Drawing on Cory Doctorow's insight, the immediate risk for workers isn't being replaced by a competent AI, but by an incompetent one. AI only needs to be good enough to convince a manager to fire a human, leading to a lose-lose situation of job loss and declining work quality.
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Beyond displacing current workers, AI will lead to hiring "abatement," where companies proactively eliminate roles from their hiring plans altogether. This is a subtle but profound workforce shift, as entire job categories may vanish from the market before employees can be retrained.
The primary source of employee anxiety around AI is not the technology itself, but the uncertainty of how leadership will re-evaluate their roles and contributions. The fear is about losing perceived value in the eyes of management, not about the work itself becoming meaningless.
AI tools frequently produce incorrect information, with error rates as high as 30%. Relying on this technology to replace entry-level staff is a major risk, as newcomers are essential for learning and eventually providing the human oversight that fallible AI requires.
The career risk from AI is not being automated out of existence, but being outcompeted by peers who leverage AI as a tool. The future workforce will be divided by AI literacy, making the ability to use AI a critical competitive advantage.
The narrative of AI replacing jobs is misleading. The real threat is competitive displacement. Professionals will be put out of business not by AI itself, but by more agile competitors who master AI tools to become faster, smarter, and more efficient.
AI's impact on labor will likely follow a deceptive curve: an initial boost in productivity as it augments human workers, followed by a crash as it masters their domains and replaces them entirely. This creates a false sense of security, delaying necessary policy responses.
Unlike past technological shifts where humans could learn new trades, AI is a "tractor for everything." It will automate a task and then move to automate the next available task faster than a human can reskill, making long-term job security increasingly precarious for cognitive labor.
Despite the hype, AI is unreliable, with error rates as high as 20-30%. This makes it a poor substitute for junior employees. Companies attempting to replace newcomers with current AI risk significant operational failures and undermine their talent pipeline.
The real danger of new technology is not the tool itself, but our willingness to let it make us lazy. By outsourcing thinking and accepting "good enough" from AI, we risk atrophying our own creative muscles and problem-solving skills.
The real inflection point for widespread job displacement will be when businesses decide to hire an AI agent over a human for a full-time role. Current job losses are from human efficiency gains, not agent-based replacement, which is a critical distinction for future workforce planning.
