The Great Filter Solution to the Fermi Paradox

We need to start talking about artificial intelligence with a level of seriousness that, so far, most of us have avoided. In every generation, there are moments when a technological shift quietly crosses a threshold. And then, almost without warning, it becomes infrastructure—something so powerful and so embedded that entire industries begin to reorganize themselves around it. However, I do not believe that humanity has faced anything with the same magnitude such as AI in the past. 

I have been working (indirectly) with a major AI company that is currently training its models. They have been paying obscene amounts for creating models to feed AI. Not long ago, in December, the systems many of us experimented with could barely handle the basics. They struggled with structured data, with formatting, with simple logic. Tasks that any first-year analyst or junior associate could perform without thinking were out of reach. It was easy, then, to dismiss the technology as overhyped.

In a matter of months, the same systems began performing work that would once have taken hours of careful effort: building financial models, synthesizing research, drafting analysis, structuring complex documents. Not perfectly, not autonomously, but well enough to change the economics of how that work gets done.

The uncomfortable truth is that the first roles affected will not be senior ones. They will be the entry points. The junior analysts. The interns. The people whose jobs have traditionally consisted of learning by doing repetitive, mechanical, but necessary work. Those tasks were never valuable because they were intellectually profound. They were valuable because someone had to do them.

It is tempting to believe that certain professions will remain insulated. Yet history suggests that no field built on information, analysis, and communication is immune to tools that dramatically reduce the cost of producing those things. So a pivot to law, consulting and other white collar jobs with the same pay and level of prestige is not a viable long term path

Even technical fields are not untouched. Software engineering, long regarded as one of the safest paths forward, is already feeling the pressure at the entry level. Around the world, there are students who invested years of discipline into mastering coding, believing it to be a guarantee of stability, only to discover that the definition of “entry-level work” has begun to shift beneath them.

Over time, the consequences are likely to become clearer. Fewer junior hires. Leaner teams. Pressure on compensation. A gradual erosion of the traditional pyramid structure that has defined many professional services industries for decades. Even the clients that banks, law firms, and consultants depend on will themselves be reshaped by these forces, and as they change, so too will the institutions that serve them.

Now this might sound weird to say but it is important to sat I believe our generation has been numbed to everything. Social media, in particular memes have served the purpose to remove the urgency from realising how shit the entire world is becoming.

The most important takeaway I want someone my age to takeaway from this article is that when people say "in time, AI will......" blah blah, that truly means in another 12-24 months. That is not far away