Flow State #6 - Affordances and Blue Collar Work
The real impact of AI in the workplace and how you can stand out from the rest
Welcome to Edition 6 of Superfluid: Flow State where I curate the smartest takes on startups, AI, and capital allocation from the 75+ articles I read every week. I’ll give you the key insight from 4 of the best pieces that I consumed over the last week that you can immediately apply to your business (in <2 minutes).
Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you thought of this week’s article. I respond to every email.
Today's word count: 585
Read time: 2 min 32sec.
AI Didn’t Change the Tool. It Changed the Affordance by Eugene Ting
Everyone’s asking the wrong question about AI. “Will AI replace my job?”
The better question and the one most people are sleeping on is: was your job actually just navigating affordances that AI just made irrelevant?
I haven’t come across this framing before, but it makes sense to me as we uncover the potential of agentic AI.
Affordances are the properties of a thing that signal how it can be used. A door handle tells you to pull. A button tells you to push. For decades, entire careers were built on knowing which handle to pull inside complex systems, the enterprise software and the workflows.
AI just handed everyone else the same handle.
The distinction that actually matters is domain complexity vs. interface complexity. Domain complexity that encompasses genuine judgment, hard-won expertise, taste is sticky. Interface complexity which involves knowing the tools and being the person who could navigate the system is what’s collapsing in real time
The AI Reality Gap by Basis Point
It’s always interesting to me to talk to friends in various industries about whether they use AI or not, and to what extent they are using it. It’s mind boggling to me how many companies are restricting their AI use to just Microsoft CoPilot.
The paradox of the current moment is that whilst AI is certainly in a capital-markets bubble, it is behaviourally under-adopted. The gap between people generating AI pictures on ChatGPT and people that optimise every part of their life with AI is enormous, but also invisible from the outside.
AI is certainly the new Excel, with a steeper learning curve, less standardised interface given the the number of tools that exist, and non discrete control over output quality.
I wouldn’t even say people who are on the cutting edge of the latest tools are getting the most out of AI, as the jump from one tool to the next. Both ends of the distribution confirm the same gap: actual, compounding, output-generating AI use is rare.
The real trade that falls out is, as always, back the true infrastructure play (no, not foundation model companies), and short SaaS products with weakening moats.
White Collar goes Blue? by Anu
The professional laptop class is staring down its biggest reshaping and identity crisis since industrialization.
Anu puts forward the notion that every company will diverge into two groups: “The elite teams are tastemakers. The standard teams are role players. Which is to say, the white collar economy is primed to split into its own white and blue.”
Critical work is done by a few elite people plus AI now. You still want a team to help execute, troubleshoot, manage, and socialize, but your patience for curating their experience equitably alongside the work is waning. Founders used to tolerate ten personalities on a spectrum of competence because they needed ten engineers to do the work. AI shrinks the team and the tolerance too because the alternative is an intelligent machine you command.
The takeaway here is to become scarce:
Brilliance — You’re so good at something or so rare in your combination of skills. Your taste, voice, and judgment alone are a strong value proposition.
Influence — You have a name, an audience, a brand that engages high-value communities. Your taste is signal and cultural influence is power.
Relationships — You’re the person the founder trusts, the client wants to work with, that just makes the team better, and people just want to be around.
Forward this to a founder who needs better signal.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you thought about the format. Feel free to hit reply and let me know, I respond to every email.
Abhi
These are great insights!