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- The Hybrid SocialWill AI make people lose jobs?
Will AI make people lose jobs?
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Italiano (Italian)
Every technological revolution has changed the rules of the game. But those who have been able to adapt have always found a new role to play.
Collective anxiety fueled by the media
Catastrophic headlines and sensationalism: “AI will replace us all”
In the public imagination, Artificial Intelligence is often described as a dark force poised to wipe out millions of jobs. This perception is fueled by alarmist headlines that leverage panic and uncertainty rather than data reality. “AI will replace 80 percent of jobs,” “Goodbye employees: AI will make them all useless,” “Will we work only 3 days a week or be unemployed for life?”
These are some of the headlines populating newspapers, social media and blogs, generating a widespread sense of social anxiety.
The problem is not the emphasis with which they are presented, but the total and utter analytical vacuum that accompanies them. These articles never distinguish sectors, roles that can be automated and those that cannot, activities that will be assisted and those that will actually be eliminated. The result of this media catastrophe is a message of fear: either you adapt or you disappear. In reality, the truth is much more nuanced and less radical.
This propagandistic approach used only to generate clicks reminds me of other historical times when a new technology was demonized out of ignorance or defense of the status quo. This was seen with computers, with the Internet, with social media, with industrial automation. AI is no exception: it is interpreted not as a potential tool, but as a hostile, autonomous agent acting to “steal” something from the human being.
In such a context, it is crucial to recover a lucid and informed vision, capable of distinguishing between assumptions, fears and hard data. Only with knowledge is it possible to overcome collective hysteria and face impending change with strategic intelligence rather than irrational and unfounded panic.
Confusion between automation and extinction
In my opinion, one of the most common distortions in the various debates on Artificial Intelligence concerns the confusion between the automation of activities and the extinction of professions. This is a gross conceptual error that amplifies unfounded fears and paralyzes critical and strategic thinking.
The reality is much more articulated: AI does not sistitute trades but transforms tasks within trades. I realize that the sentence may not be clear to everyone so let’s give an example.
The job of the journalist… AI can automate the writing of standardized articles (such as sports reports or financial bulletins), but it cannot and, in all likelihood, will never replace editorial sensibility, critical inquiry, the ability to construct an investigation, ask relevant questions in an interview, or interpret a cultural context.
This applies not only to publishing, but to a multitude of other fields. AI can assist, optimize, and speed up many of the phases of work, but this does not imply that the entire profession is undone. On the contrary, data show that in many cases, the presence of AI creates new functions, new responsibilities, and new hybrid roles.
To confuse automation with the erasure of a profession is like saying that the invention of the washing machine erased the trade of those who washed clothes by hand. Today we can say that this is not the case; it has freed up time and resources, allowing people to devote themselves to something else: to education, creativity, study or more value-added activities.
The real crux then is not loss, but transformation: a process that requires adaptation, continuous training, and open-mindedness. AI will only take meaning away from those roles that refuse to evolve, not those that accept the challenge of change by using AI to their advantage.
AI scares those who shouldn’t be there: the end of undeserved roles?
A little-discussed aspect of the public debate is that AI really scares only two categories of workers: those who are too vertical, but especially those who are too weak on merit and who are protected by non-transparent dynamics. That is, specialists who are incapable of upgrading outside their niche because they have not developed a mind capable of juggling cross-cutting contexts, and especially people who occupy roles for which they have no real skills, but have found themselves there by recommendation or kinship. Yes, especially these people would do well to start worrying!
In Italy, a country still strongly anchored to logics of titles, seniority and positioning rather than real value, AI is becoming an uncomfortable mirror. Not because it demeans humans, but because it exposes the functional uselessness of many roles. If 30 seconds with ChatGPT is all it takes to get a document that would take some offices 3 days and 6 signatures, it begs the question: was that position really needed?
In this light, the fear of AI is not fear of change, but fear of transparency. For the first time, a technology is able to measure (very often in real time), the value produced versus time spent, operational redundancy and actual contribution.
Perhaps paradoxically, the advent of artificial intelligence represents an opportunity to initiate, even indirectly, a process of natural meritocracy. Not the one imposed by decree, but the one that emerges when the system stops tolerating the useless because there is an objectively more efficient alternative.
Therefore, the fear is justified only in one sense: if your role exists only because you are unable to be able to do anything else and are unable to reinvent yourself, you do not generate added value and objectively represent a burden because you do not devote yourself to your work with passion and dedication but only to make ends meet and take your salary.
Those who are creative cannot be afraid of something that by definition is not creative. AI does not have insights; it merely performs tasks as it has been trained to do them.
The productivity paradox: we fear what should lift us up
One of the most glaring contradictions in the Artificial Intelligence debate is the fact that many workers seem to fear the very thing that, in theory, should relieve them.
Technological innovations have always aimed to optimize time, reduce errors, and automate processes. Yet in the face of AI this logic is reversed. If efficiency was once desirable, it now becomes a threat. But why?
Because in many organizations, both public and private, real productivity has never been a variable in the equation. People work or pretend to work to fill schedules, defend roles, maintain balance between weak skills and repetitive tasks. In these contexts, the arrival of a system that can do in 5 minutes what it takes a team 3 days to deliver is perceived not as liberation, but as existential danger.
The real problem, then, is not AI itself; it is that AI challenges the value of activities whose value was already questionable. Automation makes visible the absurdity of entire business processes built on slowness, unnecessary intermediation, and repetition for its own sake.
But there is also an even deeper issue: productivity creates empty space, and emptiness, culturally, is scary. Those who work in companies that do not reward individual initiative, creativity and strategic thinking wonder, “If AI frees up 3 hours a day for me…. What will I do with that time? Will I be valued for what I can create or for what I no longer have to do?”
In this ambiguity lies the real paradox: the technology that could finally allow humans to focus on what matters is experienced as an attack on survival. But fose, the problem is not the technology but the cultural model that has accustomed us to working to exist rather than to produce value.
Similar historical cases
When ecommerce came along, it was said, “It’s the end of stores.”
The introduction of ecommerce generated, at the time, a wave of panic much like the one that accompanies Artificial Intelligence today. There were fears that physical stores would close en masse, that real shopping would become obsolete, and that entire industries, from retail to logistics to the real estate market of store rentals, would collapse.
Yet, in hindsight, we know today that this was not the case…. Ecommerce did not destroy traditional commerce: it forced it to evolve. Many small stores started selling online, malls integrated omnichannel strategy, big brands invested in hybrid platforms. Click&collect, live commerce, digital drive-in was born. The shopping experience is not dead, it has transformed into phygital experience i.e., a physical and digital experience together.
In fact, what happened is exactly what is happening with AI today: those who resisted were left behind; those who adapted their model thrived. The retailer who saw ecommerce as a threat closed. The one that saw it as an opportunity, an extension of its service, gained new market share. This evidence teaches us that each technology does not erase the existing but reshapes the competitive environment. It is not technology that kills a business, but the inability to adapt to the new paradigm.
Industrialization and the end of artisans?
In the late 19th century, when the first steam engines and mechanical looms began to replace the manual labor of artisans, people cried out in scandal: “This is the death of the dignity of labor,” said many. And there was no shortage of concrete reasons: those who had spent a lifetime working with wood, iron, fabric with skill and dedication suddenly saw their craft reduced to a repetitive, impersonal, automated process.
But again, the apocalyptic prophecy proved inaccurate. Industrialization did not kill human labor, it multiplied it.
New figures, new specializations, new professional hierarchies were born. Handicraft work did not disappear: it changed roles, scaled down but did not lose value. Even today we can buy a jacket from a famous brand and pay 300 euros. Getting it made to measure by a craftsman, choosing the fabric, the buttons, the style, the workmanship can cost 3,000 euros!
Thus, there is still a context today in which uniqueness and quality are much more important parameters than quantity.
That industrial transition was one of the most powerful levers of economic and social growth in history. It enabled the emergence of the working classes, urbanization, union rights, the very concept of regulated working hours. Without that transition, there would not have been modern protections, mass access to consumption, or the ability to work outside an agricultural or feudal context.
Those who knew how to move from fear to organization, from the store floor to the factory, not only maintained their professional dignity, but helped build a new model of civilization that has allowed us to get where we are today with discoveries in science and technology that have in fact greatly simplified our existence and extended our lives.
Today, AI is viewed with the same suspicion: cold, impersonal, dehumanizing; but again, it is not the tool itself that brings about change, but the system’s ability to absorb it, modulate it, and channel it into new social and professional meanings.
Computerization and office work
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the massive introduction of personal computers into offices was experienced, once again, as a threat. It was said that computers would eliminate the need for administrative staff, that paper documents would disappear, and that human beings would become mere software accessories.
Some of the truth is there…. Many repetitive and manual functions have been replaced by spreadsheets, databases, document management systems. But what was lost in mechanical activities has been compensated for by the emergence of new cognitive and digital responsibilities. Computerization has given rise to jobs that did not exist before: data entry specialists, systems engineers, project managers, IT managers, functional analysts, developers, software engineers, etc. etc.
The secretary has become office manager, the bookkeeper has learned to use accounting software, the archivist has evolved with digital filing… The job remained but changed its skin.
This shows that whenever a technology enters a business, it does not destroy the entire ecosystem, but recombines existing businesses. Some contract, some expand, and some are born from scratch.
Once again, AI today presents itself with an impact similar to that of computerization: powerful, cross-cutting, barely visible to the naked eye but capable of profoundly redefining processes. And as then, the outcome will depend on only one thing: the willingness of each professional to upgrade.
The wrong predictions of the recent past
The history of innovation is littered with dire predictions that have in fact never come true, but then again a catastrophist headline pulls much more. Thus, as we have seen in the previous paragraphs, there are many technological innovations that have brought fear of change, a fear unfounded since change has always been positive. A technology is born when one feels the need to use it…. I start thinking about a hammer only when I have the need to hammer a nail in the wall, not before.
Prediction errors do not arise from incompetence, but from a recurring methodological error: we regard technology as an active agent, and human beings as passive. In reality, while technology evolves, humans react, adapt, reinvent themselves; and that is precisely where the catastrophic prophecies fall apart.
The transformation of existing roles
One of the most important but least understood pieces of evidence is that most of the changes brought about by AI do not involve the disappearance of roles, but rather their internal transformation. Job titles remain, tasks are rewritten. Priorities, modes of operation, tools and required skills change.
An advertising graphic designer today can no longer just layout static elements, he has to know visual prompts to generate drafts with DALL-E or Midjourney, he has to know how to edit texts from an SEO perspective, and in some cases he interacts with AI tools that optimize campaigns. The strategic part, however(message, positioning and tone of voice) remains totally in the hands of the human because he is the one who has the insight and this is where value is generated.
An architect once focused solely on CAD software and building constraints can now use generative AI to create design variations, explore new materials, test solutions in virtual environments therefore he is not replaced, he is empowered!
A copywriter no longer writes everything from scratch, he orchestrates the text, combining human intuition with AI-driven text development. His role shifts from production to semantic curation and supervision; and meanwhile a new figure is born in this context, that of the prompt writer i.e., the one who knows how to ask AIs in the right way to get the results he expects.
Even in the seemingly more exposed areas such as customer care or technical support, AI handles the basic levels, but the human rises to the higher levels where empathy, adaptation and negotiation are needed. Professionals who once handled repetitive tickets now become chatbot trainers, quality supervisors, support experience designers, and solve customer care problems where AI lacks the tone and empathy to be able to solve them.
AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the most repetitive part of your job and asks you to become something more.
In this scenario, those who upgrade, those who are willing to look at AI as a solid ally can level up, not be pushed out. The only real risk is to remain identical to oneself while the world is changing.
Working with AI, not against: the “augmented” professional
The most common instinctive reaction toward AI is defensive: “I must protect myself,” “I must prevent it from stealing my job.” But this is a static, losing mindset. The question is not whether AI will replace you. The question is whether you will be able to use it to your advantage to become better.
Generative, conversational, predictive AIs are not enemy entities; they are tools. Exactly as electricity, the computer, ecommerce, the combustion engine, the cloud have been. And like any powerful tool, their value depends on who wields them.
Today, a lawyer who knows how to use ChatGPT or Claude to draft a first draft, extract case law references, or simulate a line of argument is no less competent: he or she is faster, more scalable, and more competitive.
A designer who knows how to use DALL-E to generate a dozen visual proposals in 30 seconds is no less creative; he or she is freer to choose, iterate, and dare.
A recruiter who uses AI models to extract recurring patterns in resumes and verify them with their own critical eyes is not outdated: it is empowered.
AI is not a force that pushes you away. It is a force that comes alongside you if you let it and are willing to let it be part of your work asset. It is just like what happens in a team, the collective intelligence grows if everyone knows their value. In this case, the human remains irreplaceable in the areas where they are needed: intuition, empathy, strategic vision, moral responsibility. The future of work is not human or artificial, it is human and artificial.
The winning mindset: adaptive, not defensive
There is a common trait shared by all people who have been able to go through major historical changes unscathed: an adaptive mindset. Not necessarily brilliant, not always technically brilliant, but able to read the signs of change, accept them and act accordingly. Fighting against something inevitable is not only futile it is a waste of valuable time. These people did not resist: they studied, observed, experimented. They understood that the real danger is not change itself, but immobility.
Today more than ever, this principle comes back to center stage. In a world evolving at the speed of light, value is no longer in the position you occupy but in the speed with which you can move, relocate, and reinvent yourself. AI does not reward those with desks, but those with vision, and it silently and inexorably punishes those who are entrenched in nostalgia for “the way things used to work.”
So many people will stand still because they are under the illusion that change is optional. It isn’t! Adapting is the only possible way forward. Resisting is not a strategy; it is only a slow sentence. Yet many prefer to deny, reject, belittle what they do not know in perfect Italian style.
A totally renewed mental posture is needed today more than ever. Not the “I defend myself” one but the “I prepare myself” one. Not that of “I am satisfied with what I know,” but that of “I want to understand how I can transform myself and what I can become for the better.”
You don’t need to be an engineer, you need to be curious, open and quick to learn. It takes reading, trying, getting help from an AI tool, wondering how it might benefit your profession. Not everything works, but just trying puts you ahead of those who don’t even ask the question.
After all, it is not the cechnology that decides who stays and who goes.
It is the mindset with which one approaches it.
Those with adaptive mindsets not only survive but flourish!
Work is not dying, it is evolving and asking us to do the same
We have seen how each revolution has had its own monster to fear. Each time the worst was feared and each time the reality turned out to be different: not less work, but different work. Not less humanity, but humanity distributed, rewritten and sometimes forced out of the comfort zone.
AI is not different it is just faster, deeper and more persuasive, but it is not here to destroy work, it is here to shake up what was already not working: weak roles, unproductive repetitiveness, inefficient bureaucracy, unmotivated protections. It is scary because it lays bare the futility, and because it makes evident what until yesterday we could still pretend not to see.
But for those with talent, for those willing to learn, for those ready for change , AI is not a threat, it is a lever. An opportunity to level up and shed the superfluous, something to refocus on what really matters: intuition, planning, relationships, vision.
Work is not dying; it is changing shape. It is asking each of us, “What are you willing to become?”
Those who can respond with clarity, courage and adaptive intelligence will not only not lose their place, they will build something new and superior.
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