It's Not AI, It's Your Boss Who Will Take Your Job

I’m currently reading Karen Hao’s Empire of AI and have finished Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People.¹² Both authors paint the same picture. Tech giants are ruthless and profit-driven to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible, and this led me to a realization that Hao also articulated on Hasan Minhaj’s podcast.³ It’s not AI that will take your job, it’s the person who decided to deploy an AI solution to replace humans.

The technology itself is impressive, but we forget too often how the math works. When a $100,000 AI subscription replaces $500,000 in labor costs, it becomes a strategic investment, regardless of how well it actually works.⁴ Executives will buy such solutions, it’s not a question of if, but when.

It could look different. AI systems could be designed to remain dependent on humans, to amplify them instead of replacing them. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re designing systems meant to be autonomous and eliminate humans entirely.

The Money Has to Come Back

This narrative doesn’t lie in the nature of the technology, it lies in the nature of the investments. OpenAI lost about five billion dollars in 2024 on $3.7 billion in revenue.⁵ According to the Wall Street Journal, the company expects cumulative operating losses of 74 billion dollars by 2028.⁶ OpenAI currently spends $1.69 for every dollar of revenue it generates.

This money has to come back somehow, investors expect it. And the only way to justify these sums runs through massive labor cost savings. Hao put it this way on Hasan Minhaj’s podcast, the technology is already having a huge impact on jobs. Not because it’s actually capable of replacing jobs, but because it’s perceived as capable enough that executives are laying off workers.³ Sometimes companies even call people back because the AI tools weren’t good enough after all, but by then the damage is done.

Social media could have been designed differently too, with more guardrails, without driving teenagers to suicide. But that wasn’t the goal. In Careless People, Wynn-Williams describes how Facebook systematically sacrificed user safety for growth, knowingly accepting the platform’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar because the country wasn’t an attractive growth market.

My prediction for 2025. We’ll see significantly more AI-driven unemployment in the US, less so in Germany. More importantly, we’ll see more and more domain-specific solutions flooding the market, with an energy aimed at attacking high-paying jobs. Lawyers, software developers, financial analysts. The lucrative professions first.