Welcome to the Machine: Robots, Work, and What Makes Us Irreplaceable
An exploration of how AI threatens not just jobs, but mediocrity, routine, and the very idea of human uniqueness. What makes you irreplaceable?
Extended version of the column: AI doesn’t replace work. It replaces mediocrity.
In Japan, robots play football.
This is not a metaphor. They run, kick, coordinate. There are tournaments. Teams. Goals. They’re slow, clumsy, mechanical. But twenty years ago, they could barely walk.
Across the world, a CEO shuts down a textile plant, lays off five hundred workers, and signs a deal with a startup that automates fabric cutting using computer vision. In Paris, a lawyer rewrites contracts with the help of a language model. In Mexico or China, a real influencer is replaced by a virtual version—one that never sleeps, never ages, never complains. In Argentina, a teenager builds a full video game without knowing how to code. In India, thousands of ghostwriters give voice to an AI that’s already better at writing dialogue than they are.
And while all this happens, some ask us to «stay calm.»
They say this revolution is no different from the steam engine, electricity, or the internet. That we just need to adapt. Learn new skills. They call it reskilling. But something smells different this time. Because unlike those past revolutions, this time the machine doesn’t just do—it also learns. And by learning, it imitates us. And by imitating, it replaces us.
Fear is not irrational. It’s ancient.
Because work isn’t just a source of income. It’s identity. It’s belonging. It’s pride.
The threat of losing it isn’t just economic—it’s existential.
Who am I if no one needs me?
Who am I if the machine does it better?
Who am I if I become invisible?
Programmers thought they were safe.
Lawyers thought they were safe.
Writers. Designers. Teachers.
Now we know no one is.
But what about the others?
The ones who aren’t on Twitter writing threads about «the age of AI»?
What about the neighborhood cobbler?
The woman who irons clothes for a living?
The electrician, the delivery guy, the manicurist, the nurse, the truck driver, the HVAC repairman?
What about the sex worker?
Are they safe?
It depends.
It depends on how easily their motions can be replicated.
On how profitable it is to automate them.
On how much we tolerate their replacement.
Because one day, a customer will get tired of waiting for a delivery guy and prefer a drone that shows up in 10 minutes.
Because one day, an app will tell your retired mom she doesn’t need a massage therapist—just activate the smart chair.
Because one day, sex work won’t require skin. Just a reactive hologram with the exact face of your desire. Or a direct connection to the brain.
And it won’t be the State doing it.
It’ll be the market.
Not through force—through convenience.
They won’t take our jobs.
We’ll hand them over.
«What did you dream? It's alright, we told you what to dream.»
The question shifts.
It’s no longer what job you have.
It’s how desirable it is that you keep doing it.
What if the real problem isn’t that the machine can do our work…
but that it was never really ours to begin with?
At its core, AI isn’t taking away what we love.
It’s taking away what we tolerated.
What we survived.
What we dragged around like a sentence.
So maybe the future won’t be just a battlefield between displaced humans and triumphant robots.
Maybe it’ll be something else—a new terrain, where the value isn’t in competing with the machine but in being what it can’t:
Vulnerable. Chaotic. Contradictory. Conscious.
Human.
Maybe the cobbler will survive.
Because his hands aren’t scalable.
Because his trade is a ritual.
Because his shop smells like memory.
Because someone still values what’s made by hand.
But the washing machine repairman who doesn’t look you in the eye, who swaps parts like a robot, who can’t explain what he’s doing—that one will become a memory.
Because AI isn’t here to replace work.
It’s here to replace mediocrity.
And that hurts. Because we’ve all been mediocre at some point.
Because we’ve all survived years doing the bare minimum, waiting for Friday, getting paid just to endure.
In the near future, sex work will split into several branches:
Humans who offer real contact—by choice.
Humans exploited—because markets are never innocent.
AIs simulating emotional, sexual, and sensory connection.
Physical devices embedded with AI, capable of adjusting gesture, pressure, temperature, and response.
And millions will choose the latter.
Not out of perversion.
Out of control.
Because they don’t ask questions.
Because they don’t feel.
Because they don’t judge.
Because the new sex work will resemble the companionship we’ll have since childhood with our AI assistants—more than the messy intimacy of human beings.
And so, a part of our humanity will quietly shut down.
AI doesn’t just threaten our income.
It threatens our excuses.
It leaves us naked in front of one brutal question:
What makes you irreplaceable?
If your answer is «my résumé,» you’ve already lost.
If it’s «my degree,» you’ve already lost.
If it’s «my experience,» you’re playing with fire.
But if it’s your voice, your gaze, your shortcut-free humanity—then maybe not.
Maybe not yet.
Maybe art isn’t what AI can’t create…
but what we still don’t dare to.
Maybe the job of the future isn’t to defend what we did—
but to imagine what comes next.
And maybe, just maybe, those robots playing football today are just the mirror of a bigger game:
The one where we remember why we ever played.
«Welcome, my son. Welcome to the machine.»
Thanks to the media that published this article.
