✨ Why even supersmart AI might never take all the jobs

Superintelligence could aid 'experiential entrepreneurship' — discovering and articulating new ways for humans to flourish

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Back in the 2019 Before Times, dark-horse Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang got a buzzy bounce when he warned — on Joe Rogan's podcast, no less — that driverless trucks would cause massive job losses within six to 10 years, leading to increased suicides and violence among displaced drivers. (“Eventually there will be an outbreak of violence because some truckers will say instead of killing myself how about I bust up a robot truck?”)

His solution: A $1000-per-month universal basic income, or "Freedom Dividend." The payment would allow people to transition to new job opportunities and act as a foundation for a "human-centric capitalism," according to Yang. The idea broke through the attention filter. A quick check of Google Trends shows searches for “universal basic income,” already trending higher, massively spiked that month. (The term surged again during the pandemic thanks to the federal stimulus checks.)

Primed for pessimism

My theory is that Yang's prediction gained traction because the public had been primed for nearly a decade. IBM's Watson defeating Jeopardy! champions in 2011, an influential 2013 Oxford study claiming 47 percent of US jobs faced automation risk, warnings from tech leaders like Elon Musk, and pop-economics books like Rise of the Robots had created a powerful belief infrastructure. Moreover, all of those narrative nudges happened against the backdrop of a slow jobs recovery from the Global Financial Crisis, further making Americans receptive to automation-focused explanations.

Yet despite widespread AI unemployment fears — likely exacerbated by ChatGPT and generative AI models — mid-2025 data show the opposite: Employment is up across supposedly threatened sectors, wages are strong, and unemployment remains low. Either companies aren't widely adopting AI or AI is augmenting rather than replacing workers — or perhaps a some of both, offers The Economist in a new piece, “Why AI hasn’t taken your job,” adding the kicker: “Whatever the explanation, for now there is no need to panic.”

Don’t panic!

But what if there’s never going to be need to panic?