America, it's time for your middle class to be hollowed out too
I apologize for yet another AI essay. I work in the tech industry; since 2021 I have been responsible for building multiple AI systems for our products and have become familiar with this tech. My last job was at an AI company; I now work at a consumer company's AI lab. Thankfully (and purposefully) never at OpenAI/Anthropic/Meta/xAI/Google.
Today, this week, the three main fuckheads that lead the industry that has inspired enough physical infrastructure investment to back the entire US economy, have decided to 'slow down'. They're moving too fast, and they don't believe they should be this powerful.
This is not a sea change. They still have no credible incentive to move AI development away from universal labor-replacing devices, or systems that will ruin society as we know it. They just want to IPO, and need to project an image of not being unapologetic shitboosters, lest they undermine their listings, inspire whistleblowers, and/or invite (gasp) government intervention.
But you have to remember: where AI is today, it can still monopolize vast swathes of industry, replacing skilled workers from developers to law firms. And by replacing these workers, AI will cut out contemporary paths to the American middle class.
Even law firms are being pressured to lower their fees because of the cost benefits their lawyers are getting from AI. (Virtually everyone from my former team now works at Harvey, the company building the legal AI that is giving these law firms their cost savings. My current boss was deskmates with one of the founders, back when they were at Meta's AI lab. This is a small industry.)
My friends are building the products that will take your job.
And you probably believe you will be spared. You won't.
If you work in a middle class, professional job, you are going to be fucked over because of what these people are building.
To be fair, you won't get fucked over in a particularly new way. You'll be fucked over just like generations of farmers have been fucked over in almost every developing country in the world. You'll join a long tradition of huge swathes of people being fucked over by American capital; only this time the people are well-off and American.
Are you a lawyer? You're fucked. You will be 'devalued' as they say. A junior with access to your past writing and an AI assistant will be able to do your work. You will be fired. Your boss' job will become signing off on what AI writes. No one’s salary will increase, because the person who works hardest for the least money will get the job. Probably someone who just moved to New York and lives off their parents' money. After you are fired, your salary will be split between a Harvey subscription and cost savings for your clients. Your boss might take a cut too.
Are you a senior nurse administrator? You're fucked too. The reporting you do for your single department will become reporting you are coerced into doing for 20 other departments across the hospital. This too without a pay raise. Your contemporaries will be fired for being too junior or too old, or for simply having a bad attitude. Their salaries will go to software subscriptions and held back as a bonus for the MD/MBA who runs the hospital.
Are you working at the software company that is taking these jobs? You're fucked too.
Are you a developer? Sweet, me too. We are in the field that has leaned-in most heavily into AI assisted work and are subsequently the most dogfucked. We will be ground into dust and sprinkled like parmigiano reggiano over a particularly well-behaved GPU.
There's a good chance you are let go within the year along with anyone who started after October 2025. If you are spared, you'll become responsible for picking up more and more work, pushing out 10x more features and 50x more lines of code.
You will bear the brunt of constant improvement, and will be on the hook to build something new faster than any competitor (who btw has the same AI tools). You'll be encouraged to use AI to reply to your coworkers. Your code reviews will become two AI bots talking to each other. Eventually, the two employees who control the bots will disappear, replaced by a supervisor agent.
No one is coming to save us, developers, lawyers, administrators. There are a group of very rich people betting their fortunes on our demise.
Economists will tell you this is normal. In aggregate, people will find other jobs. I mean, the people displaced from agriculture found jobs in manufacturing right? The economy eventually reached full employment, after a transition period.
But economic transitions ignore the lost generation between those changes. They ignore the people who lost their jobs, missed rent, beat their kids, moved between states, bought a gun, picked up a pill habit, became addicted to heroin, lived on the streets, moved in with their moms, bankrupted their moms, starved, killed themselves.
Start preparing, start saving money. Figure out if you can get your debts forgiven. Find a well-to-do spouse (who is rich and AI-proof, like a Rockefeller). (Also, the government is not trying to save you. Try not to fall through a gap in the social safety net.)
The problem is not that this is unprecedented. American capital regularly produces mass human suffering for the benefit of a few. Farmers around the world have had their livelihoods destroyed by US subsidies. And after Apple, Samsung, and Sony decided buying a new phone should be an annual tradition, the people of Congo have not seen peace.
The problem is not that humanity will be wiped out. It won't. The probability of an AI apocalypse is slim. More likely, we'll fall into a state of technical anarchy. Every system from your phone to your car to the power grid, will be hacked constantly. Some people will become very rich. Very few people, possibly less than there are words on this page.
The problem is not even that the American middle class is a protected group that should be treated better than anyone else.
But what's the point of living in the richest country in the world if you're just going to die anonymous alone and hungry like everyone else?