By Robert Dean
For the Carter County Times
The AI machine is gobbling the world whole, and I don’t think people realize how gnarly it really is out there. As a parent, I wonder what my two kids are going to do with their lives, just like everyone else does. We want the best for our spawn, but unlike generations before us, the road isn’t exactly clear. If anything, it’s dark like whiskey.
I used to be optimistic about the future because everyone had their path. Some guys aren’t cut out for the garages of the world. Just the same, not everyone is designed to sit in a meeting room listening to some overpaid blowhard grind on about “circling back” on an issue that could have been an email. I used to be pretty middle of the road on college. I come from a working-class family. I’m the only one of my clan to go, and I’m the only one not in a union on the South Side of Chicago. My old man wouldn’t let me do a job with my hands. He told me I was too smart for that, that I had to keep chasing the dream of being a writer.
The thing is, I wouldn’t have that talk with my sons. If they wanted to work with their hands, I’d champion it. Somewhere along the line, we started treating college like holy water. Splash a little on your kid, and suddenly they’re better than the rest of us. But in the race for jobs against AI, we’re in uncharted waters. Entry-level jobs are being automated. Soon, McDonald’s and most fast-food joints won’t have people doing 80% of the work. The company is already rolling out AI-powered tools—connected kitchen gear, predictive maintenance sensors, and voice-recognition drive-thrus—across roughly 43,000 locations worldwide.
And it’s not just entry-level jobs on the line. The trades are on the hook too. It’s taking longer to crack, but the suits are working on it. I once interviewed with a company in Japan that was mapping warehouses with iPads to redesign workflow for automation. In a recent Financial Times piece, the writer said U.S. optimism and stock market gains are now overwhelmingly tied to AI, with nearly all GDP and productivity expectations hinging on its success—a “single-theme economy built on faith in algorithms.”
Fastbrick Robotics in Australia has already built a robot called the Hadrian X that can drive to a job site, pick up bricks, and lay them in perfect rows—work that used to take skilled masons. So, when we tell kids, “Go to college, we’ll always need doctors,” or “Learn landscaping, we’ll always need someone to cut the grass,” we’re not being honest. The truth is that the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet. There’s a human cost in wondering if the work you love will even exist in a decade. I feel that every day as a writer.
I’m not saying AI is the boogeyman, but it’s a massive disrupter—something far beyond the leap from horses to cars. This technology messes with our sense of purpose. It makes us question where we fit, what we’re for, and whether we’re still necessary. And sure, AI might one day cure cancer, and when given a choice between a doctor and a robot who won’t kill you on the table, most of us will pick the robot. That’s progress, I guess. But it also means we need to start having real conversations about what work, dignity, and skill look like in the years ahead.
Because right now, I’m not sure what I’d tell my kids to be—other than human, while that still means something.
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