AI Boom: Nuclear Renaissance

ByMickey Mullin

Part 1 of the AI Choice Point Series

This article was originally published on my Substack. Read it there for comments and to subscribe: AI Boom, Nuclear Renaissance.

The Warning Shot

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, dropped a bombshell last week that should have made every white-collar worker stop scrolling:

AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years.

We’re heading toward mass elimination of roles, especially at the entry level. Most people are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.

Here’s the part that should make you sit up and pay attention: “It’s going to happen in a small amount of time—as little as a couple of years or less.” Not decades. Not “someday.” A couple of years.

But here’s what Amodei—and most of the hand-wringing headlines—missed: This isn’t actually the catastrophe everyone thinks it is. In fact, it may well be our salvation.

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The Expedition Arrives

Picture this: A remote island community living as their ancestors did for centuries. Suddenly, ships darken the horizon. Armed strangers wade ashore speaking an alien language, carrying impossible technology. The villagers see invasion.

But these aren’t conquerors—they’re a rescue expedition. The geothermal system that’s sustained their hot springs and fertile soil for generations is about to erupt. The “invaders” are here to save them.

Most villagers resist. The old ways worked for their grandparents. Why change now? A few curious souls learn the strangers’ language, discover their tools, understand their mission. When the mountain finally erupts, guess who merely survives—and who thrives—in the new world?

The Real Volcano

Here’s the plot twist nobody’s talking about: AI isn’t the volcano. AI is the rescue expedition.

The real catastrophe bearing down on civilization is demographic collapse. Nearly every developed nation faces below-replacement birth rates. Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy—entire societies aging into irrelevance. The global economy, built entirely on continuous growth, requires expanding populations of productive workers.

When the next generation fails to replace the current one, we’re looking at a potential new Dark Age. Economic contraction. Crumbling infrastructure. Lost knowledge. The end of progress itself.

AI offers us an escape route: productivity multiplication that could maintain—and even advance—civilization with fewer human workers. The choice isn’t “accept AI disruption or keep your job.” It’s “adapt to AI or watch society collapse around your grandchildren.”

Winter comes every year, grasshopper. It’s time to put away some food.

The Historical Parallel

This isn’t humanity’s first rescue expedition. Before mechanized farming, 80-90% of the global population worked the land just to avoid starvation. Tractors, combine harvesters, and industrial agriculture eliminated over 80% of those jobs across decades.

Did this destroy civilization? No—it supercharged it. One farmer who fed 2½ people in 1900 could feed over 100 by 2000. This productivity explosion freed humanity from food scarcity, enabling urbanization, education, the sciences, space travel. We traded subsistence for the stars.

AI promises something even more profound: freedom from mental drudgery. Just as physical automation liberated us from endless manual labor, AI can eliminate the cognitive equivalent—summarizing, researching, sorting, contextualizing. AI systems are already “fantastic at summarizing, brainstorming, reading documents, reviewing legal contracts, and delivering specific (and eerily accurate) interpretations of medical symptoms and health records.”

Here’s the key difference that makes this revolution unprecedented: You can use the disruptive technology itself to save yourself from disruption. Displaced farm workers couldn’t ask a tractor to teach them factory skills. You can ask ChatGPT to help you master literally any skill you can imagine.

Nuclear Power, Not Nuclear War

AI is like nuclear technology—it can obliterate a city or power a ship to another solar system. The same models replacing entry-level lawyers can teach someone legal research skills in two weeks instead of two years. The same systems automating financial analysis can help a barista learn data science while she still has her coffee shop job.

This is why I have zero patience for the wailing and moaning about AI’s arrival. You’re complaining about being handed the tools of your own salvation while standing in the path of an actual catastrophe.

People adapt to literal bombs falling on their cities. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Economic collapse. The only thing keeping you from adapting to AI is your own choice not to.

The Great Objection Marathon

Let me address some excuses I hear constantly:

“AI is just overhyped Siri”

This is like saying the internet in 1995 was “just email.” AI represents as big a shift in leveraging human knowledge as the web was in the 2000s. Much of our collective wisdom was locked behind the sheer volume of information. Google helped, but AI is exponential—it can sift through everything humans have ever written to answer questions you haven’t even thought to ask yet.

“AI is Skynet”

Humans anthropomorphize everything—it’s how we make sense of the world. But AI isn’t human. It doesn’t have glands, hormones, or mortality driving it toward dominance. What makes us want power, revenge, or survival simply doesn’t exist in AI systems. They can mimic human behavior because they’re trained on human writing, but they can’t “want” destruction any more than your calculator wants to overthrow mathematics.

“AI makes you lazy”

Exactly. Just like automobiles make you lazy. And elevators. And dishwashers. They also let you travel vast distances, reach great heights, and focus your energy on things that matter more than manual labor. I’m writing this article with AI handling research compilation and collating new ideas and discoveries into related areas of exploration while I focus on synthesis and creation. Would I have concocted the above volcano metaphor if I were buried in organizing quotes and citations? Possibly. Or I might have been to mentally fatigued and missed out on it or another of the ideas that comprise this.

“This time is different”

Yeah, it is. Doomsayers think this means we’re doomed because we can’t adapt fast enough. Bullshit. The timeline is compressed, not impossible. Real talk: The only difference between this disruption and historical ones is that you’re alive for this one, so it feels scarier. The Boomers going through the 1980s PC revolution thought it heralded the end of human careers, too.

The Practical Escape Hatch

Here’s the beautiful irony: AI can teach you to escape AI displacement faster than any method in human history. Dan Koe outlined a framework that can compress months of learning into weeks:

  1. Define your purpose – Connect new skills to your current situation and desired future
  2. Choose a project – Learn by doing, not consuming
  3. Use AI for rapid research – Get foundational knowledge instantly
  4. Supplement with targeted tutorials – Fill specific gaps as you encounter them
  5. Leverage AI for problem-solving – Overcome obstacles in real-time
  6. Iterate with AI feedback – Improve faster than waiting for human input
  7. Achieve mastery – In weeks, not months

A financial analyst facing AI automation could use this exact process to become a content creator in two weeks. Define purpose: “Transition from vulnerable analytical role to creative field.” Choose project: “Write a series of financial literacy blog posts.” Use AI to research content creation basics, supplement with specific tutorials, solve problems as they arise, get feedback on drafts, iterate rapidly.

The result? A portfolio and new skillset before their current job disappears. This is using the weapon of disruption as the tool of salvation.

The Choice Point

“The first step is warn,” Amodei said. Consider yourself warned. But unlike farm workers who had decades to adapt as mechanization slowly spread, you have years—maybe less.

The rescue expedition has arrived. You can learn their language and join their mission, or you can cling to the old ways while the volcano prepares to erupt. Some of those who join the expedition won’t merely survive the transition—they’ll become expedition leaders themselves, helping others navigate the new world.

Here’s what I know for certain: With industrialization, humanity traded starvation for space travel. With AI, we’re trading mental drudgery for possibilities we literally cannot imagine yet. The opportunities ahead aren’t just larger—they’re unimaginable.

The only question is whether you’ll be part of building that future or spending your time mourning a past that was always going to end anyway.

Choose wisely. The ships won’t wait forever.

Coming next: Part 2 explores exactly how I rebuilt my career using AI as my daily toolkit—the specific workflows, tools, and mindsets that transformed me from layoff victim to AI-powered builder.

References

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