Soon we’ll all be unemployed because of artificial intelligence. It’s worth looking at what happened in two worlds. One is translators, where the change already ran its course. The other, happening right now, is developers, which is the world I belong to and talk about in so many videos. And in perspective, what will happen to everyone else: all the white-collar workers, everyone who does office work at a computer.
What happened to translators
Three things, essentially. Automatic translators arrived (they existed even before GPT and were already very capable), and here’s what followed.
First, the cost of translation dropped dramatically. Translators no longer had to translate word by word. They had the AI generate a draft of the translation and then corrected it. They still do this today, and these automatic translators keep getting more powerful. So the cost per unit collapsed, and by a lot.
Second, what did the translation companies do? They stopped hiring outside collaborators. The first people hit by automation were freelancers and self-employed workers. They were the first to take the blow.
Third, they hire fewer junior workers, or hire far fewer of them. The logic is: I can translate a lot more with fewer people, so I don’t take on outside collaborators, I don’t hire new ones, and the full-time translators I already have translate much more because they’re assisted by automatic translation.
Developers are next, and then everyone
This is what’s happening now with developers, and it touches far more people because it’s a much bigger pool. It’s already happening that junior hiring is in decline. It hasn’t necessarily happened yet that software costs much less, it’s all still very jagged. And luckily in Italy there are frictions tied to labor law, so business owners can’t tell an employee “starting next week you don’t work for me anymore” the way they do in America. Fortunately we have the right to work, and this slows things down quite a bit.
But I have no doubt that the effects seen in translation will show up not only in programming but across the entire white-collar world. So hold on tight, because the storm is coming. If you want to remain among the few developers still in the game, the ones who stay in charge will unfortunately be fewer. The others will specialize in something else, do creative work, they’ll figure it out. I have no doubts about the creativity and resilience, as they say in corporate speak, of our developer friends.
That’s exactly why I built a corporate course to bring technical teams up to speed on the new AI-driven development methodologies, that is, agentic engineering. Because vibe coding by now is a thing with its own niche, for people who don’t write code. There’s a whole world of AI-driven development that is much, much deeper than people think. It’s far less polarized than “AI yes / AI no.” If you frame it that way, you’ve already lost.
