AI is supposed to be a tool for people and never replace them. Anyone who believes that just gets replaced faster.
The claim has taken hold among the people who still want to rescue themselves and their picture of an intact world: AI complements human work and will never replace it. Too late. The process is well underway. People are being replaced.
This is where the big fight over the future, human or software, balances on a knife’s edge.
Everyone wants to know their job is safe and acts as if the threat didn’t exist. But it’s not their call. Other people decide that. And not even them, because there is no them. By now the whole thing has a momentum of its own that nobody can stop. The massive investments in AI infrastructure can’t be stopped either. And every micro-decision hangs on them.
No problem if someone is unsure, because nobody knows where all this leads. But it gets dishonest when anyone still claims that people can’t be replaced. Of course not every task a person can do is suddenly obsolete. And I won’t list all the future-proof trades and prove how indispensable we are. But I do want to get a feel for how many people will be looking for work because AI replaced them.
And honestly, I can’t give you a number. I don’t think anyone can. Not because it’s secret, but because nobody wants to see it.
Because I know these glasses from the inside. For years I sold something I wasn’t sure actually worked. A wristband and a story that was almost true. In the morning I put the glasses on, because they felt better than the question of what I was really doing.
When someone tells me today that AI complements and doesn’t replace, I hear the same tone. Not that of a liar. That of someone who wants to believe something, because the alternative is too big. I don’t hold it against him. I was the same.
Take off the rose-colored glasses and at first you don’t see anything nicer. You just see where you stand. And that’s more than most people have right now.