One can be forgiven the narcissistic act of googling oneself when one is on vacation. Curiosity arises. There is ample free time. It has been a long while since I checked my Google search results, and checking such things is a necessary act of personal hygiene in the digital age. If people ask the Internet about me, what are they currently being told?

So I type “alan atkisson” into my phone’s browser to see what comes up.

Two surprises: (1) Google now serves up, as the first thing you see, a formatted profile of the person whose name you have searched for, if they have any kind of public presence. Google tells you who they are and what they do, before serving you the usual list of search results. (2) I have such a Google profile. And it isn’t “Sustainability expert” (my job for 30 years) or “Swedish international development official” (my current job).

It’s “Musical artist.”

It is difficult to know what to make of this result. I might have expected “Author”: my books have sold tens of thousands of copies, far more than my albums. In fact, for most of my life, I have thought of myself principally as a writer who happened to work as an organizational leader and advisor.

But Google says different.

On what basis has it made this surprising determination of my primary professional identity?

Definitely not income. Since 1988 (the year I started working in sustainability) my total revenues earned purely from music probably don’t add up to a single annual salary — in any profession.

Perhaps this surprising internet search result is a reflection of our global culture’s fascination with pop music and musical artistry generally. Google’s AI prioritized my lifetime of mostly-on-the-side activity as a singer, songwriter and guitarist because that’s what the world values most: musical entertainment.

Consider this fact: based on the number of Google “hits” you get when you search on their names, Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran are nearly ten times more important than Antonio Guterres and Greta Thunberg. (I hope you know who the latter two are.)

Following this logic, with my six studio albums, a UN-recognized climate-change single (“Set the World Right Again”) and a very UN-y music video that is approaching 50,000 views (“We Love the SDGs”), I qualify as a “Musical artist.” So that is what gets prioritized by Google, despite the fact that sustainable development has been my professional focus for decades.

Not even being in the “International Sustainability Hall of Fame” is enough to bring that identity to the forefront in Google’s data-driven eyes, because sustainability is just nowhere near as important as music. (A search on “sustainability” gets nearly a billion Google hits, but “music” gets ten times that many.)

Of course, it could be that this is a message — something I should listen to the way people once listened to the Oracle of Delphi. Maybe the AI algorithms, in their all-knowing wisdom, have stared into the currents of the world and deduced something fundamental about me that I have failed to recognize in myself.

It is true (and I have written about this in my books) that I would never have been invited to certain key sustainability conferences and meetings early in my career were it not for the fact that I also played guitar. Later, even large companies and government agencies, for whom I worked as a senior advisor on economic or scientific issues, would occasionally insist that I also perform a song or two as part of my engagement with them. Often the inclusion of a musical interlude was a condition for getting certain speaking or consulting gigs. (On a few occasions, however, I also had to reassure a worried executive or government official that I was not going to sing unless explicitly asked to.)

Given all these reflections, I have decided to take Google’s message to heart and to consider it an honor – instead of a puzzlement – that the world’s greatest web search algorithm considers me to be, first and foremost, a Musical artist.

To be clear, I will not be changing jobs. Working at Sida, serving as Assistant Director-General of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, is a true joy. Every day, I have the honor of leading a large department and contributing to the overall management of one of the world’s leading development organizations, working to finance and facilitate sustainable development. It’s an amazing “day job”.

But thanks to Google and its AI-powered oracle, I might start playing my guitar, and singing my songs, just a little more often.