From mal-AI-se to ren-AI-ssance

Matteo Cassese opened his closing keynote on 15 May 2025 with a show of hands. Who feels their job will change radically very soon? By his count, 80 to 90 percent of the room. Who feels bad about it? About 5 percent. He used that gap to ask the audience to imagine that the future is already here: tools as smart as people, cheap to run. Then he asked what is left for us.

What the talk covers

• Why people feel uneasy: the robots did not come for factory work first but for the creatives. He points to AI substitutes for paralegals, to creative layoffs at game studios, and to CTOs who still hire seniors but train a language model instead of hiring a junior.
• A lens: the midlife crisis, a crisis of meaning that does not arrive at 45 but whenever your output is no longer your edge.
• Three things that end, in his view: hustle culture (when a machine out-produces you, output is no longer the north star), frameworks and playbooks (what fits a step-by-step video can be handed to a prompt, so work on principles instead), and metrics-driven reacting, such as watching a dashboard of numbers.
• What stays: working from the inside out, with intuition and internal motivation. There is no map any more, but there is mapmaking, a skill he says everyone can learn.
• A bet on the in-person: conferences and retreats will matter more because people want to be more human when machines handle output.

Q&A

Where to start? Make time for yourself without input, 15 minutes or more, until you are bored. And what about juniors who cannot start as juniors any more? Their path gets harder, he says, so they must build the skills on their own.

Who it's for

Freelancers who want a long-term view on AI and their own role.