Video Killed the Radio Star. AI Is Coming for the Job Description.

If video really did kill the radio star, what crime did podcasts commit? That question has been rattling round my head, mostly because of the way we’re talking about AI and jobs at the moment.

Video didn’t actually kill radio. Radio adapted. Then podcasts came along, took one of radio’s best qualities (people talking to people), removed the timetable and handed control to the listener. And now video is back. Podcasts are filmed, put on YouTube and chopped into clips for LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. You’ve probably scrolled past three today.

Technology didn’t simply replace what came before. It unbundled it. Then, every so often, we rediscover something the new technology left behind.

What we designed out of photography

Think about photography. My generation loved digital because suddenly we could take endless photos, see them straight away and delete the terrible ones (and there were plenty).

My son recently moved to Vancouver, and we had round after round of parties with his fabulous friends. I’d say it was about 50:50 film and digital on their side. We were enjoying the lovely clean images and having twenty versions to choose from, because getting Aunty Louise smiling is an art in itself. Then, a week or so later, the excited copies of their film photos started arriving (digital copies, admittedly), and they certainly do have a quality of an age about them.

One of those photos, gifted by one of these beautiful young people, is of my husband and me with the parents of my son’s partner, James. It’s now in a frame, sitting happily on a shelf in our family room.

That generation hasn’t rejected digital. They’ve discovered there was something valuable in the experience we took out when we made photography faster, easier and more efficient: the limited shots, the wait, the imperfections.

There are lots of circles in life, and I feel like I’m living in one.

A job isn’t one thing

And I think there’s something in that for the world of work. A job isn’t one thing. It’s a collection of tasks, decisions, relationships, knowledge and judgement. Often it’s also years of experience that nobody has ever actually written down. It’s rarely the job description, which tends to be the version someone wrote for the recruitment advert and never looked at again.

AI will take some of those tasks. Automation will take others, and some work will disappear altogether, as it should if it no longer adds value.

But what will we only realise we valued once we’ve designed it out?

Know what you want to keep

So before we start redesigning organisations around AI, the question shouldn’t just be “Which jobs can we remove?”

It should be “What is it about this job that we actually value, and do we really understand what we might be removing?”

Technology is very good at changing how something is delivered. That doesn’t mean the underlying need goes away.

Video killed the radio star. Podcasts resurrected them. YouTube filmed the resurrection. TikTok turned it into a 30-second clip. Film photography came back because, apparently, perfect wasn’t everything.

And AI? It might not kill the job. But it could completely rewrite the job description. The trick is knowing what we want to keep before we start rewriting it.

So what’s the thing in your role that would never make it into a job description, and that you’d want protected?