“Hope everyone enjoys their last year of meaningful work!” That’s what YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley posted on X in late February. The subtext was that artificial intelligence is on track to drastically change the workforce. And, in many industries, the transformation has already begun. Burger King is reportedly launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees and check if they say “please” and “thank you”. Software Engineers are now “vibe coding” with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s advanced coding models. And companies like Microsoft and Shopify are encouraging employees to offload some tasks to AI tools.

The vision of the technology “coming for our jobs” has existed since AI first emerged on the scene, but the promise of increased productivity has sold some workers on a new goal: learning to work alongside an AI-powered workforce. It conjures up a question that’s similar to the one Park Chan-wook posed in the (Oscar-snubbed) 2025 comedic thriller No Other Choice. Without too many spoilers: if AI wipes out a number of professions completely, what are people willing to do to ensure their place as one of the few “valuable” humans left? 

As a writer, I’m used to hearing that AI will one day replace me, as if quantity, not quality, is the deciding factor in the words people connect with. Freelance writer Liz tells me she already feels like she competes with AI. “I feel pressure to over-deliver on everything I do, as AI has given me a persistent feeling of being replaceable,” she says. “If a machine is perceived as having all of these ‘capabilities’, human labour becomes hard to justify.” After noticing a recent dip in writing opportunities, Liz suspects that AI is at least a factor. “I have also noticed a rise in a new type of gig: postings for freelancer writers not to write but to train AI,” she says. 

After graduating in December, Natália Oprzadek-Vodilková, a 21-year-old writer in New Jersey, has been using AI in an attempt to make it past the AI-screenings on online job listings. “You have to get chosen first by the algorithm to even be considered by a human,” she says. “I found myself really stressed over whether I’m using the right keyword, asking if I’m sending applications out into the void, so I started asking AI how it thinks I can appeal to the applicant tracking system.” Usually, says Oprzadek-Vodilková, ChatGPT will give her some kind of direction. The problem is there's just no way to tell if it works – except for landing a job, which she hasn’t done yet. “At a certain point, everybody’s just going to be doing the exact same thing, competing to not get auto-filtered by copying the job description, so how do I stand out?”

“At a certain point, everybody’s just going to be doing the exact same thing, competing to not get auto-filtered by copying the job description, so how do I stand out?”

For those already in the workforce, like 29-year-old Jalana Torres, who recently moved to San Francisco to work in communications, being an early adopter of AI can feel like the best bet in securing your future at a rapidly changing company. This can mean taking on a larger workload under tighter AI-inspired deadlines. “If a colleague uses AI to turn around social copy twice as fast and I don’t, eventually that becomes a problem,” she says. “You can have reservations and still recognise that you have to adapt to the reality we’re in.” By using every new tool that comes along, Torres is hoping her open mindset might make her more “valuable”, since her skill set alone no longer feels like enough. “I don’t want to be phased out, and I do sometimes wonder whether I’ll need something like an MBA or another degree just to stay competitive.”

Considering that 71 per cent of Americans are worried that AI will “put too many people out of work permanently”, you can’t blame people for wanting to secure their place in the future. If AI agents can achieve rapid, “infinite” productivity, it’s only natural to compare our output as humans and feel like we need to do more, much faster, to keep up. While there’s also talk of a four-day work week that could come with all the “free time” that embracing AI will allow, there’s one glaring issue with this promise: major companies are not developing AI with workers in mind. Our relationship with AI exists under a capitalist system, which already fundamentally treats workers as inherently and perpetually replaceable. 

Long before ChatGPT and Claude entered the workplace, we were already sold a similar myth through one of the earliest mainstream examples of AI: social media algorithms. Unable to rely on companies for basic benefits or job security, people bought into the promise of the “personal brand” becoming key to a long-lasting career. Essentially, if you could rack up enough followers, not only would every company want to work with you, but you wouldn’t even need to log into Slack. As the influencer economy has played out, we’ve seen some getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in brand deals, while others fade quickly into obscurity after going viral once. 

I use social media algorithms as an example because they illustrate how Big Tech companies can impose their view of people as transactional and monetisable, and how quickly we accepted ourselves as brands. Far from the dream of democratising industries, we now know that social media algorithms are not only riddled with biases but are accelerating the way we consume people as content. It’s no longer enough to just have followers: you have to keep up with the Internet’s insatiable appetite. Nothing and no one is “irreplaceable” in a space that is evolving at warp-speed for the sake of technological progress and innovation.

“I don’t want to be phased out, and I do sometimes wonder whether I’ll need something like an MBA or another degree just to stay competitive”

In today’s AI-powered world, tech leaders think less about why they are innovating and more about how quickly they can innovate. They sell a message of technology as self-determining, with society having no choice but to adopt it. But who exactly does that message benefit? “It benefits the people selling it, right? That this is inevitable,” says Human-AI interaction expert Julie Carpenter.

The irreplaceable worker is a compelling fantasy. For workers under mounting pressure to adopt AI, Carpenter says, we’re seeing what happens when institutions make choices for us. It’s very difficult to feel like you can opt out. But we can also no longer afford to think of future-proofing careers by individual means; the pathway forward lies in collective action to secure rights for all workers, regardless of automation. “Hyperstition is a prediction that becomes true when enough people believe in it,” says Maxime Fournes, CEO of PauseAI, a global movement calling to stop the development of more powerful general artificial intelligence systems, at least until it is known how to build them safely. “They say you can’t stop progress, but that’s just nonsense.” Especially when it’s progress just for progress’s sake. 

Fournes’s point – that no law of the universe says that a bunch of people in Silicon Valley have to continue building more powerful AI systems – leads to another necessary realisation: for too long, we have let companies decide who and what is valuable. If anything, the rise of AI only emphasises that value has never been an inherent property of work, but something assigned by the society the work exists within – a choice we can actively make together. (And that’s not to say that a more human-centred approach to AI couldn’t be part of that.) As Carpenter puts it: “History is fraught with rich white guys telling us they know what’s best for humanity.” The only way to become an “irreplaceable” worker is to demand that all the fellow workers around you are invaluable, too.