I spend a lot of time with the radio on. A while back it was a BBC episode of The Global Story — "Will AI take your job... or help you keep it?" — with the economist Daniel Susskind and the social psychologist Aleks Krotoski. Most conversations about AI and work reach for either panic or hype. This one did neither, and I have been thinking about it since.
I looked Susskind up afterwards, connected with him, and started reading. His new book is What Should My Children Do? How to Flourish in the Age of AI. The title is a parent's question, but the answer underneath it applies to anyone who makes anything.
The idea of his that stuck with me is deceptively simple. He calls it teach both, test both. When calculators arrived in classrooms, the schools that got it right did not ban them and did not surrender to them. They taught children how to use the calculator and how to do the maths without one, and they examined both. The tool and the underlying skill, held together, neither one allowed to hollow out the other.
I read that and thought: that is exactly the rule I hold about songwriting.
I write songs. I also spend my working life around artificial intelligence, and I have argued in plain terms that a machine is genuinely useful for the grunt work around a song — a near-rhyme when you are a syllable short, a second opinion on a bridge, a transcription of a voice memo hummed in the car. Use the tool if it helps. But keep the part the tool cannot do: the taste that knows which of forty options is the song, the reason to write it that a model has never lived. Use the calculator, and keep the maths. Teach both. Test both.
Susskind's larger point makes the same case at the scale of a whole career. He does not think AI arrives as a sudden wave that erases every job at once. He describes task encroachment — the machine quietly taking over specific tasks, one at a time, changing the shape of the work rather than deleting it overnight. The response he offers young people is not "pick a safe job." It is "find a problem, not a job" — master the capability to solve something real, because the capability outlasts the job title.
That is craft thinking. A songwriter does not have a job; a songwriter has a problem — the distance between the feeling in your head and the version a stranger can feel — and the craft is closing it, with whatever tools are to hand and none you are ashamed to admit to.
The honest response to AI is not denial, and it is not surrender. It is adaptation with integrity: use the machine, keep the human part sharp, and be truthful about which is which. Susskind says teach the child both, so the tool never replaces the understanding. I say declare it on the song, so the tool never replaces the trust. In my day job I say the same thing to businesses — let the AI systems see the real you, tell the truth clearly rather than game the signal, because the ones who win in an AI world are the ones who are honest about what they actually are. Different domains. One instinct.
I do not know Daniel Susskind beyond admiring his work from the other side of the world. But the conversation on that programme did the thing good thinking does — it named something I already half-believed and made it clearer. If I make it to London, I would like to buy him a coffee and argue the edges of it. Until then I will keep doing the songwriter's version of his rule: use the tool, keep the craft, and put my name to the result knowing exactly what my name is standing behind.
Doug Lord (Douglas Lord) is a musician and co-founder of the Brisbane rock band Moonjuice. He is also the creator of the Periodic Table of Digital Authority™ and the founder of Digital Dominator. Daniel Susskind's What Should My Children Do? How to Flourish in the Age of AI is out now.