The AI jobs-apocalypse is here Prepare for the laptop-class revolt1
- In his 1974 masterpiece Working, Studs Terkel tried to put words to the quiet dread settling over American labour. He was writing in the midst of what we now think of as the Third Industrial Revolution2: the early computerisation of offices and the automation of factories, forces that — along with globalisation and outsourcing of labor — would go on to hollow out entire regions of the country. What haunted the workers facing this disruption most was “the planned obsolescence of people,” Terkel wrote. “It is perhaps this fear of being no longer needed in a world of needless things3 that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much of what is called work today.”
- The rise of AI, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, is now reviving that old dread, but this time it portends a far more volatile political horizon than the last one. It’s now the college-educated, office-dwelling winners of the age of the internet and globalisation who are suddenly discovering that they, too, can become the needless things alongside the blue-collar manufacturing base that Trump and MAGA has thus far failed to revive.
- We will soon find out which way the political winds will shift in response. The first act of the AI revolution4 was a content explosion. Generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT5, Claude6, and Google Gemini7 flooded the internet in the early 2020s with cheap words, cheap images, and cheap expertise, warping media, education, and the economy of attention into something closer to a hall of mirrors8. That phase began bending politics by accelerating misinformation, flattening expertise, and lowering the costs of persuasion. We are now entering a more destabilising phase: job loss9.
- As of 2026, AI “coming for jobs” is no longer a speculative future-of-work panel at Davos. In a limited sense, it’s already here. By the end of 2025, AI had been cited as a contributing factor in nearly 55,000 domestic layoffs, according to executive-coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The January jobs report was rosier than expected, but the underlying data was grim. Healthcare and social assistance accounted for 124,000 of the 130,000 jobs gained10 last month, industries essentially dedicated to managing an ageing, poorer population. An AI executive at a top consulting firm told me last week that end-of-year updates — Opus 4.511, the Anthropic model that launched at the end of November; and GPT-5.212, the OpenAI model that launched in December — have crossed a threshold13 and can be trusted to handle more complex tasks with fewer mistakes. “Most people don’t realise it yet. Now [AI] is at the level where I think we’ll start seeing real economic impacts this year, and it will snowball relatively fast,” she told me. Investors have noticed, and software stocks are being punished on Wall Street as markets begin to price in the possibility that AI handles the bulk of global programming14.
- The snowball may have already begun rolling. In January, American employers announced more than 108,000 job cuts, the worst start to a year since the 2009 Great Recession, with layoffs up 118% year over year and up more than 200% since late 2025. The casualties are not obscure startups. Amazon eliminated roughly 16,000 corporate jobs in a single month as part of a broader plan to trim tens of thousands of white-collar roles. Meta pruned 1,000 jobs from its virtual reality unit Reality Labs. Salesforce’s CEO acknowledged that the company shed 4,000 customer-support workers after AI tools absorbed roughly half of the workload. What we’re seeing now isn’t mass unemployment but a subtler erosion: fewer entry points, thinner career ladders, and a growing sense that the white-collar future once sold as stable and dignified is about to go the way of the video store clerk15.
- It’s about to get worse: CEOs aren’t hiding it anymore16; they’re now openly advocating reorganising firms around AI labour as a cost-cutting imperative. Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20% in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is sounding an even louder alarm, predicting that most white-collar work “will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” Progressives like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes are calling this development a deliberate class war by Big Tech CEOs against white-collar workers for being too uppity, but this is not a conspiracy against professionals. It is capitalism working exactly as intended. The software doesn’t have to be perfect17; if it can get to “good enough” at drafting reports, writing code, moderating content, summarising documents, or optimising logistics, then the $120,000-a-year credentialled professional becomes extinct, as more profit can be extracted. Robots and conveyor belts did this to factories and will continue to do so; now models and chatbots are doing it to the cognitive economy, turning thinking into the next assembly line.
- This will upend politics because jobs lie at the heart of America’s social contract. As Franklin Roosevelt warned a century ago, “people who are hungry and out of a job18 are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” We have already seen how downward mobility reshapes politics because we’re still feeling the tremors of the last employment-quake. In the 50 years since Terkel’s Working, deindustrialised and job-starved blue-collar communities lost more than jobs. Factory closures unravelled unions, apprenticeships, and entire local economies, shunting displaced workers into a service sector defined by precarity and downward mobility. Elites sold the transition as inevitable progress and told blue-collar workers to “learn to code,” as if your uncle could simply download a new career. The promised “knowledge economy” absorbed a narrow slice19 of the workforce, leaving the rest to navigate wage stagnation, disability rolls, and social decay in towns that had lost their reason to exist. Over time, this produced institutional estrangement: trust in government, the media, and expertise waned; participation declined; and resentment grew.
- And so, the anxiety born of the previous wave of automation and the legitimate economic grievances of blue-collar communities were largely rerouted into a new political identity, one that fused material loss with cultural resentment. As unions withered and Democrats recast themselves as the party of the ascendant professional classes, many working-class voters concluded that no one in power was actually trying to rebuild the world they had lost. Into that vacuum stepped MAGA and a Right-wing populism20 that promised results but has instead given rise to a politics of recognition — an inverse woke — embodied in the unlikely avatar of Donald Trump.
- So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers21 — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.
- Marx, the prophet of the Second Industrial Revolution, would argue that as economic obsolescence metastasizes into political instability, a revolution will soon be upon us. After all, yesterday’s bourgeoisie is soon to become tomorrow’s proletariat. That’s unlikely, but if AI brings about a college-educated jobs apocalypse rather than a utopia of zero work and universal high income, then we will see a more drastic political shock over the next decade than we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Call it WH Auden for the white-collar age. “The Age of Anxiety” was the poet’s name for a post-WWII world in which the old guarantees had collapsed, and everyone felt one missed-step away from the void: “the wolves will get you if the moths won’t,” he warned. Large catastrophe or nibbling decay: either way22, your previous life is over.
- In the short term — the next one to three years23 — the primary victim of this upheaval will inevitably be the Republican party and the MAGA movement. Economy and jobs remain the top issues for American voters. Whether it is fully deserved or not, the electorate will blame the incumbent leadership for the AI-driven displacement24. The current administration, having tethered its brand to a return to American greatness and a blue-collar resurgence, will find itself presiding over a white-collar bloodbath. The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a massacre for the GOP25 as voters react to tariff-driven inflation and rising costs for everyone. By 2030, both parties will face the wrath of young people who are expected to build a life26 on internships, side hustles, and selling themselves on OnlyFans.
- But this isn’t necessarily a victory for the center-Left or center-Right. Mainstream democrats are trapped between worker-friendly rhetoric and donor-class dependence on the industries driving automation. Republicans are trapped between populist grievance, pro-market orthodoxy, and vying for Big Tech’s hand in political marriage. The lesson that the pandemic-era satire Eddington expertly captured was this pathology: social media trained Americans to see their neighbours as existential enemies based on voting behaviour, while the political establishment quietly benefited from the infrastructure boom, tax abatements, and data-centre gold rush that accompanied the platform economy. The culture war supplied the noise, and capital captured the signal.
- But maybe not forever. We are already seeing the emergence of a new, non-partisan “AI Populism” where something like the “Humanists” square off against “Tech Accelerationists.” Across the country, local communities are already revolting against the construction of massive AI data centres, even without the sting of massive job loss. These eerie windowless temples of compute strain local power grids and suck up millions of gallons of water and arrive with the footprint of a fleet of spaceships: alien, resource-hungry, and indifferent to local life27. The political backlash is no joke. These fights are erupting in swing states and battleground districts, animating local elections and straining party coalitions.
- In Pennsylvania this week, the Montour County commission denied rezoning for a proposed data centre tied to a major tech company after residents warned it would hike utility bills and worsen energy insecurity in a region already wary of industrial disruption. In Arizona, grassroots groups gathered enough signatures to put data centre siting decisions on the ballot, signalling that tech infrastructure could soon be one of the few issues that actually mobilise voters outside the traditional culture wars. These skirmishes are shaping up to be an early indicator of what the next phase of the AI revolution will look like politically. Not a clean Left-Right realignment, but a messy conflict between28 those who bear the costs of automation and those who harvest its efficiencies.
- The Republican Party finds itself in a weird squeeze on the AI question. Many GOP lawmakers and governors have enthusiastically backed Big Tech’s AI build-out as an economic and national-security imperative. President Trump’s pro-AI infrastructure agenda — from rapid data centre approvals to limiting state and local regulatory power — has been presented as a key front in a global competition with China29. At the same time, rank-and-file voters in data centre host states are increasingly troubled by the real costs — from utility bills to grid strain — that these facilities impose, leaving Republicans vulnerable to being tagged as defenders of distant tech interests at the expense of Main Street.
- Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to make sense of this new landscape. Party standard-bearers like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro have heralded AI as the future of the economy of their jurisdictions, while also awkwardly defending the backlash. Some progressives have embraced calls to slow or regulate data-centre construction, framing it as an issue of worker protection, environmental justice, and local control. Others worry that overt opposition to AI infrastructure will hand Republicans a cudgel to beat them with on innovation and growth.
- There’s a bizarre alignment emerging where figures as ideologically opposed as Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis find themselves on the same side. In a post on X over the weekend, Sanders said that the key disruptors30 of the 20th century economy — automobiles, radio, TV, computers, the internet — pale in comparison to the revolution AI will bring about. This week, Sanders is traveling to Stanford, the heart of the Big Tech beast, with US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to call for a moratorium on construction of new AI data centres to “make sure AI works for workers, not just billionaires.” Meanwhile, in December, DeSantis proposed an “AI Bill of Rights” to safeguard Florida residents by addressing the misuse of personal data and allowing local governments to block new data centres. “I really fear that if this is not addressed in an intelligent and proper way, it could set off an age of darkness and deceit,” DeSantis said during a press conference. When a democratic socialist and Florida’s No 1 Right-wing culture warrior start sounding like joint authors, something real is happening31.
- If we look a decade ahead, the AI revolution may force a complete rewrite of the old political spectrum of “Liberal vs. Conservative”, which will collapse into incoherence. In its place, we could see a structural realignment around — to borrow from Marx — who controls the Means of Prediction.
- As AI automates the “cognition economy,” the debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI) or a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) will shift from Silicon Valley pipe dreams to the center of the debate. Governments will be pressured to tax “robot labour” simply to prevent the total collapse of the consumer economy. If people don’t have wages, they can’t buy the products the AI is making. Just as the 19th-century state had to break up the trusts and monopolies of the Gilded Age, 21st-century politics will be a battle between the federal government and a handful of what Sanders calls tech oligarchies. These companies now control the world’s primary compute resources — the digital equivalent of oil or steel. Or we could see the opposite: a command-and-control economy32, as the state and tech formally merge and the trend of state capitalism takes firmer hold.
- The danger, I believe, isn’t that AI will produce a single coherent political movement or a technofascist state (so put away your dog-eared copy of 1984). Instead, it may fracture the old coalitions faster than new ones can form, producing a volatile landscape of backlash, regulatory whiplash, and even more opportunistic demagoguery. On the far Left, we see a rise in techno-scepticism and a demand for the abolition of “bullshit jobs” — the idea that we should stop pretending we need 40 hours of work if the AI can do it in four. On the far Right, nationalist protectionism may not align with the needs of the global AI industry. The future, for better or worse, is up for grabs.
- From this vantage point, the AI revolution is the final insult to the American worker, but over the rest of the 2020s, it may also represent the final test for American democracy. The Third Industrial Revolution taught factory towns that the future could arrive without them; the Fourth is teaching the same lesson to the laptop class. And when millions of people are suddenly told, by code, that they are surplus, it won’t be the moths that get the elites. The wolves will find them first33.
- Ryan Zickgraf is a columnist for UnHerd, based in Pennsylvania.
AI in the UK: how will jobs be affected?34
- For nearly two decades, Leonie Tucker worked as a graphic designer35 in the British film industry, said Eir Nolsoe in The Daily Telegraph. Until recently, the 36-year-old was making more than £65,000 a year. “Then last year; it was £26,000.” Now she’s on universal credit, because the sort of design work she used to do can now be done by AI, for a fraction of the cost. “Within years, millions36 could experience the same fate as Tucker: a steep drop in income, carefully honed skills obsolete, an entire career path gone.” In the City, the outlook is “super-worrying” for many junior workers, said Matthew Field in the same paper, because AI bots can perform a typical due diligence task37 in a fraction of the time it takes a human. And this is before revolutionary new AI “agents” have really been rolled out. Anthropic’s latest batch of tools is being specifically targeted at traditional white-collar workers and City professionals. The lab promises that its new bots can take on “specific job functions like sales, legal and financial analysis38”.
- Markets around the world have been roiled by a blog published last week39 by a US outfit, Citrini Research40 sketching out a future in which AI systems upend the entire economy by 202841. In this scenario, software is the first domino to fall, said The Guardian. AI tools allow software to be designed at a fraction of the cost42, gutting established businesses43. Next, the blog imagines millions of people using AI agents to handle consumer decisions44, via apps. This destroys whole sections45 of the economy that make money performing tasks people prefer not to do: insurance, travel and estate agents and financial advisers are wiped out. Payment systems are ravaged, too: instead of using Visa and Mastercard, which charge 2-3 %, AI agents do all business in cryptocurrency46, because transaction costs are lower. All these companies, with their business models ruined, shed white-collar workers in vast numbers, who are then forced into lower-paying roles. A “negative feedback loop47” ensues: companies use AI, so they need fewer workers; white-collar layoffs increase, so displaced workers spend less; and companies try to cut costs further by investing in AI. House prices drop; mortgage markets go into crisis. The AI giants get mega-rich at the expense of nearly everyone else. Back in the real world, the share prices of companies named in the Citrini blog, from Mastercard to DoorDash to Monday.com, took significant hits48.
- We shouldn’t take this piece of “doomer fiction49” too seriously, said Robin Wigglesworth in the FT. If AI massively improves productivity and competition, this will create wealth, and lower prices for us all. Like the internet, the AI transition will certainly be difficult for many companies and workers. But there will be “creative destruction”: the resources from old, failed businesses will be released to create new businesses. And governments can tax the new wealth created, to pay for social protections. AI is already hitting the UK economy, according to a recent Morgan Stanley study, said Lauren Almeida in The Guardian. British companies using AI reported that, in 2025, it had resulted in average productivity gains of 10.95% - and job losses of 8%50.
36 UnHerd Comments51
- George K: 23 days ago
Volatility yes but it smells bubble in the air. It’s been a year without any significant progress as LLMs apparently exhausted their potential. I use AI daily for my job and it’s an awesome technology which gives me a boost of about 20% productivity but it’s nowhere close to telling me that I better travel around the world rather than troubleshooting deployments
- Andrew Vanbarner: 22 days ago
Reply to George K.
Same here. AI will enhance productivity – I agree with the estimate of about 20% or so – but it still requires the user to ask precise questions, and interpret the answers correctly. The “what” of data issues is readily apparent – six isn’t nine, for example. The “why” – why is the output negative six million, when it should be nine million – isn’t as easy to deduce, mitigate, or solve. People who spend their days calling out the “whats” could’ve been automated some years ago. People who can get the “whys” built, fixed, or functioning are unlikely to ever be replaced.
- Matt Sylvestre: 21 days ago
Reply to George K. LLMs have exhausted themselves yes but now the real punch is in application which is, for now, lagging behind… Also, there will be another breakthrough that moves the AI ball forward, its more a matter of when than what…
- Louis Biafore: 23 days ago
As someone who works one the technical side of building agentic systems that perform work previously done by humans I found this article both very ‘on point’ and pleasantly original in its synthesis. Right up until the last 3 paragraphs (“As AI automates…”), at which point the exposition careens wildly outside the bounds of what seems technically plausible.
- UnHerd Reader: 23 days ago
Good article, but needs more precision. Take the USA, or UK for that matter. Take New York, or London for that matter. The data show that the jobs most affected will be female-dominated and entry- to mid-level — finance, insurance, HR, legal services. In truth, AI can do a better, faster job already. The data also show that these sectors are populated by already rather radical people (insert great feminisation thesis) who are majority “progressives.” So what does the future hold? A shrinking population of childless, 40 plus, urban dwellers with no real skills beyond mastery of memos. What we may get is a horrible transition period where Rachel from accounts re-manifests herself/they-self as a “change agent.”
- Lancashire Lad: 23 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader: Quite possibly; the really interesting points made in this essay (RK’s best for Unherd imo) revolve around the entire reshaping of our political landscapes as a result of job losses and the posing of perhaps the greatest existential question of all: what are humans for? Throw into the.mix that the political views of Chinese and Russian citizens are already ignored and suppressed, giving their economies a head start once the repercussions start to unfold. So also: how do we retain our relative freedoms, in a new age when ‘work’ is no longer a means of social agency?
- UnHerd Reader: 23 days ago
Reply to Lancashire Lad. Excellent question. I’m sure we have different answers. For me, this cuts to the contemporary problem of the institution and corporation as sites of both sociality and creativity. The traditional bureaucracy and the large corporation may become “victims” of this historical moment, but the university is the space to watch. I think we’re already seeing the changes, and the collapse. What comes next will be, minimally, interesting to watch.
- Lancashire Lad: 23 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader. Could be that actual “answers” aren’t something that can be currently addressed. The one thing that we have as humans is our very long history of adaptability. I’m sure if we can set out across the ocean in a flimsy craft, not knowing whether there’s anything else out there; or if we can head further and further north in search of food until we learn to survive amid snow and ice rather than baking sun, we can learn to adapt to the changes that we’re bringing upon ourselves. Our ancestors didn’t have “answers” to hand when they did those things, but we survived, we thrived and I don’t think we’ve actually changed very much in our cores. This is what i refer to when I speak of ‘the human spirit’, stretching back many millennia.
- Charles Stanhope 22 days ago
Reply to Lancashire Lad. Trust that Porton Down is working on a ‘new’ “vaccine”, and one that bl**dy well works this time, unlike the Chinese rubbish. We face a ‘Brave New World’ where only Alphas need survive, Betas and Gammas will be totally superfluous. The environmental and social benefits will be simply stupendous.
- John Ellis 22 days ago
Reply to Charles Stanhope. But like Huxley’s original, it will soon metamorphise into a dystopia. And even he had space for Betas, Gammas and Epsilons. Although your “vaccine” will need to be advanced indeed if it is to cull humans on the basis of their bank balances….
- Charles Stanhope: 22 days ago
Reply to John Ellis. Being a patriotic Englishman I was thinking of something along the lines of ethnicity. It seems both the simplest and eminently beneficial solution. Huxley was writing in the 30’s as you well know, so was at a considerable disadvantage as far the advances in science are concerned. However had he been alive today I am certain he would have proposed something very similar. “It cruel to be kind” as we used to say.
- UnHerd Reader: 23 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader. Feminization Reset. As per the above noted commentator, under this scenario AI doesn’t bode well for the class of “progressives”. Perhaps this drives the elite WEF globalists to reduce the world population from 8 to 2 billion. AI, the epitome in digitization, as the 4th Industrial Revolution. Isn’t this a contradiction, an oxymoron, in terms!
- Matt M 23 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader. The answer to that problem is marriage. As women’s white collar work disappears, they always have the option to marry a builder, live off his (now elevated) salary and have a few babies. Which is what she probably wanted in the first place (which is why she/they is so prickly and unpleasant at the moment).
- steve hay 21 days ago
Reply to Matt M. We are already seeing the prospects for tradesman and women to be looking on the up and up. You will already pay through the nose, comparatively speaking for the services of a competent “Tradie” and good luck to them. How interested they would be in a snarky disagreeable partner is another thing. They tend to be practical people and an entitled, probably unemployed potential partner, is highly likely to be given a miss
- Catherine Johnson 23 days ago
Reply to UnHerd Reader. You do wonder if more women will simply choose to be stay at home Moms in this new environment – particularly as more and more discussion is already taking place about how empty the modern feminist boss babe vision has been for many women.
- Louis Biafore 23 days ago
The author has seemingly lost track of the critical distinction between jobs the current LLM-based agentic systems can do: manipulation of symbols in constrained environments (paralegal work, programming) and those they cannot do, namely those which involve manipulating the physical world in unpredictable environments (plumbing, ambulance paramedic). There simply have been no breakthroughs in robotics comparable in magnitude to the transformer architecture, introduced by Vaswani et al in their seminal 2017 paper, “Attention is All You Need”, which underpins LLMs and the agentic systems being built upon them. Discussion for another day, but it does look like “pink collar” jobs are apt to be more affected in this round than “blue collar” jobs.
- RA Znayder 23 days ago
The second part of this piece explores intriguing possibilities. But for that, the first part has to be true first. And that is not really the case. So far, there really is no AI job-Apocalyps. Reports that look into it show that jobs actually being taken over by AI are quite rare. However, there is no shortage of companies that claim that their downsizing operation is due to AI. It is what investors love to hear. If anything the reasons are economic. The inflationary asset bubbles, of which AI is the biggest, are squeezing real demand. Also never talk to AI CEO’s. Most of what they have been spreading is PR; they have been selling hypothetical fears for years. Apparently investors love that too, otherwise they would not do it. Instead, talk to researchers and engineers actually working on scaling and persistent AI-problems to get a good picture. “On the far Left, we see a rise in techno-scepticism and a demand for the abolition of “bullshit jobs””. This is an interesting one. Because I feel that many of the managerial jobs that AI could potentially take over are already bullshit jobs. So if it is not really about the output of these jobs, there is not much for AI to take over.
- George K 23 days ago
Reply to RA Znayder
Both good points about companies claiming fashionable AI based reductions and AI CEOs being unreliable source of information. Unfortunately I’d add also all AI “godfathers “ ( there’s about as many as podcasts) I never heard any supporting evidence for extraordinary claims
- Louis Biafore 23 days ago
As someone who works in the “agentic” space it looks to me like many jobs—those that involve operating out in the physical world, especially those that require manual dexterity—will only be affected at the margin by LLM-based agentic systems. Even some of the “bullshit jobs” (the author obliquely references the late David Graeber’s book of the same name) will survive in some form. Of Graeber’s 5-fold typology of bullshit jobs: (1) flunkies, (2) goons, (3) duct tapers, (4) box tickers and (5) taskmaster, only “box tickers” look doomed to me. Certain “flunkies” will almost certainly survive—it will continue to be a signal of prestige to retain a human doorman and human receptionist, though you may need to be a really attractive PhD from Cambridge to get the job The second Graeber category, “goons”, which includes lobbyists will likely survive as long as nation governments have budgets. The third category, “duct tapers”, which includes programmers who fix things that should have worked without their intervention, will survive as long as there are new versions of AI systems, which invariably fail to work perfectly from day one. And Graeber’s final category, “taskmasters”—basically middle-management—will survive in some form unless the oligarch himself plans to spend his day directly dispatching orders to his AI minions. In addition, the entire superstructure of the Western legal and corporate architecture requires at certain points in the organization that there exist identifiable “wringable necks” in the event something goes wrong. As AI’s currently are indifferent to having their (non-existent) necks wrung, these roles will continue to be held by humans. In short, there are plenty of reasons for A to employ B, only one of which has to do with what B produces by their labor.
- Andrew Vanbarner 22 days ago
Reply to Louis Biafore. True. I find AI enormously helpful for my job, but it still doesn’t write particularly clean script for the kind of programming I occasionally do, sometimes just makes things up, and is once in a while flat out wrong while perhaps being technically correct. I’ve yet to see a robot accountant, nor an entirely automated project manager. Nor will AI entirely replace human judgement. AI to me is just a series of math models and algos, which we can now run quickly and efficiently using the cloud and more powerful servers and processing. But insofar as I’ve spent decades with uncooperative coworkers, unreasonable bosses, or unpleasant people who don’t seem to do very much, I won’t be upset about some people’s jobs being automated. The rest of us can lead, follow, or get out of the way. And we’ll still be paid wages if we do so.
- Alex Lekas 23 days ago
“it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself.” Seriously? This self-regard aside, AI is going to produce upheaval and no one should be surprised. The unknown is upheaval to what extent. Too many people treat this as an existential race between East and west. “We have to be #1,” say American pundits and pols, but they’re never clear about #1 in what. It’s as if they’re not sure what the fallout will be, either. The data center mechanics have been interesting. Not many communities want these things in their backyards and I have seen a disturbing trend in which city council members and other public officials sign NDAs about these projects. That borders on the criminal. When the people we elect and appoint are barred from discussing something that will impact the area, that’s a bad sign.
- UnHerd Reader 23 days ago
Anyone believe the public sector will accept AI, when large sections still use fax machines? Link. The result will be that unemployment is centred in the private sector, much of the AI infrastructure will be offshore and the government will continue to expect the same tax take from a shrining private sector. A couple of thoughts … the internet was expected to eliminate high street estate agents. This did not happen? I can guess why – issues of trust in trading assets whose long-term value was seen as rising forever – but I would like to see a proper report. Also, current AI is mean-regressive. The imitation produced by AI is influenced by the full range of available models. Currently, it is easy for someone with genuine expertise to produce better quality work than AI and to use AI to produce the same quantity. This may of course change if AI becomes more critical and less imitative.
- Edward Wynn 23 days ago
This article completely fails to address key issues. The need for human to human interaction which cannot be replaced by IT. The reality that many jobs involve IT as a side or service issue. If you lose your job because it’s been automated by a computer you were wasting your life anyway. The UK for example has a massive shortage of welders and other trades. AI has no role there. If your job involves working on a computer you were always quite likely going to be toast. Middle class bureaucrats especially in the Civil Service will defend their existence to the bitter end. The fact that western country population birth rate is declining is actually a good thing in this context. I’m going to buy a small holding with a good water supply
- G M 23 days ago
Those involved in the trades, plumbing, electrician etc., will be the least affected, until robots can do their jobs. Many of the software, lawyers, office staff tended to vote leftist and they will be affected a lot.
- Martin Johnson 18 days ago
The future is unknown, but I hope that one consequence will be that as demand for its output declines the higher education complex shrinks to less than 1/2 of its current footprint, ideally about 1/4. All the rest has been pure waste, if not destruction of value, for a generation, at least. AI might close the deal if we can free ourselves from the dead hand of the past. Get rid of all the “Studies” departments and programs, all the J-schools, all the graduate-level Ed Schools, half of the B-schools, a quarter to half of the Law schools. And then recast federal funding to not be subsidizing (through overhead rates on research grants, and student grants and loans) most of the humanities and a good portion of social sciences. Some of the savings might be put toward useful endeavors such as engineering and hard sciences. Those who think these moves are bad should pay for those functions with their own money. If states and localities and philanthropists and tuition-paying families want all that, nobody should stop them. But neither should my grandchildren enter life with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt used to pay for things that will not benefit them. That will be a start on making federal government spending serve rational purposes.
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 1: Footnote 2: Footnote 3: Footnote 4: Footnote 5: Footnote 6: Footnote 7: Footnote 8: Footnote 9:
- Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but – as with the other industrial revolutions – it’s a short-term issue. The increased power of AI just raises the bar as far as what can be done by – or demanded of – companies.
Footnote 10:
- It is often argued that in the future the jobs market will focus on the service sector and artisanship.
- Of course – China especially – are focusing additionally on the robotics market. While this may be useful for dangerous or nasty jobs, in general it seems a waste of effort – apart from the pure research aspect.
Footnote 11: Footnote 12: Footnote 13: Footnote 14:
- Again, this might be the case without the loss of any programming jobs. We might just produce 9 times as much code as more is demanded from limited resources.
- The issue will be the entry-level jobs on which novice programmers cut their teeth.
- This reminds me of decision at work 30 years ago – with which I disagreed – to have a gang of novice programmers writing simple programs rather than using an expert programmer to write a generator.
Footnote 15:
- It’s true that some jobs will no longer need doing by humans – but this is a poor analogy, because in the case of video store clerks, the job didn’t need to be done by anything.
- The question may come down to two things – cost and adaptability.
- The enormous cost of AI is currently absorbed but will eventually have to be paid for by end-users.
- Models will need the equivalent of ‘continuous professional development’ or there will be a race to the bottom.
Footnote 16:
- I seem to have read that CEOs are using AI as an excuse to get rid of superfluous staff they always wanted to get rid of but couldn’t because of ‘due process’ constraints.
Footnote 17:
- Indeed, but someone needs to check its output or we’ll end up with garbage that looks good.
- It will help enormously with ‘first drafts’, and all the boring stuff, but – as noted above – more will be asked, so there’ll just be a shift in what humans have to do.
Footnote 18:
- This shows the US perspective. Despite all the hype, and the BBC’s vox pops the welfare state supplemented by food banks mean that no-one need ‘go hungry’.
- But the shortage of entry-level jobs will cause unrest, and more needs to be done than was done in response to previous Industrial Revolutions.
Footnote 19:
- This is true. Only a small percentage of manual workers could be expected to ‘learn to code’.
- The opposite may now be true – can we expect white-collar workers to ‘learn to plumb’, especially in middle-age.
- We cannot really ‘leave it to the markets’ to deal with the AI-shock, if there is one.
- But the current issue with entry-level jobs may be due to an over-concentration on welfare issues whereby those in work have a good deal at the expense of many who have no job at all.
Footnote 20:
- The UK equivalent is Nigel Farage and Reform, of course.
Footnote 21:
- Violent revolutions aren’t made by such people – note that the regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran has held power for decades despite much of the population being well-educated and liberal-minded..
- Non-violent revolution may be no bad thing, depending on the direction it goes. But any revolution – in seeking to fix some issues by radical means – runs the risk of causing worse problems than it seeks to solve.
Footnote 22:
- If AI – and then robotics - really meant that there was no work to be done, rather than – as is more likely – that different work needs to be done – then we would have to design a system where people could live in comfort and fulfilment without work.
- That wouldn’t be a bad deal. Most people don’t get much fulfilment out of their jobs anyway.
- The issue is that – as well as the basic necessities – people need purpose in their lives.
- Capitalism isn’t designed to reward people for doing nothing, so it would need to be superseded; nor has capitalism anything to say about life-fulfilment – that’s the job of educators.
Footnote 23:
- ‘One to three years’ would once have been ‘in the immediate future’, so this shows how fast thing are – or are perceived to be – moving.
- The release of LLMs and their capabilities has been so astonishing that it is assumed that they will improve exponentially, yet this is far from obvious, and the facts suggest the reverse.
- The costs and risks involved in precipitous roll-out, not to mention employment law in the UK at least – will put the brakes on in the immediate to short term.
Footnote 24:
- We’ll see whether this ‘displacement’ takes place in the immediate term. I doubt it.
Footnote 25:
- The unpopular Iran war has obviously made things worse for the GOP, but I doubt that the MAGA brigade are likely to switch Democrat.
Footnote 26:
- There is absurd hyperbole about ‘lost generations’ - this is currently the hype in the UK, when we are talking of less than 14% of 18-24 year-olds without work, training or education, see BBC: Opportunities shrinking for too many young people, says major report on 'lost generation'.
- See the original use of the expression - Wikipedia: Lost Generation - for what a real ‘lost generation’ is like, and the enormous upheavals that have been endured in the last century and earlier in various parts of the world.
- A similar note of scepticism can be levelled at ‘climate catastrophists’ (even though climate change and interminable wars are very serious problems).
Footnote 27:
- Well, yes, and people (like me) moan about the erosion of the green belt. But these are trivial compared with – say – field enclosures in the agrarian revolution or forcing canal or rail routes across the country (think HS2 x 100).
- You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs, as they say. Look at China ‘getting things done’.
Footnote 28: Footnote 29: Footnote 30:
- Note that all these ‘disruptors’ turned out to be good things that improved lives and created wealth.
- We just don’t know whether the AI revolution will deliver the destructive goods or whether it’ll just improve matters a bit (if we can control the massive running costs lest the bubble burst).
Footnote 31:
- The objections are really quibbles that could be addressed. Presumably they are tactics with a deeper purpose.
Footnote 32:
- A command economy is the opposite of capitalism, where the state – rather than the consumer – is deemed to know what the consumer wants and knows the best way to deliver it. Such economies have been failures.
- See Wikipedia: Planned economy.
- A command-and-control economy sounds even more sinister.
- Note that the world is globalised, and ‘constraining’ big tech in the US, say, will hand all the spoils to China.
Footnote 33:
- What’s this supposed to mean? Are the laptop class going to take to the streets? Maybe in protest, but will this change anything?
- The trouble with all this is that it’s too early to say how revolutionary AI will be.
Footnote 34:
- This section is taken from The Week.
- It appeared after an edited version of the UnHerd article (less comments) above.
Footnote 35:
- Sadly, this is the sort of job that AI can do well. It does it the way a human would – by taking and modifying images produced by others – but more quickly and with a wider source of images.
- It won’t be ‘creative’, but then graphic designers aren’t (I suppose).
- There are short-term issues about copyright, but longer term issues about the same old stuff being recycled. Presumably it’ll lose its edge over time and something new will; be needed.
Footnote 36:
- Millions of what sort? There aren’t millions of graphic designers.
Footnote 37:
- It’s the ‘grunt work’ that they can do so quickly, but someone has to check that the AI isn’t hallucinating.
Footnote 38:
- I won’t be shedding any tears over the death of the salesmen.
- The same goes for routine legal tasks – it’ll be good for the rest of us if costs come down – though a human will have to oversee the AI. The issue about ‘entry level jobs’ will need to be addressed by the training they receive: they won’t get years ‘on the job’ doing routine stuff but will need to be apprenticed to a master overseer. Hopefully AI will help clear up much of the backlog and speed things up.
- There aren’t many financial analysts, and the quality of their work is very doubtful – it’s often down to luck (someone has to pick the winners), so – again – things may get better for the rest of us. There will be an issue for investors if everyone gets the same advice, though.
Footnote 39:
- Maybe, but it reverted to normal soon afterwards.
- There was push-back from economists.
Footnote 40: Footnote 41:
- This is hype. Economies move too slowly for that.
Footnote 42:
- Software build is 10% of a project. Testing is 30%, and this will need to increase if you’re not sure quite what the AI has built for you.
Footnote 43:
- Presumably these ‘businesses’ are software houses. But if AI really takes off it’ll allow more software to be delivered quicker – so no more projects taking so long that the business has changed by the time they are implemented.
Footnote 44:
- So, the idea is that you use an App, which uses AI, to decide for you various things you’ve previously used a human agent for. But you can already do this for yourself – and there are ‘compare the market tools already’. The issue – though – is data. You have to key a lot in. Maybe the AI – with access to all your records (a serious privacy issue) may be able to grab this, but much of it won’t be in digital form.
- Also, AI currently suggests absurd things – after you’ve bought a laptop, it suggests all sorts of other ones you might like.
Footnote 45: Footnote 46:
- Well, credit cards provide … credit! And they provide insurance against theft and fraud.
- Also, there are regulatory issues.
Footnote 47:
- I agree this is the worst case scenario, but we’ll see.
Footnote 48:
- But then bounced back, though DoorDash and Monday.com have been on the way down for a while.
Footnote 49:
- I agree with the FT’s analysis.
Footnote 50:
- It seems that AI is ‘cited’ in around 4% of job losses in companies that use AI, but most of the people involved are recycled to new positions.
Footnote 51:
- I’ve deleted those obviously of little or no value.
- ‘Days ago’ refer to when I copied the text on 13th March 2026.
- Many of these are interesting. Most are sceptical.
- I doubt I’ll have time to engage with these.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)