I Get It: AI Will Take Jobs. Sure, No Problem
May 19, 2026
In April 2026 I began to notice prophecies that AI will take away more human jobs than they will create. The same thing happened with the Industrial Revolution and the implantation of computers, but jobs still existed. What is going to happen with AI then? Nordot.app revealed one path in its article “AI Agent Future Is Coming, OpenClaw Creator Tells AFP.”
Peter Steinberger, the agent centric claw guy, rolled out an instant hit: An AI agent that can do real-life tasks associated with technology like checking him in for a flight or adding an appointment to his calendar. (Remember. One has to provide this software data sucker your personal information or someone else’s personal data to get good results.) Steinberger made the claim, “Agents will put you into the plumbing or handy person business.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia dubbed OpenClaw as the next ChatGPT. Sure, there’s concern, however, about security risks such as access to personal data. Steinberger believes that the next big thing in AI will come from someone who isn’t attached to a big corporation and who wants to have fun with AI. Quick reminder: Steinberger is attached to a BAIT (big AI tech) outfit. As a responsible humanoid, worries about security and how agents might be used by bad actors:
“‘Yes, I do worry a bit, especially because there’s now a whole cottage industry of companies that try to make a big buck and make it even simpler to install OpenClaw,’ he said. ‘I purposefully didn’t make it simpler so people would stop and read and understand: what is AI, that AI can make mistakes, what is prompt injection — some basics that you really should understand when you use that technology.’ But at the end of the day, ‘if you build a hammer… you can hurt yourself. So should we not build hammers any more?’”
Flash forward to May 16, 2026 and Fortune Magazine’s story “Microsoft AI Chief Gives It 18 Months for All White Collar Work to Be Automated by AI.” I quote:
Suleyman predicted “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” being done by AI. Most tasks that involve “sitting down at a computer” will be fully automated by AI within the next year or 18 months, he said, naming accounting, legal, marketing, and even project management as vulnerable. Suleyman’s warning echoed the viral essay of the week, a version of which was published at Fortune.com, by AI researcher Matt Shumer, who compared this moment to February 2020, when the pandemic was about to hit America. This will be more dramatic, though, Shumer said. Suleyman cited the exponential growth in computational power as a flashing red signal that AI could replace large swaths of professionals. As “compute” advances, he said, models will be able to code better than most human coders. Shumer and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both written about their alarm, even sadness, at watching their life’s work rapidly grow obsolete.
The only hitch in the git along is:
- There is now AI backlash
- Some companies are re-hiring humanoids thought to be disposable when AI entered the building
- Microsoft’s own Copilot is not exactly flying high.
The Fortune article published in May 2026 ends with this statement:
The three months since he [Suleyman] said this haven’t aged his take well as mounting evidence shows AI is kind of a bust, even as Anthropic’s Claude continues to displace OpenAI as the number one model and lead the chase for enterprise revenue. But MIT Technology Review featured him in April insisting that AI development won’t hit a wall anytime soon.
My view is:
First, AI is a utility that has been presented as more significant than the discovery of the wheel.
Second, the BAIT companies are desperate to find a next big thing that makes them more wealthy and powerful. Right now, AI is closer to hand than the hoped for quantum computing revolution which is probably more important than fire.
Third, AI as it is today (May 19, 2025) outputs information that is wrong, gets Ernst & Young added to a stand up comic’s set, puts lawyers in front of a checkbook to pay the fine for using AI hallucinated information in court submissions, and gets authors using AI banned from ArXiv for using AI in their “research.”
Yeah, 18 months. Sure. Anything you AI wizards is rock solid.
Whitney Grace, May 19, 2026
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