Will electricians become harder to replace than a marketer?

One tech company after another is laying off employees, citing artificial intelligence (AI) as the reason. Not because business is struggling, often quite the opposite. Revenue is rising, margins are improving, and stock prices are flourishing. But AI makes companies more efficient and, according to this logic, fewer people are needed.

At the American cybersecurity company Cloudflare, management announced last week that more than 20 percent of the workforce would be let go. In an internal message, CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the way we work has fundamentally changed.” Over the course of just three months, the use of productivity-enhancing AI tools within the company reportedly increased by more than 600 percent.

The most striking example probably came from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg announced that 10 percent of the workforce would be cut because of AI. That alone is remarkable. Even more striking, however, was the story of the 90 percent who were allowed to stay. Meta is reportedly requiring software on the laptops of its American employees that continuously records how they work: mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, even screenshots. Not to evaluate performance, the company says, but to train AI systems. The goal is for artificial intelligence to learn how people use software, how they navigate, which shortcuts they take, and how they solve problems. The ambition is explicit: to create AI agents capable of independently taking over the work, with human employees reduced to merely “supervising” them.

This goes far beyond a traditional restructuring. Here, you get to stay only if you train your replacement. And once the system fully understands how you work, your expertise may simply become software.

Manual work

On Tuesday, trade unions will once again march through the streets of Brussels. The slogans will focus on pensions, purchasing power, indexation, and “the strongest shoulders” carrying the heaviest burden. But I wonder whether we may also be standing at the beginning of a far more fundamental debate: what if the “strong shoulders” of today turn out to be entirely different people tomorrow?

Economists often say we are living beyond our means. Perhaps they are right. But the real redistribution of work may not even have begun.

Recently, I spent a week in Taiwan at TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, an extraordinary operation employing nearly one hundred thousand people. This is where the chips powering Apple, Nvidia, and much of the AI revolution are made. I gave four keynotes and two workshops there on AI and its impact.

One engineer asked a question that has stayed with me ever since: “What is the future of an expert in the age of AI?”

A damn good question.

Perhaps AI is not just changing jobs, but our entire understanding of intellectual value. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last year, without hesitation, that “the future generation of millionaires could be plumbers.”

It sounds provocative, but perhaps he has a point. For decades, we have held an almost religious belief that intellectual labor naturally ranked above manual work. Academic knowledge carried prestige. Physical labor was something to outgrow.

Strikes

But AI is beginning to completely disrupt that hierarchy. Tech investor Marc Andreessen recently put it bluntly: “The problem is that it’s cheaper and easier to hang a flatscreen TV over a hole in the wall than to find a contractor who can repair the hole.”

Perhaps we are moving toward a world where cognitive routine work is automated at scale, while craftsmanship, physical expertise, and human presence once again become rare and valuable.

Perhaps plumbers will become scarcer than consultants. Perhaps electricians will become harder to replace than marketers. And perhaps, ten years from now, strikes will look entirely different. I can only speculate about what the banners will say then.