No, you’re not special. Yes, AI is coming for your job

We’re in the early stages of the biggest societal shake-up since the invention of agriculture

Photo by Arseny Togulev on Unsplash

Video summary:

There’s perhaps a few hundred people in the world who realize what’s about to hit us, who understand just how crazy things are about to get, who have situational awareness… the fate of the world rests on these people.
(Open AI whiz kid) Leopold Aschenbrenner, mid-2024

There is an immense amount of cope about AI, especially from conservatives. This cope comes in two forms. First, there is the claim that AI isn’t really very impressive and can’t really do very much. Second, there is the claim that while AI is quite impressive and can do quite a lot, its effects on society will be largely or wholly positive.
Noah Carl, Aporia Magazine, 26/1/25

The true interface between Americans and America is at work. A lot of Americans no longer fully feel like a part of America, that nation of scrappy pioneers chasing the American Dream… With an AI revolution brewing, it’s also about to get worse. If the people implementing this revolution aren’t very careful, they risk snapping the last meager threads holding together a system that’s already deeply under pressure.
Frank DiStefano, Renew the Republic, 30/1/25

There was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career-obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing. By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
Marc Andreessen, to Ross Dothat, 4/2/25

A section of the tech-lords recoiled in horror and quickly went from being a friendly, idealistic liberal bourgeoise, paying lip service to progressive ideas, to a reactionary oligarchy, intent on reasserting control… Now they’d sack the politically unreliable managerial layer. And they’d would work furiously on the development of their Manhattan Project, their atomic bomb to drop on the professional-managerial class and replace them permanently with robots.
John Ganz, Unpopular Front, 4/2/25

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is
Oliver Anthony, 8/8/23

Let me begin by stating the obvious – anybody who claims they can predict how the ‘AI revolution’ will play out is either lying to themselves or you.

That noted, it’s possible to make educated guesses about what is likely to happen. I’ve been a student of history and politics most of my (half-century-long) life and have churned out a mountain of tech content over the last decade.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my hot take.

A grim realisation
Over the summer break, I wrote – ghostwrote, to be exact – a book. I spent 2-3 weeks interviewing the relevant people. Then I spent 9-10 weeks on the actual writing, clocking up a word rate of around 6000 words a week.

None of which is likely to sound particularly impressive to non-writers. But I was certainly impressed. Not so much by the quality of my prose, though I’d like to think that was adequate, but by how quick and easy AI made everything, from transcribing interviews to getting instant and constructive feedback on my drafts.

If you’d suggested I could pump out a ‘proper book’ – the kind that’s commissioned by a major publisher and which gets sold in bookstores – in three months flat in the pre-ChatGPT era, I would’ve scoffed at the notion.

But in ways people are only now starting to truly comprehend, AI is a game-changer. The game-changer to end all game-changers, in fact. That means humanity will soon have to change the game it’s been playing since it was expelled from the Garden of Eden.

We’re all buggy-whip makers now
As quick and straightforward as my book-writing experience was, it still involved a not inconsiderable amount of effort and, dare I say, skill on my part. I’d sometimes think to myself, ‘I wish I could just upload all the interviews (transcribed, summarised and organised by Otter.AI) then get ChatGPT Pro to spit out a completed manuscript.’

Then I’d remember that as soon as that is feasible – probably within the next year or two, and possibly in the next month or two – my wordcel kin and I will be entirely superfluous.

Granted, I am but a humble Substacker labouring in obscurity. But plenty of higher-profile creators appear to have come to the same grim realisation in recent weeks. In an article briskly entitled “Yes, you’re going to be replaced”, Noah Carl listed AI’s many achievements – successfully passing as human when conversing with humans, doing better in university exams than humans, providing more empathetic and informative responses to medical questions than human physicians, generating better business ideas than Wharton MBA students, creating better legal contracts than human lawyers, and so forth.

I was OK with all that, but then I got to the bit where Carl covers how AI is cutting writers’ grass:

Sean Thomas penned a sobering article for the Spectator titled ‘The person who edited this will soon be redundant’. Thomas, who is the author of several bestselling books, asked Gemini for feedback on his latest, unpublished novel (which was therefore not in the AI’s training data). After only 20 seconds, it served up a critique that was so good it left him “slack-jawed and dumbfounded”.

Carl goes on to quote Paul Schrader, the scriptwriter behind classics such as Taxi Driver:

I've just come to realize AI is smarter than I am. Has better ideas, has more efficient ways to execute them. This is an existential moment, akin to what Kasparov felt in 1997 when he realized Deep Blue was going to beat him at chess … I just sent chatgpt a script I'd written some years ago and asked for improvements. In five seconds it responded with notes as good or better than I've ever received from a film executive.

Carl muses:

Whether AI is just a stochastic parrot, a glorified autocomplete, or something more like a human mind – I can’t say. What I can say is that its capabilities are extremely impressive and appear to be getting more impressive with each successive release. Copers are starting to sound like Reg in the “What have the Romans ever done for us?” scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. “All right, but apart from answering exam questions, reviewing legal contracts, solving math problems, writing poetry, responding with empathy and coming up with new ideas, what has AI ever done better than humans?”

Is the Luddite fallacy still a fallacy?
Optimists point out that humans have long freaked out when new technologies have dropped, but these technologies have always (a) created plenty of new jobs and (b) raised living standards.

This is entirely true, which is why many have been quick to label fears of AI-driven mass unemployment as just the most recent iteration of the Luddite Fallacy. But what if it’s not a fallacy any more?

AI isn’t like other technologies. Steam engines didn't write poetry, nor did Fordist assembly lines compose symphonies. AI will undoubtedly create many new jobs, ones we can’t even begin to imagine at this juncture. But those jobs will be done either by (disembodied) AI solutions (agents are what everyone is currently excited about) or robots.*

As an aside, I assume that in the near future it will seem odd to talk of AI on the one hand, and other physical devices, such as robots, on the other. Soon, it will sound as odd to say ‘AI-equipped robot’ as it now sounds to say ‘electricity-powered television’. Like electricity, AI will soon be in everything. Including the human brain, for good or ill.

Joe Rogan, who’s smarter than he lets on, often muses about humankind being the beta test for what comes next. Or, as he puts it, by pushing forward with tech advances at reckless speed, peoplekind – I, for one, will miss the laughs, JT – is behaving like a caterpillar fast-tracking the cocoon-construction start date rather than fully enjoying its month in the sun. A digital, Godlike butterfly will emerge from the cocoon, but it will only be human in a vestigial way.

Gradually then suddenly
Five years ago, I wrote an article for Mumbrella, an Australian marketing and media industry publication. In it, I predicted that the legacy media’s death spiral would only accelerate and that print journalists should accept this reality and plan their futures accordingly.

I used the five stages of grief framework to illustrate how the print media had (haplessly) responded to the rise of the internet – first with denial, then with anger, then with bargaining and then with depression. I was arguing it was high time to move towards the acceptance stage and for those journos still in possession of a legacy media role to start working on a Plan B.

Ironically, my article was greeted with minimal acceptance and much denial and anger. I’ll quote one commentator, Sally Arnold, to illustrate:

A cheap and disparaging industry headline Mumbrella. A parochial opinion piece. Quality journalists are storytellers whatever the platform. The global publishers from traditional print mastheads still lead the conversation, breaking news, and have new record audiences across the globe with people seeking them for trusted information news and analysis.

Here's a ‘Hear, hear!’ response to that comment that hints at the rage many readers felt upon reading my article:

Completely agree, Sally. I don’t know why the writer has chosen to stick the boot in to his former colleagues like this, unless it’s because he’s struggling to come to terms with the fifth stage himself.

If so inclined, you can read the article and decide for yourself. But I’d argue I was demonstrating tough love rather than trading in pretty lies by confirming what everybody understood but was reluctant to acknowledge – the legacy media was in an irreversible death spiral, and the waves of redundancies were only going to grow larger and more frequent.

Be that as it may, I was undoubtedly the bearer of horrible news. I was telling people with a strong emotional attachment to their jobs that a foundation stone of their identity was going away. And that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. Those same journos who’d long bemoaned their audiences shooting the messenger proceeded to shoot the messenger when they were being informed is was their careers and lives that would be profoundly disrupted.

(As an aside, many wags have found it amusing to tweet ‘Learn to code!’ at laid-off journalists who’d spent decades breezily offering the same advice to blue-collar workers devastated by globalisation and automation.)

After receiving so much free and uncharitable character analysis from my colleagues half a decade ago, I wince at the thought of dropping a far more dispiriting truth bomb. But I must add my voice to a growing chorus warning that many, probably most, white-collar jobs – the kind typically held by hard-working, law-abiding, conscientious, pillar-of-the-community individuals – will be vapourised between now and 2030. Many pundits, including me, expect that process to kick off in earnest this year.

Like it says on the tin, AI is an alternative to human intelligence. So, it’s the ‘brain’ jobs that will go first. But I suspect many of the ‘brawn’ jobs won’t be far behind. Especially if advances in areas such as AI make it economically feasible to start mass producing, for instance, robot police, robot aged-care workers, robot miners and so on.

Admitting you’ve got a problem is the first step
I fear many people are about to fall into the same trap my legacy-media peers and I failed to avoid from circa 2008 onwards – believing they are special and therefore somehow won’t be impacted by the significant technological changes roiling their industry. Countless journos had to reconfigure their careers, and often their entire lives, at short notice after discovering they weren’t quite special enough to hang onto their old job.

I was one of them.

In a triumph of hope over experience, it seems many content creators are now desperately trying to convince themselves that a “stochastic parrot” could never generate content as good as a human.

I can understand why my peers are desperately clinging to that belief. I only recently abandoned it, extremely reluctantly, myself. Even though I’ve already lived through, and watched many friends and former coworkers live through, the devastation of an industry I’d once fondly imagined working in until retirement.

But the harsh reality is that (a) AI is already better than most human writers and is only likely to improve, and (b) Even in the improbable event messily human content creators maintain a competitive advantage over their soulless machine competitors, there is likely to be minimal demand for the ‘artisanal’ copy they’re hawking.

I’ll let Canadian journo Jeff Gaye make the obvious point:

I saw a post from a copywriter about how generative AI will never be able to do what a good writer can do, it lacks a writer's gut, it lacks soul etc… We see these posts fairly often. I think the defiant spirit is tinged with a certain amount of nervous denial. Because the truth is, just because something is second-best doesn't mean it won't win out.

Joyless corporate pizza is not nearly as good as local pizzeria pizza. Yet here we are.
Self-checkouts are a poor substitute for good customer service. Yet here we are.
Studio-generated synthesized music is not as good as live music played on real instruments. Yet here we are.
Journalism is better information than social media gossip. Yet here we are…

AI-generated copy absolutely will displace writers, not because it's better but because it's cheaper.
It's not the writers who will determine the future of generative AI, it's the readers. If AI can fool enough of them, companies will go with the fake every time. That's my "writer's gut" talking...

Gradually then suddenly
I’ll leave it there for now. But I will devote the next few blog posts, perhaps all future blog posts, to exploring how AI is now turning the established order upside down. I now believe that, rather than being overhyped, the threat of massive labour market disruption isn’t being taken anywhere near seriously enough. Mainly because it’s a nightmare scenario that nobody wants to seriously contemplate.

But as many a former journo can ruefully attest, ignoring potential threats doesn’t make them go away. It just means you’re unprepared and panicked when the inevitable finally happens.

Also, as Carl notes, kidding yourself is unseemly:

Coping is undignified. Worse than that, it’s dishonest. Conservatives take pride in dealing with things as they really are, rather than as we might wish them to be. They are meant to revere truth. And the truth is that AI threatens much of what they claim to care about. It’s certainly a far greater threat than the usual bugbears like transgender bathrooms.

*The AI breakthroughs of the last couple of years will allow robots to become vastly more ‘intelligent’ and autonomous. That means they’ll become much more useful and therefore much more widely used. This ‘robotification’ of workplaces will probably resemble the rapid take-up of drones over the last decade but be even more rapid and wide-ranging.

As an aside, drones have created lots of new, apparently reasonably paid – given the modest time and financial investment required – jobs for humans. Is this reassuring proof of the Luddite Fallacy? Only if governments will legislate make-work schemes requiring AI-equipped robots to be operated by humans. Especially given the deregulatory mania now sweeping the Western world, governments will likely soon permit far wider use of autonomous drones. There will still presumably be a handful of humans involved in deploying drone fleets, but that industry will presumably also be (near) fully automated in the not-too-distant future.