The question almost everyone asks about AI is whether it will take their job. That’s the wrong question.
“Will AI take my job?” assumes a clean binary: employed or replaced. The reality is messier. Roles are being hollowed out, restructured, and redefined in ways that never surface in the unemployment figures. In fact, the parts of your job that have already changed tell you more about where this is heading than any forecast of full automation.
The forecasts, meanwhile, keep getting louder. Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman gives the technology 18 months to reach human-level performance on most professional tasks. The evidence sits some distance behind the confidence. A Thomson Reuters report found lawyers and accountants using AI for narrow work like document review reported only marginal productivity gains, and a METR study found AI made experienced developers’ tasks take 20% longer rather than less. Even Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who spent last year warning that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs, has since walked the prediction back.
That apocalyptic framing has hardened into the default assumption, repeated by Geoffrey Hinton and Kai-Fu Lee alike. Scale AI’s Jason Droege pushed against it at the Semafor World Economy conference, arguing that executives are using AI as an excuse to dress up ordinary cost-cutting as visionary restructuring. The Economist makes a similar case, tracing the current tech jobs bust to familiar causes: interest-rate rises since 2022, accelerating offshoring to India, and a correction after the 2020-21 hiring binge.
Both things can be true at once. Most layoffs probably are not really about AI, and displacement is still measurable where it counts. Full-time employment for graduates in the most exposed fields, including computer and information science, fell from nearly 70% to 55% in the three years after ChatGPT launched, while undergraduate enrolment in programming dropped 26% in a single year. An Epoch AI and Ipsos survey found that 20% of full-time workers say AI has taken over tasks they used to do, against 15% who say it has created new work for them. In India, the retailer Dukaan replaced 90% of its support staff with chatbots; a year on, query resolution has collapsed from hours to minutes and the chief executive calls it vindication. But while the metrics work, the social ledger is harder to read.
Two harms get far less attention than the headline question, and both are already here. The first is surveillance, a theme I explored in a feature for Acumen on what it means to work alongside AI colleagues. A third of UK employers now use AI monitoring tools, and Meta has floated tracking employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train its own models. As Nazrul Islam writes in The Guardian, plenty of jobs will survive, but they will be more pressured, more fragmented, and less human. The second harm hides in the supply chain. The annotators who label the data these systems depend on are often unemployed graduates on precarious contracts; Karen Hao’s reporting on America’s AI sweatshops finds 86% struggle to meet basic financial obligations and more than one in five have experienced homelessness.
As a curriculum developer, I’ve seen that the difference between effective and ineffective design is rarely the content. Instead, it’s the clarity of the specification: what, exactly, should someone be able to do afterwards. The AI tooling executives Andrew Lau and Tariq Shaukat describe the same shift in software, where describing what to build has become harder than writing the code. The skill that holds its value is the ability to say precisely what you mean. No wonder the hottest hiring category in tech right now is writers and communicators, with Anthropic tripling the size of its communications team and OpenAI posting comms roles paying above $400,000. It seems that when everyone can generate text, the people who can think through what to say grow more valuable.
So we have time, as the Economist concedes in its cover leader. The open question is what we do with it. Spencer Greenberg maps the things people intrinsically value, among them achievement and connection, and notes that achievement takes the hardest knock when a machine outperforms us at work we once took pride in. So the danger is subtler than mass joblessness. It’s that we could spend the time we have optimising for efficiency until we have quietly automated the humanity out of work that used to mean something.
It is, as John Irving writes in A Prayer for Owen Meany, a matter of nerve:
“If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.
“Before you get to work, it’s worth deciding which hat you’re being asked to wear… pursuing the possible or optimising the certain.” ~ Possibility vs. certainty
Learn more: Know Decide Act
“Do work that matters for people who care.” ~ Building blocks of marketing
Learn more: How to Find Fulfilling Work
“Find and focus on the projects that take insight, guts and a tolerance for risk. The projects that involve significant human connection and effort.” ~ Finding the difficult work
Learn more: Betting on You
“Getting more boxes checked simply leads to having more boxes checked. If we’re here to make a difference, we often get there with better, not with more.” ~ Winging it
Learn more: The Art of Less
“Human work is any work an AI can’t do (yet).” ~ Hallucinations and human work
Learn more: The Remix
“If all that’s needed is the push of a button, we can find someone cheaper than you to push it.” ~ The AI effort gap
Learn more: Key Person of Influence
“If it’s really important, choose a path that involves less luck.” ~ Seeing the lottery
Learn more: The Science of Intelligent Achievement
“If tech helps you finish your task faster, the time saved is yours. Take the rest of the day off (at least until the boss recalibrates the task expectations.)” ~ Tasks and projects
Learn more: Leisure
“Imposter syndrome is real, and it arrives whenever we’re doing important work.” ~ Notes to myself
Learn more: Trust Yourself
“In the ideal world, credentials would be awarded to all experts, and withdrawn from all charlatans. But they don’t always line up as neatly as that.” ~ Expertise and credentials
Learn more: The Unspoken Truths for Career Success
“One of the best career choices you can make is to hire a great boss. A great boss will support you as you encounter worthwhile challenges. They’ll engage you and pay you fairly. They’ll help you build a career at the same time they teach you about the work that needs to be done.” ~ Good-boss friendly
Learn more: Managing Up
“Overdelivering on smaller promises is a shortcut to trust, loyalty and resilience.” ~ A little ahead (vs. a little behind)
Learn more: The Thin Book of Trust
“Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.” ~ Agency and contribution
Learn more: The Element
“Spending your days, day after day, not caring is a tragedy. They might not deserve your focus and effort, but you do.” ~ “They’re not paying me enough to care”
Learn more: The Passion Paradox
“There’s always room for someone who is willing to work harder and be kinder than just about everyone else.” ~ Hard work and goodwill
Learn more: How to Be a Star at Work
“Waiting for trouble means that you’re going to spend your days dealing with trouble.” ~ Organising for urgent
Learn more: One Second Ahead
“We do the work because we can, because we have the opportunity to contribute. If appreciation results, that’s nice, but it’s out of our control.” ~ Overappreciated
Learn more: The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace
“We expend effort. We create value. It’s easy to get confused about which one we’re going to ultimately be compensated for.” ~ Effort and value
Learn more: Nine Lies About Work
“We’re not machines, or even cogs in a machine. When we are at our best, we’re fully human.” ~ Seeking yoyu
Learn more: 52 Weeks of Wellbeing
“What’s the attainable, practical and generous thing you haven’t done yet? What will it take for it to become a priority?” ~ Projects left undone
Learn more: Moral Ambition
“When we bring humanity to the work in a way that others demand, labour is honoured and valued.” ~ Productivity, AI and pushback
Learn more: Work Life Well Lived
“Work is an expression of ourselves, and a chance to find meaning as we make a difference and earn a living.” ~ What sort of success?
Learn more: The Good Enough Job
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