Tools & Platforms

Tech Workers Prepping for AI Apocalypse: Working Out, Economic Crash

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3 weeks ago

August 17, 2025

Henry, a boyish-looking AI researcher, believes there’s about a 50/50 chance that in the next few years AI will become so powerful and sophisticated it will pose an existential threat to all human life. For his day job, he’s trying to prevent this from happening by working for a small safety-focused AI research lab in the Bay Area. He takes this mission seriously: He’s sworn off romantic relationships to dedicate himself to the cause, and he donates a third of his income to AI safety nonprofits.

In his free time, he’s preparing for the possibility of failure, by building DIY bioshelters to protect him and his family from an AI apocalypse.

Speaking from a video call in his office, Henry tells me it’s remarkably easy to build a bioshelter capable of protecting against lethal pathogens created by or with the aid of advanced AI. First, you buy an off-the-shelf positively pressurized tent, the sort typically used as grow rooms for plants. Then you stack multiple professional-grade HEPA filters in front of the air intake. Finally, you stuff it with as much shelf-stable food, water, and supplies as you can fit.

Henry’s bioshelter will be “quite cheap,” he tells me, “probably less than $10,000 including the three years worth of food I’m going to put in there.” He asked that I use a pseudonym because of the social stigma associated with being a “prepper” — particularly if his fears do not come to pass and humanity prevails.

Henry is far from alone in putting his money where his mouth is regarding his deepest fears and hopes for AI. For a certain class of Silicon Valley denizens, AI is not just the next buzzy technological wave; it is poised to fundamentally transform our society, and very soon. For them, there is little time to babble about the possible futures of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, over Slack channels and dinner parties. The time for radical change is now. Rationalists, a Silicon Valley-aligned philosophy centered on trying to improve human rationality and morality, have grown increasingly concerned about the perceived AI risk — while on the other side of the aisle, startup boosters’ predictions for the tech are growing ever-more ebullient.

“A lot of us are just going to look back on these next two years as the time when we could have done something.”

Some believe we’re at the dawn of an age of superabundance — in which almost all intellectual labor can be automated — unlocking an unprecedented wave of human flourishing. They’re embracing a lifestyle shift they call “smart-to-hot.” Others are bracing for economic catastrophe and making major investments and career moves accordingly. And yet others, who think AI will inevitably wrest free of human control and gain the ability to kill all organic life. They’re spending their retirement savings, having “weird orgies,” and building survival bunkers.

“A lot of us are just going to look back on these next two years as the time when we could have done something,” Henry says. “Lots of people will look back on this and be like, ‘Why didn’t I quit my job and try to do something that really mattered when I had a chance to?'”

After Apoorva Srinivasan got out of a long-term relationship in 2024, she realized she wanted something slightly different in a man — because of developments in AI.

A biomedical research data scientist living in Los Angeles, Srinivasan had historically been attracted to a certain kind of intelligent guy, prioritizing smarts over conventional attractiveness, she tells me. Now she saw that because generative AI is doing the intellectual labor of more and more people, raw intelligence has become less important to her than charisma, social engagingness, and hotness. Or as she recently quipped in a semi-viral tweet, “If you’re smart, pivot to being cool/hot.”

Many of the people I spoke to for this story believe a variation of this: that because AI will soon subsume much of intellectual life, social life will become much more integral to human society, and being physically attractive will become all the more essential to flourishing within it. Brains are over, beauty and brawn are in.

“I’ve sort of always loved fitness,” says Soren Larson, a tech entrepreneur in Florida, “and I rather think that being hot and personable and funny are poised to be rare features when AI can do all the sort of intellectual things.”

As AI subsumes more of intellectual life, some believe that being hot will become all the more essential to flourishing within society.

Jason Liu, an AI consultant, tells me he’s “already made that pivot.” Several years ago, a debilitating, repetitive strain injury in his hands brought his career as a software engineer to a standstill. He retooled his life, diving into leisure pursuits like jiu jitsu and ceramics, and fashioned a second career as a consultant, trying to optimize for delegation and free time to socialize rather than hustle. “I personally did not want to be valued for my intelligence,” he says. “I was like, this intelligence is what physically hurt me, and caused me to lose my job.”

When we spoke by phone, he was out strolling the streets of Paris, as part of an extended international jaunt. “Really leaning into leisure is kind of how I think about AGI,” he says.

Other people I meet with are reshaping their social lives today not because of their hopes for AI, but because of their fears.

“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb,” C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948, “let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.” In my conversations with people concerned about AI’s impact, a few explicitly cited this Lewis quote, and many expressed a similar sentiment, in how they’re trying to treasure the time they have now.

“It’s really freeing in some ways,” Aella, a fetish researcher and sex worker in the San Francisco Bay Area with a cult following on X, tells me of her concerns about AI development. “I like throwing weird orgies, and I’m like — well, we’re going to die. What’s a weirder, more intense, crazier orgy we can do? Just do it now.”

As we sit out on the AstroTurf lawn at Lighthaven — a kitschy old hotel in Berkeley converted into an intellectual campus for the Rationalist movement — she talks about her fears of how AI may destroy humanity. “I can’t face it all at once,” she says. “I can catch glimpses of the big thing out of the corner of my eye and then I grieve it when I can, but I don’t have the emotional capacity to really absorb it.” As a result, she lives much more in the moment. She’s gradually spending down her savings. She exercises less. She’s tried “hard drugs” she would otherwise avoid. She’s taking more sleeping pills, despite concerns about dementia risk. She’s freezing a bunch of her eggs; “I’m just trying to get as many as I can, for fun.”

Over in San Francisco’s Dolores Park, Vishal Maini, a venture capital investor, tells me something similar — though perhaps a little less extreme. “I think it makes sense to just adopt a little bit of a bucket-list-mentality around this,” he says. “Do what’s important to you in the time that we have.”

As we drink herbal tea, Maini talks me through his mental model for the coming years. He isn’t sure if we’re approaching a future where human capability is radically enhanced by AI, or a darker future in which humanity is “deprecated” by the technology. Amid this uncertainty, he advocates for “paleo-futurism”: consciously prioritizing human interaction in a world replete with hyper-engaging, endlessly personalized digital content. “As we enter the era of AI companions, and increasingly dopamine-rich digital experiences, we have this choice,” he says. “Do you go into the metaverse all the way, or do you stay in the real world?”

For Holly Elmore, concerns about AI have impacted her life more intimately: It contributed to her decision to get divorced. At a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Mission District, she tells me she and her husband were both deeply attuned to the risks of unconstrained AI development, but had different approaches to reining it in.

Elmore, the executive director of anti-AI protest group Pause AI, believed steadfast mass organization against the big labs like OpenAI was the only viable way forward, which she says her ex-husband, Ronny Fernandez, was “unsupportive” of. “We had a lot of problems and I should have probably never been in that marriage, but it just became very clear that I wasn’t going to be able to keep doing Pause AI if we stayed together,” she says. “I had a very strong moral conviction on that and it did organize the priorities in my life very well. And honestly, I love living that way.”

“I do think that trying to use shaming and promoting in-group out-group thinking to achieve policy goals has a pretty bad track record,” Fernandez, who is the manager of Lighthaven, writes over email. “Those disagreements led to resentments on both of our ends which contributed to our eventually getting divorced.” While he believes that casting the AI scaling labs as “political enemies” will likely backfire, he stresses that “there is a significant chance that smarter than human AI will literally kill approximately everyone, or lead to even worse outcomes, within a few decades.”

For others, their dreams and worst fears about AI have transformed their approach to money. Sometime in 2020, Daniel Kokotajlo, then 28 years old, stopped saving for retirement.

The AI researcher was growing concerned about the existential threat AI might pose to humanity. He worked at OpenAI from 2022 until he quit in 2024 over concerns about how it was handling AI safety — an issue he continues to work on. Earlier this year, he published AI 2027, a widely read online essay exploring how rapid advancements in AI may lead to several “loss-of-control” situations, from a world war over the AI arms race in the late 2020s to the extinction of human life by 2035, via an AI releasing a lethal chemical spray across civilization.

Haroon Choudery, an AI startup founder, sees next few years as his last chance to make generational wealth.

Amid these threats, he reasons, why bother saving for decades, when even the next few years look increasingly uncertain? “I have a decent amount of money, especially because of the equity, but I’m planning to spend it down,” he tells me at a coffee shop in Berkeley. “I’m planning to have less every year.” He says he knows of numerous other AI researchers doing the same.

On a recent episode of Dwarkesh Patel’s popular tech podcast, Trenton Bricken, a researcher at OpenAI rival Anthropic, shared that he, too, has quit putting money away for retirement, because he believes AGI is fast approaching. “It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which I have all this money that’s just sitting in this account and waiting until I’m 60 and things look so different then,” he said.

Others in the tech industry are taking a very different approach to their money. Among some of the most bullish about how bearish they see the future, there’s a pervasive fear that there are only a few years left to earn as much as possible “before the music stops,” when human intellectual labor becomes largely obsolete.

“We have just a handful of years to try to make it financially,” says a crypto writer in the Midwest who goes by the pseudonym Redphone professionally. “And if you don’t, your bloodline could be relegated to this sort of peasant class under these technological overlords who control AI.”

Haroon Choudery, a former data integrity analyst at Facebook who now runs an AI startup called Autoblocks, has a similar concern. He emigrated from Pakistan to the United States when he was 5; his father was a cabbie, while his mother didn’t work outside the home. He views the next few years as his last chance to make generational wealth for himself and his children. “Things are going to feel a lot more scarce from an upward mobility perspective, so people will generally freeze in their socioeconomic statuses,” he tells me.

Massey Branscomb, an executive at AI hedge fund AlphaFund puts this concept to me in even more blunt terms: “If you are not positioning yourself as a key member of these critical companies,” by which he means top-flight AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, “and you’re kind of living — the term is ironically a ‘wagie’ — you’re living a wagie life, then you could be on the chopping block and then it’s going to be harder. These jobs are not going to come back.”

Others are less sure AI will soon topple the global economy. As an assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, David Thorstad could be considered a wagie. But he tells me he’s not too worried about it. While he has increased the amount he’s saving because of uncertainty around AI, he urges caution about any grand predictions. “I think that there are lots of communities,” he says, “particularly in the Bay Area where groups of very smart, like-minded people live together, work together, read similar forums and podcasts, and when they get very immersed in a particular kind of an extreme worldview about AI, it tends to be very hard to break out.”

And then there are the people who aren’t just preparing AI-driven financial apocalypse; they’re preparing for an AI-driven apocalypse apocalypse.

Ulrik Horn had always been interested in “societal problems,” which led to work in renewable energies after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. But in recent years, the Stockholm-based entrepreneur has been concerned about a different kind of problem: biosecurity. Horn is worried about “mirror life,” an emerging field of biological research that involves creating mirror-forms of naturally occurring life. Specifically, he’s worried that AI may help accelerate research into the field — and may lead to devastating biological weapons. We’re five to 10 years out from AI developing this capability, he believes.

After raising philanthropic funding to research protections against biothreats, he founded Fonix — a startup building off-the-shelf bioshelters with high-grade air filters. For $39,000, you can buy a shelter you can erect at home if and when the scat hits the fan. He has received a handful of pre-orders, he said, with shipping expected in 2026.

After AI wins a war against humans, says Henry, “Maybe they’ll take care of the survivors and they’ll put humans in some kind of human zoo.”

Horn isn’t the only one viewing the perceived threat of AI as a business opportunity. Ross Gruetzemacher, an assistant professor of business analytics at Wichita State University, is launching a “resiliency” consulting firm to help businesses and individuals prepare for significant shocks as a result of AI and other existential risks. He has also bought land in Wyoming, on which he plans to build his own secure facility. James Norris, an entrepreneur and longtime worrier about a variety of threats to humanity, has recently moved into what he describes as a “survival sanctuary” in an undisclosed location in South-East Asia, and is also offering consulting services and assistance setting up sanctuaries to others. Norris has also sworn off having children, he tells me, because of the havoc he believes AI will wreak on the world.

Despite his personal fears, Kokotajlo, the ex-OpenAI researcher, is heavily skeptical of any attempt to aggressively prepare for a bad AI outcome today. “I think more likely it’s either we’re all dead, or we’re all fine,” he says. “I think if I spent a few weeks I could make a bug-out bag and make a bioshelter or whatever, and then in some sliver of possible futures it would save my family. But it is just more important for me to do my actual job than to do that.”

A few weeks after I first chatted with Henry, the young AI safety researcher, I check in via email. He’s had a change of heart, and is no longer trying to build a DIY bioshelter. He’s determined that he wasn’t thinking big enough.

Instead, he’s now trying to buy land in California, where he can build more permanent defense structures to protect more of his friends and family. “The main scenario I think about is the one where misaligned superintelligence AI takes over,” he says. He wants to be prepared for a near-future in which an all-powerful AI wages war against humans, but the “AI still has a little bit of empathy.” Once the AI wins that war, he concludes, “maybe they’ll take care of the survivors and they’ll put humans in some kind of human zoo. And I’d much rather live in a human zoo than be killed by bioweapons.”

Rob Price is a former senior correspondent for Business Insider.

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September 7, 2025

The Editors

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Tools & Platforms

Creating more jobs while transforming work

Published

1 hour ago

September 7, 2025

Krishna Kumar & Rakshitha Reddy

Artificial intelligence is reshaping employment in ways that challenge basic assumptions about work and human value. While headlines focus on job displacement fears, the data tells a different story: AI will create far more jobs than it eliminates, generating 78 million net new positions globally by 2030.

The World Economic Forum shows that economy-wide trends – including AI adoption, green transition, and demographic shifts – will create 170 million jobs while displacing 92 million. This isn’t simple technological substitution; it represents entirely new forms of human-machine collaboration that require rethinking the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.

As AI handles routine cognitive tasks, humans are being pushed toward work demanding creativity, emotional intelligence, and nuanced judgment that remains uniquely human. The question isn’t whether we can adapt – it’s whether we can evolve quickly enough to thrive.

Emergence of human-AI collaboration roles

The most revealing development in AI employment isn’t traditional tech job creation, but roles that exist precisely because humans and machines think differently. Tesla’s AI generalists, commanding salaries from $118,000 to $390,000, represent a new professional category: individuals who translate between artificial and human intelligence.

These roles reveal a deeper truth. Rather than replacing human intelligence, AI is highlighting its uniqueness by contrast. The most valuable workers aren’t those competing with machines at computational tasks, but those complementing artificial intelligence with distinctly human capabilities -contextual understanding, ethical reasoning, and navigating ambiguity that remains beyond algorithmic reach.

This represents more than new job categories – it’s the emergence of professionals who serve as translators between artificial and human intelligence. Like social media creating community managers who understood both technology and human behavior, AI creates roles requiring fluency in both machine logic and human insight.

Specialized expertise in AI age

The AI job market is rapidly organizing around a crucial insight: as artificial intelligence handles routine analysis, human expertise becomes more specialized and valuable. Apple’s Machine Learning Algorithm Validation Engineers, earning $141,800-$258,600, don’t just test code – they make judgment calls about when AI systems are safe for real-world deployment.

This specialization reflects a broader pattern across industries. AI Security Specialists, commanding low-six figures to mid-$200,000s, aren’t just cybersecurity experts – they understand how adversaries might exploit AI systems’ tendency to hallucinate or misinterpret edge cases. Their expertise lies in understanding AI vulnerabilities in ways only human insight can provide.

The educational requirements tell a similar story. While many advanced AI roles still prefer graduate credentials, degree requirements have been easing in AI-exposed jobs since 2019 as employers prioritize skills and portfolios. Companies seek individuals who think critically about AI implications, understand limitations, and make nuanced decisions about deployment and oversight.

Education and the transformation of human development

Educational mobilization around AI reflects recognition that transformation goes beyond job training to fundamental questions about human development. In August 2025, Google announced a three-year, $1 billion commitment to provide AI training and tools to US higher-education institutions and nonprofits.

Some selective, cohort-based AI training programs report completion rates approaching 85 per cent, significantly higher than traditional online courses. This success reflects a deeper truth: effective AI education isn’t about learning to use tools, but developing new ways of thinking that complement rather than compete with artificial intelligence.

The paradox of progress and human value

The most counterintuitive aspect of AI employment transformation may be its effect on human value. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, skills that remain uniquely human become more precious. Recent analyses find salary premiums for AI skills – around 28 per cent in job postings and up to 56 per cent in cross-country comparisons within occupations.

PwC projects AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, while the International Monetary Fund warns that nearly 40 per cent of global employment faces AI exposure, with advanced economies experiencing approximately 60 per cent exposure. These figures suggest transformation rather than simple displacement – work requiring humans to collaborate with AI systems while providing oversight, creativity, and ethical reasoning that algorithms cannot supply.

The gaming industry exemplifies this paradox. Despite experiencing restructuring-related layoffs, 49 per cent of game development workplaces now use AI tools. Rather than eliminating creative work, AI is pushing human creativity toward higher-level conceptual thinking – story design, emotional narrative, and cultural understanding that gives entertainment meaning rather than just technical competence.

Preparing for fundamental transformation

The research reveals both unprecedented opportunity and profound challenge. While AI creates more jobs than it eliminates, WEF estimates roughly 44 per cent of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next few years. This suggests transformation beyond retraining to fundamental questions about human adaptability and productive work.

Success stories from early adopters provide valuable insights. Companies implementing comprehensive AI training report significant productivity gains not because humans become more machine-like, but because they learn to leverage AI capabilities while providing uniquely human value.

Adaptation or transformation

The AI employment revolution represents more than technological change- it’s an opportunity to reconsider fundamental assumptions about human potential, work, and value creation. The 78 million net new jobs by 2030 will demand not just new skills but new ways of thinking about intelligence, creativity, and what makes humans irreplaceable.

The geographic and demographic dimensions add complexity that cannot be ignored. Advanced economies face higher AI exposure than emerging markets. In the U.S., 21 per cent of women versus 17 per cent of men work in jobs among the most exposed to AI. The transformation risks exacerbating existing inequalities unless approached with intentional focus on inclusive development and equitable access to AI-era opportunities.

Embracing the transformation thoughtfully

The AI employment revolution offers an unprecedented opportunity to elevate human work beyond routine tasks toward creativity, relationship building, and the kind of meaning-making that defines our species. The infrastructure investments, educational initiatives, and emerging job categories all point toward a future where humans and artificial intelligence collaborate rather than compete.

The choice before us extends beyond managing technological disruption to embracing human potential in an age of artificial minds. By recognizing that AI’s greatest gift may be forcing us to discover what makes us irreplaceably human, we can build a future where technology amplifies rather than diminishes human flourishing.

The 78 million jobs being created aren’t just employment opportunities – they’re invitations to discover new forms of human capability, creativity, and value creation. The workers who answer that invitation thoughtfully, organizations that embrace human-AI collaboration purposefully, and societies that ensure broad access to AI-era opportunities will shape a future where artificial intelligence serves to reveal rather than replace the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence.

That future requires action today – not just in retraining programs or policy frameworks, but in reimagining what it means to be human in an age of artificial minds. The opportunity is unprecedented, and the time for thoughtful transformation is now.

(Krishna Kumar is a Technology Explorer & Strategist based in Austin, Texas in the US. Rakshitha Reddy is AI Engineer based in Atlanta, US)

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