Is AI Coming For Your Job and Your Kids' School?
Why the future belongs to those who learn with AI, not run from it.
As a high school teacher and writer I’ve greatly improved my learning and productivity by shifting from Google searches to leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity. With AI transforming the job market faster than K-12 schools and universities can adapt, it’s time for both educators and students to embrace these tools not as shortcuts, but as essential tools for learning and training—especially to prepare for the careers of the future.
1. The AI Disruption: What Jobs Will Survive?
Listening to Chris Sacca on the Tim Ferriss Podcast, he painted a bleak future for the jobs that will be destroyed by AI and robots. Sacca is a venture investor, entrepreneur, and former Google executive, he founded Lowercase Capital, which made early investments in companies like Twitter and Uber, and later co-founded Lowercarbon Capital. The website states: “Lowercarbon Capital backs kickass companies that make real money slashing CO2 emissions, sucking carbon out of the sky, and buying us time to unf**k the planet.” You may have seen him as a guest judge on Shark Tank.
Sacca explains how white-collar professional jobs like lawyers and coders will recede because AI can automate their work at a fraction of the cost and at an exponentially faster speed. There may also be radically fewer blue-collar jobs like taxi and truck drivers, factory workers, and warehouse employees because of self-driving cars and more automation. In no uncertain terms Sacca says:
“The challenge is this, is that what most people do for a living is going away.”
It’s possible that he’s overstating things, as the Yogi Berraism goes: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yet, preparing for the worst and hoping for the best is sound advice here.
And because of these potential fast-approaching disruptions, Sacca doesn't even know what his daughters should be learning or what career path they should go down. History shows us that technological transitions like the Industrial Revolution's displacement of agricultural workers or the computer age's elimination of telephone operators and bank tellers create economic and social disruption that is notoriously difficult for society to adjust to, but there are options.
2. Why Students and Workers Must Adapt, Not Panic
Option one is to understand and use AI really well. Those who bury their heads in the sand or scoff at the capabilities of generative AI and just point out all of its flaws and the things humans can do better are missing the point. AI should be used to enhance human capabilities and make our lives better, not worse. Think of it as an inexpensive personal assistant that never sleeps, never complains, and can help you brainstorm ideas, analyze data, learn new skills, and tackle mundane tasks that used to eat up hours of your day.
Businesses see AI as an efficiency and profit-maximization tool. While not every company can use it effectively right now due to bureaucracy, inertia, and implementation challenges, if it saves money and increases profits, can you really blame them? While some CEOs may resist mass layoffs, companies that integrate AI with smaller teams—rather than eliminating workers entirely—will will eventually outcompete those that don't. That’s not cruel, it’s just good business.
Which is why young people still in school and just starting off their careers should prove nimble and adaptable and learn AI, not necessarily at a technical level, though it can’t hurt to understand how to train and improve them, but in a deep and useful way that leverages their skills combined with their human ones.
Which leads to the human qualities that AI can’t replace. People still desire human interaction, for friendship and many services, like at a restaurant or bar. AI robots are often not advanced enough or prohibitively expensive for widespread use, but personally I prefer the human interaction of a server even if the robot will one day be more efficient.
LLMs will probably be better doctors, lawyers, and financial advisors in the strict sense of having more subject-matter knowledge, but combining their vast database of knowledge with human reasoning and experience leverages the best of both worlds. There are also interpersonal skills that I doubt a super advanced AI robot will ever be able to match that matter to doing most jobs well and at an exceptionally high level. For example, a student can work with an LLM and often be taught more specific historical or scientific facts than the average teacher knows. But good teachers know how to not just give students facts, but provide context, activities, and personal feedback that the top LLMs can’t do right now.
3. What Schools Like Alpha Are Doing Right with AI
Alpha School, which is currently located in Austin and Brownsville, Texas, has an innovative model of teaching K-12. Students spend just two hours each day in the morning on the traditional core subjects of math, reading, science, and social studies. They are taught this not by traditional teachers but by AI tutors and adaptive apps, many powered by LLMs. What’s effective about this is the AI tools continuously adjust lessons to each student’s current level, ensuring gap closure or acceleration. Mastery-based progression means students move on only once they've demonstrated understanding.
This is one of the biggest obstacles to better learning in traditional K-12 public and private schools because in classes of 20-30 students the variety of levels can be quite dramatic and even the best teachers can’t adapt every lesson to each individual’s ability, whether that’s advanced or struggling. What happens in practice is teachers end up teaching towards the middle, where the top students are somewhat challenged and the bottom students are pushed to catch up, but the content is not so advanced that they pose no chance of catching up.
When Alpha School’s students use their proprietary AI learning platforms the teachers monitor progress, check for engagement, offer encouragement, and help troubleshoot if a student gets stuck. They act more as coaches and mentors, rather than the direct instruction that a traditional lead teacher would offer. I’m not saying there are no flaws to this, but this is probably moving students to a higher level of learning, especially more efficiently, than traditional methods that can be quite outdated and ineffective.
The other major benefit of Alpha School is that after these two hours students are free to explore their personal passions through hands-on projects, with an emphasis on public speaking and entrepreneurship. The philosophy on the school website is:
“With academics completed in the mornings, they get their afternoons back to gain real-world skills and explore interests, all at school.
Alpha students love school—it’s engaging, inspiring, and built for them. Alpha classes learn twice as fast as their peers and rank in the top 1% nationwide. Alpha students spend afternoons developing life skills and exploring their passions.
We motivate kids by giving them the gift of time to pursue the things they want to do and develop life skills."
Even taking this with a grain of salt it’s to find a criticism in this mission. This sounds awesome for young people and is everything that most K-12 schools struggle to do. (Here’s a video entitled School of the Future with No Teachers! | Full Tour.)
All of this is to say that rather than fearing AI will replace teachers, schools should harness it to personalize learning, free up teachers for higher-value interactions, and give every student the individualized attention they deserve to maximize their learning and potential.
4. Cheating, Learning, and the Real Role of LLMs in Student Writing
One of the biggest complaints against LLMs are they are just cheating devices. And certainly they have been used for that a lot, in both writing entire papers for students or doing their homework problems for them. I still believe there is such a thing as academic integrity, and if your essay is copy and pasted from ChatGPT that is plagiarism and deserving of a zero grade. But there’s a lot of related problems here.
One, plagiarism checkers are just bad at telling with a high degree of certainty whether or not a student used AI for all or some of their writing.
Two, what does it say about both the assignment that students did and that teachers can’t tell whether or not something is their writing or an LLM. As a high school teacher you have students who can’t write as well as a basic LLM, both in terms of ideas, research, and sentence quality and grammar. So by using LLMs they can ideally start to see what good writing looks like and emulate it, not copy it. Yes, there are other places to go for that, but students are attracted to the speed and personalization they offer.
The goal of student writing should not be merely to answer prompts like explain the themes of Romeo and Juliet, or who started World War I, writing assignments that can be easily done by AI, but rather it should be to teach critical thinking and develop the intellectual and communication skills that can be applied to future careers and even something as noble as living the good life. LLMs can regurgitate facts and standard analyses, but it can't replicate a student's unique perspective, personal connections to the material, or the messy process of working through complex ideas. But let's be honest—even before ChatGPT or the internet existed, most students weren't doing this out of pure joy of learning or even for a good grade.
There are also some who would question the usefulness or practicality of students answering these questions (primarily the students themselves), but if done well, these assignments can teach valuable lessons with both academic and practical applications. If you just type into GPT: “Explain the themes of Romeo and Juliet in 3 sentences” you get:
Romeo and Juliet explores the destructive power of unchecked hatred, as the feud between the Montagues and Capulets leads to tragedy for the young lovers. It also highlights the intensity and impulsiveness of youthful passion, showing how love can inspire both beauty and recklessness. Finally, the play questions the role of fate and free will, suggesting that even sincere intentions can be overwhelmed by forces beyond our control.
And if a high school student turns that in as their own work without doing the hard mental work of reading the play themselves and comprehending the themes themselves, they are missing out on crucial critical thinking skills that are the building blocks of learning anything. But if a student’s curiosity is piqued by this concise and strong AI summary this could be the jumping off point for more learning and potentially even reading the material when the student otherwise wouldn’t.
What’s great about these chatbots is how you can continually ask for more refined answers and the facts and ideas that you are particularly interested in. For example, for this post I asked the follow-up question:
In one gripping, intellectually advanced sentence, what can one learn from Romeo and Juliet that can be applied to life broadly
And got back
Romeo and Juliet teaches that when passion outpaces reflection and entrenched conflict goes unchallenged, even the most sincere love or noble intent can become collateral damage in a world governed by pride, impulse, and fate—reminding us that emotional maturity and reconciliation are essential for enduring harmony in both personal and societal life.
"I could go further and ask it for historical examples of this phenomenon. This prompt though demonstrates that the speed and specificity of AI create opportunities for higher-level thinking, knowledge accumulation, and making connections—which is what real learning is about.
There are many more valid criticisms of this process and LLMs more generally, but for the sake of time, the more important point is that like any technology, it's how you use it that matters most.
5. Preparing for the Post-AI Economy
One last issue to discuss regarding AI is what happens to young people after they leave the classrooms of high school or university? Is AI leading us to an economy plagued by mass unemployment and rising inequality or will there be huge productivity gains that lead to such large income and wealth gains that people will have more than enough money to live on with even more leisure time?
It’s too early to tell, although early evidence shows that unemployment for recent graduates is rising.
According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates (ages 22–27) jumped to 5.8% in the first quarter of 2025, which is the highest level since 2021 (123). This is significantly higher than the general unemployment rate for all college graduates, which stands at 2.7% (1). The underemployment rate for recent grads also rose sharply to 41.2% (2). (Perplexity)
A significant portion of these numbers is AI driven and concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains.
This is a reminder that a college degree is not a free ticket to a high paying job or stable career path. When people like Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, which runs the LLM Claude, warn that AI could replace up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs, it is not time to panic, but to adapt. Not saying this will be easy, but it has never been easier to access all of the knowledge that the world has to offer. AI and the global economy does not have to be zero-sum, we still need smart, kind, multi-skilled people to provide goods and services that make people’s lives better and easier. The future will belong to those who embrace lifelong learning, adapt with resilience, and use technology as a tool to create new opportunities and businesses where none existed before.
(More on this from the excellent Derek Thomson’s new Substack.)
6. Conclusion: Teaching the Future, Not Just the Past
AI, education, and work will continue to evolve in ways we can only start to imagine. Innovations in automation, robotics, biotechnology, and large language models, will transform traditional roles. Entirely new fields and career paths will emerge. Adaptability, curiosity, and a willingness to learn will be more valuable than ever. This should be one of the core missions of all educators to help facilitate these skills.
AI is not simply a tool for efficiency, it’s a catalyst for creativity, collaboration, and lifelong growth. Time should be spent on safe and ethical AI that complements and improves human capabilities, in education and the arts. People are far from perfect and we want technologies that amplify our best qualities and minimize our worst ones. The next chapter will be written by those who are bold enough to learn, adapt, and shape technology to serve humanity’s highest aspirations.