The Educational Catastrophe

Jobs will disappear while children are still dreaming of entering those very professions. Entire degree programs will become obsolete before students graduate, creating a generation saddled with debt for non-existent careers. The acceleration is exponential, not linear. We've compressed centuries of historical displacement patterns into months

Last week I wrote that we're on the verge of instantaneous human obsolescence.

In that piece, I argued that the current AI revolution is displacing jobs at an unprecedented speed, compressing what were once decades of historical displacement into just six months to two years. While past technological disruptions took 20-80+ years to fully eliminate professions, AI is achieving similar results in a fraction of the time. This fundamentally accelerates the pace of economic transformation and renders corporate retraining promises obsolete.

We're witnessing a systematic, generational wealth transfer disguised as career preparation. Computer Science enrollment peaked in 2021 at 573,000 students. They will graduate in 2025 into a field where 30% of code is already AI-written and major tech companies are laying off software engineers en masse. That represents over $200 billion in aggregate student debt for rapidly diminishing career prospects..

The timeline math for students is devastating:

• 5 years out (2030): A student enters college in 2026 for data analysis and graduates in 2030. AI will have eliminated the field in 2027—three years before their graduation.
• 10 years out (2035): Displacement cycles will have compressed to one to three months. Any education longer than six months will become a catastrophic financial bet.
• 15 years out (2040): Displacement cycles will be measured in weeks. The entire concept of "career preparation" will have collapsed.

The New Reality: Instantaneous Obsolescence

We've crossed the threshold where displacement speed exceeds human adaptation capacity. With 41% of employers planning workforce reductions due to AI within five years, elimination cycles are now shorter than any possible retraining timeline.

The evidence demonstrates that technological job displacement has accelerated from 80+ year historical transitions to 6-month AI-era eliminations. Modern technological displacement has eliminated the time buffer that allowed for natural workforce adjustment, creating a fundamental mismatch between elimination speed and human adaptation capacity.

Anyone alive today faces potential instantaneous obsolescence as AI's acceleration continues. The traditional career model—education, employment, gradual advancement—is now incompatible with technological reality. We are witnessing the fastest occupational changes in human history, and our institutions, from corporations to universities, remain structurally incapable of addressing this new paradigm.

What this actually means for you and your future

This week, I spoke with several people who didn't even know their profession is gone. Some of them have seen all the signs but justified the situation as "the market is down" or another reason that was true in the past.

It's not that they are in denial. They simply haven't considered this reality.

Have you?