Note:
This is the most difficult column I’ve ever written. And I’m dropping into first person here to note that even though I often write in a third person omniscient voice, this column was written by a real person with skin in the game. It is difficult not because it was technically hard to write. Not because the concepts are that difficult. But because it’s ethically dodgy to warn folks about impending catastrophe without injecting some kind of hope. But I think the warning is so urgent that I must make an exception.
There is a concept in Tort law known as duty to warn, indicating that a party will be held liable for injuries caused to another, where the party had the opportunity to warn the other of a hazard and failed to do so. And I feel obligated to warn because decisions you make now may negatively affect you in the very near future, a future that looks nothing economically like we’ve ever experienced.
Three years ago, most people had never heard of ChatGPT. It arrived quietly, almost humbly, an experiment in conversational software that seemed like a novelty more than anything else. But in the blink of an eye it spread everywhere, touching nearly every corner of life. If you work in an office, if you write reports, analyze data, draft emails, fill out forms, file claims, prepare briefs, negotiate contracts, run spreadsheets, or do anything that depends on the movement of information rather than the movement of your hands, you are already working beside an AI system. You may not see it directly, but it is there. And here is the part that people really do not want to hear. Projections are that in three more years, most cognitive work as we understand it today will no longer require humans.
That does not mean that people will stop having value, or that there will be no need for judgment or oversight or creativity. It means the economic engine that has run on human intelligence for centuries is about to run on something else. There will be no safety net built in time for the millions whose skills become obsolete. There will be no smooth transition from one field to another. There will be no clever retraining program waiting on the other side of displacement. Entry level jobs, which once gave workers a foothold, will collapse first. And the higher-level reasoning jobs that once felt like safe territory will be replicated faster and cheaper by machines that never sleep and never stop improving.
It is hard to describe how quickly this is unfolding without sounding alarmist. But the past three years have been a kind of economic telescope pointed at a future that is rushing toward us. AI systems improve not year by year but month by month, sometimes week by week. New models appear with capabilities that would have been considered science fiction in 2020. A quiet revolution is happening in the background, and for most people life still looks normal. The grocery store is open. The gas station works. Your paycheck clears. Everything looks steady from the outside.
But this is what it feels like standing on a beach before a tsunami. The ocean is calm. The horizon is unbroken. The world is deceptively ordinary. What you do not see is what is already racing toward you under the surface.
ChatGPT’s release was an underwater earthquake. That is not hyperbole. It pushed the entire global economy off center in a way that is only now becoming visible to those who follow the technology closely. For a while, the water even seemed to recede, the way it does before a massive wave. Companies paused hiring. Entry level roles vanished quietly. The ladder that younger generations need to climb began to disintegrate. None of this felt like a crisis at first because no single moment looked dramatic enough to trigger panic. But taken together, the pattern is unmistakable.
There is a wall of water forming offshore. By the time it is visible to everyone, it will be too late to run.
This poses an ethical dilemma for me as someone who writes about our changing world. I have a personal rule that I try very hard to keep. Never point out a problem without suggesting a solution. Never dismantle someone’s worldview unless you can help them build a better one in its place. Never write for the sake of shock or despair. If you are going to tell people that something they rely on is unstable, you should offer them a path forward.
But I am struggling with that now, because I do not see an obvious path forward, at least not in the system we currently live in. The usual solutions do not work in a landscape where intelligence itself is being automated. Retraining does not help when the destination job is vanishing. Moving into a different industry does not help when all industries are adopting the same tools. Education does not help when AI learns faster than any human can. Entrepreneurship does not help when AI can build, market, and run a business with almost no human input. These tools are extraordinary. They will save lives, improve medicine, enhance creativity, uncover scientific breakthroughs, and solve problems we have struggled with for generations. But they will also hollow out the economic structure that ties wages to survival.
And here is the part I wish I could soften but cannot. Any strategy that might protect people from the coming wave is not politically viable in the United States today. Safety nets require trust, and public programs require consensus. Structural reforms require a shared understanding of the problem.
We have none of those things. We are a country that cannot agree on what day it is, much less how to redesign the foundations of the economy. So, the tsunami keeps coming, and the people on the beach keep believing that calm water means safety.
I wish I could tell you to move to higher ground, but there is no higher ground yet. The truth is that we are entering a period when the economy continues to function on the surface while the underlying logic quietly collapses. Sure, productivity will rise. And trillion-dollar profits will rise. Nvidia, who makes most of the chips powering AI, has a valuation of $5 trillion. In 2020, five years ago, it was $343 billion.
Meanwhile, ordinary people will feel an increasing sense of insecurity without understanding why. The work they used to do will change shape or vanish entirely. The world will start to feel unpredictable in a way that is difficult to articulate. This is not because anyone failed. It is because we built an economy that depends on human intelligence at the exact moment we created something that can outperform it.
But here, directly, is why I think this information is important to you. Current estimates are that by 2030, four years from now, 30 percent of hours currently worked across the U.S. economy could be replaced by AI, and of those not completely replaced, 60 percent can be significantly augmented by AI. That’s conservative, because it’s based on AI as it is now. Numerous top experts in the AI field, though, point out that AI’s intelligence is increasing exponentially, day by day, and it’s likely that most jobs will be impacted in some way within three years. Why is that important?
If you buy a home, a car, or any large investment that you must go into long-term debt for, if you decide to have children that you must support, the prospect is that you may have no job in a few years, or a low paying job at best. As for ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI), do you really believe the current government is going to bail us out? The Calvary isn’t coming to save us.
So what’s the point of pointing out a problem that I argue there is nothing we can do to resolve? My hope is that naming the truth is a kind of lifeline in itself. We cannot outrun the wave, but we can at least stop pretending it is not there. Preparing psychologically is not nothing. Understanding the magnitude of what is coming is not nothing. And talking about it openly, without false comfort, is not nothing. Maybe that is the best any of us can offer right now. A clear view of the horizon, and an honest accounting of what is heading for us.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
