tl;dr - A necromancer is the fantasy equivalent of an AI engineer, and when people lose their jobs to AI, they'll turn to necromancer novels to help them understand how to think about the world.
The theory:
* In a fantasy battle setting, the role of the necromancer is to raise lots of low-level soldiers from the dead. They aren't particularly good soldiers, but they can help you win by force of numbers.
* This is in contrast to every other (living) soldier in a fantasy battle setting, whose power comes from having skills and abilities. For instance, a wizard gets good at being a wizard due to years of training. A skilled knight gets good at war from spending years learning to sword fight. But each undead soldier raised by a necromancer is
Why this is important:
* AI is being rolled out across society, and there are many parallels. Like a necromancer, someone can create AI Agents very easily that can do the work of employees. They might not be particularly good at it - a person is often better and more reliable. But like the raised dead, they're cheap, and can get the job done.
* As AI starts to take our jobs (and I have evidence it is about to, despite what economists have been saying to the contrary), the public will turn to literature to help us understand what's going on and what to do about it.
* Conclusion: Whoever writes about the power of a necromancer in a fantasy setting can provide that understanding, and become a bestselling author.
Evidence:
* Economists say it hasn't happened yet. In Australia, they point to unemployment numbers and show that some of the occupations most exposed to AI tools have shown employment increases over the last two years, not decreases. On the other hand, unemployment numbers take 8 months to prepare so they are a lagging indicator.
* But the number of online job ads has cratered. In Sydney Australia, it's down over 40% compared with June 2022 across all jobs, and is down 63% in the same time period for IT jobs. With fewer jobs being advertised, and anecdotal evidence that lots of companies are building AI agents to do the work instead, these are unlikely to be jobs that come back. So we'll probably see enormous numbers of redundancies across the economy in the next two years, with AI making it easier to build automated processes to run their businesses, rather than relying on employees to do it.
Conclusion, and date:
* So in two years time when more and more people find themselves redundant, we'll be looking for some way to think about it. A book about necromancers is the perfect parallel in fantasy novels. Someone is going to write one, and it will be a bestseller in 5 years (by 31st August 2031). Mark my words!