It's computational everything

I was listening to a talk by Debbie Mcmahon from Financial Times recently at Productcon recently and I was surprised by the fact that even in journalism we’re seeing tailwind trends more and more computational skills required — genAI is now used to spot stories, and to spin up newsworthy headlines and narratives around these stories.

They are now, ‘computational journalists’…who are equipped with AI, data and trendspotting skills.

This is now the bread and butter, and journalists need these skills to survive. Essentially, another discipline has become computational.

Not just journalists. Architects are computational architects. And so on…

You even have computational archaelogists who are not just equipped to understand the lost history of a geography, but can also use tools such as GIS to analyse the very geography they want to understand the lost history from. Not just that, they now use statistical analyses to process large archaelogical datasets.

The concept of “computational X” for all imaginable fields X — suggesting that computational language opens up possibilities far beyond traditional computer science, allowing for the various disciplines to be classified in computational terms.

With the thesis of K-shaped economy emerging, existing disciplines are evolving to even go beyond just using computational tools in their existing disciplines, but to also ‘AI-ise’ their disciplines.

If you think of your job, not just as ‘one-big job’, but as a series of jobs-to-be-done, then the concept of ‘AI-ising’ your disciplines make more sense.

Instead - think of your job as a “bundle of tasks”.

For example, if you’re a sales rep – your job is a bundle of tasks: 

• Prospecting potential customers
• Drafting cold emails
• Tracking response rates 
• Scheduling calls
• Doing the calls
• Writing notes during the call
• Followup emails
• Drafting proposals
• Updating your CRM
• etc..

How many of those tasks can AI do today? Maybe only 2-3 out of 20 can be significantly boosted with AI today.

But AI is improving fast. Soon, half your tasks will be handled by AI.

Write this down - in the future being able to “manage robots” will be more valuable than managing humans.

Even my field, product management had already transitioned to a computational nature, and is now becoming more AI-ised. We might have to manage an army of bots, AI agents and microservices (apart from managing humans and products, of course). There is an increasing need for product managers to cook up prototypes and foster a culture of rapid experimentation, and to test ideas faster within teams:

My thesis for product management is that it would become more of prototype management. There would be a lot more experimentation, quick validations that the product roles would handle, much more than what we do today. Product management and Product building would probaby fuse into this new (undefined) role. We can call this as “AI Product Management” for now, but I suspect that this would be something else entirely different.

Not just disciplines, but even hobbies. Every hobby is becoming computational and AI-ised. Hobbyists can conduct various “what if?” experiments in a risk-tolerant virtual environment by manipulating bits before proceeding to conduct the very same experiments by manipulating atoms:

• Reading books is still popular, but reading books has been mostly replaced by audio books, Kindle e-readers annotated with Goodreads comments and community-annotated Kindle highlights.
• Traditional film based cameras have been replaced with digital cameras, smartphones, which again ends up in screens for editing, image manipulation, or for the Tiktokization of the videos
• Model building now involves building CAD models first, where creators construct models first in digital space, complementing (or) sometimes even replacing the physical kits.
• Even gardening which is predominantly a physical activity has become less screen-free over time for some folks. Some do digital plant monitoring with apps to check when to water their plant next?
• Paper-based journalling is now done in sync with note-taking apps for archiving, searchability, cloud syncing etc.

The screen-free hobbies are not screen-free anymore. The screen-free disciplines are also not screen-free anymore. And it’s not even about the changing economy, the surrounding tailwinds, and the need to play catch-up games with everyone and everything around us.

AI just makes us better and well crafted at what we do, even in crafts.

For me at least, AI hasn't given me the ability to be 10x more productive, not even 2x. Instead it's made me 2x better. I produce higher quality work than I did before. I don't see that on your graph. Higher quality > more productive.

— Jack Rhysider 🏴‍☠️ (@JackRhysider) February 21, 2025

It’s computational and AI everything.