Future Proof Newsletter: Immigrants won’t take your job. AI will

Hi everyone,

Last weekend, I stepped a bit outside my zone to give my first political keynote. I was there for my college buddy and fraternity brother, Senator Ruben Gallego, but the topic was a little different than the usual campaign trail rhetoric.

My talk was titled "The AI Inflection Point: The Future of Work in an Age of Intelligent Machines," though I almost used a more provocative alternative: "Immigrants won’t take your job, AI will."

I generally try to stay out of the political fray, but years ago I asked Ruben why I couldn’t remember a single candidate (with the sole exception of Andrew Yang) talking about job automation. He gave me a reality check: voters in Arizona don’t vote on automation; they vote on immigration, education, and water rights. He was absolutely right. My research for the talk showed that while 22% of voters consider immigration their top priority, only 1% feel that way about AI.

Yet, according to current economic data, you are roughly 14 times more likely to have your role displaced by an AI agent than by an immigrant. As uninterested as I am in politics, I find it incredibly striking when it feels like the entire world is pointed in the wrong direction. We are debating the border while the structural foundation of the labor market is shifting beneath our feet.

We are already seeing the first waves of this shift. Amazon recently announced it is cutting 14,000 corporate and manager roles as it flattens its organization to move at "AI speed," and Jack Dorsey’s Block recently laid off 10% of its workforce, explicitly citing AI as a driver for future efficiency.

Perhaps most telling is the quiet crisis at the entry-level: research from IDC and Stanford University shows that enterprises are already drastically reducing their hiring of junior talent. I shared a story in my newsletter two weeks ago about a good friend of mine who runs an investment fund; he recently launched an entire equity ETF without hiring a single additional researcher. He didn't need a junior analyst to crunch the data; he built an agentic system that could do it in seconds.

This can feel like a grim prophecy, but as I discuss in my book, Future Proof, we’ve seen this pattern with every major technological disruption. While some roles are destroyed, the explosion of new capabilities creates entirely new categories of work. Today, we are seeing the rise of prompt engineers and agentic AI architects, roles that didn't exist even three years ago.

In the book, I share the story of Chadwick Washington, who used to help me as my social media manager. Instead of fearing automation, Chadwick spent his downtime experimenting with the latest generative video and audio tools. By leaning into his curiosity and building new workflows, he successfully tripled his salary and ended up giving me his notice (I’m still heartbroken). I’ve included an excerpt about his journey below.

The biggest question isn't whether the jobs will exist, but whether humans can pivot quickly enough to claim them. Our human brains are wired for linear progress, but AI power is doubling every 7 months. This creates a massive "people problem" I see in organizations every day: employees are often paralyzed by fear, either rejecting the technology outright or begrudgingly accepting it as an inevitable burden.

Only a small fraction of people see the real opportunity: a way to offload the repetitive "drudge work" to machines to make their own jobs more human. Those who embrace this can leapfrog past their peers and, as McKinsey research highlights, they actually find their work more enjoyable. By automating the mundane, these early adopters are able to reclaim their time and focus on the high-level, creative work that truly matters.

So, what should you do when you see headlines about massive AI-related layoffs? Don't wait for a formal training program. Lean in. Play with the tools. Experiment. It is truly amazing how quickly you can now build agentic systems to automate your own workflow, create high-end multimedia content that never would have been possible previously, and produce polished reports and decks in a tenth of the time it took last year.

The gap between the early adopters and everyone else is no longer widening gently…it’s exploding. The best way to be "future proof" is to start building today!

Best,

Dr. Michael “House” Housman

For months, I worked closely with a guy named Chadwick Washington. Chadwick’s a visual effects artist who moonlighted as a social media manager, helping me refine content and sharpen messaging. He’s a smart, creative, hardworking guy.

Then, he started tinkering with the newest crop of AI multimedia tools, stuff that could generate images, videos, and even audio at the push of a button. He played, experimented, broke things, fixed them, and tested out wild ideas just to see what the tech could do.

One of his experiments was to take boring, inanimate things and make them come alive through AI animation. For fun, he started creating videos of epoxy being poured onto floors in moments, washing over it and showing the finished results. Don’t ask me why epoxy — he told me he deliberately picked one of the most “tech-backward” industries he could think of, figuring if anyone needed a little AI magic, it would be them.

And he was right.

A couple of his epoxy videos went viral online, and pretty soon a flooring company reached out to him and said, “Hey, could you make more of these for us?” What started as goofing around with AI turned into a full-fledged gig. After a few conversa- tions, they realized Chadwick could do things for them that no one else could. They offered him a deal.

He gave me notice shortly thereafter (I’m still heartbroken about it) and walked away from his social media side hustle with me and a few other clients. He’s now building a brand-new career as an AI artist, making significantly more money than before, doing work that literally didn’t exist just a few years prior.

I’m proud of him, even though I’m sad I can’t afford him anymore. But his story resonates (no epoxy pun intended) with the bigger point: Yes, AI is going to eliminate some jobs, but it’s also going to create many more. Chadwick wasn’t a machine learning engineer. He was just brave enough to apply new tools in an unexpected place.

That curiosity opened the door to a whole new career path.