Oh, look, another report marking the end of your career. But this one is not some angry Reddit post or a think piece penned by a bitter journalist. No, no, this is straight from the World Economic Forum, you know, the ivory tower where billionaires like uh, Soros and policymakers like, uhm, Soros, gather to decide our collective fate.
And what fate have they envisioned for us this time?
Apparently, 41% of employers worldwide say that they’ll fire your sorry ass and replace you with AI by 2030.
That’s not a warning.
That’s a verdict.
Final.
Irrevocable.
Pack your bags, kiddo.
And no, it’s not happening in some hazy, distant future. They are talking the next five years. Let that sink in. Five. Years. AI is kicking the door in and stealing the silverware, and leaving a thank-you note on its way out.
Don’t believe me?
Ask Klarna – more about that later.
So, before you continue reading, I’d say, take one last pill of Prozac before you can’t afford one anymore, snort a line of anything, and take a few stiff drinks, because this will be a tragedy of epic proportions.
But, there’s a silver lining to it all.
Apparently the same report tells us that after the AIpocalypse, AI will generate more jobs than it destroyed. But the question is————for whom?
Read on, but first – a word from our sponsors:
“Need a bunker? Act now and we’ll throw in a year’s supply of canned beans and Wi-Fi to livestream the chaos”
The canary in the corporate coal mine
Remember Klarna? The fintech darling that promised to revolutionize online payments? Well now, they’ve done some “revolutionizing”, all right, just not the kind you were hoping for. Entire departments are replaced with a shiny AI stack. Teams that once managed operations, logistics, and customer care are a goner.
Not trimmed, not optimized.
Gone.
All that’s left is a skeleton crew to babysit the AI. And the thing is that Klarna isn’t an anomaly. It is the template for what’s about to hit nearly half of all companies.
Half.
Ok, nearly, you nitpicker!
Agentic AI isn’t a buzzword no more. It is the grim reaper of the corporate world. Agentic AI signals tares a rift into society, where people aren’t augmented by the machines as we were told, nope-sure-eee! It is handed over entirely. I ain’t talking about replacing grunt work, because this is about gutting entire hierarchies.
The report paints a pitch black picture of what the workforce will look like by 2030, and it sure as h*ll is not you sitting comfy at your desk. By then, about 41% of employers worldwide plan to slash jobs. The guillotine is already erected and it is aimed at roles who are considered “routine” or “administrative”. You know, postal clerks, payroll staff, and secretaries are the first to be thrown off the roof.
These are the workers whose jobs rely on predictable tasks that machines are more than capable and happy to do. Even the creative safe havens, you know, like graphic designers, aren’t safe anymore. Generative AI tools are now capable of whipping up mediocre-level graphics in seconds. And because for an untrained eye, mediocre is enough, human artists are left to wonder if their hands have been declared obsolete.
And the timeline…. man, pfoey… blink and you’re already behind, because this will be happening over the next five years. Between 2025 and 2030.
Industries from finance to logistics will see AI slash entire departments. Banking jobs, especially in the back and middle offices, are facing mass extinction. Legal secretaries…Yeah, Agents, and GPT’s got that covered too. If your job involves pressing buttons or filing papers, big chance you will be filling in unemployment papers soon.
In any case, employers are clear about one thing. “ if a task is repetitive, a bot will do it. If a job is creative, a bot will do it cheaper”. The rest of us are on the sideline, watching the wreckage unfold in real time (while we wait our turn).
Ouch.. bleak prospects.
Another Prozac, please?
Thank you!
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Welcome to the short term: 2025–2030
The report isn’t sweet about what is to come you know. Because jobs that involve routine tasks are going extinct. Postal clerks, payroll staff, executive secretaries, all headed for the corporate chopping block. Even creative roles like graphic designers, which were once thought immune, are now circling the drain. Because AI can churn out “creative” slop faster, and cheaper, and customers do not care about quality anymore in this “generative economy” either. Products have become outputs anyway. Sure, it’s soulless plagiarism, but it’s cost-effective. Employers love that. Read: Every breath you take, and every move you make, AI’ll be watching you | LinkedIn
And don’t try to fool yourself about “reskilling”. Even the World Economic Forum likes to dangle that carrot of hope. My God, they are saying that 77% of companies will retrain their employees to work with AI.
What does that even mean?
Are we all going to be working on a content farm, producing data to train the next generation of AI?
I do know what it means.
It means learning to sit quietly while your robot coworker screws up your job, and then fix its mistakes.
Sound really fulfilling.
Nah, didn’t think so, huh.
Reskilling is the corporate equivalent of slapping a Band-Aid on a gaping shotgun wound, blood squirtin’ ‘n all.
Anyway, the skills that are in demand are shifting faster than you can even update your resume. AI and big data top the list.
Duh.
You know, people like me who build this shit, so you can go home and enjoy welfare. If it still exists after the robo-uprising. Maybe we’ll be calling it UBI (Universal Bas…. Ah! Forget it.. not going to promote this sham).
Well, one thing’s for sure. I draw the line where it comes to willingly reducing headcount.
Anyway, on the green side you also have network folks, cybersecurity kids, and people with “technology literacy”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Is that just a fancy way of saying “I can Google stuff”?
Employers say that they want creative thinkers and agile workers.
Let me stop here, and think about what that means.
I get it!
What they really want is pliable drones who won’t question why their jobs are disappearing.
Wall Street’s love affair with job cuts
Let’s not forget the bankers. If anyone can screw up with AI, it’s Wall Street. Bloomberg Intelligence launched their own nuke a couple of days agon. They conducted a survey, and based on that, they concluded that 200,000 jobs in global banking are waiting for the guillotine in the next three to five years.
That is 3% of the entire workforce.
Back office. Goner.
Middle office. Bye-bye.
Ops. Bots can do it faster and cheaper. So ciao!
And Wall Street execs aren’t mourning these losses of course. They-are-celebrating. Cutting jobs is just another line item in their efficiency reports. The analyst behind the report, with the cool name of Tomasz Noetzel, says that these roles will not vanish completely.
They will be “transformed”.
Sure. Bots will do 90% of the work and humans get to sit around, waiting for it to fail, and in the mean time pretending that they’re still relevant.
It’s not transformation.
It’s erasure, repackaged in a PR-friendly look and feel.
And then there was hope. Or was there?
Like in any other good horror movie, there’s always one of the characters that think they can make it out alive. And in this case, there’s good news as well.
The same World Economic Forum report says that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. Seventy-eight million more jobs, to be exact.
Sounds peachy until you actually read what they write, and you realize that most of these roles will involve designing AI tools or working alongside them. In other words, they are not replacing your job. They’re replacing you. They’ll hire someone cheaper, younger, and more tech-savvy to babysit the machines.
The WEF predicts a net increase of 7% in total employment by 2030.
That’s assuming their math checks out.
Big if.
They say that this growth needs companies who are willing to invest in reskilling and “lifelong learning”.
Yeah, sure.
Wake-up, and smell the coffee.
Most companies won’t. They’d rather pocket the savings from automation, pay-off their debts, save a little for a rainy day, and call it a day. If you think corporations care about your professional growth, I have a bridge to sell you.
What do we do now?
So here we are. And knowing this, waddowedo? Do we fight back? Escape to another planet or find a dimension where AI doesn’t exist?
Or, and hear me out, do we just stop playing their game entirely?
Stop buying their crap. Seriously. Wear the same clothes for five years. Cancel your subscriptions. All of them. Do you really need six streaming services just to rewatch TBand of Brothers or Friends for the 14th time? No. Read a book. Borrow a DVD (yes, those still exist). Or stare at a wall. It’s free.
If the corporations love efficiency so much, let’s see how efficient they are when we collectively stop feeding their endless appetite for profits.
Just imagine if no one were to upgrade their phone every year because Tim Crook decided to sell you GenMoji, and slap an extra camera on it and call it revolutionary. Your current phone is fine. It texts. It scrolls. It takes blurry photos of your dog that you’ll never print out anyway. Let it live its best life. I’m doing it right now. I’m still stuck with my iPhone 12 cause I had enough of it.
And clothes. Oh, clothes. The fashion industry pumps out billions of pieces of clothes every year. They convince us that we need 27 shades of beige. Well, we don’t. Wear what you have. That hoodie with a hole in it is now “distressed”. Those jeans that don’t quite fit anymore…Belt it. Wear them into the ground.
If corporations want us to embrace efficiency, let’s see how efficient they are when we stop feeding their endless profit machine. Imagine the panic in boardrooms when Q3 profits implodes just because we all decided, “Nah, I’m good with what I have”.
It’s not that I am anti-stuff, or going full minimalist monk. You know I love my gadgets, and like poking around in new stuff, and I even like AI for all its potential for doing good, but this is about starving the beast.
Every coin we stop spending is one less that they can use to develop the next AI tool to “streamline” us out of existence.
Let them choke on their unsold inventory. They need us more than we need them. WE are the masses. So maybe, if we stop buying their shiny new shit, we will remember what it’s like to actually live.
And if you don’t want to join, fine, you can just quietly retrain for the honor of becoming an AI’s assistant.
Your call.
Prozac anyone?
Not for me, I’ll just lock my wallet.
Signing off from the frugal frontier!
Marco
Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️
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