My love note to Austin Meyermann, Founder of HunterCrown, a headhunter for the water industry, because I think he's cool and sitting on the Future of AI in the Water/Waste Water Recruiting industry.
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Most people think recruiters are clerks…resume shufflers, calendar coordinators, corporate middlemen moving warm bodies between cubicles. That’s the story we tell ourselves so we can keep ignoring them. But it’s wrong. Recruiters aren’t clerks. They’re intelligence agents. They sit closer to the future than almost anyone in the building because hiring is prophecy.
Companies don’t hire for what they are. They hire for what they’re afraid of becoming without. That’s the tell. A business that hires accountants is maintaining. A business that hires engineers is building. A business that hires AI researchers is betting. A business that hires water scientists is either scared or scaling. And fear is always more honest than marketing. If you want to know where an industry is going, don’t read the press releases. Watch the job postings. The job postings are confessions.
Think about basketball. If every team suddenly starts recruiting six-foot-ten athletes who can dribble, you don’t need an analyst report to tell you the game is changing. You know the future is positionless. You know speed matters more than bulk. You know what’s coming before the season even starts. Hiring patterns are weather patterns and recruiters are meteorologists. They feel the pressure drop before the storm.
Now apply that logic to AI. Everyone is hypnotized by the wrong thing. They’re staring at the software, the models, the hallucinations, the magic tricks. AGI this. Superintelligence that. It’s theater. Intelligence isn’t the bottleneck. Physics is.
Compute produces heat. Heat must be cooled. Cooling requires water. Always. It doesn’t matter if it’s nuclear, coal, hydro, or a hyperscale data center. Every server farm is just a very expensive kettle. Boil enough silicon and eventually you need a river. We pretend AI runs on math. It runs on evaporation.
Every time you ask a model to write an email, somewhere water moves. Every time a company trains a foundation model, a reservoir quietly pays the bill. Nobody wants to say that part out loud because it ruins the illusion. We want AI to feel weightless…cloud, virtual, digital. But there is nothing virtual about a cooling tower. There is nothing digital about a drought. The cloud is just someone else’s water.
AI isn’t limited by intelligence. It’s limited by plumbing. The future of artificial intelligence will be decided by wastewater engineers before it’s decided by PhDs. Because the real question isn’t whether we can build smarter models. It’s whether we can keep them from cooking themselves alive.
This is where recruiters quietly become dangerous. While everyone else is arguing about algorithms, recruiters are seeing something else entirely. They’re seeing more postings for wastewater optimization, thermal engineers, nuclear plant operators, grid resilience specialists, and sustainability infrastructure. Fewer postings for pure theory. More for survival. That tells you everything. Industry already knows where the constraint is. The bottleneck has shifted from brains to resources.
Crypto accidentally proved this. Billions were poured into mining rigs, warehouses full of GPUs, and power contracts the size of small nations. Everyone called it a scam. Maybe it was. Okay, they were. But the hardware stayed. Hardware doesn’t lie. Those same machines now train AI. Crypto didn’t fail; it laid the concrete. It built the skeleton the AI boom is standing on. Speculation funded infrastructure. Infrastructure birthed intelligence. History always works like that…railroads before cities, power plants before suburbs, data centers before “the cloud.”
And we’re not even heading toward AGI first. That’s fantasy marketing. What we’re really getting is something more mundane and far more invasive: sensors in everything, chips in clothing, devices talking to devices, agents paying agents, microtransactions humming quietly in the background of life. An Internet of Everything. Which means exponentially more compute, exponentially more heat and exponentially more water. The math isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable.
So the next Industrial Revolution (the 6th IR for those counting) won’t be about intelligence. It will be about sustainability. Not “How smart can we get?” but “How do we avoid collapsing under the weight of what we built?” Water recycling. Energy efficiency. Closed-loop systems. Infrastructure that doesn’t cannibalize the planet. That’s the real frontier…not the chatbot but the cooling system.
And the first people to see that shift won’t be CEOs, venture capitalists, or policymakers. It will be recruiters. Because before strategy decks, before earnings calls, before press releases, there’s always a quiet requisition: need five wastewater engineers, need a thermal optimization lead, need a grid systems architect. Those lines are the canaries. The future whispering.
So when you talk to a recruiter, don’t treat them like admin. They’re holding tomorrow’s blueprint. They know which industries are panicking. They know which companies are preparing. They know where the bottlenecks are forming. They aren’t filling jobs. They’re forecasting civilization.
The punchline is simple. The future of AI won’t be decided in code. It will be decided in pipes. And the people who see that first won’t be the technologists. It will be the quiet observers watching who gets hired to keep the water flowing. Because intelligence is cheap. Reality isn’t. And physics always collects its debt. Always.
Samson
Anthropologist-in-Residence, MilkyWayEconomy