Everyone is Googling the future of work.
With fingers crossed that their current “intelligent” role—knowledge worker, analyst, developer, scientist, consultant—won’t be the next to be rendered obsolete by AI. We refresh headlines hoping for reassurance: AI will augment, not replace. New jobs will emerge. Humans will always be needed.
But I think this is where we’re failing to ask the right question.
For generations, humans have been trained—conditioned, really—into the hustle mentality. Work longer, harder, and sleep less. Grind for 18 hours if you can. Productivity is the virtue and constant exhaustion is a badge of honor. And at the end of it all, we’re promised prosperity, dignity, and meaning.
But what if that entire premise is about to collapse?
What if AI combined with fully capable robotics can do most, if not all, of the work required to sustain society? Not just white-collar work, but physical labor, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare assistance, agriculture, and infrastructure maintenance. What if machines don’t just help us work—but eliminate the need for most human labor altogether?
Would they still not generate the prosperity we all need?
And if they can, then perhaps the uncomfortable truth is this: the more jobs AI can automate, the better it may be for humanity as a whole. Not worse.
That idea feels almost heretical in a world built on hustle. But imagine a society where machines work relentlessly—without fatigue, ego, or burnout—for the benefit of all humanity. Humans, on the other hand, spend their time doing what humans uniquely can do: building meaningful relationships, caring for families, creating art, traveling, resting, thinking, healing, and simply being human.
Maybe it’s time we stop fearing automation and start supporting it. Maybe it’s time to ditch the hustle mentality entirely—and accelerate the machines taking over work, rather than slowing them down.
That thought alone is enough to unsettle most dinner table conversations. But it’s not science fiction anymore.
How Fast AI Has Actually Moved
We underestimate AI progress because we experience it incrementally, not cumulatively. But zoom out just a few years and the acceleration is impossible to ignore.
AlphaFold was a turning point. Protein folding—a problem that stumped biology for decades—was effectively solved by AI. That wasn’t an incremental improvement but rather a categorical leap. Suddenly, years of lab work collapsed into hours of computation. Drug discovery, structural biology, and molecular research were permanently altered.
And that was before foundation models went mainstream.
Since then, we’ve seen AI systems reason across domains, generate code, interpret medical images, assist in scientific discovery, and learn from multimodal inputs—text, images, audio, video—simultaneously. What once required teams now fits inside a model checkpoint.
2025 has been particularly remarkable. The quality, speed, and autonomy of AI systems have crossed thresholds that no longer feel experimental. These systems in some cases, are outperforming human experts outright.
All signs point to 2026 being even more consequential. We may see breakthroughs that once felt symbolic of human intellectual dominance: a solution to Navier–Stokes, another Clay Millennium Prize problem falling, or scientific discoveries that redefine entire fields.
AGI’s Domino Effect
The conversation inevitably turns to AGI—artificial general intelligence. The moment when AI systems can reason, learn, and transfer knowledge across domains at a level comparable to or exceeding humans.
Whether AGI arrives suddenly or gradually is almost beside the point. What matters is what happens after.
Once you have systems that can improve systems, everything becomes a domino effect. Scientific discovery accelerates. Engineering cycles shrink. Materials science, energy research, medicine, climate modeling—all move faster than human institutions can adapt.
This is why infrastructure matters. Massive data centers, specialized compute clusters, and initiatives like Project Stargate are the physical scaffolding of the next economic order. Compute becomes the new oil, and intelligence becomes abundant.
And when intelligence is abundant, it becomes cheap.
That single fact—cheap intelligence—may be the most disruptive economic force humanity has ever encountered.
When AI Acquires a Body
AI on its own is powerful. But AI with a physical body changes everything.
Robotics has long been the bottleneck. Software advanced quickly; hardware lagged. That gap, however, is fast closing. Projects like Tesla’s Optimus are early signals that humanoid robots are capable of learning tasks, adapting to environments, and operating continuously are no longer speculative.
China, in particular, is moving aggressively in this space—combining manufacturing expertise, state-backed investment, and AI research to scale robotics at speed. When these systems mature, they won’t just work in factories. They’ll handle logistics, construction, caregiving, agriculture, and maintenance.
At that point, labor—both cognitive and physical—ceases to be scarce.
And when labor isn’t scarce, the entire economic model shifts.
The Ripple Effects on Labor Markets
| There’s no polite way to say this: massive job losses are coming. |
Not overnight. Not all at once. But steadily, persistently, and across sectors. Jobs won’t just disappear; they’ll hollow out. Fewer humans will be needed to produce more value than ever before.
This is not a failure of workers nor laziness nor a skills gap but a structural shift.
Intelligence will be cheap and so will labor. Hence, productivity will detach from human effort.
And as AI plus robotics drive down the cost of goods and services, everything becomes cheaper—food, transportation, manufacturing, energy, healthcare interventions. Scarcity diminishes, even as traditional employment collapses.
This is the paradox: abundance without jobs.
Which brings us inevitably to Universal Basic Income.
UBI as the Great Equalizer
Universal Basic Income isn’t a utopian fantasy.
In a world where machines generate most economic value, distributing that value becomes a political and moral necessity. UBI acknowledges a simple truth: humans deserve dignity and security even when traditional work is no longer required.
It decouples survival from employment.
Critics worry that UBI will make people lazy. Agreeably, that could be the case, though history suggests otherwise. Humans are inherently driven to create hierarchies, challenges, and meaning. Even without jobs as we know them, people will build new forms of status, competition, and exchange.
Capitalism is likely to mutate, not disappear.
There will still be markets, prestige, innovation, and inequality—just expressed differently. The human species is remarkably resilient and endlessly inventive. If anything, we’ll find new ways to reintroduce competition, identity, and ambition.
The “fittest” will still survive—but fitness may no longer mean working the longest hours. It may mean creativity, emotional intelligence, adaptability, or vision.
So… What’s Pharmacogenomics Got To Do With It?
Honestly? Not much.
Pharmacogenomics is just one of many scientific domains that will be transformed by AI-driven intelligence abundance.
We stand at the edge of a future that challenges our deepest assumptions about work, value, and purpose. The machines are coming—not to steal from us, but to free us from an outdated economic bargain.
Whether we choose fear or imagination is still up to us.
Here’s to hoping we choose wisely.
And on that note—here’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas.
