In The Matrix, Neo gets offered a choice. Take the blue pill and believe the comfortable lie. Take the red pill and see reality as it actually is.
Right now, everyone's taking the blue pill on AI and employment. The comfortable lie sounds like this: "AI will take our jobs, unemployment will soar, we'll need universal basic income." It's everywhere. Tech leaders say it. Economists say it. It sounds smart and careful and responsible.
Here's the red pill: AI doesn't destroy jobs. It never has. It creates leverage, and leverage creates explosive demand for human expertise. The pattern has repeated for 200 years. The Luddites were wrong about looms. The pessimists were wrong about tractors. They were wrong about computers.
And they're spectacularly wrong about AI.
The Economics Are Simple (When You See Them)
Wealth is the accumulation of things people want. When a new technology arrives, it doesn't just redistribute the existing pie. It gives us a vastly more powerful oven to bake a thousand new pies.
When the tractor arrived, we didn't just need fewer farmers. We freed up millions of people to become engineers, teachers, doctors, and eventually, software developers. When the personal computer arrived, it didn't eliminate the secretary. It created the entire information economy and millions of jobs that didn't exist before.
Here's the pattern: every time we automate the boring stuff, we free up human capacity to tackle bigger, more valuable problems. The economy doesn't shrink. It expands to fill the new possibilities.
What Actually Happened With Spreadsheets (And Why It Matters Now)
Marc Andreessen has been making this argument for years. His favorite example is what happened when spreadsheets arrived in the 1980s.
Before VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3, financial analysts spent most of their day doing arithmetic. Literally adding and multiplying numbers, checking their work, updating forecasts by hand. When spreadsheets arrived, everyone predicted mass unemployment for analysts. The computer could do in seconds what took analysts hours.
Here's what actually happened: the number of financial analyst jobs increased dramatically. Not decreased. Increased. Because when you removed all the arithmetic grunt work, what was left was the actual analysis. The interpretation. The judgment about what the numbers meant and what actions to take. And it turned out there was enormous demand for that judgment once it wasn't bundled with days of arithmetic.
Plus, because analysis became so much faster and cheaper, companies started analyzing things they never bothered to analyze before. New markets opened up. More companies could afford analysts. The grunt work disappeared but the expertise became more valuable, not less.
This is the exact pattern we're seeing with AI now. The difference is that AI is so much more capable than spreadsheets that the unbundling is happening faster and across more domains.
How to Make Wealth by Paul Graham
Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2004, long before AI was part of the conversation. He had an essay called "How to Make Wealth" where he made a simple observation: at a big company, your contribution gets averaged with everyone else's. You might be ten times more productive than the median employee, but you get paid maybe twenty percent more. The company captures most of the value you create.
His solution was startups. Start a company, work incredibly hard, capture more of the value you create. That worked for some people. But most people don't want to start companies. They just want their expertise to be properly valued.
What's happening now is that AI is creating a third option. Not "work at a big company and let them capture most of your value" and not "start a company and take on huge risk." But rather "use AI to remove the overhead that makes independent expertise hard to deliver, and work directly with the people who need what you know."
Ben Thompson did an early version of this when he started Stratechery. He was a product manager at Microsoft, but the organizational structure meant most of his time went to internal processes rather than the strategic analysis he was actually good at. He started writing detailed analysis of tech strategy and charged people directly for it. No venture capital. No employees. Just expertise delivered directly to people who valued it.
That was 2013. It worked, but it required Ben to be an exceptional writer and marketer. He had to build his own audience, create his own distribution, handle all his own operations.
AI changes the equation. You don't need to be Ben Thompson level at writing and marketing anymore. The AI can handle the documentation, the formatting, the client communication. You just need to be good at your actual expertise.
Tasks Die. Jobs Evolve. Demand Explodes.
The confusion about AI comes from misunderstanding what a job actually is. A job is not a monolithic block of work. It's a collection of tasks, some valuable, some just necessary drudgery.
AI is ruthlessly good at automating the drudgery—the routine, repetitive, predictable stuff that humans do because someone has to, not because it's where we add the most value.
When AI can instantly analyze a dataset, draft a compliance document, or research case precedents, it doesn't eliminate the data analyst, the compliance officer, or the lawyer. It eliminates the toil. It frees them to focus on what only humans can do: judgment, strategy, creative problem-solving, and understanding what the client actually needs.
This is not a job lost. This is a job elevated.
The real insight is this: when you remove the toil, you don't reduce the demand for human expertise. You increase it. Because suddenly, things that were too expensive, too time-consuming, or too complex to attempt become possible. The market for expert judgment doesn't shrink when the grunt work disappears. It explodes.
Why Packy McCormick Makes Millions (And What It Means For Experts)
Packy McCormick worked at a venture capital firm doing what venture analysts do. Research companies. Write investment memos. Model out scenarios. Valuable work, but like most jobs, it was about twenty percent high-value analysis and eighty percent coordination overhead.
In 2020, he started a newsletter called Not Boring. He'd write detailed analysis of companies and industries, the kind of deep research that was previously locked inside investment firms. Within two years, Not Boring had over 200,000 subscribers and was generating over two million dollars per year.
Packy's expertise as an analyst didn't change. What changed was the delivery model. Instead of his analysis being bundled inside a firm's investment process, it was delivered directly to people who valued it.
Now imagine what happens when AI can help with the research, the drafting, the formatting, the distribution. Packy still needed to be an exceptional writer to make Not Boring work. The next version of Packy won't need to be. The AI will handle the writing mechanics. The human will provide the insight and judgment.
This is not about replacing Packy. This is about creating ten thousand more Packys. People who have valuable analytical expertise but who aren't naturally gifted writers or marketers. AI removes that barrier.
The One Million Jobs That Didn't Exist Yesterday
At FlexDuty, we're not theorizing about the future of work. We're building it. Our mission is to create one million new opportunities by proving a simple thesis: humans combined with AI are unstoppable. Here's how it works. A client needs expert help—data labeling, security audits, compliance review, machine learning support, creative production. They describe their problem to our AI-powered platform. The AI scopes the work, asks clarifying questions, and matches them with a vetted expert who has the exact knowledge they need.
The expert—working from anywhere, setting their own rates, choosing their own projects—delivers the work. The AI handles the grunt work: the matching, the scoping, the project management overhead. The human handles what only humans can handle: deep expertise, contextual judgment, and the creative application of knowledge to solve real problems.
This is not freelancing as we knew it. This is not the race-to-the-bottom gig economy. This is professional, high-value work that pays fairly, respects expertise, and operates on the expert's terms.
And here's the thing that matters: none of these jobs existed five years ago in this form. The technology that makes this possible—the AI that can scope projects, match skills, and manage workflows—didn't exist. The market demand was latent, trapped behind too much friction, too much cost, too much complexity.
AI didn't destroy these jobs. AI created them.
Why This Works (And Why It Scales)
Marc Andreessen is right: we have a failure to build. But the bottleneck isn't a lack of ambition; it's the friction that prevents our best experts from operating at full speed. We have massive, unmet demand across every sector: housing, energy, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and yes, expert services.
The bottleneck has never been demand. The bottleneck has always been supply. Specifically, the supply of productive human capacity operating at high leverage.
Here's what was broken in the old model: if you're a brilliant security auditor, tax specialist, or ML engineer, your options are limited. You can work full-time for one company. Or you can freelance on platforms where you compete with hundreds of others, many underpricing their expertise just to win the bid.
Neither option is ideal. The full-time job means most of your time goes to coordination and internal processes. The freelance platforms create a race to the bottom on price.
AI fixes this. When AI handles the low-leverage work—the research, the drafting, the analysis, the project scoping—you can focus entirely on high-leverage judgment. You can serve ten clients instead of one. You can earn what a full-time salary provides, but with complete control over your time and projects.
This is the unlock. AI doesn't replace the expert. AI makes the expert so much more productive that demand for their expertise increases dramatically. And when you multiply this across every knowledge domain—legal, compliance, creative, technical, strategic—you get to one million new high-quality opportunities.
The Real Threat (It's Not AI)
The only real threat AI poses is not to employment. It's to complacency.
The people who will struggle are those who refuse to adapt, who cling to the old, low-leverage tasks that AI can do better and faster. The future belongs to the experts who embrace AI as their co-pilot, who understand that their value lies not in executing routine tasks but in applying judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking.
This is why we're building FlexDuty. Not to replace human expertise, but to multiply it. To prove that technology expands human potential rather than limits it. To show that when you remove the friction and the grunt work, what emerges is not unemployment—it's a flourishing marketplace of expertise. The Luddites feared technology because they saw it as a force of destruction. They were looking at the wrong thing. They saw the tasks disappearing. They didn't see the wealth being created, the new industries emerging, the explosion of human capability that followed.
We see it clearly now. AI is not the enemy of employment. AI is the most powerful engine for opportunity creation we've ever built.
The Future Is Already Here
The jobs of the future will be better than the jobs of the past. They will be more flexible, more valuable, and more aligned with what humans actually want: autonomy, fair compensation, meaningful work, and the ability to apply their expertise where it matters most.
One million opportunities. That's not a dream. That's the plan. And it's just the beginning. The only question is: are you ready to be part of it?
Join the future: FlexDuty is building the marketplace where AI meets human expertise. Whether you're an expert ready to monetize your skills on your own terms or curious about what flexibility looks like, we're proving that technology creates opportunity, not scarcity.