It’s Just a Matter of Time Until AI Wipes Out Most Jobs

 According to the experts, a new world is coming and it’s going to come so fast that we won’t even recognize our near future.  They say it’s already started.  They say that eventually even the trade jobs like plumber will be replaced.

This all seems like one more event that points to the soon coming of Christ.  Making everyone get a mark in order to buy or sell anything will be child’s play for AI.

********************************

You’re not imagining it: The AI job squeeze isn’t some future apocalypse, it’s already quietly underway. 

Professor Yoshua Bengio spent four decades building the technology that is now coming for your job. He is a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, a Turing Award winner, and one of the most-cited scientists in the world on Google Scholar—and now he’s turned his back on his life’s work to warn that your job is probably already under threat.  

Desk jobs, or as Bengio called them, “cognitive jobs, the jobs that you can do behind a keyboard,” will be the first casualties of automation. 

“It’s just a matter of time,” the AI pioneer stressed on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEOpodcast.

“Unless we hit a wall scientifically, like some obstacle prevents us from making progress to make AIs smarter and smarter, there’s going to be a time when they’ll be doing more and more, able to do more and more of the work that people do … And then, of course, it takes years for companies to really integrate that into their workflows, but they’re eager to do it. So it’s more a matter of time than, is it happening or not?”

And he admitted that it’s Gen Z new-hires who are currently being hit hardest by AI, as junior roles are the easiest to cut, consolidate, or backfill with software—but eventually everyone’s jobs will be impacted within five years.

It’s not just office jobs that are at risk; even trade jobs and democracy itself are threatened 

For years, degrees were pushed as the key to success for the young and aspirational looking to nab well-paying and stable jobs. But now, even highly educated students are finding themselves “unemployable” as employers launch a “wait-and-watch strategy” in the midst of AI. Graduates in the U.K. are facing the worst job market since 2018. And companies like Intel, IBM, and Google have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that AI is expected to take over in the next five years.

But it’s not just a blip or a reflection of the current economy, Bengio warned. As more firms lean on AI and eventually robots, too, the technology will only get smarter, he said. 

“As companies are deploying more and more robots, they will be collecting more and more data. So eventually, it’s going to happen,” Bengio said when asked whether AI will be able to wipe out all work. Even young people trying to outsmart automation by ditching degrees or upskilling into trade jobs are destined for the same dead end.

“So if you do a physical job—as Geoffrey Hinton is often saying, you should be a plumber or something—it’s going to take more time [for AI to replace your job], but I think it’s only a temporary thing.” 

Now, knowing the devastation AI could cause, Bengio said he regrets his life’s work. 

“I should have seen this coming much earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to the potentially catastrophic risks,” the 61-year-old admitted. “But my turning point was when ChatGPT came, and also with my grandson, I realized that it wasn’t clear if he would have a life 20 years from now, because we’re starting to see AI systems that are resisting being shut down.”

https://fortune.com/2025/12/19/yoshua-bengio-ai-only-a-matter-of-time-before-every-single-job-is-wiped-out-even-gen-z-trade-plumbing/