It can only get better or worse. If you are not on the right side of history, you are done. If you are terrified for the wrong reasons, you are right. If you are hopeful for the right reasons, you are also right. I just want to know how it affects my future and my kids' futures. It's coming for everything you hold in high esteem: your job, money, your skill and a lot more you can't even comprehend right now. I'm not writing this to scare anyone. I just think it's your right to know. You owe it to your future self to keep up. Prepare yourself for all the possible paths of life. For anything that could change your life in ways you didn't even imagine. I don't know exactly what's coming. No one does. But something is coming. It's already happening.

Have you read Matt Shumer's post on the mindblowing ways AI is changing things everywhere? And it's only getting started. Shumer "spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space."

He knows his stuff.

He knows exactly how these systems work. That's why I take him seriously. Powerful people are pouring billions into the "invisible employee." They are greedy for the returns. Big tech firms are listening. And preparing for it. And it can only get better at what it does. The trouble with screen work is that it's not visible to us. To the average person. You can't physically see how much better it's getting. But the people who work with it are seeing it. And they are terrified. The people working in tech are anxious about what's coming.

I think a very weird way of life is coming. You may be safe. I know I'm not. For your future self's sake. And for your kids and their kids, educate yourself. Find the tools to help you adapt.

Shumer said something that terrifies me:

"I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave."

"If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can't do most office jobs?" he asks. I'm thinking about what that means for my work.

I read a story on The Telegraph about a designer who "poured two decades of her life into the film industry." "I worked my way up to become successful, to become a lead graphic designer for things like Apple TV. I worked very, very hard for it. And then the work just disappeared," says Tucker. Some of the smartest people have been warning us in their own ways for months. "Something I was very good at is now free and abundant," writes Aditya Agarwal, one of Facebook's earliest engineers. Entire economies are built on one basic idea: scarcity. Skill, time and expertise. AI is turning "scarce" into "abundant." And abundance destroys price. Of almost everything. Even things you worked hard for.

How do you even prepare for a beast like AI? That's what I want to know. What might "preparation" even mean? "The honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't "someday." It's already started," says Shumer.

That hurts.

But it's true.

"Almost all knowledge work" is shrinking fast.

In his essay, The Adolescence of Technology, Dario Amodei, an artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, said, "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it."

We've been here before.

Factories replaced farm labour. People saw the physical machines being driven to places. They heard the engines being set up. When computers arrived, people physically learned to type and watched terminals replace typewriters. The change was visible. Uncomfortable. But visible. This one is different. The change is happening on screens, behind software interfaces, in server farms. And most of us interact with it through a chat box that looks almost embarrassingly simple. You type something in. It types something back.

How threatening can that be?

The answer, it turns out, is very.

That's what makes it terrifying. And easy to dismiss. You are not seeing the change. But it's happening.

Tucker spent two decades in the film industry as a graphic designer. She worked her way up. Led design for projects at Apple TV. Two decades. That's not a career built on luck. It's a hard-earned skill. The work didn't get harder to find. It didn't move cities. It didn't get outsourced to another person on a different continent. It just disappeared. Because the thing she spent twenty years learning to do well can now be done in minutes, by a tool, for free.

When a skill becomes free and abundant, its market value collapses. Doesn't matter how good you are at it. Doesn't matter how hard you worked. The price floor drops to zero. Companies don't have to pay six figures for an employee to do it. There's a tool that could replace you. And save cost. At your expense. You might be thinking: okay, but surely this only affects certain kinds of work. The creative stuff. The repetitive stuff. I understand that instinct. It's protective. It's also, I'm afraid, probably wrong.

Remember what Shumer said, "If your job happens on a screen, then AI is coming for significant parts of it." It may not be 100% true. But you get the picture. All screen work is at risk. It doesn't mean just low-skill data entry. It's data analysis, writing, design, coding, and research. The knowledge work. The stuff that used to require years of education and experience. The stuff that was supposed to be the safe harbour when routine jobs got automated. We built an entire educational and economic system on the assumption that knowledge work was the destination. Get a degree. Learn to think. Learn to write, analyse and solve complex problems.

That's the life.

That's the protection.

No more, I'm afraid. Most technologies made humans stronger in the past made us better. AI makes us optional. That's the terrifying difference. The calculator didn't replace mathematicians. The internet didn't replace writers. Excel didn't replace accountants. But AI replaces the act of producing the output. Not the tool. It's doing the work. I'm not saying every knowledge worker is about to be replaced tomorrow. I don't believe that. And I don't think it's useful to think in those binary terms. But I do believe that the task of almost every knowledge job is going to change, and change fast. The parts that were supposedly the highest-value parts are exactly the parts AI does best. What's left is judgment. Relationships. Accountability. Good taste. The human stuff. But even those are not as safe as you think.

It's not so afraid of becoming irrelevant.

Not exactly. What scares me is the possibility that I might not even notice when it happens. The designers and engineers who got disrupted knew about the changes. They read about them. Followed the news. And then one day the work was gone. I'm terrified of the gap between understanding that something is changing and having built the habits, skills, and income diversification to actually absorb it.

Okay. What now?

Be smart. Learn the tools even if you don't use them. Be aggressive with savings. Put money away. Just in case. Teach your kids to be learners. Builders. And adaptable. I don't know what ten or twenty years will look like. But give your kids the mindset to be smart enough to keep up. They need a mind that can survive multiple futures. Teach them curiosity, resilience, emotional regulation, problem solving, creative thought processing, social intelligence and how to learn without being told. Help them become self-directed learners. That's how they can survive anything. Obsession with a single career path may not work. Be so adaptable they can't ignore you. That's how I'm preparing. My has been an experiment in progress for years. Nobody knows exactly how this plays out. Not the AI researchers. The entrepreneurs. Or the economists.

The range of possible futures is wide, from a world where AI turbocharges our capability and creates new kinds of abundance, to futures that are darker and more disruptive. Possibly both at the same time in different places. But regardless of which future we get, the people who will benefit or stay relevant are the ones who learned how to keep learning. Not those with the most knowledge. There's a difference. One is a habit of mind. The other is a credential. Your most important asset right now is your capacity to adapt. Not a specific skill. Not a specific industry.

Your adaptability itself.

That means staying curious about tools even when you're not sure you need them. Understanding, at least roughly, how the technologies changing your industry work. And how to make decisions around them. Become one of those smart people who can read into patterns, adapt to it, and add value in ways that are hard to replicate. That's your "specific" advantage. Not a degree or credential. A mindset. You don't need anyone's permission to take this seriously. It's happening with or without your knowledge or preparation.

Something is coming.

It's already here.

And I think there are two ways to respond to it.

One is to look away. To assume someone will sort it out. To hope your corner of the world is safe for long enough. I understand that response. It's very reasonable given how much is already demanding your attention. The other is to look directly at it. Not to panic. But to convince yourself, this is real, and I owe it to myself and the people I love to understand what it means for my life. And to make smart choices while I still have choices to make. I know which one I'm trying to choose. I hope you have the time, or find the time to think through what's happening to our futures. You don't have to terrify yourself. But take yourself seriously. To take the future seriously.

Change at this scale has happened before.

Agriculture. Industrialisation. The printing press. Electricity. The internet. Each one changed how we work. What life looked like. And what skills mattered. Each one was terrifying at the time. But opened things up in ways that couldn't have been predicted. I don't know what the next ten years will look like. But I do know that the people who did well through past disruptions were the ones who stayed curious and adaptable. Those who didn't confuse the security of the familiar with actual safety. Right now, I'm aiming for genuinely curious engagement with what's coming. That means I'm preparing myself. Saving what I can. Learning from smart people who understand what they are talking about. I need an open mindset. And a willingness to keep adjusting as things become clearer.

The world is changing whether you're ready or not.

There are no perfect preparations. There is only intelligent preparation. You don't need certainty. But "readiness" helps. That means stop thinking in careers. Start thinking in capabilities. Careers are longer linear. Those with the strongest stack of capabilities are the "ready ones." Things like learning fast, communicating clearly, selling ideas and building systems/things. Other skills like solving human problems, leading people, and making smarter decisions are harder to automate. Not impossible. "Harder" buys you time. Time matters. AI will crush a lot of specialists. But it will reward integrators. People who can connect ideas across domains, understand people, make decisions with incomplete information and translate complexity into clarity. The people who create direction.

Something big is coming.

That much is already obvious.

The question is just what you're going to do with that knowledge. You don't need to figure out your entire life now. Nobody can. You just need to stay curious about what's happening at work. Save what you can. Cash gives you options. When the time comes, you can pivot, retrain, take risks, say no, walk away from toxic work or start something new. People living paycheck to paycheck can't do that. AI threatens stability. So yes. Be aggressive with savings. Teach your kids to be learners. Credentials may not be enough. And don't wait for a more convenient time to take this seriously.

Something is coming for everything you hold in high esteem: your job, money, skill, and sense of certainty. Your very idea of "security." Even your identity. For a lot of people, work isn't just income. Its meaning. So when AI touches work, it touches the self. That's why this is scary. It's not just economics. It's existential. But you don't need to predict the future to survive it. You just need to become the kind of person who can handle multiple futures. And that's doable.

It's hard.

But doable.

The future will likely split people into those who adapt early and those who deny until it hurts. And once you cross the point where it hurts, you're reacting, not preparing. You're panicking. And that stage is expensive. If you're scared right now, you're paying attention. Fear isn't always weakness. Sometimes fear is early intelligence. And if you're hopeful. Good. Hope keeps you building. The goal is to be ready. No one knows exactly what for. Be ready anyway. And the best time to prepare anything was yesterday. The second best time is right now.