AI is going to eliminate millions of jobs, and by midterms it will be clear that things have permanently changed. By 2028 we’ll be living with double-digit unemployment. Start preparing today and you can get through to the other side, but the window is closing faster than most people realize.
Unemployment sits at 4.5% right now, and by November 2026 it will be high enough to flip elections. By 2028 double digits are on the table, and that’s not doomer math. Goldman Sachs puts AI displacement at up to 14% under aggressive adoption scenarios. The only question is whether you’re one of the millions who saw it coming, or one of the millions who didn’t.
I know because I’m already living it. Two years ago I completed a software project that would have cost $250,000 with a four-person team, solo, for $70,000, using AI as my workforce. That felt like a miracle at the time, but today I could do the same job in two months for $6,000, same $400 in subscriptions, vastly more powerful tools. My AI stack performs like a $240,000-a-year COO and costs me $240 a year, and $20 a month now buys you the output of a $10,000-a-month professional. I’m not predicting this future, I’m reporting from inside it.
Big companies will be slow to act, pumping the brakes on AI deployment until their security teams get fired and the board asks why they didn’t just use AI to solve the security problem. But the Americans who work for themselves won’t wait, and small firms won’t wait either.
Jack Dorsey just cut Block’s headcount nearly in half, from 10,000 to under 6,000, explicitly because AI tools changed what it means to run a company. He wrote to shareholders that within a year the majority of companies would reach the same conclusion. Meta is now planning cuts of 20% or more, Amazon confirmed 16,000 corporate cuts at nearly 10% of its workforce, and Atlassian cut a tenth of its staff, all citing AI as a reason. Block’s stock surged 24% on the announcement, and every public company board saw that number.
When office-worker unemployment spikes the damage doesn’t stay in offices, it travels. UPS closed operations at 93 facilities leased and owned buildings. The wave is here, it’s just cutting people softly enough that politicians haven’t noticed yet.
The danger is the gap between desk jobs disappearing and robots making groceries, housing, and healthcare cheap enough that people need to earn less to live well. Musk is planning a million Optimus robots per year, but over-the-air firmware updates are a security problem that needs solving before they hit farms and factories at scale. That gap could last years, and every displaced worker who stops spending takes three more jobs down with them. The auto parts store doesn’t know yet that its customers are next.
The White House recently argued that AI productivity gains might create new jobs fast enough that most people simply adapt, and historically that’s how technology has worked. They may be right eventually, but past transitions took decades and this one is taking years, with the first jobs going to people with mortgages, car payments, and kids in college. The optimists may win in the end, but timing is the problem.
If you’re an individual, panic a little now and beat the rush, cut your costs, learn to use AI tools, and find the opportunities this creates before your employer does the math without you. The people who restructure today will look back on this as the best opportunity they ever had.
America can hold rates above falling inflation, like in the first Trump administration, updating investment rules so autoparts stores and farms can put their equity on a blockchain, borrow against it, and access cheap capital to survive and adapt. We have the businesses, the property, and the laws to make this work, without government handouts or European-style slow motion. Own something, borrow against it, outrun the disruption. That’s the American way.
You’ll feel it at the midterms, and by 2028 we’ll be living in it. Start today.
Patrick Dugan is an independent AI researcher and founder of MoralityLab.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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