The Last Generation to Matter

There’s a version of the AI story everyone already knows. Robots take the factory floor. Algorithms take the call center. A dramatic headline, a mass layoff, a clear villain. That story is comforting, in a strange way, because it has a shape you can brace against. The real story unfolding right now has no shape at all, and that’s exactly what makes it more dangerous. Nobody is taking your job in one clean motion. Your relevance is simply, quietly, fading, one small deferred decision at a time, until you look up one day and realize you’ve become background noise in a conversation you used to lead.

I don’t say this to be alarmist. I say it because the evidence is already sitting in the data, and it doesn’t look like the movie. It looks like silence.