A friend in Lahore — senior partner at a law firm of good standing — told me recently, with some satisfaction, that his chambers have stopped hiring trainee associates. “The machine drafts better than a five-year lawyer,” he said, “and it does not ask for leave.”

He calls this efficiency. He has not yet asked himself the question that should be keeping him awake: when his generation retires, where will the next senior partners come from, if nobody is ever allowed to be junior again?

Hold that question. Because the future of every profession depends on how it answers it. It is the real AI story of 2026, and it is not the one you have been reading.

You have seen the other column many times by now — the one that tells the freelancer to upskill and the graduate to learn prompting. This is not that column because this year’s layoffs are not chiefly about the freelancer. Oracle cut 21,000 people; Amazon cut 16,000. When a global law firm shed a tenth of its people, the partners stayed — the support staff went.

The pattern is uniform: not the senior lawyer, his assistants; not the chief engineer, the fresh graduate. The machine is not yet eating professions. It is eating the apprenticeship — the junior years through which every profession has always reproduced itself.

Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning godfather of AI, compressed the economics into one sentence: “It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.” The machine’s rewards flow first to those who own it. Its costs arrive first for those selling routine labour. The first thing it consumes is the only commodity a junior has ever had to sell: hours of routine work, done cheaply, while learning.

Now, say aloud what Pakistan actually exports. Not software, in the........

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