The Professional Collapse: Predicting AI Labor Circa 2045 Is Just Too Much Today

Jules Verne and crystal balls everywhere have nothing on this news story.

New to “The Professional Collapse?”

The Professional Collapse explores how the exponential advancements in AI and robotics are changing white-collar professional life faster than we can keep up.

If you want to go along for the science-fantasy-as-real-life ride and comment away with your observations—click the “subscribe now” button just below here. It's all free!

And, don’t forget about “The Second Bill of Rights” today! Join the SBOR mailing list if you haven’t done so already!

In a recent Guardian article, futurist Adam Dorr declares with certainty that "robots and AI will replace most human labor in 20 years," that may usher in an era of “super-abundance” that will transform society from the ground up. While there’s no denying that automation is accelerating rapidly and that structural job displacement is already underway in many white-collar professions, Dorr’s confidence in long-range outcomes is a perfect illustration of why so much futurism veers into mythology or Jules Verne territory.

He’s not wrong to flag that most job categories are vulnerable. Nor is he wrong to suggest that large segments of the economy, from clerical functions to logistics, will be reshaped by AI and robotics in ways that compress costs and eliminate the need for human oversight. These are facts already playing out in real time. But what makes the article frustrating is the mismatch between the scale of the disruption underway and the seeming intellectual laziness with which it’s being extrapolated.

The Illusion of the 20-Year Horizon

Unless it’s me, when someone says “in 20 years, we’ll see . . . ” what they’re really saying is: “I need a timeframe far enough out that no one can hold me accountable.” It’s the safest number in the futurist playbook. Not so far out that it feels like science fiction. Not so near that people will demand receipts. But in the case of AI and robotics, even five years is starting to look like a fool’s horizon.

We are no longer in an era where you can model social or economic outcomes using the patterns of the past. (Yet, I just completed a 100-year financial analysis model for an appendix to The Second Bill of Rights.) The core capabilities of today’s generative AI models—text, image, audio, and video—are evolving every six weeks or less. Robotics is beginning to experience a similar exponential phase shift, spurred not just by better hardware but by the integration of real-time adaptive reasoning systems. We don’t yet fully grasp what these systems are capable of, and we certainly don’t understand how their convergence will play out socially, politically, or economically. Any straight-line forecast, whether optimistic or dystopian, is destined to collapse under the weight of unforeseen breakthroughs or bottlenecks.

Futurism that pretends otherwise is less about foresight than fantasy.

“Abundance” as a Mirage

One of the more seductive lines in the article is Dorr’s claim that this shift will lead us into a period of “super-abundance.” (He’s moved us far past the usual fantasies of plain old “abundance” somehow.) He envisions a post-scarcity world where food, shelter, goods, and services are produced so cheaply and efficiently by machines that the entire logic of labor collapses. The implication is that we will all soon live like techno-aristocrats, unburdened by work, freed from drudgery.

This is not a new story. Versions of it have been trotted out since even before I was a kid—back when early computerization was supposed to lead to 20-hour work weeks and robot butlers. The problem isn’t that the underlying technologies don’t improve dramatically. They do. The problem is that human institutions, political incentives, and economic gatekeeping don’t respond to abundance by distributing it evenly. They respond by creating new forms of control, scarcity, and hierarchy. Any honest assessment of our last 200+ years of productivity gains should disabuse us of the idea that “abundance” naturally equals “broadly shared benefit.”

Dorr glosses over this completely. There’s no serious engagement with the mechanisms that would have to shift—from tax systems to ownership models to retraining pipelines—for the majority of humans to thrive in a fully automated society. Without those systems in place, “abundance” becomes another tech PR myth—useful for TED Talks and VC decks, but disconnected from the real world most people inhabit. (Maybe it’s in his book?)

Collapsing Professions, Expanding Uncertainty

What’s more immediately important than long-range predictions is recognizing what’s already happening. We are living through a simultaneous erosion of professional stability across multiple domains. Legal research, medical diagnostics, copywriting, curriculum design, architectural rendering, intellectual property rights protection, and even certain forms of software engineering are all being upended. Not just by one tool or one model, but by an expanding ecosystem of capabilities that are often modular, cheap, and indifferent to credentialism.

The implications are not just economic—they are deeply psychological and cultural. Professional identity, especially in white-collar sectors, has long been tethered to a sense of irreplaceability. But as more tasks are atomized and automated, we are witnessing a loss of function that strikes at the heart of what it means to be “useful” in a specialized domain.

That’s not to say everyone becomes obsolete overnight. But we’re already seeing professionals subtly shift their roles from executors to explainers, from builders to supervisors. That can hold for a little while. But not forever.

Systems Don’t Reform Themselves

Another glaring omission in the article is the role of institutional inertia. For all the talk of a coming revolution in how we live and work, there’s almost no mention of the regulatory, bureaucratic, and legal structures that will either delay or distort this transition.

Dorr writes as if the future unfolds automatically—technology marching forward, society neatly adapting in parallel. That’s never been how change works. Most of our systems are designed not to adapt but to resist. Licensing boards, school accreditation bodies, insurance regulators, union contracts, municipal procurement rules—all of these are friction points that slow adaptation and entrench inefficiency. They don’t just delay the future—they shape what version of the future gets to exist at all.

Unless and until these systems are addressed, we won’t see a clean shift into abundance. We’ll see a deeply uneven landscape where some sectors and geographies thrive under new automation paradigms, while others flail or ossify.

But, maybe this time changes will come so quickly that those barrier to entry gatekeepers just won’t be able to keep up . . .

The Value of Humility

To be clear, I’m not arguing that the professional collapse won’t happen. It’s already happening. What I am arguing is that forecasts like Dorr’s do more to distract than clarify. They lull us into thinking that the hard part is the technology, when in fact the hard part is the transition—figuring out how to realign the scaffolding of daily life around a new economic logic.

What we need is not glib prediction but rigorous scenario planning. Not smooth narratives but messy contingency mapping. And above all, a great deal more humility about what we can’t see coming.

Because if there’s one thing the last few months have shown, it’s that our imagination about how AI and robotics will evolve is almost always behind the curve. Whatever Dorr envisions for 2045 may arrive by 2030. By the time we get there, the questions will have changed.

---

What are your 2030 and 2045 crystal ball predictions for the state of labor and life?

SUBSCRIBE to follow along—COMMENT please, I want to hear what you think and see deep into the future. And, SHARE this with your friends, family, and subscribers. Thanks!

• READ more about The Second Bill of Rights on its website.

• JOIN its mailing list.

• SPREAD its message everywhere.