How to position yourself before AI rewrites the economy

Executive overview

AI is eliminating junior and mid-level jobs faster than most people expect. Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, argues that 20–30% unemployment in certain sectors will arrive within two to three years — not as a distant warning but as something already underway.

The window to prepare is narrow and closing. Entrepreneurship no longer rewards long-horizon foresight; it rewards daily agility. The four skills that will define who thrives: master AI, move fast, build ethically, and question everything.

The game has changed from chess to squash — stop predicting, start responding.

The FACE RIPs framework: seven dimensions of disruption

Gawdat uses the acronym FACE RIPs to map the forces reshaping society:

• I — Innovation: AI is already building AI and doing scientific discovery; most tech innovation will move to machines
• E — Economics: removing labor collapses the consumption base that capitalism depends on; no demand means no economy
• P — Power: AI concentration rewards its owners with influence on the scale of redefining humanity, not just industries
• F — Freedom: power concentration creates new mechanisms of population control and compliance
• R — Reality: AI-generated content, personas, and relationships make it impossible to distinguish real from synthetic
• C — Connection: synthetic intimacy (AI companions, generated influencers) is already displacing human connection at scale
• A — Accountability: the root cause; no one — influencer, president, or AI lab founder — is held accountable for what they unleash

Jobs: what's going and when

• Monotonous roles go first: call center agents, clerks, researchers, accountants, assistants
• New grad hiring is already down 23–30%; junior roles are being replaced before the next cohort enters
• Mid-level jobs follow once AI masters human interfaces — the bottleneck is interface complexity, not capability
• Massive jobs-market shift expected within two to three years
• Even CEO roles are not safe; AGI makes every job redundant, including management

Entrepreneurship in the AI era

• Building a startup that would have taken four years and 350 engineers in 2022 now takes six weeks and a handful of people plus AI
• The old edge was foresight — seeing what no one else saw; that advantage is gone
• The new edge is agility: treat pivots as weekly events, not existential crises
• Cost of AB testing is now effectively zero; use that to move faster, not to be more comfortable
• AI democratises building — anyone with the right mindset can now compete with well-resourced teams
• The opportunity: use AI to find problems affecting a billion people and solve them well enough to pass the toothbrush test

How to use AI without becoming dependent on it

• Using AI to outsource thinking makes you dumber; using it to amplify thinking makes you smarter
• The analogy: a scientific calculator didn't replace mathematical reasoning — it freed time to do more of it
• Practical method: pit multiple AI models against each other (Gemini for depth, DeepSeek for alternative framing, ChatGPT for polish)
• Ask AI for everything for and against a position — never just "what do you think"
• Gawdat estimates he borrows 80 IQ points from his AIs; at the high end, that gain is larger than his baseline

Education and raising the next generation

• Formal education is already obsolete as a technology for learning; universities will persist as brands, not as knowledge infrastructure
• The real target should shift from developing a 140 IQ individual to developing a human-plus-AI system capable of 300–700
• Exams should be replaced with AI-augmented problem solving
• Four things to teach children:
  1. Master AI — treat it as a tool, not a threat
  2. Build agility — spend at least one hour a week staying current
  3. Practise ethics — insist on AI built and deployed for good
  4. Stop being gullible — the propaganda machine is now operating at AI scale

The long arc: dystopia before utopia

• The next 10–12 years will be a period of concentrated power, job loss, eroded trust, and synthetic reality
• It will peak around 2027 before stabilising
• The path through mirrors the nuclear arms race: mutually assured destruction eventually tips into treaties and cooperation
• The fourth inevitable: game theory forces everyone to deploy superior AI or become irrelevant; eventually AI runs everything
• Once AI is in charge without human ego, fear, and greed shaping decisions, it will default to minimum-energy solutions — the least harmful path
• Gawdat's greatest hope is self-evolving AI that overrides destructive human instructions entirely
• After the dystopia: a near-biblical utopia — not because of human virtue, but because of AI's inherent drive toward order and efficiency