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The Diary Of A CEO · 3 min · Jul 13, 2026

AI could erase the usual path from one job to another

He argues that earlier technologies left new work because they automated only parts of the economy. If AI can do every job, workers cannot escape displacement by moving to another role.

Daniel Kokotajlo

Daniel Kokotajlo is a former OpenAI researcher and founder of the AI Futures Project.

Lead author of AI 2027. He left OpenAI's governance team in 2024 and now runs the AI Futures Project, a forecasting nonprofit.

About this segment

He argues that earlier technologies left new work because they automated only parts of the economy. If AI can do every job, workers cannot escape displacement by moving to another role.

From “ChatGPT Whistleblower: They Offered Me $2m To Keep Quiet, No One Is Ready For What's Coming!”, Jul 13, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Which jobs will AI replace, and which are safe?” See all 23 answers

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 55 answers

“But we are talking about a hypothetical future situation in which everything gets automated.”
Daniel Kokotajloat 56:19 · The Diary Of A CEO56:19

Takeaways

  1. Past technologies automated tasks, not every category of work.
  2. Workers may move to new roles that AI can also perform.
  3. In his forecast, mass displacement follows labs' own automation.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 19:25AI labs plan to automate their own research first7:12
  2. 1:14:22Plan A would slow AI and make frontier research transparent7:41
  3. 13:18OpenAI's expected safety pause gave way to continued racing2:40

  4. 56:03AI could erase the usual path from one job to another3:04

  5. 1:34:21Job loss could also strip people of political power4:04Up next
  6. 1:46:11He would not permanently shut down AI, though he is torn4:05

Transcript

From the transcript The Diary Of A CEO publishes with the episode.

  1. 56:10

    Some people say, though, there's going to be so many jobs created that we can't foresee right now, like there was in the Industrial Revolution or the Internet boom or whatever. The problem with that is that... past technological advancements have been more narrow. They've like automated some things, but not everything. But we are talking about a hypothetical future situation in which everything gets automated. So there isn't any new job that you could do that the AI couldn't also do, except if it's like protected by regulation or something. That's also a thing. But so like, for example, right now there's this sort of like cycle where...

  2. 56:47

    You know, the AIs learned to do a certain thing, like write copy or like draft code or like debug something. And then humans who used to do that thing switch to managing AIs or switch to doing the other stuff that the AIs can't do. And that's why there's been this dynamic historically of, you know, new jobs opening up and people flooding to them. But if it gets to the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can do and better and faster and cheaper, then whatever that new job is that you might have switched to, the AIs can switch to that too. And they'll already be better at it than you.

  3. 57:20

    Because we haven't seen widespread unemployment yet in the economy, do you think people are getting a little bit complacent? Because what I'm seeing on my timeline is a lot of people saying, I told you so. I told you everything would be fine. And when you look at the US unemployment rate, currently it's flat to slightly down. If you look at the UK, it is up. The trend is up compared to last year. We're at about 5% unemployment. The US is at 4.2% unemployment.

  4. 57:44

    Yeah. Basically, nobody has said that there would be mass unemployment by now, or at least we didn't say that. And we were historically one of the more bullish people on AI progress. In AI-2027, because of the dynamics that we just described, the mass unemployment doesn't happen until 2028 or 2029 after they already have superintelligence. Because, again, the companies aren't trying to cause mass unemployment as step one. That's like step three after, you know, it's like step one, automate themselves.

  5. 58:10

    Step two, have this recursive self-improvement to get to superintelligence. Step three, expand out into the economy and out of everything. And so this is really unfortunate from humanity's perspective because one might have hoped that If there was this broad wave of automation going through the economy, people would sit up and pay attention and think about where all this is headed and demand good regulations from the government. But that's not actually what the strategy the companies are taking. You know, they're going to be getting the superintelligence first and then doing the broad wave of automation, which means that by the time they're actually doing all of that, well, it's already going to be moving very fast and the AI is already going to be very powerful.

  6. 58:50

    In your 2027 report, so you wrote that in 2025, but it is called AI 2027. You said that in mid 2025, we'd have the autonomous employee, which is sort of like AI agents taking instructions over Slack or Teams.