AI and Automation: The Future Is Already Here (And It’s Not What You Think)
The phrase “AI and automation will take all the jobs” has been repeated so often that it’s become background noise, like elevator music for the apocalypse. But in 2025, after living with generative AI, robotic process automation, and autonomous systems for years, the reality looks very different from both the utopian dreams and the dystopian nightmares.
Automation Isn’t New; Intelligence Is
We’ve been automating work for centuries. The spinning jenny took jobs from hand spinners. The assembly line decimated artisanal manufacturing. Excel destroyed entire floors of accounting clerks. Each time, society didn’t run out of work; it ran out of boring work.
What’s different now isn’t automation itself; it’s that we’re automating cognitive labor at scale for the first time. Writing marketing copy, debugging code, diagnosing X-rays, translating languages, creating illustrations — tasks that required years of human training are now being done (sometimes poorly, sometimes brilliantly) by models you can talk to like a coworker.
The Jobs That Disappear vs. the Jobs That Appear
Yes, some roles are evaporating faster than anyone predicted:
- Junior copywriters who spent their days rewriting the same product descriptions
- Entry-level coders whose main job was translating tickets into boilerplate
- Radiologists who primarily did routine readings (many now oversee AI instead of doing the first pass themselves)
- Travel agents, stock photographers, basic legal researchers…
But simultaneously, entirely new categories are exploding:
- Prompt engineers → evolved into “AI workflow architects”
- Human-AI collaboration designers
- Synthetic data curators
- AI ethics compliance officers (love them or hate them, they exist)
- Professional “vibe coders” who build aesthetic experiences on top of AI backends
- People who fine-tune models for niche industries (think AI that speaks fluent construction or dentistry)
The net effect? We’re not seeing mass technological unemployment. We’re seeing the fastest reallocation of human talent in history.
The Real Risk Isn’t Job Loss; It’s Stagnation
Here’s the part no one wants to say out loud: the biggest danger of AI + automation isn’t that you’ll lose your job to a robot. It’s that you’ll keep your job… and slowly turn into its robot appendage.
When the tool does 80% of the work and you spend your days doing QA on machine output, approving minor changes, and handling edge cases, something psychological happens. Your ambition atrophies. Your curiosity dulls. You become the human CAPTCHA.
We’ve already seen this with earlier automation. Think of the social media manager whose entire day is now just hitting “boost post” and tweaking targeting parameters. Or the lawyer who went from crafting arguments to filling out slightly-different versions of the same contract template.
AI accelerates that process dramatically.
The Leverage Revolution
The winners in this new world aren’t the people who work harder. They’re the people who figure out how to multiply their output by 10× using tools.
One developer + Cursor/Claude/CodeLlama can now outpace an entire 2018 engineering team on many tasks.
One indie creator + Midjourney + Suno + CapCut can produce content that used to require a studio.
One salesperson + AI lead enrichment + personalized video messaging closes deals that used to take weeks in hours.
This is the real story of AI and automation: radical democratization of leverage.
So What Should You Do?
- Stop trying to compete with AI on speed and volume. You will lose.
- Ruthlessly automate everything boring in your work (yes, even if it feels like “cheating”).
- Double down on the deeply human parts: taste, judgment, emotional connection, synthesis of disparate ideas, moral courage.
- Build in public. The new resume is your digital trail of what you’ve shipped with these tools.
- Treat AI like an endlessly patient, slightly arrogant junior colleague — not a god, not a slave, but a collaborator.
The Next Five Years: Three Scenarios
Let’s fast-forward to 2030 and look at the three ways this could actually play out:
Scenario A – The “AI Middle Class” Boom
Most knowledge workers become 5–20× more productive. Salaries for top-tier “human + AI” operators skyrocket. A new creative/technical middle class emerges: people earning $300k–$800k doing work that feels like play because the drudgery is gone. Inequality between those who master the tools and those who don’t becomes the new digital divide.
Scenario B – The Bureaucratic Backlash
Regulators, scared of rapid change, blanket-ban or heavily restrict consumer AI tools “for safety.” Companies lock everything behind enterprise contracts and compliance moats. Productivity gains accrue only to large corporations and governments. Independent creators and small businesses get priced out. We get a weird 1950s-style corporate dystopia with better PowerPoints.
Scenario C – The Great Flattening
Open-source models keep improving faster than anyone can regulate. The cost of intelligence drops toward zero. Anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can start a one-person unicorn. Geographic inequality collapses as the best “AI-augmented human” in a small town in Portugal outcompetes entire Manhattan agencies.
My money is on a messy mix of all three, leaning toward C in the long run because code and weights leak faster than laws can be written.
Final Thought
Every previous automation wave made life better but felt terrifying in the moment. This one is no different — except the pace is measured in months, not decades.
The future of work isn’t human vs. machine.
It’s human + machine vs. human without machine.
Choose your side.
P.S. I wrote the first draft of this post in 2023. An earlier version of me revised it in 2024. Today’s version was outlined by me and written in collaboration with Grok 4, then heavily edited (read: fought with) until it sounded like a human again.
That’s the job now.
