The Age of AI Great Replacement Has Arrived. How Can Ordinary People Survive? (Translation)

Reading AI news over the past couple of years, many people feel quite conflicted. On one hand, it feels amazing: things that used to take days to do can now be churned out in minutes. On the other hand, there’s a nagging unease: if I can use these tools, so can my boss, and so can the company — then what is my value worth?

What makes Dan Koe’s long-form essay interesting is where he takes this. He doesn’t frame it as “Is AI going to replace you?” Instead, he flips the question: if an upgrade in tools is enough to make you worry about your next meal, then maybe the truly fragile thing isn’t your job — it’s that you’ve bet your entire life on a single bet.

AI may not take your job immediately, but it will quickly expose your dependency.

For many, their sense of security is bound up in a well-worn set of arrangements: go to school, pick a major, join a company, do your bit in a role, wait for a raise, wait for a promotion, wait for a fancier title. This path isn’t useless. It gave many people cash flow, experience, identity, and a sense of order in life.

But here’s the problem: if you leave that system and suddenly realize you don’t know what you can create on your own, you’re in trouble. You find you’re great at running meetings, taking requirements, writing documents, pushing things forward through corporate processes. But once you step out of that flow, you have no body of work, no audience, no clients, no small sandbox to experiment and fail repeatedly.

This is where Dan Koe’s idea of “wage slavery” really stings. It’s not saying getting a salary is shameful, or that having a job is low-class. What it says is: if you can only get your value through someone else giving you a role, a task, feedback, a sense of worth — your freedom is very limited.

Escaping wage slavery isn’t about escaping wages. It’s about escaping the need to prove yourself only with a company badge.

Faced with AI, many people naturally fall into two reactions. One is to curse it: this thing is destroying the industry, hope it doesn’t advance. Another is to chase it: learn this tool today, switch to that model tomorrow, collect a bunch of prompts, feeling like you’re already standing at the door of the future.

But Dan Koe’s take cuts deeper: The tool is not the answer. The tool is just an amplifier. If you already think, AI will amplify your thinking. If you already express, AI will amplify your expression. If you already have a sense of project, taste, patience, and the ability to iterate, AI will make you move faster. And vice versa.

If you don’t already know what problem to solve, what’s worth doing, how to make others care about what you make — then no matter how powerful the tool, it will only help you produce a lot of unseen content, unused products, and forgotten accounts faster.

In the AI era, the most valuable thing isn’t “knowing how to use AI” — it’s knowing what to use AI for.

So the solution for ordinary people isn’t to quit your job and start a business tomorrow, nor to force yourself to become a machine churning out 20 pieces of content a day. A more realistic start is to carve out a small plot of land for yourself: write an article that is truly yours, build a small tool that solves your own problem, publicly document a project from zero to one, or organize the lessons you’ve repeatedly learned at work into something others can understand.

It’s okay if it’s rough at the beginning. Rough things can at least be seen, can get feedback, can be revised. Things that don’t exist can never be iterated.

That’s why I find this essay worth reading. It’s not peddling the fear of “AI is coming, everyone run!” It’s saying something more down-to-earth: don’t hand your entire life over to a single system to price.

You can work, but don’t only have work. You can learn tools, but don’t just stay at learning tools. A company can give you opportunities, but you also need to slowly grow something that doesn’t depend on the company.

Code, content, products, accounts — these are all leverage that ordinary people can slowly accumulate. They won’t make you free overnight, but they will give you one more path.

And in a time of accelerating change, having one more path is itself very important.

So don’t just ask: Will AI replace me? The better question is: With AI, can I create something of my own faster? Can I make people remember me for my judgment, my expression, my work? Can I stop living solely through a certain role, a certain company, a certain process?

This might be the thing ordinary people really need to prepare for in the age of AI’s great replacement.