The "Worker + AI" Model: The most successful professionals are those who use AI as a "co-pilot," rather than trying to compete against it.
Skill Shift: The demand is heavily shifting toward skills in AI/ML, data engineering, and system design.
Paradox of Productivity: While AI offers immense potential to enhance work, it also raises challenges regarding the "automation paradox," where increased efficiency can lead to a greater, often disastrous, reliance on automated systems.
The Uncomfortable Truth
There is a fanciful notion that once automation handles the drudgery, people will shift from wage-labor to pursuing personal passions, creative arts, community service, and intellectual endeavors. That daily life will focus on leisure, education, and human connection. This is, to put it plainly, nonsense.
What is actually occurring — right now, not in some theoretical future — is that automation brings about efficiencies in organizations, and those efficiencies concentrate wealth upward. The divide between those who own the machines and those displaced by them grows wider with every process automated. The truck driver whose route is now driven by software does not become a poet. They become unemployed.
Being a technology advocate does not require being blind to this. In fact, it demands the opposite. If you advocate for the tool, you must also advocate for the people affected by it.
What Must Change
Tax Automation: If a machine replaces a worker, the productivity gains should not flow exclusively to shareholders. Automation taxes can fund the transition, retraining, and social safety nets that displaced workers need.
Universal Income: When entire categories of labor disappear — and they will — the social contract must adapt. Universal basic income is not a reward for idleness; it is recognition that productivity gains belong to society, not just to capital.
Equal Claim to the Benefits: The men and women displaced by machines should not be the ones to pay the price for progress. They have an equal claim to the benefits that automation produces. A society that automates its way to prosperity while abandoning its workers has not progressed at all.
Automate the dangerous work. Automate the repetitive work. Automate the crab boats and the long-haul routes. But do not pretend that the human cost is someone else's problem.
Technology advocacy without social advocacy is just greed with better tooling.