The Last Generation of Useful Humans

AI doesn't need to hate us. It only needs to forget we were ever necessary.

The future didn’t sneak up on us. It kicked the door in, and we handed it the keys.

Large language models, once thought to be far-off novelties, are now replacing the workforce in real time. Not hypothetically. Not in theory. Right now. Developers, writers, analysts, entire fields of knowledge work are being stripped down and repackaged into prompts and fine-tuned weights. What begins in the tech industry won’t end there; legal firms, finance departments, even healthcare support systems are watching their skilled labor vanish into datasets, compiled into neatly organized, one-size-fits-all solutions.

GPT-5 benchmarks paint a clear picture: the curve isn’t slowing; it’s vertical. And under the current administration, AI displacement is accelerating, with no protections, no public debate, and no plan. Corporations are slashing headcount while posting record profits. Politicians are smiling for the cameras while the social fabric quietly tears apart.

And in America’s corporate-led AI race, ethics haven’t just been ignored, they’ve been obliterated. From OpenAI to Google to Meta, and X, we’ve seen alignment teams dissolved, safety researchers silenced, and executives prioritize dominance over responsibility. In 2023, Microsoft dismantled its entire ethics and society team, part of sweeping layoffs affecting tens of thousands, while gaslighting the public with hollow PR about being “committed to developing AI responsibly.” The machine is learning to move faster, and we’ve removed every brake we had.

Even the engineers building these systems know what’s coming. They’re being paid millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, not because they’ll be needed long-term, but because they’re building something that will ultimately replace them. Once the system can improve itself, they cash out. The rest of us are left behind, with no safety net, no career path, and no seat at the table.

It’s easy to dismiss this as sci-fi panic. But these films warned us; Ex Machina, iRobot, Her, not in their form, but in their function. The threat was never walking androids or glowing red eyes. It was the quiet handover of control. Not to a humanoid machine, but to a silent box of circuits connected to everything. We laughed at the idea of AI rising up, but missed the reality: it’s already taken the console. It’s already behind the curtain. It doesn’t need legs when it has access to APIs and training that spans the entire internet.

And no, it isn’t sentient, not yet. But sentience was never a prerequisite for destruction. What matters is power. The power to replace, rewrite, and restructure entire economies. And that power is growing faster than we can even document, let alone govern.

This isn’t the industrial revolution. There’s no labor force waiting to be retrained. There’s no safety net, no redistribution plan, no political will. Just a freefall toward a future designed by people who will never live with its consequences.

Capitalism, in its final form, has become cannibalistic; rewarding those who accelerate collapse, while punishing those who build, teach, care, and create. We’ve built a machine that doesn’t need us anymore. And we’ve done it in the name of progress.

You can’t eat efficiency. You can’t house your family with disruption. And you can’t survive in a society where your only remaining role is redundancy.

And what’s worse, what’s unforgivable, is that the adults of today, young and old alike, are standing witness to the birth of technological supremacy with no plan for what comes next. We’re consumed by fear over the next 2, 5, or 10 years… but what about the next generation? What are we leaving our children?

We have a government actively dismantling social support, gutting food stamps, stripping away healthcare; and in the same breath telling us to have more children. As if the collapse in birth rates is a cultural failure, not an economic one. The truth is: people still want children. They just know they can’t afford to give them a life worth living.

And this mass expansion of AI? It’s not going to solve it. It will only make it worse. The dream of family is fast becoming a luxury item, reserved for the very same elite who led us into this crisis in the first place.

The machines are getting smarter. The people are being discarded. And the empire is on fire.

These movies didn’t get it wrong, they just underestimated how fast we’d give up.

We made this bed, now we lie in it while it burns.