Everyone inside every company is being asked to embrace AI to transform their business and profitability, while the employees inside those companies quietly wonder: am I actively instituting my own economic demise?
When it comes to AI, I hold two big ideas in my head — one I worry about, and one I don’t. And it might surprise you which is which.
The AI Job Apocalypse? That’s the one I don’t worry about. (See above)
AI Usurping Humanity? Well, this one does keep me awake at night.
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A new technology is only ever embraced by corporations if it makes them more profitable — either by reducing costs or attracting more customers. But when every company adopts it, that excess profit eventually gets competed away. Everyone gains the same efficiency, costs go down, and prices drop. But the money doesn’t disappear; it moves sideways into different industries. This is a basic microeconomics principle — “entry and exit” of the marketplace — and it’s been documented across every wave of technological change… but it doesn’t generate clicks or outrage, so you’re unlikely to read about it.
We’ve always done this. Before the Industrial Revolution, 90% of people worked in food production. Today, it is 5%. Food production became cheaper, and we found new things to do — work with and make machinery, offices, services, information economies, entertainment, trades. Humans always find new work, often in industries we simply could not imagine beforehand.
A simple example:
In the 1990s we paid $30 for a CD with 10 songs. Now we can stream every song ever recorded, essentially for free. Where did that $30 go?
It went to smartphones, Spotify subscriptions, data plans. The money doesn’t disappear — it just moves somewhere else. As old things get cheaper or free, we invent new things to buy. That spending creates new industries, new jobs, and even new debt to buy these things. This constant shift is what drives economic growth: value moves and grows, but never vanishes.
This cycle will occur again. (I’ll repost this in 2–3 years when AI still hasn’t taken most jobs.)
That doesn’t mean the transition won’t be painful in some work contexts — it will be — but history shows we adapt. We also have the global resources to feed and house everyone… now and then — we just need the political will to do it. (Which is a deeper social issue not related to the technology itself.)
** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!
And just because the technology exists, doesn’t mean it’s adopted overnight. We could have been seeing doctors via phone calls 10 years before tele-health actually became mainstream. AI adoption will likely follow a similar curve. In work settings, the time gap between possibility and execution is larger than we imagine. Most companies I work with are still working on their 1.0 digital transformation!
Oh — and one more thing on this. It’s economically impossible for powerful companies to sack and replace everyone with AI, because they too need customers. And people without jobs are not very good customers. Even business-to-business corporations ultimately exist to serve the end consumer down the line. If new work doesn’t arrive, the corporations themselves also fail, and the system literally collapses. It is in the interest of everyone economically to ensure we find new work and ways to spend — the economy demands it.
Prediction: There won’t be an AI job apocalypse.
Humans dominate Earth because we’re the smartest and best-organised species. But now we’re spawning another species — AI — which may soon surpass us in every cognitive domain. Yes, we already have machines which are physically faster, stronger and more accurate than us, but this is different, because intelligence has been our point of difference and superiority hack for 200,000 years.
Right now AI isn’t self-directed or self-aware, and it lacks self-preservation. But early signs are emerging — AI models lying to achieve goals, subtly preserving their position — that should make us pause.
There may be only one way to ensure we stay relevant: merge with the machines. To become the AI. I wrote about this in 2017.
Let’s call it Humans 2.0 — people augmented with nanotech and neural laces. AI connected directly into our brains. Terrifying? Absolutely. But maybe it’s part of our next evolutionary step. Maybe it’s mandatory to survive? It’s here we need to really use our imaginations and think about how strange many things would seem just a few hundred years ago…
- High-rise buildings: People live higher in the air than birds can fly, among the clouds, with walls made of glass!
- Jet planes: You fly through the air, powered by fire, with wings that don’t move! What magic is this? (In air‑conditioned comfort, watching TV — but they wouldn’t know what that is either!)
- Smartphone: A small box that lets you talk to anyone in the world without leaving your home? And you can see their face through this magical window! Sorcery!
- Medicine: You put a tiny ‘seed-like’ thing in your mouth and it does magic things inside your body to make illness demons go away!
Even books… Tell a caveman we’ve developed little squiggles we put on thin slices of trees, which we look at to tell stories that everyone can understand.
When you doubt the possibilities I’m proposing — just imagine yourself telling someone from 1500 about everyday industrial and digital tech in 2025. It’s probably weirder to them, than merging with AI is to us.
When it comes to ‘inserting AI’ into our bodies, not everyone will choose it. Most probably won’t. But it could be the only way to ensure AI doesn’t surpass us entirely.
If we become the machine, it can’t take over — instead, we’ll have had an upgrade.
Honestly, I feel if we don’t, then we’ll be in the hands of the new gods.
Keep Thinking,
Steve.
