Emad Mostaque: the "digital double" mechanism nobody's retraining plan accounts for

https://reddit.com/link/1vp4uav/video/v9m00c73yjjh1/player Emad Mostaque: "Forward-deployed engineers, AI transformation people, because they can do the work of 10, 100 people." That's the role that survives this — already a real hiring category, not a future one. LinkedIn's own data has it growing 42x since 2023, priced $127K–$265K+ at the labs actually building this. That's the part that should sit heavier than the digital-double line. It's not that your job disappears. It's that a different job, already priced and already hiring, opens up a few rungs above where you're standing — and most of us don't have a clean path into it yet. I've watched a smaller, slower version of this exact move before. No AI involved — just a stamp and a highlighter. Hmm... this one really gets me out of my chair and pace around my living room, so let me try to recall it properly. When I was working as a Technical Engineer in the Tender Department of one of the largest main contractors in Malaysia — there was a skill we always used. Fair warning, I'm sharing privileged information here. Well... it's probably an open secret in the industry anyway. Whenever we tendered for a project — let's say Malaysian Airlines (MAS), widening a runway for their newly-bought Airbus A380 — we'd hit the parts that were out of our expertise. Airway lighting, drainage, flight angles, height restrictions. So we did the natural thing: called for outside help. Engaged specialized sub-contractors who'd done airway pavements before, to hand us the technical know-how and their quotation. We knew full well these sub-contractors were already MAS's long-time maintenance contractors — it was just a matter of time before they'd be folded under our main contract anyway. So when they submitted their technical documents, we stripped their company logo, re-arranged it, added our own branded wording, our own logos. Woalah. It was now our own internal technical know-how. We'd suddenly become experts in pavement-widening and hangar works. We didn't get the job, though. We all knew that tender was just for show — a comparison exercise to cross-check MAS's already-chosen main contractor. But the knowledge we gathered from those specialists was now folded into our own knowledge vault. Our own proprietary knowledge. Are we stealing? I wouldn't use that word. When there's a problem, the client comes after us — not our subcontractors. So to properly solve it, we have to own the knowledge too. The right word might be "necessary." https://preview.redd.it/lkn6gis5yjjh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=adbb096873b0ea6de01f5084eba7a6e8731c6b21 ———— Every version of this mechanism arrives wearing the same word. Ours was "necessary." This one's wearing "efficiency." Actually — a post I put up about the same compression logic, just running through one operator instead of a stripped logo came to mind while writing this one. Drop your take — where's the line between "necessary" and something with a worse name? Clip credit: The Beyond Tomorrow Podcast with Julian Issa — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.