Will AI Really Steal Your Job? Let's Talk Reality.

(Illustration: a man in a suit with a briefcase standing behind three robots, all queued up at a door labeled “JOB INTERVIEW.”)

I keep getting sent videos like this one. Some guy from Google or wherever is talking about how grand and mighty artificial intelligence is, and how now, finally, we’re going to have absolutely everything. Moreover, these videos are always wrapped in endless disclaimers like: “YouTube has deleted this a million times,” “the video should be hidden,” and “you have 20 seconds to watch this before the world ends if you don’t.”

Go ahead and watch it. The guy talks at length and in a very boring way about something.

Reality — it’s different in everyone’s head. No matter how much you sit around dreaming about having a flying DeLorean 600, it’s not going to appear. At some point, no matter how many holy songs you hear about AI pouring divine manna into your mouth, you’re just going to want to eat and take a dump. And when you go to the store and find only a can of pickles-and-that’s-it, and then go to a squat toilet and discover there’s no toilet paper or water, you can ask ChatGPT for help all you want — nothing’s going to happen.

There will always be problems. Don’t assume you’ve learned a profession for life and will never need to change it. It’s better to adopt another perspective: “I’ve learned one profession, and I do it well. If needed, I can learn another.”

No matter how many people claim ChatGPT will replace artists and programmers, their numbers aren’t dropping. The real point is: bad artists and programmers will soon be pushed out of the market. AI is already bad enough to replace people who write code with two left hands.

But AI won’t do anything to the monetary mass circulating in today’s world. No one is going to pay ChatGPT to do the work. Sure, we all pay OpenAI $20 a month for a subscription. But so what? They’re still going around asking for $300 billion in investments.

Three hundred billion dollars. Do you even realize how much money that is? If you had $300 billion and spent $1 million a day, you wouldn’t use it all up in ten lifetimes. $300 billion for training a new AI is… nothing compared to how much money there is in the world.

$300 billion is 0.375% of the world’s money. It may be the budget of a country, but as budgets go, it’s a weak one. There are still trillions of dollars in the world that are not involved with AI.

So even if AI comes along and takes your job, snatches your screens, boots you off your computer, and says, “Get outta here, you filthy mutt!” — you still have a 99.625% chance of earning just as much as you would in programming.

I only know of one invention that stole the future from humanity without giving anything back: the hydrogen bomb. That invention — no matter how you spin it — is the end of everything. Every other invention has always benefited someone. And whoever is clever and resourceful enough to make money from that invention will benefit. Remember: the amount of money in the world isn’t shrinking. The future is always there for us. And even if there’s no place for a programmer in it, there will still be a place for an engineer. Who knows — maybe the most popular profession will be “beachside mocktail-serving machine builder”? Or maybe “Visual Basic and Pascal programmer”?

So don’t get upset after watching videos like that. The people talking in them have lost touch with reality a bit, while the rest of us just want to live in nice homes and poop in clean toilets.