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AI fear is at its peak.
Every single person believes AI is coming for their job. Lawyers will only show up to court to do what AI still can't. Analysts and personal assistants will be gone. Coding will be a lost art form.
I have a radically different take on this.
I’m not a doomer. I see the massive shift AI is creating as real and necessary. And I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities in history. But, but, but…..
In the next 24 months, the global economy will be unrecognizable. You’ve seen the Youtube videos and newsletter posts warning of “36 months left to get rich.” (I actually think you only have 24 months.)
They’re not wrong.
But what happens in 24 months isn’t a total collapse of the economy and everything we know. What happens isn’t that robots will do all manual labor and AI bots will do every office worker job there is. This is a doomer’s view of the world.
What happens in 24 months is that whatever career you have right now WILL be disrupted. The BS work will be gone. Automation will replace admin. Low-level jobs will mostly be nonexistent.
But this doesn’t create mass unemployment and force some dystopian view of the world to become the new norm.
No, it’s far simpler than that.
AI will force every one of us to be high agency by default
High agency means you stop waiting for permission, perfect conditions, or guarantees. You figure it out. You ship the work. You adapt.
The person who thrives in the next 24 months isn't necessarily the smartest. They're the one who acts fastest with whatever tools are available.
Excuses won’t work anymore.
Low-quality work will no longer be accepted. Admin work will no longer pay the bills. Manual labor jobs like driving a taxi probably won’t be around.
The bar will be raised… in every form of work.
And you will either adapt or become part of the permanent underclass who can’t earn a living. Thankfully, when humans are forced to change they usually do.
But a lot of people are going to go through this change the hard way.
They’re going to have to lose something before they get the psychological and logistical gains that come with the AI revolution. This is a blessing from up above if you ask me. A mass upgrade to the human software is exactly what is needed.
Why the AI doom story is fundamentally wrong on every level
An article on X by Matt Shumer about the AI revolution went viral. 83M views.
Ironically, Matt is an AI company founder and the article is basically a sales pitch for his startup. The entire narrative he writes is built on fear. And he’s not the only one. Social media is filled with AI doom p*rn.
It’s created a hidden mental health crisis.
No matter how smart you are, you can’t help thinking that you or your kids are going to struggle to find work in the future with your current skills.
Matt says the AI models have improved so much that his technical skills are no longer needed in his startup. If we stop there it looks like all technical people are screwed.
There’s another hidden cue he drops. He says the AI companies made AI great at writing code first because coding is how AI can improve itself. So just because AI can write great code it’s assumed it will have the same success in the same amount of time with all other skills. This is a lie.
Then Matt describes the doomsday scenario:
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.
If you read that you nearly piss and sh*t your pants at the same time. It’s hard not to be scared. Matt misses a fundamental truth though.
The assumption is the jobs we have today will be the same jobs in the future.
This is flawed. AI is a tool. It will help humans do work. And it may do all the current work humans do. This means human work will have to evolve.
The same way it did when faxes turned into emails
The same way group phone calls turned into Slack chats
The same way physical retail turned into online stores
Work will continue to look different. We'll continue to evolve. But the fact that our work changes doesn't mean it disappears.
The one area I agree with Matt on is that this revolutionary change will happen faster than people think. We have about 24 months left of the current human work.
Those who don’t adapt and upskill in that time will be screwed. No doubt in my mind. The same happened when the internet went mainstream in the late 90s. And again when smartphones put it in everyone's pocket a decade later.
People who didn’t adapt became irrelevant.
Matt also points out that as of a few weeks ago ChatGPT’s AI is now building the future of AI.
“GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations.”
I agree that this change means AI will build faster than it ever has since 2022.
Children are the most at risk
The current education system doesn’t understand that most existing jobs and skills are being replaced by AI. The career of the future is not yet known, but schools are still teaching skills that may no longer be needed.
I have 2 daughters. To prevent this problem I’m helping them to become masters of creativity, imagination, communication, and socializing. These skills will always be required no matter what future jobs we have.
It’s also why I took my 3 year old to one of the most famous UFO landing sites in history. I want my daughters to understand that humanity's problems will get bigger, not smaller — and that's a reason for excitement, not fear.
I want her to understand that it’s highly unlikely we’re alone in this universe. Once she accepts that reality, it supports the logic that humans will build things outside of Earth.
Therefore, the little problems we’ve solved on Earth over the last few centuries are nothing compared to the problems we will need to solve for humans to live and work on the moon and other planets later on.
Going beyond Earth gives us our optimism back.
It helps us see abundance rather than scarcity.
The 175 year old idea that changes the AI narrative
Writer Connor Boyack shared this powerful idea:
“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and tho