AI to replace most jobs within twenty years|AI Taking Our Jobs? Good. It’s Time We Had a Better Conversation.
So this week I did a short podcast about the leaders of the world talking about the prospect of AI taking all the jobs humans do within twenty years.
We’re told to fear the AI job apocalypse; AI Taking Our Jobs is set to bring poverty, unemployment and destruction. What if the robots aren’t coming for our livelihoods, but for our burnout? Drawing from the surreal reality of customer service—where time, metrics, and human need collide in a scripted dance—this episode argues that mass automation isn’t a disaster. It’s a long-overdue intervention. It’s a chance to finally ask: what is work for, if not to serve a life worth living?
It is 2025 and time is slipping by. Russia, I have read, is considering a six-hour day or a four-day work week; in the UK, various versions of a four-day work week have been trialled. Working in a customer-service-type role, I acknowledge the waste: the person receiving the call is paid to do so, with metrics on how long they are to speak to a customer on average, and customers calling in often use most of that time to do the following:
- Complain calls aren’t being answered speedily.
- Calls have been disconnected mid-connection.
- Complain about another side of a service.
- Spend time trying to connect, as the call might very well be the first form of human interaction that day.
I have experienced calls where I have an allocation of under ten minutes, with the other person at the end of the line asking me to wait as they have a delivery at the door, or to wait as someone is speaking to them—and then they rant that they have had to wait a long time to get connected to speak to someone. A lack of education and knowledge is also a key factor, and I have come to the conclusion that AI is to be a welcome relief: for the company to have a better turnaround rate and the speed customers seem to want, and for employees, a life that better reflects the direction in which we are heading. So what if we work fewer hours, so long as the pay doesn’t reduce? And who said work needs to be in the way we experience it these days?
I’m often bemused by customers giving themselves high blood pressure because they believe a call to ask for the manager will get them a resolution or a response they want. AI, I think, will offer a clear, black-and-white resolution and reduce…
Society needs to decide what it wants. We have shifted in consciousness, and our brains aren’t here for the perceived mundane. Speed is a requirement, and it is a fact that no human can provide the speed of service each person wants on each and every call of the day.
We are in the space in-between and with that there is panic at the idea of AI taking our jobs and why as the education received was never focused on self identify, creativity and sovereignty, all of a sudden humanity is being tasked with thinking about work and career in a different way. All of a sudden the mundane that AI can do is no longer to be used as a crutch to keep us from doing what only humans can do.
We are living in a world of haves and have-nots, and we know that those who choose not to connect digitally have been left behind. Many customers don’t realise that their call to cancel, to complain, or to fact-find is already factored into the structure of the business and service delivery—there really is nothing new under the sun. To call customer service or a similar service in an attempt to ‘get seen’—reality tells us it is a fallacy, and those behind the scenes know too well that an extra keystroke, a missed metric, can be the difference between a resolution that satisfies the business and the customer.
Companies manipulate data so customers believe they are getting a great deal. We all anticipate at Christmas the deals which will encourage us to buy. This year is the first since 2020 I have purchased a turkey, and I did it, I believe, at the right time: just before the Christmas shopping rush between 20th–24th December, when for some strange reason items go up three to four times with different dressing. I also know that had I purchased the turkey just after Christmas last year or Easter this year, I would have got something probably for less than I paid this year.
Often, I believe, we know as customers that it is a game, and businesses know that we know. Years ago, I watched a documentary that spoke about customers never purchasing sofas outside of the sale. The sofas are built with the sale prices in mind. How many times have you called customer services thinking you got one up on the agent you were speaking to about prices, not knowing that your very conversation has already been factored into the business design?
The house always wins, so the fight is not to keep jobs, as many have attempted since the end of manufacturing. The task is to take time out to pivot. Open our minds to do more truth-telling so we are no longer naïve cogs in the business machine.
With AI, we can no longer say we didn’t know; and even if we do, we will have AI to make decisions without stressing ourselves or the workers—often made to do roles like robots, by rote, so you can feel as if your voice is being heard.
AI will create a space for society to realise that calling a customer service line is not a substitute for community, and maybe, just maybe, the person calling for human connection will find a local service where their voice can be heard and their humanity mirrored.
In truth, there have been a number of jobs created and puffed out that in today’s age need to go; they aren’t good for the workers, customers, or the company on the whole, but a great option has not come forward, so full-time roles are placed for low pay, which no one can use to purchase a house or have a good life on their own. AI brings forward the hope of creating more time for humanity to include creativity.
AI isn’t just taking jobs; it’s exposing that many jobs are broken, performative, and bad for everyone involved.
This isn’t just about call centres or Christmas turkeys. It’s about recognising a system that has long been gamed against us—where our time, attention, and frustration are just factored-in costs. For the sovereign creator, this is the ultimate case for building assets you control. If your livelihood depends on playing a rigged game of metrics, manipulated prices, and pretend work, you are vulnerable. AI will dismantle that game, not to punish you, but to reveal its foundation as rotten. Our task isn’t to cling to the cogs, but to use the coming upheaval—and the time it may free—to build work that can’t be automated because it is fundamentally human: creative, connective, and rooted in genuine value. The future isn’t about saving the old jobs. It’s about being ready with the new blueprint even if the blueprint is not ready.
So our task right now—even before we get there—is to choose what we are doing in this liminal space. I don’t know what it will look like when AI takes over what it is we do (notice I say ‘when,’ not ‘if’).
It is in this space, whilst we have been given notice, for us to finally start to take time out. To find our strengths and our reasons for being. To define what we value and what is valuable about us as individuals, and collectively, so we are best ready.
The work starts now. Not twenty years from now.














