5:44 PM: April 21, 2025. Lagos, Nigeria

Dear Son,

As I am writing this, I am, by my front, faced by a young man who I know to be a UI/UX designer. On Easter Sunday, I spent the entire day in a library with a young social media manager, who complained that her job included graphic design, content writing, copywriting, and posting on social media. Sympathetic, I tried showing her how to work faster and WorkSmart AI with AI.

Outside the library, I can see, from where I sit, two men, probably brothers, enjoying an appetizing meal of pepper soup with cans of beer, while their kids play with their smartphones.

Son, less than 20 years ago, none of this—my present scenario—was possible or even conceivable. The young woman who’s frustrated by the stressfulness of her job would have been complaining about the stress of hitting a hard machine my father, your grandfather, called a typewriter. They were stiff, did not recommend words or auto-correct, and made unnecessary noise when you hit the keyboards. The young man, obviously, would not be in a library with his laptop making websites look cool, because there was nothing like the digital ecosystem. (I am assuming you know what a digital ecosystem is; if you don’t, ask a robot or any AI you use, and I’m sure they are likely to tell you it was a technology of the past where all things were in the computer cloud.)

My point is that the world you live in today is socially and economically distinct from the world I grew up in, and unrecognizably different from the one of your grandparents.

Let me give you a bit of history, Son.

Just as the digital revolution of the late 1980s and early 2000s completely changed the world, a new era came upon me and set in motion a world absolutely different from the one I had known.

Before the maturity of the AI revolution—the world you now live in—researchers predicted that 97 million jobs would be lost. Industries would be displaced, but new ones, jobs (about 172 million) and industries, would emerge.

Let me tell you, Son, that during the Industrial Revolution, an era between the late 18th century and early 19th century, the jobs of artisans, handloom weavers, agricultural laborers, and horse breeders were replaced, as mechanization and new transportation systems like railways transformed the world.

People kicked against that change when it was in its early stages. But those who accepted it were transformed with it.

Again, when the digital revolution—the era I was born in—reached full maturity, typists, switchboard operators, clerks, traditional ad men, disc makers and sellers, all lost their jobs as digitalization took root.

Steve Bartlett, in his book The Diary of a CEO, narrated the story of a former CEO of one of the world’s largest music stores, who dismissed the then-emerging era of digitalization.

“People love music; that’s why we’ll always be in business,” the CEO said.

Well, Son, people love music—and I believe they still do—but they moved online and now play songs on what we call Spotify and Apple Music. As I write to you, I am playing Part of Me by Noah Kahan on Spotify. Ask your robot—it probably knows the song.

Hence, as the digitalization of music took hold, the CEO, who operated a chain of stores where music discs were sold, lost his business and went out of business.

The story of how Blockbuster, an American home video rental service that raked in $3.24 billion in 2010, went out of business four years later, has been widely told and can be found in my historical archives.

Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix—one of the biggest video streaming platforms of my time—had approached Blockbuster CEO John Antioco with a novel idea to digitalize movies. Hastings was laughed out of the room even before the presentation was over. Now, as I write to you, Netflix’s market cap is valued at $416.22 billion.

My point is that the jobs we consider today, April 21, 2025, as skilled and sought-after, are likely to be obsolete in your time. Data clerks, customer service agents, bank officers, journalists and writers, coding jobs, graphic designers, UI/UX designers, social media managers—these might not be the reigning jobs of your time. But they were of mine.

I am writing this to you not because I fully understand how the transformation will happen, which jobs are at risk, or which new jobs will be created. I am writing because, fully aware that we are at the beginning of a new era, and having applied myself to study other industrial revolutions, I strongly believe a drastic change in my world is imminent.

I am not only going to ask you if this era I wrote to you about happened, but how you are faring in it. And more importantly, what emerging era do you feel is on the verge of maturity?

It is very important that you don’t fight any emerging era but ride on it for your survival and the preservation of the human race.

That’s what I hope I did. Did I?