https://arab.news/6vtbv
For two centuries, technological revolutions have promised both upheaval and renewal. The spinning jenny broke the guild system, tractors displaced farm laborers but fed millions more, and computers hollowed out clerical work while spawning entire industries. Each wave of innovation stirred anxiety about mass unemployment yet, each time, new sectors absorbed the displaced.
Artificial intelligence, however, is different. Unlike the loom or the tractor, AI threatens not just manual labor but cognitive work: drafting contracts, diagnosing illnesses, even writing software. The question confronting policymakers in 2025 is no longer whether AI will reshape labor markets, but where humans will still find employment once machines do the thinking.
The pace of change is extraordinary. ChatGPT’s debut in 2022 was followed by Google’s Genie 3 in 2024, a system that allowed robots to navigate real-world environments. GPT-5, released in 2025, pushed the frontier of reasoning further. These are not niche tools. They are general-purpose technologies diffusing at a speed no earlier industrial revolution ever witnessed. Projections vary, but they all point in the same direction: tens of millions of jobs lost, hundreds of millions potentially automated worldwide and layoffs in the US already at their highest since the pandemic years.
