Throughout the course of history, the job market has changed every time a revolutionary or groundbreaking technology has come along. Something is invented, people panic, the market adjusts, society creates new jobs, and the world accepts its new normal.
Take the 1440's for example. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany. This caused a great amount of fear within the Catholic Church, who controlled what was read and by whom. The printing press eliminated the need for monastic scribes who spent their lives copying manuscripts by hand. The mass printing of books enabled people to become literate and educated in ways never seen before. Then in the early 1900's the invention of the automobile put blacksmiths and horse related vocations permanently out of business. The people in those trades panicked and were genuinely afraid. Interestingly, the automotive industry ended up needing far more employees than the horse economy it had just replaced. The same could be said about the railroad, the telegraph, and the internet.
The AI era, however, is unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Artificial intelligence is currently viewed as a useful tool that benefits our everyday lives. We have been told that it is here to make our lives easier and simpler than any previous generation of humans. What mainstream Silicon Valley CEO's fail to mention is that this is just the beginning. At the moment, AI is highly efficient at simple tasks but much less proficient at solving complex issues without being prompted. The ability to match or exceed human cognitive abilities at every task is being called AGI, otherwise known as Artificial General Intelligence. This is not science fiction. The world's largest tech giants are investing billions of dollars into building the first AGI prototype, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta AI. AGI is no longer a distant hypothetical. It is an emerging reality that is closer than most people realize.
Think about what it would mean to have your job become obsolete with nowhere to go. You would probably do what humans have always done and go find something new. But that is exactly the problem. AI does not create new opportunities the way other technologies have. Every time it advances, another wave of careers and industries gets permanently eradicated. It is like a snowball that only grows larger as it rolls downhill, except in this case the slope never ends and there is nothing there to slow it down.
You might think this sounds pessimistic or far off, but it is already happening around you. Look at the very companies building this future. Anthropic’s own engineers report that virtually 100 percent of their code is now written by Claude. Due to this radical shift in how software is built, entry-level computer science majors are already experiencing a fifty percent decrease in hiring, despite the fact that the AI era has only just begun. The CEOs and billionaires who are campaigning for AI the hardest will not be the ones who have to suffer the consequences of an entire labor force being flushed out by machines. You will. Historically, technological revolutions automated physical labor, thereby placing displaced workers in new roles that required human intellect, judgment, and creativity. Some will argue that AI will do the same, that new categories of work will emerge that we simply cannot imagine yet. That may be true for a period of time. But unlike every previous revolution, AI can now think for you, analyze data, write code, and draft content. When a machine can do everything the human mind can do, there is no next category of work waiting on the other side. All I ask you to think about is when that happens, which it inevitably will, what will be left for us?