Probably. We can’t all be high value and even if we think we are now, there’s an AI model coming soon to seriously diminish our worth. And if there isn’t, there’s still a human being willing to bet on the day when it does.
Evidence of this comes via the seriously high-value Bill Winters, chief executive of Standard Chartered bank, who gifted the phrase “lower-value human capital” (LVHC) to public discourse as he explained how AI would allow the replacement of back-office jobs “with the financial capital and the investment capital that we’re putting in”.
At one level this is merely a statement of the obvious, but describing people as “lower-value human capital” did seem perhaps a touch insensitive, or, as a former boss put it, “inartful”. But perhaps it was just the kind of deracinated corporate and finance gibberish you get when you get used to describing people as human resources.