AI impact on the future of work (your job is at risk)
Last week a friend told me he'd been let go from his tech job. Low to mid-level role, decent company. They called it "restructuring." Called it "cutting costs."
We both knew what actually happened. AI took his job.
If developers aren't safe, what makes you think any other industry is? AI drafts legal documents. Robots assemble cars and pack your Amazon orders. Artists aren't safe either.
I'm not trying to scare you. I watched it happen to someone I know, and that's enough to pay attention.
Adaptability is the only job security left now. You have to become an Autodidact Polymath.
Work is a newer idea than you think
Trading time for money hasn't always been the deal.
Early humans hunted, gathered, farmed, made things by hand, traded with each other. No jobs, no employers.
The real change came with the Industrial Revolution. Machines took over manual labor. Cities grew. Jobs became the backbone of the economy.
Henry Ford's assembly line gave us the 40-hour workweek in the early 20th century, and we're still living inside that structure.
The whole concept, trading time for money inside a structured organization, is barely 200 years old.
It's a temporary arrangement. And it's already cracking.
Mechanization, urbanization, factories: that's what built the employer-employee dynamic we treat as permanent. Before that, most work was self-directed.
Why this time moves faster
Past transitions took generations. Agriculture to industry took decades, plenty of time to adjust.
Now? Everything could look different by tomorrow.
Your phone carries more computing power than NASA had for the Apollo missions. AI can already do most tasks better than a person, except the genuinely creative ones.
Technology doesn't inch forward anymore. It leaps. The curve is exponential.
It feels like a treadmill that keeps speeding up. Just when you catch up, the pace increases again. There's no pause button.
Some days I can't keep up with all the new tools either. Something changes with AI every day. Right when I get proficient at one thing, it's already obsolete.
It's only going to move faster from here. I'm scared too, honestly.
Why we'd rather look away
Change is uncomfortable. Full stop.
When something's unfamiliar, our brains default to fight or flight.
There's a name for the fear of adapting even when the old way is broken: transition anxiety. And a name for pretending the problem will just resolve itself: the ostrich effect. Both are just human nature.
Don't tell me you're immune to this. If you are, you're an outlier.
Don't tell me you love it either.
Because I'd call bullshit.
The people who actually come out ahead just accept it's a hurdle they have to clear. Most of us aren't wired that way.
Here's the hard truth. Ignoring the shift doesn't stop it. It just means you get left behind.
I like hovering around the status quo as much as anyone. But the second I get too comfortable, I stop progressing. I regress. Same goes for everyone. The world doesn't wait.
Where the jobs actually go
AI isn't coming for your job. It's already here.
According to the IMF, 60% of global jobs may be impacted by AI.
"Impacted" doesn't necessarily mean extinct. Then again, for a lot of roles, it might mean exactly that.
Some jobs are complementary: a judge using AI for research still needs to be a judge. Others get fully replaced: clerks, data analysts, the low-level roles an AI agent can just do end to end.
It's happening either way.
The upside nobody talks about
There's an upside here too, not just survival mode.
Think about the first businesses that got online early. They didn't just survive, they dominated. Nobody remembers the ones that waited. The same thing is about to happen with AI.
It also cuts work time down hard, which sounds like a threat to your job until you realize it means you could run a whole business without a team. Whole industries are opening up around this too: automated customer service, AI diagnostics, robotics that didn't exist five years ago.
What I'm actually doing about it
I'll be honest, I don't have a crystal ball. Most "geniuses" didn't see the post-internet boom coming either. But here's what I'm doing.
I use AI tools in my daily work now instead of waiting for them to become standard.
If you're still in a 9-5, work somewhere that treats AI as an ally instead of a threat.
I build things with it. I've used v0, cursor, and lovable to put together apps, and AI writing software for content. Tinker, break stuff, learn.
And I follow AI people on X instead of mainstream media. Mainstream coverage of this stuff is slow and already out of date by the time it airs.
I know people close to me, family, friends, colleagues, who reject this whole thing outright.
"It's a scam."
"AI and robots can't replace humans."
"I don't trust it."
I can't be bothered convincing any of them.
The same thing happened during the crypto boom. They didn't understand it, so they called it a scam and moved on. Sure, plenty of it was a scam. Same is true of anything new.
So keep your tap dancing shoes on and stay in the trenches.
Otherwise you'll really be left behind.
A different kind of contract
Work is changing, and that's not a bad thing.
We're moving toward a world where traditional work is optional, where it serves your life instead of the other way around. Value gets exchanged differently too.
Don't reject it. Don't wait for someone to make room for you.
Nobody's coming to help you.
That's all I've got today.
Talk soon,
Brendan