The AI tsunami warning and the money blind spot costing you right now
The IMF just called AI a 'slow-moving tsunami' for jobs. Here's the brain trick that stops you preparing for it.
The warning that should make you look at your income differently
CNBC reports that IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned this week that artificial intelligence is hitting the global labour market like a “slow-moving tsunami.” Not a sudden crash. A slow one. And that detail matters more than most headlines will tell you.
So why does a slow wave feel less scary? And why does feeling less scared right now actually put you at more risk?
That’s what I want to get into today.
Your brain is wired for right now
There’s a behavioural idea called present bias. It’s the brain’s tendency to weight what’s happening today far more heavily than what’s coming next year or the year after. You know this feeling. A threat that’s years away gets filed away somewhere at the back of the mind. A threat that’s arriving tomorrow gets your full attention.
The slow-moving nature of this AI disruption is almost perfectly designed to trigger present bias. CNBC reports that the IMF estimates about 40% of jobs worldwide will eventually be “augmented, downgraded or eliminated.” That’s an enormous number. But “eventually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, right? Your brain hears “eventually” and relaxes.
So you carry on. You book the next client. You send the next invoice. You tell yourself the income feels okay right now, so it probably is okay.
Why this is especially sharp for you
If you’re a freelancer, a consultant, a coach, a creative or a therapist, you’re already living with income that moves around. Some months are great. Some are thin. That instability is the baseline.
Now add the fact that CNBC reports the IMF’s warning points to “routine, repetitive” tasks as the first to go. A lot of what takes up your admin hours, your first-draft writing, your scheduling, your basic client communication, that work is already shifting. Not dramatically. Task by task, as Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam put it on the same panel. Task by task. Slow enough that present bias does its job perfectly.
You don’t feel the squeeze today, so today feels fine.
The ostrich effect sitting underneath this
Here’s the thing that sits under present bias for a lot of self-employed people. Researchers Dan Galai and Meir Sade identified something called the ostrich effect, which is our tendency to avoid looking at financial information when we sense it might be bad news. Head in the sand.
When the AI story feels far away and abstract, it’s very easy to not look. Not to map out where your income actually comes from. Not to ask which parts of what you do could be replicated by a tool in twelve months. Not to look at whether your client base is widening or quietly narrowing.
The slow-moving tsunami is actually the most dangerous kind for someone with the ostrich effect, because slow gives you every excuse not to look.
One small thing for this week
So here’s the one action I’d ask you to take this week. It’s not dramatic. It’s not a plan. It’s just looking.
Write down your last three months of income. Where did it come from? How many clients? How many income sources? Were there more or fewer sources than the three months before that?
That’s it. You’re not deciding anything yet. You’re just pulling your head up and actually seeing the shape of your income right now. Present bias shrinks when you make the future a tiny bit more concrete and visible. This does that.
You’re not solving anything in one sitting. You’re training yourself to look instead of filing it away for later.
What to do with what you find
If what you see makes you want to think harder about how your income is structured going forward, that’s a conversation for a qualified financial planner in your country. They can help you think through buffers, income diversification strategy and what resilience actually looks like for a business like yours. I’m a planner myself, not an adviser, so I’ll always point you toward someone who can look at your full picture.
And if you want to keep getting pieces like this one, The Thursday Money Note goes out weekly. Short, plain, one idea at a time, just like this. You can join free at the link below.
The tsunami is slow. That’s exactly when you look.
Source: CNBC Economy
Joel