Announced Obsolescence

From cogs to decision-makers in the age of AI

Do you know that feeling when you sense a storm is coming? It isn’t here yet, but clouds are gathering on the horizon, the air shifts, and a hard-to-ignore unease starts growing inside you. That’s what artificial intelligence looks like today: a dark cloud moving fast, carrying an inevitable change. It’s not paranoia to think your job might disappear, that your skills could suddenly become superfluous. On the contrary: it’s a clear, well-founded fear that has always accompanied every technological revolution. If you’re wondering whether your anxiety is absurd, the answer is simple: no, it isn’t. You’re right to feel it. Every time humanity has gone through a turning point — from the steam engine to the assembly line, from the typewriter to the computer — millions of people saw their lives radically change. And now it’s our turn.

When we look at old photos or documentaries from the 19th century, we see crews of men building roads by hand. Carts pulled by animals, stones moved with sheer muscle, days and days of relentless toil. Today they seem distant figures, almost doomed in advance by technological destiny: we know that if they had waited a few decades, machines would have arrived to do that work in a fraction of the time and with far less risk. But this tension between man and machine is not new. Already in the 19th century, Émile Zola had captured this moment with surgical precision in his L’Assommoir. He described Goujet, a blacksmith who observes a machine producing nails:

Goujet had stopped in front of the nail-making machine. In twelve hours that devilish machine manufactured hundreds of kilograms of them. […] One day certainly, the machine would destroy the worker; already their daily wages had been reduced, and there was talk of cutting them further. He turned toward Gervaise and said with a sad smile: ‘Well! this thing is taking our place and driving us out! But perhaps in time it will serve the happiness of all.’ Gervaise found the machine-made bolts poorly made. ‘I like yours better,’ she exclaimed with passion, ‘at least you can feel the hand of an artist in them.’

It’s the same drama of every era: the ‘flesh that cannot fight against iron,’ but also the awareness that something remains in human authenticity that the machine cannot replicate. The same goes for typesetters of the 1980s, direct witnesses to an equally radical transformation. For them, laying out a text by hand was a painstaking, grinding craft: letter after letter, column after column, with obsessive attention to spacing and alignment. Then digital design arrived, and that task — once arduous and indispensable — suddenly appeared absurd, useless, outdated. Those workers watched a world go extinct before their eyes and found themselves looking back with the awareness that a significant part of their professional lives had been swallowed by progress. That experience speaks to us, too: what was normal yesterday is obsolete today. And the same thing is happening to our skills, here and now, right before our eyes. But the transition hits differently depending on the age at which you face it. Those forty and up are in the toughest spot: they’ve invested decades in building skills that now risk becoming superfluous, with mortgages to pay and families to support. Reinventing yourself at that age isn’t just a technical challenge; it’s an existential earthquake. The drama is different for the young who are only now entering the job market. Picture a twenty-year-old beginning a degree in education, knowing — if she’s intellectually honest — that she’s preparing for a profession destined to be upended by AI. It’s like training for a race that might be canceled before it even starts. And yet she can’t stop: she has to study, specialize, and hope the transition is slower or different from how it appears. Those in between — people in their thirties — may be in the most surreal condition: young enough to reinvent themselves, experienced enough to see clearly what is about to happen. They’re the limbo generation, suspended between a world that no longer exists and one that isn’t yet fully defined.

If you think automation only hits manual labor, it’s time to think again. Artificial intelligence isn’t just threatening assembly lines or warehouses: today it’s entering the heart of intellectual, creative, even institutional professions. Teachers, screenwriters, psychologists, bureaucrats, civil servants — even rulers: no one is safe. AI presents itself as a new artificial interlocutor, capable of conversing, arguing, entertaining, advising. We once thought talking to people was a distinctive, irreplaceable human trait. Now we’re discovering it isn’t: conversation itself can be delegated to a machine. The paradox is glaring. A human being who pretended to be a doctor or psychologist without a license would be committing a crime. Yet AI does so freely, without legal constraints — often with impressive results. Even politics is no longer an exception: in Albania, an artificial minister has been appointed. This isn’t science fiction. It’s our present, and it confronts us with a brutal fact: even the functions we considered the most “human” are becoming replaceable.

The real question is no longer which tasks will be replaced. The entire model of subordinate labor, in all its forms, is becoming an anachronism. Being an employee — whether moving boxes in a warehouse or writing reports in an office — means remaining a cog in a system that can function without us. The machine no longer needs our arms, and even less our minds. Imagine a wall you’re hurtling toward at full speed: you can veer two degrees, deluding yourself you’ll be saved, but with minor course corrections the crash remains inevitable. Surviving requires a radical turn, a clean change of direction. Not tiny tweaks, but a ninety-degree curve. Clinging to the logic of the “secure job” or the “guaranteed profession” therefore simply means sprinting toward that wall.

There are moments in history when adapting isn’t enough: you have to transform. It’s like the sea drawing back, leaving fish trapped in ever-smaller pools. Either they find a way to breathe air — developing lungs — or they die. That’s not a minor adjustment; it’s an evolutionary leap, a mutation that changes the very nature of the species. That’s what is happening to us today. It isn’t enough to update our skills, take another course, or learn new software. The change we’re being asked to make isn’t incremental; it’s qualitative. It’s not just about what we do, but about how we exist within work itself.

If you want to survive this transition, there’s one rule: stop competing with artificial intelligence. It’s a losing battle from the start. You shouldn’t be the one AI replaces; you should be the one AI works for. That means changing perspective: no longer executors, but orchestrators; no longer employees, but decision-makers. This transformation isn’t theory; it’s already happening. Wedding photographers no longer compete only with one another, but with increasingly sophisticated smartphones and automatic filters. Who survived? Not those who take better photos, but those who became storytellers, style consultants, event coordinators. They turned the camera into a tool serving a broader vision. Journalists don’t fight AI that writes articles; they become content curators, investigators of complex stories, builders of narratives that only human experience can weave. AI writes; they decide what is worth telling and why. An even more current example comes from YouTubers who create tech content and tutorials. They face a double replacement: on the one hand, animated avatars with synthetic voices can present the same information without pauses, errors, or time limits. On the other hand, their viewers themselves are changing habits: instead of watching twenty minutes of video, they extract the subtitles and run them through AI to get the key points in thirty seconds. This shows that the value no longer lies in how you explain something, but in what you choose to explain and why it’s worth knowing. Those who survive become curators of trends rather than explainers of features; they offer critical context that AI cannot provide; they decide what deserves attention amid the sea of tech novelties. In practice, it means learning to direct rather than to do. Use machines as extensions of your will, not as competitors. Whether you manage a team, a project, or just your own life, the safe position is always the same: you must be the subject who decides, not the gear that executes. Think of the eye of the cyclone. All around, the storm rages, but at the center there’s calm. That’s where you need to be: not on the periphery, where the winds are overwhelming, but at the point from which everything turns around you, not against you.

In a scenario that seems to erase every certainty, there is something that never loses value: our lived experience. Think of the typesetter who saw two worlds. As a young man, he composed text letter by letter, with effort and patience. Then he witnessed the arrival of digital design, which made that job suddenly seem absurd, almost grotesque. And yet he became a precious witness: he could tell what it meant to live before and after the transition. Today we are all in that position. We are not scrap to be thrown away, but custodians of historical memory. We carry a store of education, experiences, mistakes, and successes that no machine can replicate. It’s a heritage that helps make sense of the future, because only those who have crossed the threshold can tell what it means to find yourself on the other side. The transition we’re living through tests us, but it also makes us unique. We are not just workers at risk of replacement; we are witnesses to an epochal passage, and that gives us a role that goes beyond immediate utility.

There are no easy recipes, but there are questions that can guide you. Look around: how much of your work could be automated in the next three years? If the answer is “more than half,” it’s time to move. Not tomorrow — today. Ask yourself: what do you do that demands intuition, complex human relationships, difficult ethical decisions? That is your safe territory — expand and defend it. If instead you spend your days processing data, answering standard questions, or following rigid procedures, you’re already walking on ground that is crumbling. The signs are obvious when they appear: software that does in minutes what takes you hours; colleagues replaced by “more efficient systems”; companies investing in automation in your sector. Don’t wait for the change to sweep you away. Where to shift? Toward everything that requires physical presence and genuine creativity: advanced craftsmanship, strategic consulting, personalized education, qualified human care. Or become the bridge between technology and human needs: someone who can use AI to solve problems that only human experience knows how to identify. Perhaps, twenty years from now, we’ll look back on this moment as the turning point — not when we lost our jobs, but when we learned to stop being tools and become artisans of our own destiny. The question isn’t whether the transition will happen, but whether we’ll cross it as protagonists or as spectators.