Every previous wave of technological disruption displaced workers over decades. The industrial revolution took a full generation to restructure labor markets. The transition from agriculture to manufacturing played out over 50 years. Even the internet revolution, which moved fast by historical standards, gave workers roughly 15-20 years to adapt.
AI is compressing that timeline to months.
This week as we reported on Moonshots, Anthropic published data showing that more than 80% of the code merged into their codebase is now written by Claude. Their engineers are shipping 8x as much code per quarter as they were two years ago. On the same day, OpenAI’s head of reinforcement learning told an interviewer they’d “turn AI on AI itself” within six months. The models aren’t just doing work faster. They’re learning to do the work of making themselves better.
A 24-year-old graduating this spring with a computer science degree, $150,000 in student debt, and a plan to become a software engineer is walking into a labor market where AI can already do 76% of open-ended coding tasks successfully, up from 26% just six months ago. That number is not going down.
And software engineering is the canary. Legal research, financial analysis, medical diagnostics, content creation, customer support, consulting, translation, accounting: the list of knowledge-work categories where AI performs at or above entry-level human capability is growing every quarter.
The people this hits first and hardest are not manual laborers. They’re the exact demographic that has driven every revolution in modern history: educated young people who did everything they were told, took on debt to get degrees, and are now discovering that the economy has no use for them.
THE MISSING SAFETY VALVES
Previous generations had escape routes. In 19th-century Europe, disenfranchised young men could emigrate to the Americas. In post-Civil War America, they could go west. In the mid-20th century, expanding government and military provided employment floors. None of those valves exist at the same scale today.
There’s no frontier to absorb millions of displaced knowledge workers. With drones military forces will shrink, not grow. Government employment is contracting in most Western democracies. And the gig economy which once served as a buffer, is itself being automated. (The Gig economy is where a person or business is contracted to complete task-based work for another business or person. Transactions usually happen through a mobile application or website).
Historically, the other safety valve was family formation. Young men with jobs get married, have children, buy homes, and acquire stakes in social stability. Young men without jobs don’t. In every revolution I’ve cited, the inability of young men to marry and start families was a compounding accelerator of rage. Marriage rates in the US for men under 30 are already at historic lows. AI-driven job displacement will push them lower.
One more factor that has no historical precedent: this generation of potentially disenfranchised young men is the most networked in human history. The Arab Spring proved that social media enables radicalization and coordination faster than any government can respond. The tools available now make 2011-era Twitter look primitive.
THE COUNTERARGUMENT AND WHY I’M STILL CONCERNED
The optimist’s case, is that AI will create new jobs faster than it destroys old ones. That has been true of every previous technological revolution. The automobile eliminated horse-related jobs and created millions of new ones. Self driving cars and trucks will decimate jobs. The internet destroyed retail jobs and created the entire digital economy.
AI will generate new categories of work we can’t yet imagine. But the timing matters enormously. If the destruction comes in 2-3 years and the creation takes 10-15, you have a decade-long window where tens of millions of young people in developed economies have no economic pathway. A decade is more than enough time for the pattern to repeat.
Jack Goldstone’s research shows that revolutionary conditions require three elements arriving simultaneously: elite overproduction (too many educated people for too few positions), fiscal crisis (governments unable to fund social programs), and mass mobilization potential (large cohorts of idle young people with the tools to organize). AI could deliver all three within the same compressed timeframe.
WHAT WE NEED TO DO ABOUT IT
This is not a prediction of inevitability. It’s a risk assessment. And the response needs to be proportional to the risk.
First, we need to radically restructure education. Four-year degrees that cost six figures and train people for jobs that AI can do are worse than useless. They’re incendiary. Education needs to move toward human skills that complement AI: judgment, leadership, creativity, physical-world expertise, and entrepreneurship.
Second, we need to accelerate new job creation, not just wait for it to emerge organically. Government policy, corporate investment, and entrepreneurial energy should be directed at identifying and scaling the new categories of work that AI enables, not just the AI itself.
Third, we need honest public conversation about timelines – there is NOT enough public discourse going on regarding this potential outcome. The worst possible outcome is to tell a generation of young people that everything will be fine, hand them diplomas they borrowed $150,000 to earn, and let them discover the truth on their own. That’s how you get revolutions.
The pattern is clear. The demographics are in place. The technology is accelerating. The question is whether we’re smart enough to learn from 400 years of history, or whether we repeat it. Because the change is happening so quickly it is unlikely unbelieving governments will do what is necessary for its people. The Bible reveals where we are in God’s history, as prophesied the world is casting off God and His commandments and persecution of Christians is increasing.
Fortunately, God is still in control and we know Jesus returns to restore righteousness but before He does, God has told us that lawlessness will increase and a time of tribulation will exist for those that love God and choose to keep His commandments.
“For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.
“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” Matthew 24:7-12
Fortunately, Jesus continues with: “But the one who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” Matthew 24:13-14
We know from Revelation that in the “last days” God not only sends two witnesses from heaven to be His witnesses on Earth, but He also sends three angels with the following messages:
ANGEL 1. “And he said with a loud voice, Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.” Revelation 14:7
ANGEL 2. ” Another angel, a second, followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.” Revelation 14:8
ANGEL 3. “And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” Revelation 14:9-10



