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From The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: A Thought Exercise In Financial History, From The Future

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.

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A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?”

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The interconnected nature of these systems weren’t fully appreciated until this print, either. ServiceNow sold seats. When Fortune 500 clients cut 15% of their workforce, they cancelled 15% of their licenses. The same AI-driven headcount reductions that were boosting margins at their customers were mechanically destroying their own revenue base.

From AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

[..]

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

[..]

Before AI, there was a ceiling on how much you could produce in a day. That ceiling was set by typing speed, thinking speed, the time it takes to look things up. It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also a governor. You couldn't work yourself to death because the work itself imposed limits.

AI removed the governor. Now the only limit is your cognitive endurance. And most people don't know their cognitive limits until they've blown past them.

On the very next day after the acquisition, as many as 20 of the firm’s 50 employees got pink slips from the company, according to a report. The people asked to leave were employed in project management, engineering, user interface, testing and marketing. The reason cited by one of the employees was that the company no longer had suitable roles to offer to the employees.

The lay-offs highlight a dark side of the start-up culture in India, where initially high-profile acquisitions grab headlines, but not much is said about what happens after these deals transpire.

Your income is not as much as you think it is.  Let me show you why  using the numbers from the US Census Bureau for Santa Clara county

Median household income (in 2013 dollars) is $91,702 .However, note that this is not the amount that comes into the bank.  The employer deducts the  federal tax from this. A rough estimate of the income tax would be 27% (standard deductions, no dependents). This leaves $66942.46 .

After the Federal government takes its cut, the state government levies the state tax on the income. For California this would be 8%. This leaves $61587.06 .

Now let us calculate how many hours someone needs to work to get $61587.06 into the bank. A workday is 8 hours. Mean travel time to work in(minutes), is 25 minutes. Let us assume that he/she gets 21 days of vacation. This means that including the commute hours, subtracting vacation hours and assuming 5 days a week, he/she work 2069.55 hours annually.

So, your hourly earning rate is 61587.06/2069.55 = $29.75. Read that again: the median hourly earning rate is $29.75 . If you do not account for the tax cut and the time you spend in commute, you will believe that your hourly earning rate is 46.65 . However, that is not what an employee earns.

Next, let us see how this converts to buying power. Suppose someone with median income wants to buy shoes with a sticker price $100. The sales tax in California is 8%. What this means is that he/she end up spending $108 on the shoes. To earn $108 , this person needs to work for 3.6 hours.

I have made a spreadsheet to make this calculation easier. . If you want to figure out your spending power, create a copy of the spreadsheet and fill in the cells with numbers that apply to you.

Some ballpark numbers (for California):

• if your annual income is $50,000 , you need to work 6.7 hours to spend $100
• if your annual income is $100,000, you need to work 3.3 hours to spend $100
Defined tags for this entry: ideas, My take on life, work

Here is a heuristic that can give an idea if your job can be automated and might eventually become non existent :

• can it be done by a software that has the ability to reason about "maybe" secenario. For example : is it time to replace the light bulbs and in what order should the light bulbs be replaced. Or is this change in the code base dangerous.
• Can it be done by a software that can read an ordered list or report (for example: a bug list) and create an accurate representation of the project in a human readable (more precisely, a manager readable) format: are there any blockers for the completion or are there any tickets that can delay the whole project

Today completes my seven years at Yahoo! These seven years have given me an opportunity to work with some great people, given me a chance to clean up mess at a huge scale and taught me new almost every day. Thanks Filo & Jerry for creating this place.