/ Vision
Work is for bots.
Life is for humans.
Life is for humans.
/ The Blank Collar / Manifesto
A newkind ofprofessional.
For most of the last two centuries, the job defined the person. AI is the first tool that can take the routine part off your plate. What the work is for becomes an open question.
/ Mission
A field guide to working alongside AI.
The why
For the first time, the routine part can be handed off.
For two centuries, work defined us. We built our identities around what we did. Who we were came second. The job became the person and took the hours with it.
Then the machines learned to do the work.
Most people see this as a threat. It doesn’t free anyone automatically, but it opens a choice that did not exist before. Not “what should I do for a living?” but “what should I live for?”
People gave their best years to work that couldn’t give anything back, and rarely got to choose otherwise. Now they can. That’s what The Blank Collar is about.
Three eras
Three eras, three collars.
Every age of work produced a kind of worker. The intelligence age produces the Blank Collar.
The industrial age
Blue collar
Built the industrial age. They built things by hand.
The information age
White collar
Built the information age. They moved knowledge by mouse.
The intelligence age
Blank collar
Builds the intelligence age. A new kind of professional who works alongside AI agents, directing them and framing the problems, and keeps what no machine can take: taste and judgment, and the conviction to act on them.
The shift
When AI absorbs the process, the human expands.
And the value compounds from there. That compounding is the edge: the company that holds the framework outruns the company that does not.
The companies that understand this will not look like the companies of the last era. They will be smaller and sharper, and more human for it.
Routine output goes to the machines. A person sets the intent and judges the result. Work in the old sense is on its way out. Craft and presence stay human. The bots get the rest.
Origin
The Blank Collar was an accident.
New York, 2016. A talk on the future of work, and one misheard vowel.
blackmisheard as →blank
The creative director said “black collar.” Kristian heard “blank collar.” The mishearing turned out to be the right answer, one letter off. It named the worker the intelligence age would need, six years before ChatGPT.
What we believe
Four convictions.
The premises everything else is built on.
01
AI hands the routine part of work back.
It clears the routine rather than doing the work for us, and the time goes to the parts that need a person, like care and judgment.
02
Most companies use AI to do the same thing, faster.
The interesting question is what you’d do that you couldn’t do before. We help the companies asking it.
03
Routine output belongs to machines.
Humans set the intent and decide what is good. That judgment is the work that does not get automated away.
04
The future of work is not work at all.
It is craft, contribution and presence. Everything else is for the bots.
The Operating Code
How a blank
collar works.
Beliefs explain the why. These six are the how: the working principles of a Blank Collar, day to day.
P.01Direct, don't do.Set the intent and frame the problem. Then judge what is good. The doing is for the bots.
P.02Automate the process. Protect the craft.Hand the routine, repeatable work to machines. Creativity, empathy, taste and conviction stay with you.
P.03Vision before data.Vision is the only variable that does not need AI to exist. Decide what the work is for, first.
P.04Strong HX, or nothing ships.The interface between human and machine decides whether AI multiplies the work or adds noise. Weak HX makes everything above it irrelevant.
P.05Use AI to do something new.Doing the same thing faster and cheaper is the easy version. That is how most companies will get this wrong.
P.06Share what you learn.The next era of work is too important to be the property of any one company. Everything we learn, we publish.