Today, Dec 2025, we are going through an AI revolution. Gemini-3 just got released a few weeks ago, OpenAI plans to release GPT-5.2 very soon, and we are talking about models getting gold medal in IMO. This just blows my mind, how we were able to go from a "write me a poem", which was the only thing an LLM could do decent on 2023, 3 years ago, until now where they can even make discoveries in fields like math by their own. I don't think people are aware of not only where we are, but where we are heading.
We are heading towards a future where AI will do everything. When I say "everything" I mean it. People seem skeptical, but they should not, it will happen sooner or later (and in my opinion sooner than people think). Already in the software space we are having agents doing plenty of long delicate tasks, not only we are talking about google sheet's stuff, but we are talking about agents connected to the internet where they can interact with that environment, use tools, browse the web, manage your accounts, do tasks 100% automated.
I want to go through some topics in this article, but most importantly want to talk about what will happen with labour mainly.
Agents are becoming more and more powerful, from executing a google search 2 years ago to retrieve contextual information to respond to the user prompt, to being able to surf the web as a normal person would last year, and today, being able to take actions on their own, using function calling to do whatever a human would be able to do, and beyond that, at scale, with no fatigue.
I am afraid of how this will impact labour in the next 5 years. Yes, 5, not 50. We are moving extremely fast, and the regulations are null. Like, why would someone hire a team of 5 designers to do flyers, when they can simply hire one to use AI to create dozens of options in parallel? It's cheaper, faster, and in some cases even better and more creative. Why would someone hire 5 customer support people when they can do it with 1 + AI? Why would someone hire 5 devs to code a new feature when only one person can do it with Cursor agents?
We are inevitably heading towards this future. All organizations are as simple as a hierarchical tree diagram. AI is slowly replacing the lowest leaves of this tree, it's already starting to happen and will be much bigger as AI continues advancing. All those junior roles will be forever gone.
So that makes me think: What will happen with these people? AI intelligence is advancing faster than humans are capable of. ChatGPT was a high school student intelligence 3 years ago, undergrad 1.5 years later and at the level of a grad today. So in 3 years it was able to do what would have taken 5+ to a regular person. And not only that, but it has also already achieved this grad level of quality that has become the new base of LLMs. Like, if you wanted to compete with LLMs 3 years ago, it was as simple as being more than a high schooler, but if you want to compete now, you should be more than a grad student. But getting back to my previous point, if this high schooler that wanted to compete against ChatGPT back 3 years ago and lost, and decided to study one particular subject to beat GPT, today he would still be studying and being an undergrad, where GPT is already grad, by the time he becomes a grad, tendency shows that GPT will already be PhD level. So how do these people compete with AI at all? All this next generation that are currently in high school, what is left for them? Where should they be focusing? If the time it takes them to master one skill is slower than the advancement of AI. To be honest I don't know, but what I see happening is that there will be a big unemployment wave soon.
And how will this affect the economy? We are talking that companies are spending billions and billions less as they transition to use AI.
I am already starting to live this with my project, so I'd like to give you this example of how I see it from my side right now: As for the moment writing this, I am working on grego.ai, AI tool to find vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Our whole objective is to outperform humans, that make mistakes and leave vulnerabilities in the contracts, so we can generate a safer ecosystem. It's a difficult task to solve, we are at grad level AI right now, and this requires an extra step of intelligence that is not yet available today. After intense work we can proudly say we have developed this system that performs better than all junior auditors, and that we are at par with semi-senior devs, and we are slowly getting to senior level, and hopefully soon to beat them. Right now teams of auditors usually consist of at least two people: one senior dev working with a junior one. And in some cases it could be up to 5. Now on our side, we have created such a good tool that easily these companies can replace this junior auditor with our tool (again, lowest leaf of the tree), that will outperform it for 10x the price.
So we are already making companies save 10x on 50% of their costs, in other words a 45% of their total costs. So once again, I wonder what will happen with these junior auditors. They will most probably want to keep learning so they can become senior and we don't take their jobs, but at that point (1-3 years), we will already have reached that point. And this person will be in the same situation to try to go for a PhD level, but once again we will beat them by that time.
So: (1) Every company will have lower costs (layoffs because AI), (2) the market will start offering lower prices to outbeat their competitors (less revenue), (3) nobody wants to hire these people, (4) AI advances. Repeat in loop.
This means that there will be a huge gap in the economy. Those that are junior today (or less) will most likely never get a job again, meanwhile the PhDs will still have their jobs for at least more years. But if this continues this way, there should be a tendency of the whole economy going down, and people becoming unemployed forever.
So how will these people live? 10-year-old kids, what will they do when they finish high school? How does this AI future look like?
I want to make a comparison with the industrial revolution, because at the end of the day, in that revolution, machines replaced humans, and all this writing would also apply to that same logic, but there was no downturn of the economics back then, but instead a huge uplift in the entire world economically. So that makes me wonder what the difference is here, and if I am mistaken with my assumptions based on this prior evidence. But I see one very big differentiator between back then and today. What machines replaced back then was not humans, but their hands. People were not using their brains back then, only their hands. Their whole job was exactly one manual mission. They didn't have to think, but just work. So machines easily replaced that. And all those people had to adapt to positions where they now had to think, and take different actions based on tasks they got. Otherwise they would have been replaced by another machine.
Today people "no longer use hands", in the sense that all is done with more efficient machines now, and they "use their mind" instead. But well, "Artificial Intelligence" arrived now. "Artificial". "Intelligence".
The only differentiator that people had until today over every other machine, is their ability to think. Their human nature, of adapting to the environment and taking action based on that. Being able to adapt to different scenarios, think carefully, plan, and not just do one single task non-stop like a machine. And now this whole new AI revolution is taking that single thing from humans. And to be honest, I don't see how people adapt to that, like they did in the industrial revolution. What else have people now that computers cannot have with AI?
The way I see it is that people will slowly start working for the AI next, not the other way around. AI will outbeat humans in intelligence very soon, at the point where the only place humans win is on the physical world. Robots and machines using AI are the next big thing as that is definitely the final level of replacing humans. So maybe the next 50+ years are all about helping AI to build their physical body, in different forms: electrodomestics, robots, big machines, small ones. In 50+ years there will be big factories all managed by AI with no human in the loop, that will give itself physical bodies, without the need of extra humans in the loop, by at which point, jobs will no longer exist as AI will take care of everything.
So maybe that is the response of what people will start doing within the next 50 years: giving physical capabilities to AI, creating machines that can create other machines. Otherwise there is not much role for a human in the short-medium term.
The only part of the economy that will greatly increase is the entertainment sector.
Getting back from the future. I'd like to talk about a few points on how I see entertainment today. Mostly, I'd like to lean on the side of how generations are becoming more and more dependent on entertainment these days, and then talk about how this, combined with AI, is making people think less and dumber in the long run.
On the first side, it's crazy to see how people are addicted to entertainment. This is not because of AI, but because of the internet boom finally exploding because of all the infra that could be built these past years. My fathers grew up reading notices from the newspaper as a child, now we are talking that the infra made it possible that I can play an online video game with my friend 10k kilometers away from each other at a 400ms latency. People are more connected than ever, all of them on the internet, in social medias. It seems like it is becoming human nature to be born with a social profile. And people are consuming plenty amount of hours on their cellphones in these medias. As more people get inside, content is better, and they consume it even more, that's the whole network effect of social media apps. Most of the young people I know are addicted to Instagram or TikTok, they'd spend an insane amount of hours in these apps, and not to mention 10-year-old kids with 10+ hours of Playstation per day.
The facility of accessing all this entertainment is as simple as reaching out to your pocket. Nothing stops you from hovering your phone to unlock your phone, and on one single tap start consuming reels from any place in the world. This is all obvious stuff that everyone can say and relate to. But where I want to get into here is that people are becoming so dependent and addicted to entertainment that they are slowly getting dumber. People are getting used to doing everything as simple as possible so they can have more time to entertain later. Studying gets harder when you have such a reachable distraction sitting next to your hand, when you listen to the notifications you are getting, and when your brain pushes you constantly to get back to that easy and fast dopamine.
Now why I tell this here, in this AI article, and not in another one, is because I am now starting to realize how AI is also drastically affecting this. It has to do with these two things:
Content: The number one reason people are spending more time on entertainment is because they are starting to see better content. If you entered Instagram 10 years ago, you'd enter for 5 mins, saw some of the recent posts from your few friends, and then exited the app short after. Now media is overwhelmed by content and all of this is tailored presented to you with next level algorithms. Now, AI is a huge boost for people to create more and better content. This means the content that people see will start to get better and better, locking them more in. What used to take days for a creator to edit a video, is now done through an AI tool in minutes. What used to take weeks for movies to animate, is now done with AI models. New games are vibe-coded. Even music is being AI-generated.
AI easy access: AI is now also helping these lazy people to be even lazier. The lazy people that you gave a tasks to and did the least effort possible just to slightly get that done the simplest way possible, are now using AI to even make those tasks for them. That person that you used to give one hour to do one task, that would have used 40 min to do the task and 20 min to be with their phones, will now ask the AI to do the task for them in 20 min and will now spend 40 min on their phones.
So combining that from above with the advancements of AI, it is very hard for me to see where we are heading as a society. Inevitably, juniors will have a very hard time finding employment, and also, we are raising a whole new generation that instead of trying to outcompete AI and try to become smarter than it, it is going in the opposite direction.
How will employment be like in the next 50 years? If AI is imitating the only differentiator that humans have as nature, the brain, then what is left for them? Builders building specific AI solutions will eventually succeed, but what about the rest 99% of the population?
I don't want to sound as an AI hater, instead I love it. It's inevitably the most impactful technology we have built in human history. And I am really optimistic that AI will come for good. It will help us to make plenty of discoveries that would have taken us decades, or wouldn't ever be reached. It will help us build new technologies and at a faster speed. We should be grateful of this invention, every single field will benefit from it, from helping us find the cure of lethal diseases, to making the day-to-day tasks easier for us.
With the help of AI we will be able to advance faster than ever. But we need to make sure that there is a clear path to use this as an advantage and not as a disadvantage. People first will become angry at AI taking their jobs, just like it happened with machines back then. But all is for a future good. So we could achieve in a long-term future being job-less and have AI taking care of us.
So to sum up, I think every single person should be as much aware as possible so they start preparing as soon as possible. All the people that I am surrounded by, all the 9-5 people going to offices doing junior jobs, are not even considering this scenario. And if I were them, I would start worrying now. AI will slowly replace their jobs in the next 5 years and the only thing they care about is having a job today without thinking ahead.
And as a last sentence: It seems the question will eventually come up to be if the society is able to transition in 100 years to an economy-less world where people won't have jobs, and AI will do everything.