"AI Won't Take Your Job, a Person Using AI Will"—Yes, You Using AI Will Replace You Not Using It
Let's end this conversation once and for all
The Gist
I. Neither AI nor other people will take your job: While fears have shifted from AI taking jobs to people using AI replacing others, the reality is that you will most likely replace your non-AI-using self by adopting AI tools.
II. You don't have to like tech; it likes you: You'll inevitably use AI—often without realizing it—as it becomes integrated into everyday technologies, leading you to outperform your previous self who didn't use AI.
III. "My life is fine, I don't need this": We often resist new technology with "My life is fine, I don't need this," but history shows we're "powerless children" who bow down to it, just as writers moved from quills to keyboards.
IV. Like the sun will rise again tomorrow: Resisting AI is futile—"If you don’t go to AI, AI will come to you,” but you should be optimistic because that’s precisely what makes it unlikely that a random AI user will take your job.
I. Neither AI nor other people will take your job
Like other debates about innovative technology, this one started with a sci-fi cyberpunk slogan:
AI will take your job.
It sounded unsettling. Back in late 2022, when ChatGPT first launched, most people’s idea of AI was shaped by Hollywood movies like Terminator and I, Robot. Terrifying, yes, but fictional. ChatGPT turned fantasy into reality and hypothetical fear into alarm. The thought of a real human-hunting machine was still unimaginable but the “take your job” part added the right amount of mundanity to make us uneasy. It was a hard pill to swallow—dystopia is here, guys, not in books or the distant future where you thought it belonged. Experts echoed it and echoed it hard.
However, once you consider it, the idea that current AI systems could threaten your livelihood requires a hefty dose of delusional imagination: “How the hell will ChatGPT replace me when it doesn’t know how many R’s there are in the word ‘strawberry’ or how to solve simple puzzles or win at tic-tac-toe—playing first!?” Sooner or later, people found trivial flaws in the “powerful” algorithms so skepticism grew. As nerve-wracking as it is to lose your job, the evidence didn’t support the fearmongering. And although apprehension toward AI has lingered to this day, few—not even economists—ever expected chatbots to replace them.
AI’s shortcomings, added to humans’ natural tendency to think of ourselves as special—nothing ever happens—led people into justified disbelief (which is the common stance today, except if you read the comment sections of the New York Times or The Washington Post). The knee-jerk worry gave way to dissenting reflection, which gave way to accusations of hyperbole by the most vocal critics: “Don’t sell us the end of the world, you idiots.” The rest didn’t even bother to care. They went on with their lives, genuinely unfazed by AI. As a result, the story evolved:
AI won’t replace you, a person using AI will.
Oh, that was worse. It felt closer to home, more believable—like a nightmare out of the uncanny valley. Too familiar to be far-fetched yet too unusual to be normalized. It was a fitting twist. It grounded the implicit urgency in a tangible reality: It’s not a digital being but another human who will take your job (which happens all the time) if you don’t engage with this new thing that’s calling you but you haven’t touched yet.
As a writer, I couldn’t imagine ChatGPT doing my job. I laughed in discredit when people hinted at that possibility. But a freelance dude somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic managing a bot swarm to do the job of five or ten writers? That I could imagine. I didn’t laugh anymore. The fear, suddenly, wasn’t based on faith in the millenarian promises of tech executives. It captured, in a futuristic wrapping, the common anxiety of the precarious worker: being redundant and not knowing what to do about it.
So the new phrasing caught on: it’s not AI, it’s people using it. The apparent wisdom turned maxim, then cliché. It was repeated ad nauseam in debates on AI’s repercussions on society and culture. (The last prominent person I’ve heard say it is none other than Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang.) But to me, it didn’t feel complete. The underlying message was strictly right—human + automation > human—but I didn’t feel the kind of somatic dread I was expecting. I had to understand why.
So I dug up another twist—an optimistic one—that I firmly believe makes the story truer: The person who will most likely replace you is not some distant one-man-band AI-savvy stranger.
It’s you.
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