AI & The Coming Human Transformation
Humans Are the New Horses: AI and the Next Industrial Revolution
In early 2025, IBM announced that 94% of its human resources tasks had been automated using AI. To many, this headline passed unnoticed as just another incremental improvement in workplace efficiency. But this quiet milestone marks the turning point of an era. For the first time AI has proven it can reliably replace complex, judgment based, white collar work roles traditionally thought to require the human touch. It wasn’t a declaration of war on employment; it didn’t need to be. The future arrived not with a bang, but with a spreadsheet.
To grasp the scale of what’s coming, we need to look backward. During the Industrial Revolution, horses were indispensable. They plowed fields, pulled freight, transported people, and powered economies. But when steam engines and motorized vehicles entered the scene, their usefulness vanished almost overnight. By 1960, America’s horse population had collapsed from over 26 million to just a few million. Not because they failed but because the economy no longer needed them. Their decline wasn’t a tragedy of moral failing. It was a shift in utility. Society evolved, and the horses didn’t fit anymore.
Today, humans face the same kind of obsolescence but on a scale far more disruptive. We are not being replaced by stronger machines; we are being replaced by smarter ones. AI systems are rapidly mastering tasks once thought immune to automation: customer service, bookkeeping, graphic design, marketing, diagnostics, and even elements of strategic decision making. What makes this different from past technological shifts is that AI is not replacing one job it is learning how to replace all jobs, simultaneously and across industries. It doesn’t require rest, it doesn’t demand wages, and it improves at exponential speed.
We are not training the replacement for one profession we are training the replacement for the entire concept of work.
In previous industrial shifts, displaced workers often had somewhere to go; factories replaced farms, offices replaced factories, and then the digital economy opened new creative and service opportunities. Retraining was difficult, but possible. Today, that safety net no longer exists. The industries that AI is targeting are the same ones people were retrained into over the last 40 years. And the speed at which AI is mastering new capabilities far outpaces the time it takes for any workforce to adapt.
Worse, most new jobs created by AI will not be labor intensive or widely distributed; they will be high leverage, high efficiency roles designed to manage or interface with the AI itself. A few people will get those jobs. The majority will not. We are facing the first economic shift where technology doesn’t just change the job it erases the need for human labor at its core.
Between 2025 and 2035, the labor market will experience a transformation more violent and more total than anything in living memory. Entire sectors will hollow out and not slowly, but in cascades. Customer service centers, administrative offices, marketing departments, accounting firms, and freelance platforms will be stripped of jobs as AI becomes not just cheaper, but better. Even creative industries, once thought safe, will face a flood of AI generated content that drowns out human work by sheer volume and speed.
As more jobs disappear, the few that remain will become intensely competitive. A shrinking pool of employment will be chased by a growing sea of displaced workers. Wages will compress. Contracts will become gig based, precarious, and conditional. The idea of career stability will vanish. Even many of the so called “knowledge workers” will find themselves irrelevant not because they lack skills but because they are now economically irrational to hire.
In this new economy, inequality will no longer be a political talking point it will be a structural inevitability. The few who own and deploy the AI will generate staggering profits. Everyone else will scramble for scraps. And in this scramble, the illusion that “hard work leads to prosperity” will finally break.
This is not just another economic shift. It is the end of an era, the final decoupling of labor from survival. And while the early adopters and corporate owners will ride a wave of unprecedented prosperity, most will face the opposite: uncertainty, dependency, and quiet despair. The fabric of society will begin to strain under the weight of too many people with nothing left to offer the market.
Governments will lag behind, as they always do. Their responses will be reactive, not strategic. By the time policy begins to catch up, the damage will be done. Basic care systems like universal healthcare and UBI will eventually appear but only after unrest forces the issue. And even then, they will arrive thin, late, and insufficient.
In the next article, we’ll explore the social fracture that follows: how the new economy divides into winners and losers, how society stratifies into castes, and why, for most, VR and antidepressants may become the only remaining comforts.