Everyone has a take on AI. It'll take our jobs, collapse society, or usher in a new era of abundance. The doomerism is getting loud, and honestly, exhausting.
Here's where I've landed: both extremes are wrong, and the truth in the middle might be worse than either.
The two camps
The optimists assume benevolent elites — that productivity gains will be shared, that we won't recreate the misery of the industrial revolution in digital form. The pessimists say the elites are anything but benevolent, that profitability comes before people, planet, or species survival.
Both feel like incomplete arguments. Neither accounts for what's actually happening right now.
The present
AI has made life meaningfully easier for the technically savvy. Websites, apps, prototypes — things that once took teams now take afternoons. Daily tasks get automated. Questions get answered. For many, a thought-partner with vast knowledge appeared out of nowhere. That's genuinely good.
But here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: the entry-level is dead.
We're not seeing mass layoffs. Instead, we're seeing something quieter and more damaging. Mid-level engineers, PMs, designers, and operators are routing work that used to go to junior hires directly into AI agents and coding tools. The apprenticeship model — where a 22-year-old learns by doing the unglamorous work — is being quietly dismantled. We're kicking the last of Gen Z off the ladder and pulling it up behind us.
Meanwhile, LLMs have hit an incremental wall. The leap to full replacement of skilled humans isn't coming. But unskilled roles and entry-level development positions? Those are already gone.
Where this goes
This isn't 90% unemployment. It's slower and in some ways worse. My read:
- We'll see roughly 25% unemployment and a crushing of workers under 25 within the next five years.
- There will be a temporary spike in productivity and output quality — followed by stagnation as the pipeline of developing talent dries up.
- In 20–30 years, wealth consolidates entirely. The wealthy own everything — assets, infrastructure, the tools of production. Everyone else is left with neither skills nor leverage, a permanent underclass in a system that has no use for them. Feudalism, but with better hardware.
The worst of it won't be felt by most people reading this. Billionaires become trillionaires. Those who already made it mostly stay put. But the world they'll hand off — the one currently being quietly hollowed out — will be a different story.
We're in the last of the good years. Enjoy them.