Last year, the takeaway from all the HITEC AI sessions was, “You won't be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by someone using AI.” But what hides under that statement is the fact that 10 of you will be replaced by one person using AI – still a net negative of nine jobs. These jobs previously were held by educated, but perhaps more junior people. People who invested a great deal of time and money getting a college degree and are eager to start learning how to function in the business world.

There are several problems already with AI. There is moral frustration over the fact that AI is trained on all art and writing of others without attribution or compensation. I can read Shakespeare and produce writing inspired by it, or see a painting and then paint something similar.

When a human does that, there is less concern if it isn't a direct copy. I'm extremely frustrated — even annoyed — by the AI slop that is permeating every aspect of our attention, from the obviously AI-written posts on LinkedIn and the inauthenticity (and laziness) it conveys to the deep fakes and sheer volume of poorly written SaaS applications. Slightly more concerning is the power consumption of these data centers and what that means for energy prices. I recommend you familiarize yourself
with the massive amount of energy your questions require.

Quite a bit more concerning is the loss of human ability to think, to struggle, to fail and to improve through hard work. AI companions are on the rise, and there is no shortage of examples on how this can go wrong. And are we really OK that such a large number of AI executives and creators estimate between 5% and 20% chance that AI leads to human extinction? Would you buy a dishwasher that had a 20% chance of blowing up your neighborhood? How about a 5% chance? While those examples are important and concerning, they are for another discussion. What triggered me to write this column is that we’re already seeing the first signs of an eventuality that will affect us all.

A study of payroll data from Stanford shows that 13% of junior jobs in AI-impacted areas are already gone. The data they looked at is from almost a year ago, and that number is almost certainly climbing. Companies are realizing they can use agents for junior-level tasks already, for cheaper.

To executives and shareholders, this sounds great on the surface, but the problem is that you have a generation of people fresh in the workforce who need the real-world experience that your mid-level and senior employees have earned through years of working. The study shows that more senior-level jobs are on the rise due to AI, but we must still consider that with these junior jobs going away, this heralds the end of cognitive mobility in those positions that require real-world experience to develop. And that is before we even get into the reality that AI agents will start replacing mid-level and senior employees as well. It’s likely the latter will happen in a shorter period than it would take those junior-level and mid-level employees to develop ahead of this curve. Multiply this across every cognitive industry, then add the quickly following intelligent robots also benefiting from this increase in AI capabilities.

A common response is that technology has always replaced jobs, but from that technology new industry has risen and created new jobs. But this isn’t the same as farmers being replaced by a harvester, or human computers being replaced by silicon computers. This is different because just one branch of AI (LLMs) is already capable of replacing many different cognitive jobs. It's something that can (and does already) improve itself, and its abilities are growing rapidly. Just looking at the improvements from ChatGPT 3 to Gemini 3 Pro, in such a short period of time, should make it clear the trajectory we're on. Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus refers to AI as a wave of digital immigrants with genius-level ability who can work nonstop and for pennies on the dollar.

It’s important to consider that these “digital immigrants” are taking high-paying knowledge jobs already, and this is only going to increase.

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