Informed 479

Show notes.

Is AI coming for all our jobs? That’s the main topic this week, with lots of resources for you to check out so you can work out on which side of the fence to fall.

Postbag.

Anon: How can I make my Featured items look the same size?

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Other topics in this week’s show:

• Something Big Is Happening AI article by Matt Shumer.
• Frank Prendergast has shared a voice note about this. Check out Frank’s podcast with Justin Collery: The AI Argument
• See this annotated version and podcast as a rebuttal to Matt’s article, produced by Ed Zitron.
• About that Matt Shumer post – another rebuttal, by Gary Marcus.
• Watch a clip of Mustafa Suleyman, CEO at Microsoft AI, speaking to the Financial Times about what AI will do to white-collar jobs.
• LinkedIn Local programme to shut down at the end of 2026.
• LinkedIn action on automated comments
• LinkedIn Future of Work fund open till 15 March 2026 – apply here
• What’s your oldest post on LinkedIn?

Full transcript.

Is AI going to come for all of our jobs? That’s what we’re looking at today in episode 479 of the Informed podcast. Hi, everyone, I’m John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast all about LinkedIn best practice. As usual, we’re going to get the show started with the Postbag section.

This week’s question has been asked by a couple of people, so I won’t attribute it to any one particular person. And the question is around making the Featured section of your LinkedIn profile look aligned.

I’ve had some problems with this in the past. There are a few tricks that you need to deploy to make things work out properly.

You might know that the Featured section on your LinkedIn profile is a chance for you to show your greatest hits on your LinkedIn profile, so that if someone is discovering you for the first time, you can point them towards particularly important content for them to know what your product or service is about, and it’s a chance to really just showcase your best stuff.

But what you’ll actually find is that when you start doing that, you start clicking the 3 dots on a post and say Feature on profile, things can look different sizes when you look at the Featured section. Looks a bit higgledy piggledy and doesn’t always give the best impression.

So, what I’ve found has worked best for me is to make sure that anything I add to the Featured section is in the Link category. So, if you go to your Featured section, if you have one already and click the + button to add a new thing, you get a few different options of what type of thing you want to add. So, I always recommend selecting the Link option, then paste in a link of the resource you’re pointing to, it could be a YouTube video, it could be a LinkedIn post or something else, and then upload your own thumbnail image to represent what that thing is about.

So, at this point I’ve gone and created my own thumbnail images. You can see them if you look at my LinkedIn profile, and I’ve made sure that all of the thumbnail images are exactly the same size. I’ve found that 1000 pixels by 800 pixels seems to work best for me.

Once you’ve created an item, you need to then also set a description for it as well. And again, I found that if you have different lengths of text for each item, that changes the alignment of how they look in the Featured section. So, I recommend keeping your text the same length and ideally quite short so that you maximise the visibility of the thumbnail.

So, keep your thumbnails the same size, keep your descriptive text the same length, and hopefully that should lead to a nice branded, good-looking version of your Featured section. As I say, go and take a look at the one on my profile for an example, and good luck if you’re creating yours.

This past week I’ve read an article that has been going viral in AI circles, and it’s called Something Big Is Happening, and it’s written by an investor in AI, and I found the article quite engaging, and because if I share an external link to a post, then that tends to get very little visibility, I took this blog that this chap Matt Shumer had written and I turned it into a document post.

So, I copied the text out of the blog post and I pasted it into a word processor and then exported that result as a PDF and uploaded it to LinkedIn. So, that becomes a document post, and in all of my years of creating LinkedIn content, document posts, although they take a bit longer to create, they tend to get the best visibility.

Sure enough, that post has had a lot of visibility, a lot of engagement, and so I’m going to point you towards it if you haven’t already read it, so you can see what you think.

But the prevailing thought of the author of that post was that a lot of white-collar jobs are going to go away because of the ever-increasing pace of development of AI. Now, some people have come back in the comments and said, well, you know, this guy’s biased or we can’t really trust what he says, but I think it’s fairly clear that AI really is getting a lot better than it was when it really first landed on the scene in terms of our public consciousness in 2022. AI is a much older discipline than that, but in terms of using things like chatbots, things that people use every day on their computers and their phones, that really only started a few years ago, but things are moving very quickly now.

Having read the article, having read some other follow-up pieces, that’s encouraged me to start finally taking a proper look of AI and see how I can use it in my business. I passed the article over to friend and colleague Frank Prendergast, who is has in recent times become a bit of an AI go-to for me.

Now, Frank runs his own podcast with a colleague of his, Justin Collery, called The AI Argument. And that’s one of my now my favourite shows where they talk about topical things that are happening in AI. And I asked Frank for his opinion on this because he certainly knows more about AI than I do. So, I’m going to just play the voice note that he sent back to me right now.

I read the article Something Big Is Happening by Matt Schumer and I think it’s a very good article to read, especially if someone has not been keeping up with what’s going on with AI.

I think it’s worth reading to see one perspective on the capabilities of these models, how quickly the capabilities are progressing, and to start thinking about the possible impact on employment that these AI tools could have.

I think the article does possibly give a sense that these models are currently more reliable than they actually are, especially when they’re used by non experts. So, Matt Shumer talks about how the tools are doing a lot of the coding work that he would previously have done himself.

I personally would not be able to use the tools to do that level of coding because I don’t have the level of expertise needed to guide the system or to check its output. So, I do think he does give a slightly unrealistic view of just how reliable they are right in this moment of time, and I would recommend that somebody read the Matt Shumer article and then go and look up Gary Marcus on Substack and read his post about the Matt Shumer post. And Gary Marcus is the other end of the spectrum.

Gary Marcus is not a big fan of LLMs, thinks they’re a bit of a dead end and thinks they’re completely unreliable. Between the two articles, you would have a very kind of, you get both ends of the spectrum of the argument.

And this is the issue, this is the weird moment in time that we’re in right now, is this uncertainty of who’s right? Is Gary Marcus right that LLMs are a dead end and they’re not capable of taking anybody’s job.

Or is someone like, say, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, right when he says there is going to be a literal bloodbath when it comes to white collar employment. So, it’s a very tricky moment in time.

But what I think, and I basically think that, you know, I’ve had this feeling something big is, is happening since 2023, and I have been concerned about the impact on jobs right from the beginning. And the thing that I always say is, it’s very hard to predict the future. Nobody can tell what is in our future, but what we know for certain is that the AI labs, all of them, are working very, very hard with some of the smartest people on the planet on developing a technology that can absolutely replace humans in a lot of different types of jobs.

We would be crazy not to be planning for, what if they succeed? Because they have come a long way towards their goal. What if they succeed? We need to at least be planning for that. And there just seems to be very little of that right now at the highest levels.

We need our governments to be looking at this very seriously with economists, with sociologists, with labour market experts, with AI researchers, and figuring out, well, what if they pull this off? What if AI is capable in the next couple of years of doing huge swathes of human labour? What do we do then? And how do we actually make a living and keep a roof over our heads?

So, thanks again there to Frank Prendergast for that thoughtful contribution.

I wasn’t aware of the piece by Gary Marcus, but I’ve taken a look at that and it’s certainly quite a divergent opinion from what was being promoted by Matt in the first instance. I’ve also found something else that’s even more scathing, so I’m going to link to these things in the show notes so you can check them out.

I will play one more bit of audio from a recent interview with Microsoft AI’s CEO, and you can hear what he thinks about what’s going to happen to jobs in the coming months.

I think that we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks. So, white collar work where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person. Most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.

And we can see this in software engineering. Many software engineers report that they are now using AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production, which means that their role has shifted now to this meta function of debugging, scrutinising, of doing the strategic stuff like architecting, of putting things into production. So, it’s a quite different relationship to the technology. And that’s happened in the last 6 months.

So, that was the voice of Mustafa Suleyman just then. And I’ll link to the longer piece about this that I found online so you can listen and make your own judgements.

The problem I always have with things like this is that if you’re not an expert in a domain, it’s hard to know whom to trust. And Frank was alluding to that earlier. So, which side of the spectrum is correct? Is the answer actually some kind of muddy grey thing that’s right in the middle? Who’s to say? But I think it’s worthy of discussion, and I hadn’t seen very much discussion about this at all in my LinkedIn network, and so even if not everyone agrees with what was in Matt Shumer’s original article, I think it’s good that people are now thinking about it and talking about it.

And so I’ll leave you to go and do some more research on this and have a think about, as Frank says, what happens if it does come true, that AI can do all of the jobs that we can do, that it can design all the logos and do all the accounting and all the other things that we do for day-to-day work. What happens to us then? So, have a think about that and I guess be prepared.

In the meanwhile, I’m playing with the professional version of Claude, which is Anthropic’s Large Language Model chatbot. It’s got some pretty cool features and I’m seeing how it can optimise some of my behind-the-scenes workflows.

What I’ll never do, though, is use AI at the front end. So, it won’t be used to send messages or to make connections, create videos or audio. It’ll always be me doing all of those things.

So, anything I use AI for will just be to speed up my back-end processing of things. If I come up with anything earth-shattering about that, I will of course let you know.

OK, on to other LinkedIn news now. We found out that LinkedIn is deciding to shut down the LinkedIn Local programme. So, you may be aware of the LinkedIn Local hashtag and the meetups that happen around the world.

This idea was originally created by an Espresso+ member, Anna McAfee, and she even released a book about this called How a Hashtag Changed the World. She’s recently done an Instagram reel on this topic. So, I’m going to just hand over to Anna to share the news about what’s happening here.

LinkedIn have recently announced some changes to the LinkedIn Local terms that everyone needs to be aware of. Under the current terms, users are able to organise meetups and build communities under the name and brand of LinkedIn Local.

At the end of 2026, this will no longer be the case. The terms will come to an end and the LinkedIn Local licensing will expire. I have not been a part of this decision.

But I have spoken with LinkedIn about this change and the reason for this is that there is increasing confusion among LinkedIn users as to whether these events are official or sponsored. My guess is reading between the lines as well is that there’s also activities going on that aren’t synonymous with their brand, but I can’t really say that for sure.

A few of you have asked me for my opinion on this and the truth is, whilst I’m sad, I’m also not particularly surprised. The terms released in 2019 were never very clear on monetisation rules. There was no community rules or guidelines in place and the co-branding aspect that they discouraged, it’s impossible to police at a global scale.

My advice to anybody running events is just consider renaming your groups to something else that’s not LinkedIn Local or doesn’t use the name LinkedIn at some stage this year.

LinkedIn do not want members to stop meeting up around the world. They’re just looking to distance themselves from widespread from the widespread use of their brand that they can’t control.

So, yes, there we go. Not the best of news I don’t think. I think LinkedIn Local was a nice programme but there’s nothing to stop you having those meetups if you want to. You just need to think about rebranding before the end of the year.

Another bit of news direct from LinkedIn is that they’re now taking extra action on automated comments. So, there’s a little contribution here via a video from a LinkedIn product manager. So, let’s listen to what she has to say now.

Today, I want to talk to you about the conversations on LinkedIn. You can see these conversations under posts and all the comments that come in. They’re very meaningful, they spark interesting conversations and help people connect to opportunity. But these comments are only helpful when they’re authentic, and so we’re going to take some action against automated comments.

These are comments that are posted to LinkedIn through a third-party or through a script or a browser plugin, but without any human oversight or review. Usually when they are posted like this and are low quality, they end up flooding the comments section and degrade the overall experience.

So, we’re going to take 3 actions. The first one is if you detect automated comments, we will remove them from the most relevant section of the post. So, this is right under the post where all the comments are. Most relevant is the default sort order.

The second thing we will do is we may remove it from outside the commenter’s network. And the third one is that if a member continuously posts automated comments on LinkedIn that are low quality, we may also restrict their ability to use LinkedIn.

We welcome tools that help you engage on LinkedIn thoughtfully and responsibly, but we do not allow tools that bypass human review entirely and post automated content on your behalf. So, let me know if any questions or feedback in the comments below.

It does sound promising. I did comment on Gyanda’s post about this and I said, the second point is particularly interesting. Does this mean that the concept of shadow banning is real on LinkedIn? She hasn’t responded yet.

There have been a lot of comments, almost 200 at the time of recording, so she’ll be busy if she does try and respond to those things.

So, fingers crossed that LinkedIn actually do take action this time and make sure that those automated spam comments, very low value things get taken out of our feeds.

Last bit of LinkedIn-specific news that’s just come out is that LinkedIn are doing another round of their Future of Work fund, and that’s going to be open until 15 March. It’s really aimed at young people. If that sounds at all interesting, you might want to click through in the show notes to see news about this release and also an application form where you can get involved.

I’ll finish with a bit of fun, which is that I’ve posted on my feed when my first accessible LinkedIn post was. It was 26 July 2013 and I got that by downloading my LinkedIn data archive and looking through the list to see when my oldest post was. I found some older posts than that but they wouldn’t load inside LinkedIn, but the one that did was from then: July 2013.

And really I put this post out as a bit of fun, but also to show people that you can download your data.

So, if you’re on LinkedIn desktop and you go to the Me menu and then down to Settings and Privacy, and then into Data privacy and then Get a copy of your data, you can request the complete archive of pretty much everything you’ve ever done on LinkedIn, and one of the files you get from doing that archive is called shares.csv, and if you open that up and scroll to the bottom you can see a date-ordered list of everything you’ve ever posted and so you can find out what your very first post was.

It might just be a walk down memory lane. It might be an interesting marker of how far you’ve come since you started on LinkedIn, so you might want to have a bit of fun and go and take a look at that.

OK, that will do for this week. I’ve had a bit of a cold, so hopefully I’ve come across nice and clear and if not, apologies. As usual, if you come across anything that is of interest on LinkedIn that you want to ask about, feel free to send me your especially your techie questions and particularly if you’d like to send me a voice note, I love to hear those on the show. Thanks for listening and catch you next time.