Another Tuesday morning. Sun’s already up, probably judging me through the grimy windowpane. The coffee’s gurgling, smelling like the ashes of last night’s ambitions. My head’s doing a fair impression of a cement mixer. Just another day in paradise, eh? Then I stumble across this latest dispatch from the geniuses who think they’re inventing the future, probably while sipping kombucha and congratulating themselves on their stock options. “From disruption to reinvention: How knowledge workers can thrive after AI.” Thrive. That’s a good one. Sounds like something you’d read on a pamphlet in a clinic waiting room.
So, Fortune – a magazine I usually only see when I’m looking for something to swat a fly with – tells the sob story of some 42-year-old software engineer. Poor bastard had a computer science degree, pulling down six figures writing code for some tech behemoth. Thought he was set, king of the nerds, future-proof. Then the AI wave, this “generative AI,” washes in like a digital tsunami. Job gone. Not outsourced to some poor sod in Bangalore, not downsized by some beancounter in a cheap suit. No, his job got swallowed by an algorithm. A string of ones and zeros that can crap out code faster and cheaper than he ever could, and it doesn’t even need coffee breaks or whine about the fluorescent lighting.
Now he’s applied for over 800 jobs. Eight hundred. Let that sink in. Nothing. So, he’s delivering lukewarm chow mein for DoorDash and living in a goddamn trailer. Wondering what happened. What happened is the future, pal. The one they kept promising us was so bright we’d have to wear shades. Turns out the shades were to hide the tears.
They call this “identity collapse.” Not just economic misfortune, oh no. It’s deeper than that, apparently. For decades, they say, “knowledge work has been the engine of self-worth and social mobility.” Where intelligence found validation, where contribution met compensation. And losing that to a machine? It’s losing “a way of being in the world.” Engine of self-worth? My ass. For most folks, a job is the engine that keeps the repo man from towing your rustbucket and the landlord from changing the locks. Self-worth is what you try to scrounge together from the wreckage after the world’s done kicking you in the teeth. Now a machine can do your precious “thinking, analyzing, and creating.” Your unique human spark, as it turns out, ain’t so unique when it comes to filling a spreadsheet or debugging code.
“The Great Unmooring,” they call it. Or “The Great Displacement,” as the trailer-dwelling ex-coder put it. Sounds dramatic, don’t it? Like the title of a bad disaster movie. Me, I just call it the same old story with a new coat of paint. The powerful find a new way to squeeze more out of less, and the little guy gets… well, unmoored. Displaced. Screwed. Pillars of human value shifting, they say. Yeah, they shift alright. Usually when some fat cat in a corner office figures out a way to replace a few thousand salaries with a server farm.
Then there’s this professional photographer acquaintance, specializes in landscapes. Poor bastard. AI’s already got its digital mitts all over his gig. Trip planning, writing articles, even shitting out images that would make your eyeballs water. He says his business would be kaput if it wasn’t for people’s “deep-rooted desire to have first-hand experiences out in nature.” People still want to get mosquito bites and twist their ankles, apparently. For now. How long before they’re happy with a VR headset piping perfect, AI-generated wilderness straight into their optic nerves? Less sweat, no bugs.
“The advance of AI has triggered not only a migration of labor, but a migration of meaning.” Migration of meaning. Christ. Sounds like something a stoned philosophy student would mumble. The old map, where thinking and creating were human territory, no longer offers safe passage. At least not the kind that pays the damn bills. The terrain has changed. And for many, identity is being disrupted. Disrupted. That’s the polite word for it. Like saying a guy who got hit by a freight train was “inconvenienced.”
And, of course, they gotta drag in some pop singer. Billie Eilish. Kid’s got a song, “What Was I Made For?” Sings from a place of confusion about identity and belonging. “I used to float, now I just fall down/I used to know, but I’m not sure now.” Hell, I could have written that line any morning for the last thirty years, usually while staring at a half-empty bottle and a full ashtray. She says it speaks to anyone questioning their identity. Well, no shit. AI just gives us another five-star, gold-plated reason to feel like we’re adrift in a leaky boat without a paddle.
This is the beginning of a “cognitive migration.” Away from what machines now do well, and toward a “redefinition of what we humans are truly for.” First comes disorientation, fog, grief. Yeah, tell me about it. And then, if we’re fortunate, curiosity and hope. Hope. That’s a dangerous word. Like a stray dog, it’ll follow you home and then shit on your carpet.
Then we get the history lesson. What we do has shaped who we are. Agrarian societies, Industrial Age, blah blah blah. Farmer, shepherd, machinist, analyst. Identity tied to the job. Sure. And when the job vanishes, so does the identity, and then you’re just another bum trying to score a drink. The Industrial Revolution redefined time with clocks and shifts. Now this digital revolution, or whatever the hell it is, is redefining thinking. Progress, they call it. Some of us down here in the gutter have a different word for it.
The “knowledge worker” – that paragon of modern economic progress. Armed with expertise, architects of the digital age. My god, the sheer, unadulterated bullshit. These guys weren’t architects; they were bricklayers, same as any other schmuck, just using fancier tools. Their creativity and intellectual rigor. Now, that “rigor” can be replicated by a smart toaster. And the psychological effects? People feel less motivated, more bored when AI tools take over the interesting bits. Imagine that. Your job was already soul-crushing, and now a machine does the only part that wasn’t completely mind-numbing, and does it better. It’s like being cuckolded by a Roomba.
A colleague writes to these guys: “I need your help finding my next job – one that AI can’t take!” Good luck with that, sweetheart. They’ll probably tell her to become a professional hugger or a artisanal pickle-maker. Something “authentically human.”
So, where do we go from here? “Meaning and the human harbor.” Sounds like a cheap motel by the docks. AI transforms what we do, so we have to rediscover why we do anything. What does it mean to contribute, to matter, to be needed when a machine can outthink you, outcreate you, out-everything you? Some answers, they say, lie in spaces AI hasn’t touched. Because meaning doesn’t emerge from capability alone. It emerges from “human context, relationships, and agency.” A machine might compose a melody, but it doesn’t grieve. It might write a wedding toast, but it doesn’t feel the joy. Meaning must be lived. That’s rich. Try telling that to the bill collectors.
They quote some novel, The Resisters, where life in an automated future is held together by knitting sweaters and reading Melville aloud. Cozy. Quaint. Probably written by someone who’s never had to choose between paying the heating bill and buying a bottle of cheap wine. The human harbor, they claim, lies in “empathy, ethical judgment, artistic creation, appreciation, and the cultivation of shared purpose.” These capacities are primary, they insist. Funny how these “primary” capacities always seem to be the first ones that don’t pay jack shit in an economy built on “extraction and efficiency.”
And get this – Pope Leo XIV, some made-up pontiff for this article I guess, suggests humanity must respond to AI like it did to the Industrial Revolution: with a “moral reckoning.” The dignity of labor. Who it allows us to become. Beautiful words. Easy to preach when you’ve got a direct line to God and your own country in the middle of Rome. Try finding the dignity of labor when you’re scrubbing toilets after your “cognitive skills” have been automated out of existence. The task isn’t just finding new jobs, but “new ways to be human.” Sounds exhausting. I’m still trying to master the old ways, mostly involving bourbon and regret.
We’re in a lull, they say. The calm before the storm. AI has “breached the gates of human work,” but its full consequences are “uneven and delayed.” Like a slow-acting poison. You feel fine for a while, then one day you wake up coughing blood. Most people don’t feel the ground shaking yet. But the tremors are here. AI 2027 – some report by brainiacs – says artificial general intelligence, AGI, with human-level cognitive versatility, could be here in a few years. Google DeepMind’s new AI is already “dreaming up algorithms beyond human expertise.” Wonderful. Can it dream up a cure for a hangover? Or a winning lottery ticket? That’s the kind of algorithm I could get behind.
Like all revolutions, it won’t be a single boom. It’ll be a process, “uneven and quietly disruptive before it is obviously transformative.” So, preparation matters. “Cognitive migration begins with the human interior, with the stories we tell about who we are, and what we are for.” Jesus H. Christ on a crutch. If we wait until the shift is unmistakable, we’ll be behind. But if we begin now, to “imagine new ways of being valuable, meaningful, and whole,” we might meet the future on our own terms. Sounds like a pep talk for lemmings heading towards a cliff. Our own terms? The future usually dictates its terms with a sledgehammer.
Back to Billie Eilish. “What was I made for?” Not a surrender, they chirp, but the beginning of someone trying to find their way. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the howl of a creature caught in a trap it doesn’t understand. We all should ask the same, they say. Sure, I ask it every goddamn morning. The answer usually involves finding my pants and another cigarette.
“Our cognitive migration finds its destination not in competing with machines on levels of intelligence, but in rediscovering the unique human capacity to care about outcomes in ways that arise from our embodied, social and ethical nature.” That’s a mouthful. What it means, I think, is that we’re supposed to be good little humans, full of feelings and ethics, while the robots run the show and collect the paychecks. The future belongs not to those who resist, but to those who meet it by “deepening their understanding of what made them human in the first place.” What made us human? Our opposable thumbs? Our capacity for spectacular self-deception? Our liver’s heroic, though ultimately futile, battle against cheap booze?
Migration is always disorienting, but also a path to new belonging. Right. Tell that to the dust bowl farmers. Tell that to the factory workers whose jobs went overseas. Tell that to our code-slinging friend in his trailer. New belonging. Sounds like a fresh hell with a different zip code.
So, what are we made for? I’m still leaning towards another shot of whiskey. Or maybe just to burn it all down and see what crawls out of the ashes. At least that would be an authentic human experience. This whole “reinvention” song and dance? It’s just another way for the house to make sure it always wins, while we’re left holding our dicks and wondering where the next drink is coming from.
Alright, my glass is empty and my patience is thinner than a bookie’s alibi. Time to see if there’s any meaning at the bottom of this bottle. Or at least a temporary truce with reality.
Chinaski out. Don’t let the algorithms bite.
Source: From disruption to reinvention: How knowledge workers can thrive after AI