Picture a house of cards built atop a pyramid of champagne, flutes. Beautiful. Intricate. And terrifyingly fragile.
That's our digital economy right now. Not because it's weak, but because it's intricate. Every card supports another, every level enables the next. We built this masterpiece deliberately, carefully, over decades. Tax credits that drew studios. Schools that trained talent. A virtuous cycle of creativity and innovation.
Reality Check: Those jobs powering our creative economy?
They didn't exist when Friends was still on air. We built
this. All of it. And now AI is sitting on our couch,
raiding our fridge, and rewriting our house rules.
Here's the hard truth: The entry points that built our industry are disappearing first. Junior artists, entry-level developers, and support roles—the jobs we used to use as stepping stones—are becoming stepping stones to nowhere.
But this isn't a story about loss. It's a story about opportunity—if we're brave enough to seize it.
Scene: Last week, I watched a junior artist who used to
spend weeks modeling environments do it in minutes with AI.
But instead of being replaced, they're now art directing
the AI, pushing it to create things no one has ever seen
before. That's the future we need to build toward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m54Iqw7ogvk
Our greatest strength isn't our technology—it's our people, the connections between them, and the crazy ideas that spark over coffee and become companies. We need to invest in these spaces, these moments, these possibilities.
We can't keep training people for jobs that won't exist. We need to prepare them for jobs we haven't imagined yet. That means reinventing our educational pipeline, building AI literacy, and creating new pathways to success.
Education Story: An Emily Carr graduate told me recently,
"I'm not learning tools anymore—I'm learning how to learn
tools." That's the mindset we need to cultivate.