The economic impact of AI.
I’ve never been particularly interested in predicting the future. Most predictions are wrong, and history has a habit of humbling people who claim they’ve figured out what’s coming next. That’s why I tend to ignore the hype surrounding most new technologies, investment fads and “once-in-a-generation” opportunities.
But AI has been different.
Over the past year, I’ve found myself quietly changing my own behavior – not because I suddenly became an AI fanatic, but because the evidence kept piling up.
I look at investments differently. I ask different questions when thinking about businesses. Before considering whether to hire someone, my first instinct is now to ask whether AI can do the job instead. I’ve probably spent more time learning about AI over the last twelve months than any other topic because I can no longer convince myself it’s just another technology cycle.
I don’t know what the world will look like ten years from now, and neither does anyone else. But I have reached one conclusion that has fundamentally changed the way I think: continuing to make long-term decisions as if the next decade will look like the last one now strikes me as the riskier assumption.
What Changed My Mind
When I sold my business a few years ago, AI was little more than an interesting toy. Like everyone else, I played with ChatGPT, asked it silly questions and had it write the occasional email or blog post. It was clever, occasionally useful, and fun to experiment with. But I didn’t see it as much more than another tech gadget.
That changed gradually. First, it became my editor. Then my research assistant. Then an intellectual sparring partner that challenged my thinking and helped me work through complex problems.
Before long, it was writing code, updating our websites in seconds instead of hours, creating marketing content, analyzing investments and helping me make better business decisions. Today, I’m writing this article with the help of an AI copy editor that’s been trained to understand how I think and write.
It didn’t stop there. AI became my virtual assistant, my software developer, my social media manager and, increasingly, my business partner. At Tomco Capital we’ve deployed AI throughout our companies, ERPlingo and Medicus Training, where it now runs and manages parts of the business that, not long ago, required people to do manually. Every few weeks another task disappears from someone’s to-do list and quietly becomes an AI workflow instead.
At the same time, I started noticing the same thing happening in the physical world. Our AI-enabled vacuum robot mapped our London apartment without any setup or programming. I watched AI-powered robotic cooking systems preparing meals in a restaurant in Marylebone. Household robots like Neo are beginning to reach consumers for around $500 per month. None of these products are perfect, but that’s almost beside the point. We’re effectively looking at version 1.1 of a technology that is improving at a breathtaking pace.
The interesting part is that I never found myself saying, “Surely it can’t do that yet.” My reaction was almost always the opposite: “Give it another couple of months and it will.” And, more often than not, it did.
That was the point where I stopped thinking about AI as another technology trend and started asking a much bigger question: What happens if this pace of progress continues?
Why I’m Starting To Worry
Every major technological revolution has changed the way we work.
Steam replaced muscle.
Electricity transformed manufacturing.
Computers automated calculations.
The Internet transformed communication and access to information.
Each of these technologies made people more productive. They changed jobs, eliminated some and created many others, but human labor remained at the center of the economy.
I believe AI and robotics represent something fundamentally different.
For the first time, we are teaching machines not only to think, reason and make decisions, but increasingly to act on those decisions. AI is rapidly becoming capable of performing cognitive work that, until recently, only highly educated knowledge workers could do. Robotics is beginning to do the same for physical work. Software is advancing at breathtaking speed. Hardware will almost certainly move more slowly because the physical world is messy, constrained by manufacturing, supply chains and infrastructure. But slower doesn’t mean different. It simply means the timeline is longer.
This leads me to a conclusion that I never thought I would write:
I believe the majority of human labor – both cognitive and eventually physical – will be performed by AI systems and robots within our lifetimes.
Not because machines will suddenly become conscious. Not because of science fiction. But because they will become economically better.
Businesses don’t adopt technology because it’s exciting. They adopt it because it’s cheaper, faster, available 24 hours a day and, increasingly, more capable. History shows that once the economics become compelling enough, adoption isn’t driven by ideology—it’s driven by competition.
If I’m even half right, I don’t think we’re looking at another industrial revolution.
I think we’re looking at the moment when human labor ceases to be the foundation of the global economy.
And this is worrying me.
The Chart That Made Me Pause
A few days ago I came across a chart by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo. It wasn’t the chart itself that caught my attention – it was the idea behind it.
It predicts that once AI reaches AGI (artificial general intelligence = human-level capability) and robotics follows, the majority of human cognitive and physical labor could be replaced over an astonishingly short five-year period, roughly between 2030 and 2035.
Do I believe that exact timeline?
No, not really. In fact, I hope it’s wrong.
Forecasting breakthroughs is almost impossible, and replacing physical labor depends on factories being built, robots being manufactured, supply chains scaling and businesses investing billions of dollars. The physical world simply moves more slowly than software.
But that’s not what made me stop and think. For the first time, I realized I could no longer dismiss the underlying premise.
What if the timeline isn’t five years but ten? Would that really change the conclusion?
I don’t think it would.
Whether it happens between 2030 and 2035 or 2035 and 2040, we’re still talking about the possibility that, within a single generation, AI replaces most cognitive labor while robotics gradually replaces much of our physical labor. Not because machines become conscious or sentient, but because they become economically superior.
That thought has profound implications.
For more than two centuries, our economies have been built around a simple assumption: people exchange their labor for income. Our tax systems, pension systems, healthcare systems, consumer spending and, ultimately, capitalism itself all rest on that foundation.
So the question that keeps nagging at me isn’t whether AI will take jobs.
It’s much bigger than that.
What happens when human labor is no longer the foundation of the global economy?
So What Have I Changed?
I’m not selling my stocks and moving into a bunker.
I’m not predicting the collapse of civilization.
And I’m certainly not claiming to know exactly how this plays out.
But I have changed my behavior.
As an investor, I spend far more time thinking about which companies will benefit from AI and which business models depend on expensive human labor. I also ask myself a different question: if AI changes the economic landscape as profoundly as I think it might, how should I position my family’s wealth today rather than react later?
As a business owner, the question has changed from “Who should we hire?” to “Can AI do this first?” Every repetitive task is now a candidate for automation. Every workflow gets challenged. Every new hire would have to clear a much higher bar than it did two years ago.
Personally, I’ve made AI part of my daily life. I use it to write, research, code, challenge my thinking, build software, analyze investments and automate parts of my businesses and personal life. The goal isn’t to replace human relationships or creativity. It’s to understand this technology well enough that I’m not standing on the sidelines while the world changes around me.
Most importantly, I’ve stopped dismissing things that sound impossible.
Today my reaction is different.
“Give it another couple of months.”
Because that’s exactly what I’ve watched happen over and over again.
Final Thoughts
I have no idea whether history will prove me right or wrong.
What I do know is that I’ve never seen a technology improve this quickly, become this capable or spread this fast. More importantly, I’ve never seen one with the potential to replace both cognitive and physical labor at the same time.
Maybe the transition takes ten years. Maybe twenty.
Maybe there are breakthroughs we can’t even imagine today that completely change the picture.
But I can no longer dismiss the possibility that we’re witnessing one of the biggest economic transitions in human history.
If that’s true, then pretending it’s business as usual seems like the riskiest strategy of all.
Only time will tell.
