When Work Vanishes

Reckoning with AI, my career, and the hollowing out of value

I'm a canary. An early AI casualty. A copywriter, idea worker, whatever.

In the past, when someone said they worked in advertising, it meant something. Cleverness. Wordplay, wit, the knack for making people look twice at a toothpaste ad. A grasp of tone, culture, timing. Fluency in human friction.

Now I'm not sure what it means.

Classic capitalism thrives on labor arbitrage—moving work wherever it's cheapest. Manufacturing to maquiladoras, to Special Economic Zones, to the global South. An engineer in Fremont became one in Bangalore. A machinist in Dayton lost his job to a robot in Dalian. These transitions were temporary dislocations in an inevitable march toward progress. Learn to code.

AI is different. AI is the next stage: replacing labor entirely. Not moving it—vaporizing it. Not just low-wage work either. High-skill, high-cost sectors are cracking. Law. Writing. Code. Diagnosis. Investment research. Teaching. The stuff machines would never do, because they required judgment, taste, creativity.

I've worked in this zone for decades. I've made my living shaping language into something that sells, persuades, or at least doesn't suck. I've pitched in glass towers and attended Zoom meetings my kitchen table. I've written lines that live for two weeks and die with a soft click.

I always knew this work wasn't sacred. But it was mine. I had honed a craft that was supposed to keep me ahead of the curve.

I also knew—on some level—that I was lucky. My kind of work had been spared. When factory towns emptied out, when retail collapsed, when the phone reps and the freight handlers and the hotel housekeepers got replaced or squeezed, I told myself I was in a different category. That what I did was too nuanced to be automated, too human.

That was a kind of middle-class myopia. The assumption that the intellectual nature of our jobs made them indispensable. That we could watch other sectors fall and somehow remain untouched.

Now the curve is bending differently. AI doesn't need to be perfect—just cheaper, faster, scalable. And crucially, good enough. Good enough for procurement. Good enough to fill quarterly presentations. Good enough to make my name unnecessary.

There's talk about AI as a tool, not a replacement. The comforting version—the Microsoft Copilot demo where the smiling marketer "focuses on strategy" while the assistant does the work. But for many of us, there is no strategy job. Strategy was the job. Thinking was the work.

This isn't just my problem. It's a tremor under every knowledge-sector job… the slightly nausea-inducing subtext when someone asks if you've "played around with ChatGPT." The anxiety in teachers' voices, UX writers', radiologists', product managers', coders. We're all trying not to flinch.

And here's what I need you to understand: this isn't going to get better. It's going to spread. The disruption that's hitting creative work now will cascade through every industry that trades in information, analysis, or expertise. My ex-wife saw it coming and made the jump to healthcare—direct patient care, the kind of work that still requires human presence. She was smart. She got out while getting out still meant something.

It's not about losing jobs tomorrow. It's about being made adjacent to the job. De-skilled. Marginalized. Turned into QA for machine output. Watching your rate drop and hours disappear while being told to "embrace the opportunity."

Meanwhile, productivity soars. Margins expand. The dream of laborless profit inches closer. AI just accelerates it, makes it cleaner. You don't need to offshore when you can offload.

The logic of capital doesn't require mass employment anymore. It only needs markets. And when language itself becomes a product, even our inner lives can be mined, priced, and replaced.

The loss is hard to explain. Not just money, though that's real. It's erosion. Of dignity. Identity. The quiet pride of being able to say: I made that. I helped. I mattered.

This isn't a manifesto. I don't have solutions. I'm still working, for now. Still writing, pitching. Still pretending my edge is sharper than the blade coming for me. But I can feel it.

I'm writing this down not because it changes anything, but because someone should. Before the air gets too thin.

But maybe there's something else we can do while we're still here. Maybe we can turn toward each other instead of away. Support the people in our networks who are struggling with this transition. Share resources, connections, honest conversations about what's actually happening.

Maybe it’s calling a friend before they vanish from Slack. Passing a lead to someone whose hands still make things. Or even just saying: I see what’s happening. I’m scared too.

Maybe we can build the kinds of communities that don't optimize for productivity but for something harder to measure—care, attention, the small gestures of a slower life.

Maybe that's how we survive this: not by competing with machines, but by doing the things that make us irreplaceably human.