador!

Compadre, le grité — ¿cómo se llama esto aquí? ¿La mina de Nus está muy lejos?
— Aquí es; yo soy el encargado de la tarabita para el paso, pero tengo orden de no pasar a nadie, porque no se necesitan peones. Lo único que hace falta son aserradores.

No vacilé un momento en replicar:
Ya lo sabía, y por eso he venido: yo soy aserrador. Eche la oroya para este lado.

Jesús del Corral, ¡Que pase el aserrador!

Jean-François Millet, The Sower (c. 1850) — public domain

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Things we need to let go

"Let go, Luke."

Entitlement. Titles. The idea that the last 30 years of rules will describe the next 30.

© Lucasfilm / Disney — Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

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Things we need to cultivate

Patience. Craft. Depth.

Like coffee in the Colombian highlands — the things worth having are slow, deliberate, and compounding.

Juan Nino / Unsplash — free to use

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Self Reliance (Agency and AI)

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Traducción libre (Rosina Castaño):
"¡Sálgase de las enaguas de su mamá y enfrente la vida que le tocó!"

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Universal Basic Income (UBI)

  • Why? Hyper-automation, and humans' inability to keep up with AI.
  • How / what kind? TBD.
  • Who / where? ~67% of humanity — i.e. everywhere.
  • When? TBD — but sooner than the techno-feudalists are saying.
  • CUBIConditional UBI: tied to participation (education, community), not entitlement.
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References

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Q&A

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912)

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