AI Is Coming for Jobs Faster Than Anyone Thought (You’re Not Early Anymore)
Briefing
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has erupted into the mainstream, monopolizing tech and business news. An entire AI INFO-PLEX has sprung up seemingly overnight:
Utopian manifestos,
Doom-tinged essays,
Breathless how-to videos. \
Everyone with a take. Some are thoughtful.
Others are agitating. Many are loud. All of them are guessing.
Beneath the noise, the same handful of questions surface over and over, reframed a thousand ways:
➢ Is AI the next great leap forward? (It is.)
➢ Will AI reshape and transform everything? (It will.)
➢ Could AI really be the beginning of the end? (It could… sorry.)
If you were there in the early internet days of the ’90s, the broadband and mobile booms in the aughts, and the hopeful rise — and shameful derangement — of everything by social media in the 2010s, you see the similarities. By now, you know the patterns. You’re familiar with the strange bedfellows that accompany every technological upheaval: fear and excitement, clarity and tumult, sober minds and wild optimists.
So what makes AI different? Well, EVERYTHING! The pace. The stakes. The histrionics and convulsions. The trillion-dollar investments. The sheer velocity of change. And lately, that difference has started to ripple through the culture — most visibly in the headlines.
This past week, the tone of those headlines took on a decidedly darker shade. The usual hedging around AI and jobs gave way to escalating alarms, each louder, more frantic, more urgent than the last. And it wasn’t just the messaging; it was the messengers — AI-first CEOs, software founders, tech veterans. Their fear felt sharper. Their optimism more strained. Something had changed. Or at least, it sounded like it.
I don't rush posts here. I like to go slow. Write intentionally. Observe more, collect more, sit with the words, shape them gradually, let each piece find its voice. But this week, sitting still felt wrong and out of step. So instead of taking my sweet time to write a long, reflective piece on AI and the future of work, I'm jumping in mid-chaos with a few things I think are worth saying.
Separate Signal from Noise
The debate about AI and jobs is already outdated. We're no longer talking about some distant-future dilemma. It's right here, right now, and it's moving in hard. For years, opinions were spread out. Tech optimists framing AI as the next industrial revolution (old jobs out, new jobs in); tech doomers warning of mass layoffs, societal collapse, and white-collar extinction. But now, all that speculation is giving way to reality. The landscape beneath our feet is rocking' and Rolin'..
To start, you need to separate the signal from the noise:
➢ Stop listening to fear-mongering randos on TikTok. Build your own perspective.
➢ Don't just listen to what people are saying, ask them why they're saying it. What do they stand to gain?
➢ Follow the money. Layoffs don’t lie. Capital doesn’t chase comfort — it chases gains, leverage, and advantage.
And right now, that advantage is AI.
Chopping Block
Let's just say it: layoffs are coming. They're already happening. And they will continue to happen bigger and faster than most people are prepared for. The cold truth no one's saying out loud is that the knowledge economy is on the chopping block — all those desk jobs that rely on communication, coordination, analysis, and synthesis of information. It won't happen all at once. It probably won't even happen very fast at scale. But it will happen. Piece by piece. Role by role. Tool by tool.
Of course, we will need people to build and run this future. But unless that someone is you, you need a plan. And no, using ChatGPT instead of Google is not a plan. And it does not make you AI literate. Chatbots are just the entry point to AI. The real work — and the real disruption — is happening deeper in the stack:
・Chips.
・Energy.
・Robotics.
・Infrastructure.
・Enterprise automation.
・Workflow reengineering.
・Edge AI & Embedded intelligence.
・Cloud compute & Distributed systems.
Yeah, no joke. AI isn't about typing clever prompts or googling into a chatbot. It's about building faster, cheaper, leaner, more profitably. It's about delivering the goods: higher ROI, time-saving automations, contextual robotics, life-saving medical breakthroughs.
The Truth & The Trap
Over the past year a pithy, slightly delusional talking point has been floating around LinkedIn posts, tech keynotes, and Substack think pieces:
AI won't replace you but someone who knows how to use AI will.
How quaint.
But this is only partly true and dangerously oversimplified. "Adapt or be left behind" misses a harder, more nuanced reality. You can be highly adaptive and still get displaced if the system around you moves faster than you can. You have to stop thinking of AI as skills. Skills are important, sure, but right now they are secondary, third-ary, fourth-ary... you get the point. Three things and three things ONLY matter: economics, speed, and scale.
Let's start with what is true?
➢ The people who survive and thrive will be those who learn how to work with AI as a force multiplier.
➢ Entire categories of work will be hollowed out or automated away, especially those based on repetition, synthesis, mid-level creativity.
➢ People who understand and effectively leverage AI will have a massive advantage in insight, scale, and productivity over people who don't.
Getting & Staying in the Game
So what should you do? How can you protect your job, or better yet, future-proof your value?
➢ Bridge disciplines — AI rewards interdisciplinary thinkers. If you understand marketing and code, or law and product, or design and analytics, you'll be the translator between silos. That's power.
➢ Experiment constantly — Treat AI like a tool bench. Try it on your work. Try it on your hobbies. Break things. Build workflows. Find leverage. The people who experiment now will be the ones designing the new rules.
➢ Shift from task-doer to outcome-driver — If your value is "I do X," you're vulnerable. If your value is, "I get Y result, no matter how we do it," you're resilient. AI may replace how things are done, but it won't replace why they are done.
➢ Double down on what AI can't (yet) do well — Think taste, ethics, human judgment, emotional intelligence, contextual decision-making, and real-time adaptation in chaotic systems (e.g., having to do with people, ambiguity, interpersonal relationships). Find your spot; build your edge.
➢ Master the interface layer — Learn how to talk to AI: prompting, editing, reviewing. Learn how to direct and build things with AI. Try vibe coding tools like Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf. You must understand that these tools are the new literacy. Knowing how to frame a problem, critique a model's output, and make it better is now table stakes.
The bottom line: you don't have to become an AI engineer, but you do have to become (truly) AI-literate, and fast. So yeah, maybe AI won't replace you. But it definitely will make the other person 10X faster, better, smarter than you. And that's what will replace you.
What I tell my kids and the young people I mentor about preparing for AI?
➢ Don't just use AI, translate it.
➢ Understand the context of AI, not just the tools themselves.
➢ Try, learn, experiment with many different AI tools, not just chatbots. Repeat.
➢ Watch what capital is doing. Where money flows, jobs and opportunities follow (or disappear).
➢ Ask better questions. AI rewards people who know how to frame problems, spot edge cases, and push for clarity.
➢ Focus on outcomes, not tasks. Jobs are shifting from doing the thing to making sure the right thing gets done, well.
➢ Scan your field, adjacent fields, and the cracks in between. Find out where the change is coming from, and understand why.
➢ Build your second brain. Use AI to organize, remember, synthesize. Treat it like a tool for thinking, not just a productivity hack.
➢ Don't trust AI blindly or dismiss it lazily. Learn to evaluate, correct, and contextualize its outputs. That's where your value lives.
The Restructuring Has Already Begun
We are past predictions and hypotheticals. This is no longer a drill. The restructuring has already begun. If you don't believe me, take a look at a mere sampling of tech news headlines from this past week alone:
'Are We All Doomed?' The CEO of Fiverr Says AI Is Definitely Taking Your Job
Recent McKinsey report predicts that by 2030, AI could automate 30% of U.S. work
Microsoft is laying off 6,000 workers (about 3% of the company), many of them engineers
Closing Thought: Wake Up Call
I did not write this piece to scare you. I wrote it to wake you up. Fear, we know, sells. There’s no shortage of assholes out there stoking anxiety to build their brands. I am not one of them. If this felt like fear-mongering, you missed the point. This is a call to action. Learn the tools. Understand the shift. Put your future in your own hands before someone else does it for you. (And if you need a push, read Doomers, Sentinels & Vanguards in the Age of Agency and Uncertainty).