Boards and CEOs knew they had to keep this quiet...
The invisible replacement trend started very quietly in late 2025 after public backlash against early AI-adoption by large corporations
(while people still posted hilarious hallicinations and bad Gen-AI images desperate to "prove" that AI was idiotic and couldn't possibly be the threat they intuitively felt it was).
Instead of direct layoffs in favour of cheap AI adoption, whenever a role is vacated (quits, retirement, redundancy, promotion), it's permanently backfilled by AI instead of a human.
Remaining workers are pressured to increase productivity and handle multiple roles with AI-based tools. Contracts are not renewed.
Client jobs for freelancers dry up. By 2027, millions transition into a literal fight for unskilled manual jobs (after failing to upskill fast enough). By 2032... well, you can see what happens then...
The chart below shows how the human share
of roles shrinks from 2025 to 2055.
Assumptions (rough, for illustration only): Australia ~10% annual job exit / churn
(based on ~8% changing employer each year plus other exits); US ~30% annual total
separations; UK ~35% annual turnover. All natural exits are filled by AI, not humans.
Lines show the percentage of 2025 human roles remaining and the percentage of roles
now filled by AI.
2025
Most of us had no idea what was coming. The ground was already moving beneath our feet. The systems we trusted felt fragile, shaken by pandemics, wars, climate upheavals and the widening gap between those with capital and those without. Into this came GPT-5 and its kin — not quite gods, but clever enough to hint at something larger. People spoke of “proto-AGI,” and for the first time the idea of a machine mind that could learn anything seemed less like science fiction and more like an obvious inevitability.
2026
That inevitability arrived. A demonstration shook the world — a system that could solve across domains with almost no human input. The reaction was fireworks and sirens at once: corporations celebrated, regulators panicked, and ordinary people began to sense that the very notion of “a career” might be slipping through their hands.
2030
The years that followed brought a steady drift. Creative niches of humanity remained, but most “expensive” white-collar knowledge roles had been effortlessly absorbed into machine competence. Governments ran awkward experiments with basic income, and while some nations stabilised, others recoiled at the politics of paying people to be idle. Climate migration and economic instability rewrote borders. Yet fusion energy flickered to life in laboratories, a promise of abundance.
2035
The robots had completely caught up. Dexterous machines joined the software minds, and manufacturing, logistics, even the sensitive challenge of elder care and similar “untouchable” industries were no longer human monopolies. Nations raced to build sovereign AIs of their own, treating them as nuclear arsenals once were. A treaty was signed, but enforcement proved a paper shield. Inequality stretched to grotesque extremes, as a handful of trillionaires stood against a swelling global precariat.
2040
The 2040s brought collapse of the job contract itself. Work was no longer the spine of society. Most advanced economies turned to universal income or resource credits, while the Global Centre, rich in sunlight and human energy, began to surge. Climate stabilisation finally gained ground — machines scrubbed carbon and tinkered with the sky — but the cures came with their own new ailments.
2045
Humanity faced not an external crisis but an internal one. Leisure was everywhere, but meaning was scarce. New cults, new religions, new “economies of purpose” emerged, offering identity to those no longer bound by necessity. Even language began to mutate, straining to hold the weight of altered lives. Governments themselves leaned on AGI advisers until politics felt like a hybrid theatre, half human, half machine.
2050
The paradox was complete. Information was infinite, but minerals, water and arable land remained contested. AI-run logistics determined who ate what and when. And so we found ourselves nostalgic for effort, for challenge, for difficulty. Retreats opened where one could simulate hardship—labour camps for the wealthy who had never held a tool, ration games for those who longed to remember hunger. People began to crave the sting of necessity as if it were a long-lost delicacy.
2055
A place of abundant time but constrained matter. A place where hardship has become a foreign, nostalgic myth rather than reality. We look back almost fondly on the struggles that once shaped us—the luxury of hardship.