AI fear is at its peak.
Every single person believes AI is coming for their job. Lawyers will only show up to court to do what AI still can't. Analysts and personal assistants will be gone. Coding will be a lost art form.
I have a radically different take on this.
I’m not a doomer. I see the massive shift AI is creating as real and necessary. And I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities in history. But, but, but…..
In the next 24 months, the global economy will be unrecognizable. You’ve seen the Youtube videos and newsletter posts warning of “36 months left to get rich.” (I actually think you only have 24 months.)
They’re not wrong.
But what happens in 24 months isn’t a total collapse of the economy and everything we know. What happens isn’t that robots will do all manual labor and AI bots will do every office worker job there is. This is a doomer’s view of the world.
What happens in 24 months is that whatever career you have right now WILL be disrupted. The BS work will be gone. Automation will replace admin. Low-level jobs will mostly be nonexistent.
But this doesn’t create mass unemployment and force some dystopian view of the world to become the new norm.
No, it’s far simpler than that.
AI will force every one of us to be high agency by default
High agency means you stop waiting for permission, perfect conditions, or guarantees. You figure it out. You ship the work. You adapt.
The person who thrives in the next 24 months isn't necessarily the smartest. They're the one who acts fastest with whatever tools are available.
Excuses won’t work anymore.
Low-quality work will no longer be accepted. Admin work will no longer pay the bills. Manual labor jobs like driving a taxi probably won’t be around.
The bar will be raised… in every form of work.
And you will either adapt or become part of the permanent underclass who can’t earn a living. Thankfully, when humans are forced to change they usually do.
But a lot of people are going to go through this change the hard way.
They’re going to have to lose something before they get the psychological and logistical gains that come with the AI revolution. This is a blessing from up above if you ask me. A mass upgrade to the human software is exactly what is needed.
Why the AI doom story is fundamentally wrong on every level
An article on X by Matt Shumer about the AI revolution went viral. 83M views.
Ironically, Matt is an AI company founder and the article is basically a sales pitch for his startup. The entire narrative he writes is built on fear. And he’s not the only one. Social media is filled with AI doom p*rn.
It’s created a hidden mental health crisis.
No matter how smart you are, you can’t help thinking that you or your kids are going to struggle to find work in the future with your current skills.
Matt says the AI models have improved so much that his technical skills are no longer needed in his startup. If we stop there it looks like all technical people are screwed.
There’s another hidden cue he drops. He says the AI companies made AI great at writing code first because coding is how AI can improve itself. So just because AI can write great code it’s assumed it will have the same success in the same amount of time with all other skills. This is a lie.
Then Matt describes the doomsday scenario:
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.
If you read that you nearly piss and sh*t your pants at the same time. It’s hard not to be scared. Matt misses a fundamental truth though.
The assumption is the jobs we have today will be the same jobs in the future.
This is flawed. AI is a tool. It will help humans do work. And it may do all the current work humans do. This means human work will have to evolve.
The same way it did when faxes turned into emails
The same way group phone calls turned into Slack chats
The same way physical retail turned into online stores
Work will continue to look different. We'll continue to evolve. But the fact that our work changes doesn't mean it disappears.
The one area I agree with Matt on is that this revolutionary change will happen faster than people think. We have about 24 months left of the current human work.
Those who don’t adapt and upskill in that time will be screwed. No doubt in my mind. The same happened when the internet went mainstream in the late 90s. And again when smartphones put it in everyone's pocket a decade later.
People who didn’t adapt became irrelevant.
Matt also points out that as of a few weeks ago ChatGPT’s AI is now building the future of AI.
“GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations.”
I agree that this change means AI will build faster than it ever has since 2022.
Children are the most at risk
The current education system doesn’t understand that most existing jobs and skills are being replaced by AI. The career of the future is not yet known, but schools are still teaching skills that may no longer be needed.
I have 2 daughters. To prevent this problem I’m helping them to become masters of creativity, imagination, communication, and socializing. These skills will always be required no matter what future jobs we have.
It’s also why I took my 3 year old to one of the most famous UFO landing sites in history. I want my daughters to understand that humanity's problems will get bigger, not smaller — and that's a reason for excitement, not fear.
I want her to understand that it’s highly unlikely we’re alone in this universe. Once she accepts that reality, it supports the logic that humans will build things outside of Earth.
Therefore, the little problems we’ve solved on Earth over the last few centuries are nothing compared to the problems we will need to solve for humans to live and work on the moon and other planets later on.
Going beyond Earth gives us our optimism back.
It helps us see abundance rather than scarcity.
The 175 year old idea that changes the AI narrative
Writer Connor Boyack shared this powerful idea:
“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” —Frédéric Bastiat, 1850
Every technological revolution has seen both seen and unseen consequences. We can visibly see that coding as we know it is dead. What we can’t see yet is what other technical problems this will create.
Maybe the role of a coder is to give the code a human stamp of approval. Maybe coders focus on the direction of what code needs to be written but don’t write code themselves. Maybe their role shifts to more of a system design role. Or maybe coders become managers of AI bots who write the code.
We can’t see what the future is yet.
That doesn’t mean we should panic and drown ourselves in AI doom p*rn. It just means we should be patient. We should evolve. We should pay attention.
AI fear gets millions of views because fear sells better than optimism. Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money, nails why doom content always outperforms optimism...
Optimism often feels like a sales pitch because it promises a better future, whereas pessimism sounds helpful by highlighting immediate risks.
This is exactly why Matt Shumer's fear-based article got 83 million views. Fear isn't more accurate than optimism. It's just more freaking entertaining.
The doomers and social media scrollers love to predict the future. And people love to hear their prediction or their descriptions of what is going to happen (as if it were fact), because it’s entertaining. Humans hate uncertainty. They’d rather know the death of their career was coming than to wait and see.
But no one knows what AI will do.
It will 100% create new job types. It will change the way we work. We’ll probably all be talking with and using AI all day. New companies will be born. There may be social media for AI bots to connect and chat with each other. New industries have and will continue to appear as a result of AI.
You can either piss your pants in AI doom… or you can focus on the opportunities. History shows that those who focus on the opportunities do well. Those who believe in doomsday, skynet, and underground bunkers torture themselves.
To succeed as a human and not end your own life, you must make it a daily habit to override your natural fear-based human operating system.
Fearing AI is fearing change, and that’s the real pandem!c.
History shows us just how dumb it is to fear technology
1. The end of human memory
Socrates is worshipped by the modern man with 6-pack abs.
What a lot of people don’t realize is he feared the act of writing. He thought it would be the end of human memory. He worried the more we wrote the more forgetful we’d become. This would mean our ability to internalize wisdom would be lost.
The end result would be humans who appear to be wise but are actually stupid.
Fast-forward, and we now know that writing is a tool. It unlocked our minds and allowed us to share wisdom. Writing allowed us to think and join the dots between ideas. Writing has allowed us to take ideas and facts and expand on them. This has made humanity wiser (the opposite of Socrates’ fear).
Some argue AI is making us stupid, just like Socrates thought writing made us stupid. He was wrong and the AI critics will be too.
2. The wrath of horse sh*t that could ruin the environment
In the late 1800s, major cities like London and New York were facing what they thought was an unavoidable apocalypse: horse sh*t.
Horses moved humans from A to B. They also shat everywhere.
Mass hysteria broke out. It was feared major cities would drown in layers of sh*t. The smell of horse sh*t would rule the world and lead to an environmental crisis.
“Oh no, what shall we do Mr Denning?”
The fear was overblown. What no one could see coming was the invention of the car. It solved the horse sh*t problem. But cars ended the industry of taking care of animals, scooping up poop, and selling horse accessories.
We went from manual labor to machine-based labor. New jobs and industries were created. Mechanics became a thing. Car spare parts became an industry. Then we needed gas stations.
Same applies to AI. AI will replace bullsh*t jobs like analyzing data, doing Powerpoint decks, and forwarding emails amongst departments. That’s a great service to humanity. And new jobs will appear that are higher-level.
We just can’t see the new jobs yet. But that’s not a reason to panic.
3. The invisible power of the 1800s that even spooked a president
All of us are too young to remember when electricity became a thing in the 1890s.
It wasn’t some technological revolution with a parade and cheers in the street from grateful electricity consumers. Nope. It was utter chaos. Because humans can’t see electricity, it was thought of as a ghost and an invisible threat.
People got so scared they called the police claiming the invisible electricity was coming through their windows and poisoning their food!
U.S. President Benjamin Harrison was so terrified of the new light switches in the White House that he refused to touch them, forcing staff to turn the lights on and off for him. What?!
Fast forward a few years and electricity changed humanity forever. It gave birth to lights which allowed humans to work longer hours and even work at night. And it allowed rev heads like me to drive electric-powered Teslas and do burnouts in silence :)
Some think AI is invisible & scary and is a threat that needs to be controlled, just like people thought the same about electricity. Humans fear what they can’t see.
Extreme fear is a pattern you should pay attention to
I only gave you three stories.
I could have given you 1000 more stories. Or even told you about my ex-girlfriend’s dad who got fired because he refused to use a computer at his job in 2001 which made him unemployable and forced him into permanent retirement at 45.
If you read history you realize the fear of technology and change is all the way through human existence. It will never end. And it always tricks us.
Don’t let the AI revolution trick you.
Where the doomers get it wrong is they assume in their scarcity-ridden brains that the world is fixed. It has a certain amount of work available. As AI takes over it will take more of that human work away. They forget that new tools help us create more value and that expands the economy and number of jobs.
Connor Boyack says this:
The seen (job losses) are vivid and personal. The unseen (job creation in industries that don’t yet exist) is abstract and therefore invisible.
Fearing what you can’t see is as dumb as fearing a light switch because it uses electricity you can’t see.
This time in history feels exactly how it did in the 90s when everyone said the internet would destroy books, music, privacy, movies, business, retail shopping, etc. But those things didn’t get destroyed. They got better. They expanded. They became more efficient.
The upside of this whole thing is humans will do less bullsh*t work and that will allow us to do real work that uses our creativity and imagination. How anyone could possibly see this as a bad thing is beyond me.
The real risk of AI is you lose your mind
Content creators are going to keep spreading AI fear.
It gets them empty likes which they derive meaning from. It makes them feel special. And seeing people suffer secretly brings them joy – it’s why I never want to be known as a content creator.
But the risk here isn’t AI.
The risk is losing your mind to an overwhelming tidal wave of fear that throws you off your game. The next 24 months are for extreme focus. They’re for you to master AI and to take advantage of the enormous opportunity.
Don’t poop your pants and piss away all the opportunity.
Follow this advice from Jim Rohn:
“Stand guard at the door of your mind”
If someone is telling you AI will destroy the world, it’s time to unfollow them. Or even block them. You must protect your mind at all costs. You can’t function without it.
AI will force people to change in the next 24 months. And humans will do anything they can NOT to change. You must be different. You must accept change. You must embrace change. And you must be early to change.
AI is an opportunity, not a threat. The next 24 months will prove it.
P.S. The most common question I get, week after week, is this:
“What the heck do I sell online???”
Hi Tim, Thank you for your optimistic, uplifting, and helpful article. I admit I'm contending with fear as well. I lost my (good) job as a tech marketing writer almost three years ago. Until November, I was a contractor earning pittance (a pittance I'd welcome now) producing blog articles and case studies for tech companies. In November, I moved to Madrid and am now casting about trying to figure out an "income." I will revisit your work; it always inspires me. Re: your statement "The next 24 months are for extreme focus. They’re for you to master AI and to take advantage of the enormous opportunity," can you recommend a book, writer, or article that may help me understand what "master AI" means for someone like me and what the opportunities may be? I was an early adopter and have used ChatGPT and Claude a good deal for all manner of things, but I don't think that's what you mean by "master." I've been exploring ghostwriting, but learned just last night from a ghostwriter in my writers' group that "the entire middle has fallen out of the ghostwriting field" due to AI. Now, only elite writers charging $30k to $50k per project and AI farms in India churning out AI memoirs for $50 total comprise the market. A friend suggested I position myself as an editor humanizing AI-derived copy, but I'm in a beta testing group for an AI editor that's amazing, and I see the writing on the wall there too. Thank you, as always, for your work.
Hi, Tim, my skills as a copy editor and proofreader won't be obsolete in 24 months or even 24 years. I would stack my skills up against any current AI on the planet. From 1970 to 2010 I read about 8000 books. I have just finished reading my next thousand books (2015-2025). I documented them on my computer in a lovely database (in 2022 I was up to 730, then my system crashed completely in 2024). I have documented on paper the next 300. I bet I gained a lot more wisdom and understanding of writing and editing skills out of those books than any AI would gain from reading ten times as many. So bring it on, I'm ready. BTW most emails that end in .ai right now DON'T work, so be warned. AI is far from the perfect solution to anything at present.