When Work Disappears- The Silent Crisis of the AI Age

The Post On Sunday

When we are children, we imagine the future with a kind of unshakable certainty. Some dream of standing before a classroom, chalk in hand. Others see themselves in crisp suits, working in law, finance, or engineering. For most of us, work becomes more than a way to survive — it is a marker of identity, a source of pride, the anchor that steadies our lives.

But the rise of artificial intelligence is quietly unraveling those anchors. What once felt like stable ground now trembles beneath our feet. The conversation about AI is often framed in terms of innovation, efficiency, and new opportunities. Politicians speak of productivity gains; CEOs talk of competitive advantage. Yet, hidden behind the optimism is a quieter, more unsettling story, one about identity, meaning, and the very real fear of disappearing into irrelevance.

In 2011, economist Guy Standing described a new class of workers, plagued by insecurity and exclusion, as the “precariat.” More than a decade later, a new kind of precariat is forming, the AI precariat. These are not just the unemployed. They are teachers who find themselves replaced by personalized digital tutors; writers and designers competing with machines that can draft and sketch in seconds; accountants and paralegals whose tasks can now be completed faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors by algorithms. For these people, the loss is not only economic. It is existential.

The numbers paint a bleak picture. The IMF warns that 60% of jobs in advanced economies and 40% in emerging markets are already exposed to AI. Nearly a billion jobs worldwide, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, could be disrupted in the next year alone. Some leaders, like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, cling to the belief that AI will open the door to better and “superior” jobs. Others, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, caution that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear within the next four years. And the World Economic Forum’s own predictions show that by 2030, more than four out of ten employers plan to reduce their workforce because of AI.

For those swept aside by the tide, retraining is often presented as the solution. Learn AI, learn coding, learn how to prompt the machine. But this does not answer the deeper question: what happens to a person when the years spent in classrooms, the late nights of study, the sacrifices made to build a profession suddenly mean nothing? What happens when the work that once gave you purpose, routine, and dignity vanishes, not slowly over decades, but in waves?

And those waves are already here. The first came with traditional automation, machines and robots replacing repetitive factory jobs and service roles. The second wave has been brought by generative AI, rewriting the rules in marketing, law, finance, and journalism. Now the third wave, “agentic AI,” is advancing: systems capable of completing multi-step tasks without human oversight, threatening managers, researchers, and administrators. Looming on the horizon is the fourth wave, artificial general intelligence, which could, by the end of this decade, perform most of the cognitive tasks we once believed were uniquely human.

History has shown us what happens when work disappears. When the coal mines shut down in Britain, entire communities collapsed. In the American Rust Belt, the closure of factories left towns gutted, families fractured, and spirits broken. Addiction, despair, and political anger filled the vacuum left by lost livelihoods. The AI revolution threatens to repeat this, but at a scale and speed the world has never seen before.

And yet, as governments and corporations pour billions into AI research, strategies, and regulations, one element remains dangerously neglected: the human soul. Work gives us more than a paycheck. It gives us structure to our days, pride in our skills, a role in society. Strip that away, and people lose more than income. They lose themselves.

This is the shadow of the AI era, not just mass unemployment, but a mass identity crisis. The grief of losing a profession, the isolation from a society that no longer values your skills, and the disillusionment with institutions that promised stability but delivered only uncertainty.

At a retreat of the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, the issue sparked urgent discussion. The conclusion was sobering: the crisis is real, but it is vastly underestimated. If left unaddressed, it could fracture societies, fuel extremism, and unravel the fragile trust that holds communities together.

There are ways forward. Governments can prepare safety nets, from universal basic income to new models of social protection. Communities can create new spaces for belonging and purpose beyond the narrow confines of employment. Mental health support, too often sidelined, must move to the center of the response. And, perhaps most importantly, societies must begin an open conversation about how to redefine meaning when traditional work fades away.

AI promises progress, prosperity, and possibility. But it also demands a reckoning. Because when the jobs are gone, the real question will not be how many machines we have built, but how many humans we have lost along the way.

Who will we be without our work?