Over the past year, I’ve had many disquieting realizations — that the American voter is more forgiving of insurrections than inflation, that being 37 means having one bad knee (and another not particularly good one), and that the New York Mets made a pact with Satan in the fall of 1986, for which subsequent generations of fans would eternally pay.

But my most unsettling epiphany may have been this: Robots can now do much of my job better than I can.

For a decade, I have made a living partly by synthesizing news articles and academic studies into accessible explainers, which white-collar workers could skim while pretending to do their jobs. The skills that this vocation requires — the capacity to rapidly digest text, craft clean copy, and sound like I know more about any given subject than I actually do — are ones that ChatGPT possesses in spades.

Worse, it can exercise these abilities far more efficiently than I can. ChatGPT requires five seconds and a speck of electricity to explain how President Donald Trump’s tariffs have impacted the dollar. To perform the same task, I need about 48 hours, six meals, 37 Twitter breaks, and at least three medications. And unlike myself, the chatbot can instantly rewrite its analysis in the voice of a pirate.

But journalists are hardly alone in fearing our impending economic obsolescence (which is, admittedly, a longstanding pastime within the field). Knowledge-workers of all kinds — from software engineers to financial analysts to filmmakers — are sweating their robo-competition. And not without reason.

In investor calls, executives are touting plans to satisfy their labor needs with artificial intelligence at a historically high rate. Goldman Sachs is slowing hiring and speeding AI deployment. The fintech firm Klarna has used AI to slash its payroll by 40 percent. Salesforce says machines can now perform 50 percent of the firm’s work.

AI-generated mass unemployment is still the stuff of science fiction. But the technology does appear to be slowing hiring in heavily exposed fields, particularly for junior positions. And labor market data indicates that something weird is afoot: Over the past 35 years, recent college graduates have almost always had a lower unemployment rate than American workers writ large. Now, a young college grad is more likely to be involuntarily jobless than the typical US worker.

Meanwhile, the major AI labs are promising to deliver an artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is to say, a machine that can outperform humans at all cognitive tasks — in the near future. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI is likely to wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs by 2030. Investors seem to be betting a lot of money on such outcomes. This year alone, companies are poised to sink $375 billion into AI infrastructure.

Among anxious laptop workers, these trends have fed half-ironic chatter about the coming of a “permanent underclass”: Once AI renders virtually all human labor commercially useless, most people will be condemned to eternal subjugation and precarity. No company will pay you for work that a robot can do better. And no market economy will let you climb the income ladder if your labor has no value. In Silicon Valley, such reasoning has generated a peculiarly dystopian variant of hustle culture: Make your fortune in the next five years, and you’ll claim a place in the perpetual aristocracy of AI owners — fail, and you’ll forever be at their mercy.

All these claims are wildly speculative. It’s not certain that today’s AI labs have functioning business models, much less the wherewithal to develop omnicompetent robots. Yet of all the nightmare scenarios spun by fatalistic futurists, AGI-induced neofeudalism strikes me as among the most plausible.

AGI may or may not decide to liquidate the human race. But it will tank the value of human labor, more or less by definition. We don’t know how ordinary people will fare in a world........

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