Just Another Tech Cycle

Let’s stop pretending this is just another one of those. You know? Those tech cycle things, right? Because, it is not.

This is not smartphones. This is not social media. This is not e-commerce. This is the automation of human cognition. Holy shit! Allow me to reiterate that again - human cognition. That´s crazy. And the people building it are talking about it like it’s a weather pattern nobody controls.

They say things like:

“Productivity is growing at unprecedented rates.”

Yes. Productivity. Translation: fewer workers needed.

They say:

“Society will have to adapt.”

Who is society? The 22-year-old graduate with debt and no job offers? The junior analyst who just watched half her department replaced by software? The kid who did everything right and now discovers the entry-level ladder has been deleted?

They say:

“The government will need to step in.”

Oh really? The same government you lobbied to deregulate? The same institutions you weakened under the banner of efficiency and cutting bureaucracy? Now suddenly it’s someone else’s responsibility?

They talk about “economic growth” like it’s a moral good in itself. Five percent. Eight percent. Ten percent. But growth for whom? If productivity doubles and wages don’t, that’s not shared prosperity. That’s extraction.

If companies need fewer workers and keep more of the gains, that’s not progress. That’s concentration.

And we already live in a society strained by thirty years of widening inequality. Housing out of reach. Healthcare tied to employment. Young people delaying families because stability feels fictional.

Now we layer this on top: An industry openly celebrating systems that can replace white-collar workers at scale - writers, designers, coders, legal assistants, analysts - while calmly saying, “New jobs will emerge.”

When? Where? For whom?

Entry-level jobs are not a luxury. They are the bridge between youth and adulthood. They are how you gain experience. They are how you build dignity. They are how you participate. Remove that bridge and what do you get? A generation with education but no entry point. Energy but no outlet. Ambition but no pathway.

And history is very clear about what happens when large numbers of young people feel structurally locked out of the future. They don’t quietly accept it. You cannot tell millions of capable young adults, “You are no longer economically necessary,” and expect social harmony. You cannot celebrate trillion-dollar valuations while telling displaced workers to “reskill” into jobs that may not exist yet or never will. You cannot hoard the gains of automation at the top and assume the bottom will remain calm.

If capital captures most of the upside and labor absorbs most of the shock, instability is not radical speculation, it’s a predictable outcome. And what makes this moment even more dangerous is the tone. The calmness. The technocratic language. The framing of mass disruption as an “adjustment period.”

An adjustment for whom? For investors, it’s portfolio rebalancing. For executives, it’s strategic realignment. For young people, it’s their entire life trajectory.

We are being told this is inevitable. That competition demands it. That if we don’t build it, someone else will. The enemy will. China will. That may be true. But inevitability does not erase responsibility.

If you accelerate displacement, you are responsible for the displacement. If you benefit from automation, you are responsible for how its gains are distributed. If your tools reshape society, you do not get to shrug and say, “Policymakers should handle it.”

Because here’s the part no one wants to say out loud: A society where wealth concentrates further, where opportunity narrows, where safety nets weaken, and where young people see no viable future, that society becomes brittle. And brittle systems break.

Not because people are irrational. Not because they are lazy. But because human beings need: Purpose, security, dignity, a stake in the future. If this new industry truly wanted to “benefit humanity,” it would be moving just as aggressively on:

• redistribution mechanisms

• worker transition funds

• universal basic security

• public ownership stakes

• guardrails that internalize social costs

Instead, we get speed, scale and reassurances. All of that as the systems that were in place to try to protect the population are torn and eliminated. Once again, by whom? By YOU!!!! Yes, YOU!!!

You can’t build a system that sidelines millions and expect gratitude. You can’t tell a generation “trust the market” when the market just automated their ladder. And you absolutely cannot assume that a young, connected, educated population, fully aware of inequality, will respond to permanent exclusion with passive acceptance.

Energy without opportunity doesn’t disappear. It reorganizes. The question isn’t whether AI will change everything. It will. The real question is whether we are building a future where most people feel included in that change, or whether we are engineering a world where intelligence itself becomes private infrastructure and everyone else rents access to relevance.

Because if it’s the second one, then this isn’t just a technological revolution. It’s a social gamble. And history is not kind to systems that gamble with their youth.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas