How to Escape Wage Slavery in the Age of AI

I know we have already been told the story that some people don't hate work. There is actually a way where you can escape the wage salary in this age of AI. There are some people that they hate waking up to a life that they didn't choose.

They sell their time just for enough money in order to survive and they know that they are easily replaceable. The world of AI is actually expanding everyday. This is the plight of wage salary.

They are doing the grind work and no one cares about that. And it's all for someone else's agenda. Because I have no doubt, it is not about having a job.

It is about having no leverage. These people have no leverage that can build them out of their life. The work of AI is acceleration.

It accelerates this kind of dynamics. And it's automated routine tasks, predictable rules and checkbox careers are becoming automated everyday. The ones that are not automated are outsourced, others are underpaid.

The people who feel it's the hardest are those whose work can easily be standardized and they can be made into express sheets. Just one Google sheet can render a lot of people out of work. But many of us thought that AI has come to stay.

And it will not threaten anybody. But AI doesn't just threaten wage slaves. It exposes the difference between the people who merely have a job and the people who own a trajectory.

The real risk is that there is a process of interchangeable kind of lifestyle. The danger here is not that AI will take all the jobs. We are more concerned about more crazier things.

It is about outputs that are being generated by AI. Shallow thinking that is replaceable and work that has no distinct value, that is attached to one name. AI is actually faster, a cheaper version of everyone.

And companies driven by efficiency will choose speed and scale every time. When you look at it on the other way round, people who combine these three things, the judgment, identity and leverage, they easily move from wage salary. When you look at judgment, the ability to make good decisions in a messy real-time situation, only a human can do that far beyond what AI can do.

The identity of AI is still something that people are still questioning. And when it comes to leverage, system tools, assets, including AI itself, that allow your work to compound instead of being recessed to zero early morning. The work of AI is to automate and make life easy.

And you can use AI as a leverage. It is not a competition. You cannot out-grind machine.

No, you can't. When machine works 24-7, you just have to sleep after. But you can out-think, you can out-frame and out-relate them.

The mindset shift here is very simple. You don't treat AI like a threat. It can actually make your job easier, better and faster.

So instead of saying that AI can replace you, the best thing to say is how you can become the person who design, orchestrate or apply AI tools in your niche. Instead of trying to learn every AI tool out there, just pick one or two that aligns with what you are doing and master it very well to perfection. Then instead of asking or thinking if you will be out-competed, the best thing to know is how can you have a perspective that stands out with the help of AI as your companion.

These are the kind of people that will survive the mass replacement. Even if you have to build your hazards from purchase delivery, you have to do this in a very quiet way. It is not quitting your job tomorrow, then returning to nothing.

It is about changing terms under which you trade your time. Though this looks like picking a problem, a niche, that you actually care about and going deep to develop non-trivial insights. You can use AI to accelerate your learning and content creation.

You can use it to make research and experiment a lot of things. You can build visible proof of work, thread essay, projects, products and services that can carry unique fingerprints depending on you who is making the prompt. From this, you are gradually shifting from paid by the hour to paid for outcomes.

And as time goes on, you are moving from I sell time to I own something that generates value. This is what we are supposed to become with the help of AI, not the other way around. If AI is making your current role twice as efficient tomorrow, would your life get better or would your position become less?