Post-AI World: Survivors and Casualties

AI anxiety is real right now. Job displacement, loss of agency, the feeling that the world is moving faster than we can adapt.

Most of the reassurances feel hollow because they are. The anxiety is proportional to the threat.

This Time Is Different

Previous technological transitions shifted labor from one sector to another. Agriculture to manufacturing, manufacturing to services. There was always somewhere for displaced workers to go.

This time is different.

AI isn’t targeting a sector. It’s targeting a capability layer that runs across all sectors. Cognitive work, symbolic manipulation, information processing. These aren’t an industry. They’re the common substrate of most white collar employment.

What’s harder to target is the judgment, patterns, and relationships that are uniquely yours. Your context.

The Shrinking Runway

Young people entering the workforce face a different math than previous generations.

They’re not just competing with each other. They’re competing with seasoned professionals augmented by tools that multiply productivity. The baseline expectation is higher. The tolerance for learning curves is lower.

Entry-level roles used to be where you built context: judgment, relationships, pattern recognition. That runway is shrinking. When AI can handle baseline cognitive work, “junior” becomes harder to justify.

The people who’ve already accumulated context have an advantage. The people who haven’t are running out of time to build it the old way.

The Circularity Problem

The economic circularity problem is underappreciated.

Consumer economies run on a cycle: wages enable consumption, consumption enables production, production enables wages. If you remove the wage-earning step for a significant portion of the population, you don’t just have an employment problem. You have a demand problem.

Companies can’t sell products to people without income.

The responses being discussed? Universal basic income, shortened work weeks, massive retraining, ownership redistribution. None have political consensus, proven implementation at scale, or clear funding mechanisms.

And they probably won’t anytime soon.

The people building the technology and the people thinking about social adaptation are largely separate groups having separate conversations.

Cold Comfort From History

In 1900, about 40% of the American workforce was in farming. Today it’s under 2%. That’s an enormous displacement, but it played out over nearly a century. The service economy expanded to absorb the labor. Time was the buffer.

The horse economy tells a similar story. The transition to automobiles eliminated millions of jobs: breeders, farriers, stable workers, carriage makers, hay farmers. New jobs emerged in auto manufacturing and road construction, but the people who lost horse-economy jobs were largely not the same people who got automobile-economy jobs.

Coal mining is the harder example. Appalachian communities built entire economies around extraction. When those jobs left, the replacement jobs never came. Retraining programs were promised. Investment was announced. Decades later, the hollowed-out towns remain.

Most historical transitions didn’t have plans. They had survivors and casualties.

What You Actually Control

So what do you do when you can’t wait for coordinated solutions?

You think carefully about what you actually control.

AI is exceptionally good at general capability. What it doesn’t have is your judgment: the decisions you’ve made, the patterns you’ve seen, the relationships you’ve built, the context you’ve accumulated.

In an AI-mediated world, context becomes more valuable, not less. It’s the part that isn’t easily replicated.

But only if you own it.

Context as Asset

Right now, most AI tools hold your context hostage. Your history, your patterns, your preferences live inside systems you don’t control.

When disruption accelerates, that lock-in becomes a vulnerability. You’re not building an asset. You’re renting access to yourself.

The alternative is treating your context as something you own and carry with you. Portable across tools, platforms, and whatever systems emerge next. Not dependent on any single agent or company continuing to exist or continuing to serve your interests.

I honestly don’t know if this is the answer. I’m not sure anyone has the answer either.

But it’s the question I keep coming back to.

In the absence of coordinated plans, individual agency matters more. The people who navigate disruption best won’t necessarily be the most technically sophisticated. They’ll be the ones who can clearly see what they uniquely offer and maintain ownership of it.

That’s not a solution to the macro problem. It’s a survival strategy for the transition.

What are you doing to maintain agency in a world that’s shifting faster than institutions can adapt?