The Future of Work is Deskless

But First…Cool, if Real

For $5k, you can do robotic assembly in your house or office:

Scroll to the end of this newsletter to see.

Becoming Dauntless

Artificial intelligence is ripping up the old rulebook AI and to the uninitiated, the result is pure chaos:

• Anyone can be a creative, without the 10,000 hours, while tenured film editors scramble.

• Copywriters, who have long been an endangered species, are filing for unemployment, while people who haven't finished a book in years are writing a 1000-page novel in a few hours.

• A non-techies who doesn't know what HTTP stands for can mock up an app MVPs with a few prompts.

And it's not just anecdotes here and there.

The Wall Street Journal and Axios, and dozens of outlets in between covered the impending AI tsunami that could wipe out all those highly paid, knowledge worker desk jobs so many of us suffered through university to attain.

The New York Times covered Alpha School last week, a program that uses AI to provide each student with a personalized 1:1 lesson plan for two hours of core academics a day, and then workshops that teach real-world skills.

Even in hard tech (i.e., industries with physical products like computers, rockets, chips, energy generators, etc.) is seeing a change in gatekeepers with the rise of AI and robotics. Now you no longer need a Ph.D to get a prototype out the door.

At Dauntless, we are preparing the deskless workforce with AI-enabled augmented reality to guide work and synthesize complex data for our mere mortal brains to parse to support those "human on the loop" jobs.

Other job options I see:

• Taste-maker jobs (speaking of jobs, think Steve Jobs for these types of roles - he wasn't an engineer but a taste maker that understood engineering and made extraordinary things),

• Jobs traditionally considered "blue collar",

• Jobs we don't trust AI to do, and

• New jobs involving AI integration and curation.

How are you being impacted by the AI transition, and does the shake-up in the status quo work in your favor or against?

Tech News to Make You Smarter

• The Federal government wants to use your tax dollars to give up to $75M to select small businesses. (Federal News Network). Not in total, to each company. The Federal government currently awards non-dilutive funding to small businesses through the SBIR/STTR Program in $75k - $2M R&D contracts/grants. But right now, there's no limit to how much funding one business can get. The SBIR Reauthorization (the program expires September 30th) proposes a lifetime limit of $75M, which IMO is waaayy too high, but I guess better than the no limit that we have now.

• Google filed patents that suggest they're baking a device that you would wear continuously, every day. (AR Insider) The patent covered multimodal sensors (cameras, microphones, inertial units); adaptive displays for light/dark modes, and privacy features so people can't see what you're looking at in the lens. Also, stalking patent filings is the tech equivalent of being a paparazzi in Hollywood. Just saying.

• Robots Are Auditing Sidewalks (Remix Reality). As someone who has tried to push a stroller around Houston, I support this endeavor.

Saved on Socials

The posts, memes, job postings and videos that caught my attention this week:

• How ChatGPT works (Instagram) - CatGPT

• Why Designers are the new founders. (Instagram)

• Worst Volume Control Design (Instagram) - An oldie, but a goodie. I will never not watch this.

• Curing work anxiety one lemon at a time (Instagram)

Recently Played >

What we listened to this week

• Background Music Playlist (YouTube Music)

• Songs We Wish We Wrote (Cover Album on Spotify)

Overheard on Slack

Enter the chat. What our devs are talking about…

• “This level of vindication hits better than espresso. Someone tell Sabrina Carpenter”. - When saying 'I told ya so' doesn't quite describe it.

📸 This is real! The company is called MicroFactory, and you can reserve a mini factory here on their website.

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