AI Is Taking Over: How It Will Transform Work, Purpose, and Power

A new technological era is here—not to replace us, but to redefine how we work, live, and find meaning.

Introduction

In 1589, an English inventor named William Lee stood before Queen Elizabeth I with a revolutionary machine. His creation—a mechanical knitting loom—could do in minutes what a human hand might take hours to stitch. But the Queen refused to grant him a patent. Her reasoning?

“I have too much love for my poor people who obtain their bread by the employment of knitting to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment and thus making them beggars.”

That moment—half empathy, half technophobia—was an early rejection of a labor-saving machine in the name of protecting working-class jobs. And it set a tone that echoes through centuries of innovation.

We’ve heard the refrain ever since: machines will take our jobs, leave us purposeless, render us obsolete. The Luddites destroyed textile machines in the 1800s. Workers feared steam engines would replace their brawn. Then came the computer, and with it, dire predictions that the job market would collapse under silicon chips and blinking screens.

But look around today: the U.S. unemployment rate hovers around a historically low 4.1%.¹ And while it’s true that some jobs have disappeared, it’s also true that entirely new industries—cybersecurity, digital marketing, app development, AI safety—have emerged. History hasn’t proven the pessimists right. Not yet.

So why are we afraid of AI?

Welcome to the Age of Anxiety—and Opportunity

Artificial Intelligence is the latest guest at this long-running dinner party of disruption. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are among the fastest-adopted technologies in human history, already embedded in our workflows, search engines, and creative processes. They help draft legal memos, debug code, and synthesize academic research.

It’s easy to see why people are nervous. Unlike previous technologies that replaced manual labor or routine office work, AI mimics what we once believed was uniquely human: learning, creating, even reasoning.

But that doesn’t mean it replaces us. It redefines what we do.

We’ve seen this movie before. The Industrial Revolution caused massive short-term disruption but led to long-term gains in productivity, wealth, and living standards. The average human in 1850 worked 3,300 hours per year in dangerous, exhausting conditions. Today, that number is closer to 1,800, with safety regulations, weekends, and paid time off.² Innovation brought “short-term disruption, long-term benefits.”³ AI is poised to do the same.

From Tools of the Body to Tools of the Mind

Technological change always starts with the body—engines, factories, machines that lift, move, and make. But AI marks a shift: it’s a tool of the mind.

Today, AI assists doctors in diagnosing cancer, teachers in grading papers, architects in simulating stress tests. And while it can automate rote thinking, it also amplifies human capacity. As a research assistant, an idea generator, a second pair of eyes—it’s already saving professionals hours each week. Personally, in my own life, I’d estimate a 10% boost in productivity using AI tools regularly. That’s modest for now, but it’s growing.

So no, AI hasn’t caused mass unemployment. Not yet, anyway. It has created change. It’s reshaping jobs, workflows, and expectations. It’s not about replacement but rather reorientation.

What Gets Lost and What Gets Gained

We should acknowledge what’s at stake. Technological change is never neutral. It alters power, redistributes labor, and introduces new dependencies. Automation often targets routine tasks but leaves behind a human-shaped core—tasks that involve judgment, empathy, ambiguity.⁴

Still, we must ask: what becomes of our leisure? What becomes of our purpose?

If AI handles the thinking and the doing, what do we do? More time for hobbies? Or more hours glued to screens? If labor becomes less necessary, will fulfillment become more elusive? Will we find new frontiers of creativity—or drift toward hollowness and nihilism?

We’ve seen, through history, that society adapts—slowly, unevenly, often painfully—to major technological transitions. But adapt we do.

Between Singularity and Fizzle: A Democratic Crossroads

There’s a temptation to think in extremes: either we’re hurtling toward an AI utopia or spiraling into existential doom. Reality, as always, is likely somewhere in between.

My personal take? I’m not a doomer, nor an accelerationist. I approach AI from a posture of agnosticism—with reverence for its power and realism about its risks. If you asked me the probability of an AI-caused existential catastrophe, I’d put it at 7-10%. That’s uncomfortably high. But still very much a minority scenario.

More likely is an “industrial revolution” outcome—massive societal transformation without existential collapse. But unlike the first industrial revolution, which gradually empowered workers and birthed democratic institutions, this one could consolidate power in fewer hands. If AI supercharges surveillance, enforces algorithmic preferences, and replaces agency with optimization, we’ll have traded freedom for convenience.

That’s why we need voices to shape AI’s trajectory. Not just to regulate, but to democratize. To fight against its anti-democratic tendencies, not its existence.

We need people who can say, “Yes, this technology is powerful. Yes, it could change everything. So let’s make sure it changes things in ways that are just.”

A Future with AI: Neither Dystopia nor Dreamland

AI is not going away. It will not be “paused” or “stopped” by letters or protests. It’s coming, and it’s coming fast. We are on the cusp of a new era—not unlike the transition from agrarian to industrial society. That shift took centuries to play out. Ours might unfold over decades. Maybe less.

But we are not helpless. We must learn, prepare, and adapt. We can shape AI’s implementation through public policy, collective bargaining, ethical design, and grassroots pressure.

What we cannot afford is denial. Technological anxiety is nothing new. We always fear new technology—and are almost always wrong about the nature of that fear. People worried that machines would make humans obsolete. What actually happened was more complicated: machines made some humans richer, others poorer. Some more powerful, others voiceless. Some freer, others more tightly bound to systems they couldn’t control or understand.

The danger wasn’t the sewing machine—it was who controlled the factory. The danger wasn’t the steam engine—it was who built the railroads and who got left behind. The danger wasn’t the computer—it was how governments and corporations used it to monitor, segment, and manipulate.

What we should fear is not the machine, but our own failure to ask: What is it for? To enhance human flourishing, or to extract more from us, with less in return? Who owns it? A few corporations headquartered in Silicon Valley, or the broader public who will be shaped by its influence? Who benefits? The shareholder? The consumer? The worker? The surveilled? The invisible?

Denial is tempting. It lets us kick the can down the road, to pretend that we can opt out, that the “AI revolution” is still some abstract future event. But it’s already here—in your Gmail inbox, your Spotify algorithm, your insurance premiums, your job search, your classroom, your courtroom.

The machine isn’t the problem. It never was. The problem is whether we shape the machine or whether we let it shape us, quietly, invisibly, irreversibly.

Because if we get the answers above right, AI can help deliver on a centuries-old dream: more time, more safety, more prosperity—not just for the few, but for all.

Conclusion

To those who ask, “Will AI take over the world?”—my answer is yes. But not in the dystopian, robotic overlord kind of way. It will take over in the sense that it will touch every corner of our lives: how we learn, how we work, how we dream, how we define value and meaning.

We should meet that future with eyes open and hands ready—not clenched in fear.

Just as we survived the sewing machine, the steam engine, and the microchip, we’ll survive this too. And we’ll be better off because of it.

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE.

2. Worldwide numbers show an even greater improvement: Maddison’s (2001, p. 347) computations show that between 1870 and 1998 the number of annual hours worked per employee in the highly industrialized western economies fell almost precisely by half, from roughly 2,950 hours per worker in 1870 to 1,500 hours per worker in 1998.

3. Mokyr, et al. (2015).

4. Brynjolfsson, Mitchell, and Rock (2018).