Don't Take the Doom Bait

The AI doom posts keep going viral. They're wrong.

You've seen these posts. AI is going to make everyone a serf. Your only options are to hyper-gamble or accept permanent serfdom.

These posts constantly go viral on X. They tap into something real, concerns that many people have, questions about what the future holds in a world where computers are agentic and intelligent. But the posts are always doomer and that’s exactly why they spread and are promoted. But most importantly, they are wrong. Let me explain.

The Concerns Are Real

I’m not going to sugar coat it. There is going to be massive workforce disruption and many jobs will be lost.

In October 2025, U.S. employers announced 153,074 job cuts, the highest October total since 2003. That’s a 175% increase over October 2024 and a 183% rise from just the month before.

The median new hire is now 42 years old. Pressures on entry level jobs are building. I see this in my own work, the amount that I can hand off to AI rather than having to hire another junior person is quite astonishing.

Amazon now has over one million robots deployed across its facilities, nearly matching its 1.56 million human workforce. Internal documents suggest the company aims to automate 75% of operations and could eliminate 600,000 positions by 2033. The average employees per Amazon fulfillment center, around 670, is the lowest in 16 years. Meanwhile, packages handled per worker surged from 175 in 2016 to 3,870 today.

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So yes, this is happening, and it is accelerating. There is no doubt about it.

And let me pile on for a second. Then there’s the affordability crisis, which I experience first hand like almost everyone in my peer group. It’s just expensive to be alive. The median home price is above 7x median income, levels even worse than before the Great Financial Crisis. For context, my parents generation were buying their first homes around 3-4x range.

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And then how about your earnings? If you work in Corporate America you might see your wages grow 3% year over year. A little bump that probably most people appreciate, but don’t recognize they’re actually getting poorer each year. The thing is that real inflation is running easily 5-10% each year now. Your net worth might look like it’s growing on paper, but your purchasing power is eroding, outside of an occasional promotion.

This also means for the assets you want to save in such as S&P 500, real estate, or otherwise, they are also growing more than 3% per year, so each year you can afford less assets, which are the primary avenue for building wealth.

Again this is specific to white collar “safe path” jobs, but this is the lived experience for many.

So I understand the frustration, don’t get me wrong. I have it too.

What the Doomers Miss

But look, here’s what the doomers are missing. When technology destroys jobs, it creates opportunities. Technology is leverage, and that leverage is available to anyone willing to learn how to use it.

Only 12% of American workers use AI daily in their professional roles. That number has tripled in 2.5 years, and it’s accelerating. But we’re still incredibly early. I am one of those people, and have been for the past 18 months or so, and I will tell you first hand, I can accomplish far more at work than just a few years ago, making me more valuable to my employer and also giving me a wider range of skills that can be leveraged in other ways should I want to.

So if you’re in that 12%, you’re not at odds against AI. AI is on your team. You are competing against the 88% who aren’t using it. The window isn’t closing, it’s wide open.

Another thing to consider is technology adoption skews younger. I know for a fact my parents don’t even know what Claude is (Right Dad?). The people leading the charge and exploring what’s possible with AI are almost all younger. The push for vibe coding, agentic work, and just general use of AI for productivity boosts, these are outsized to people in their 20s, 30s, 40s.

Older demographics largely won’t use this technology, at least not for a while. I am reminded of how when I was younger my grandfather had a PC desktop but he didn’t have internet, I’m pretty sure he just played solitaire on it.

The younger generations will benefit disproportionately by these technologies.

This is the great irony of the doom narrative. The same technology supposedly ending all opportunity is the same technology creating unprecedented leverage and younger generations are growing up with and will be “AI native” just like I grew up in a world of being “internet native.”

The internet meme of “you can just do things” has never been more true. You don’t need credentials or permission. In fact I think credentials will become increasingly useless, a topic for another day.

It’s actually incredibly exciting the things that you can do now, without having to even be a technical person who can code. The people who are doom-scrolling about AI taking their jobs are probably not using AI to build anything, and probably aren’t even that dialed in to begin with.

The Hyper-Gamble Trap

Here’s the biggest problem with the viral doom content. While in some senses, it is a meme, and may not be taken too literally, the prescription is insane. And many people take it at face value.

The hyper gamble culture is pervasive and signs of the most nihilistic behavior. Maybe 1% of people who hyper-gamble will hit it big and get lucky. The other 99% will get wrecked.

And they are already beaten down and discouraged about the future, this advice only worsens their future outlook.

You can see the symptoms of the hyper gamble despair everywhere. U.S. sports betting revenue grew from about $1 billion in 2019 to nearly $14 billion in 2024. That’s a 15x expansion in five years. Prediction market volume exploded from roughly $6 billion in 2024 to over $60 billion in 2025, 10x in one year.

And then there is crypto. Most of the space is just degenerate gambling dressed up as innovative “tokens.” Platforms like Pump.fun are just casinos, I mean even Coinbase is a casino, and they are the biggest company in the industry. People are aping into “fartcoin” hoping for a 100x because they’ve given up on building anything real.

The Real Play

So what’s the alternative? You don’t need to hyper-gamble. You need to take calculated risk. Let me be specific about what that actually means.

AI takes people who are good at something and makes them very good. And it takes people who are very good and makes them best in class. The best programmers in the world aren’t saying they’re twice as productive with AI. They’re saying 10x.

And what if you feel like you aren’t great at anything to begin with? Well, first, don’t discount yourself so much, people are often their biggest critic. But also, AI can not only get you from good to great, it can also get you from nowhere to somewhere.

It’s not just a tool that can take work off your plate, you can literally tell it “teach me how to do this” and it will walk you through it, and along the way you can ask clarifying questions and get explanations on where you went wrong. This kind of one-on-one instruction used to cost thousands of dollars or require knowing the right people. Now it’s in your pocket for $20/month.

Another big unlock is combining skills. Being good at two things isn’t just additive, it’s multiplicative. Being good at three things is more than triple. You become irreplaceable through the combination, not through any single skill. A coder who can also design and manage product is exponentially more valuable than someone who can only write code. AI makes that kind of cross-training possible for basically everyone now.

So what should you do?

Build something. Start a side project. Create content. Develop a skill that compounds. A little each day adds up faster than you think.

And remember that affordability crisis I mentioned earlier? Your skills aren't the only thing that need to outpace the system

Save in assets that can’t be diluted. If you’re saving in dollars, you’re destroying your wealth. Store your value in assets that grow against the real rate of inflation. I use Bitcoin as my primary savings vehicle because it can’t be debased and has asymmetric upside for anyone with a multi-decade time horizon.

The career advice for this era is simple. Don’t be fungible. If you can be swapped out, eventually you will be. But if you have a rare combination of skills amplified by AI, you’re not competing against the machine. You’re operating the machine.

Doom is the Easy Way Out

Here’s the thing about the viral doom content. It gives people permission to give up. Every day more people realize the game is rigged, the financial system is broken, and they split into two camps. Some go into degenerate gambling on prediction markets and memecoins. Others decide the whole system is beyond repair and just check out entirely. But these are just two flavors of the same thing. Excuses for inaction and despair.

This is not new. Every major technological revolution produces the same panic. The printing press was going to destroy the church. The automobile was going to destroy the horse economy and everyone who depended on it. The internet was going to make us all unemployable. And every single time, the people who adapted and built with the new technology didn’t just survive. They thrived. The ones who sat around predicting the end of the world got left behind.

The doomers and the hyper-gamblers are two sides of the same coin. One group says the future is hopeless so why bother. The other says the future is hopeless so just roll the dice. Both have given up on the actual work of building something. Both are coping.

The future is going to suck and we are all serfs? I don’t buy it. I never have.

It’s still the best time to be alive. But only if you choose to build rather than doom-scroll. The future is yours if you want it.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who’s been doom-scrolling a little too hard lately. I send one of these each week, so make sure to get on the list. And if you reply or comment below with what you thought about this piece, that helps me keep improving.