Aug 25, 2026
A surprising number of ppl reached out genuinely very anxious about AI taking all white collar jobs and taking away their livelihood. I'm the wrong person to ask about this stuff, but fwiw here's what I think about it:
In this future maybe ~2B ppl become unemployed, robots are stamping datacenters into the ground to meet compute demand (or constructing them in orbit due to nimbyism, idk), supply of goods and services explodes (unless there are new bottlenecks?), and our sociopolitical institutions are completely destabilized and possibly have crumbled. If this sounds fantastical, fair enough, but this is what will need to happen for all white collar labor to be performed by machines.
Yes much of this ^^ will turn out to be wrong because these things are hard to get right and it's not my area, but the point is, it's such a weird future that becoming an electrician is not going to help you. So as a matter of personal economic safety I don't worry about any of this at all. (Assuming we all make it through, I can't wait for this future to come actually)
So then, what _should_ you do? I maintain the same things you should always be doing. Learn smtg, build smtg, knock on doors, get yourself in a room with the most competent people who will have you, work really hard to be reliably useful, look around for weird asymmetric opportunities. Every once in a while when you're ready or are forced to, go back to learning and knocking.
Ppl always ask what if that doesn’t work? In that case you’ll have some skills, you’ll hopefully know lots of competent ppl who trust you, you’ll rebuild and you’ll figure it out. My model for this is my family who came to America in middle age and restarted from zero. They didn’t speak the language and didn't have a network of ppl. It was hard, but they kept their chin up and it turned out fine. If they could do it you can do it. And you're in a much better position, so keep your chin up and have no fear.