AI Job Replacement: Slow Then Fast, May 2025 Edition
With all this AI job and economy disruption, don’t forget that we tend to overestimate short term progress and underestimate it in the long term.
We’re not going to suddenly in 2026 have 10 or 20% unemployment, or half of white-collar jobs going away.
I think it looks something more like:
2025: Companies are shocked and are trying to figure out what’s happening. Some layoffs and use of AI starts in the most forward,-leaning companies.
2026: More companies start figuring out what is happening, and more start dying off because they run out of money and can’t compete with newer AI-powered startups. Layoffs and white-collar unemployment accelerate.
2027: The first year that it really starts to hit hard, because the AI can now actually replace many white-collar workers. New companies understand that they mostly need relatively few high-IQ and high-agency generalists who are experts with AI. Layoffs and unemployment accelerate even more. People start calling for legislation against AI job replacement. UBI conversations start getting serious. The first humanoid robots start to become visible and potentially viable for some manual labor jobs.
2028: Most companies with a pre-2023 structure and workforce are now considered in danger of going out of business. The vast majority of companies are retooling their entire business and their entire workforce in the direction of high-IQ and high-agency AI experts wielding large agent teams and processes in order to survive. Most new “hiring” for companies is either one of those ultra-high-powered generalist humans, or an AI employee. Layoffs and unemployment are extremely high. The call for legislation to protect human jobs begin to get loud. UBI and human job protection are firmly in the conversation for all political candidates worldwide, but especially in the United States. Humanoid robots powered by AI start to actually penetrate the market and start to disrupt certain manual labor industries.
2029: White-collar unemployment is now a very serious problem. Even more manual labor work starts to get disrupted as the quality of the humanoid robots improves. There is now a general panic among the population about how they are going to pay their bills without having jobs. The populist outcry against the rich people who have made money in AI and robotics will massively increase. UBI implementations start to happen and larger scale plans start to take shape at the state and national level in governments worldwide. The immigration situation gets even more heated because now governments literally have to pay people so that they can survive. So the push by citizens to kick out all illegal immigrants in their countries suddenly becomes very loud and serious.
In other words, 2025 and 2026 might look remarkably similar to 2024 and 2025.
But after 2027 I think things might get very weird, very quickly.