In June 2025, Jim Farley said AI would replace half of all white-collar workers in America. Dario Amodei put unemployment as high as 20%. For more than a year, executives have reframed the future of knowledge work as a countdown clock.
I want to make the opposite case — and I want to be honest that I have skin in it.
In 2017, my firm wrote about what we called Coaching Networks: software that uses machine learning to guide workers in real time, gathering data from a distributed network of people and learning the techniques that actually work. The idea that mattered most was this: the human being is the mutation engine in the system. Software learns what’s already proven. But genuinely new moves — the ones no model could have predicted — come from creative people finding a better way. The system spreads those mutations to everyone else. The cycle repeats.
We were early. The technology wasn’t ready. It is now. And the idea has aged a great deal better than the doom has.
The Countdown Gets the Wrong Number
