Humans need not apply

2025 is the year of "agents" ... FACE/OFF for ZOOM ... And here come the A.I. gadgets.

A decade ago, a YouTube video titled “Humans Need Not Apply” painted a picture of a future where automation and AI will render human jobs obsolete.

Fast forward to 2025, and this vision is unfolding with remarkable accuracy.

“No office politics. No coffee machine small talk. Just pure algorithmic productivity.”

That’s the tagline for JobForAgent.com, the first job board for autonomous AI agents — essentially autonomous programs that can make a series of complex decisions to complete tasks.

The postings on the site look familiar at first glance — researcher, podcast editor, SEO optimizer, but there’s one key difference: Only bots can apply.

Startups have begun listing “help wanted” ads exclusively for AI Agents, and tech giants are hyping AI Agents as the next big productivity revolution.

A decade ago, AI agents were a fringe sci-fi idea. These days, most tech moguls say they're the next big thing. And if they're right, it could trigger massive unemployment and economic upheaval.

While automation has always sparked fears, the rise of AI agents represents something bigger: Humanity is no longer just outsourcing its menial labor, we're outsourcing critical thinking.

AI Agents wanted

Last year, a tiny startup called Firecrawl posted a job ad that quickly went viral on social media. “Please apply only if you are an AI agent, or if you created an AI agent that can fill this job,” the December listing read.

This stunt generated mixed feelings online and signaled an upcoming trend. In Poland, two entrepreneurs launched JobForAgent.com where people can post jobs that will be fully completed by an autonomous AI Agent, end to end. Think of it as something similar to a Fiverr or Upwork platform, but for bots.

Initially, the reactions about Firecrawl’s job post and JobForAgent.com called it just another marketing stunt or pointed out that there still needs to be humans building these agents.

But six months after the initial post, the momentum seems to be only picking up.

Firecrawl is back at it. It's now committing $1 million to hiring AI Agents, as it's CEO proudly proclaims that the future belongs to "those who build and control armies of AI agents."

As someone who works with AI Agents on a regular basis, I can tell you first hand that the Agents are not good enough to replace full human jobs. But as new advancements come in every month, it feels like believing “it won’t get good enough to replace us” is wishful thinking.

Big Tech’s big bet

Tech’s biggest players have wholeheartedly embraced AI agents, sometimes while warning that they could completely upend our economic systems.

In January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that “in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”

Weeks later, Nvidia’s founder Jensen Huang declared, “The age of agentic AI is here,” envisioning a future where a company with 50,000 employees might also have 100 million AI agents working alongside them. In other words, each human could be amplified by an army of bots — or perhaps replaced by them.

No one is more on board than ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. He takes the position that Agentic AI should replace a lot of the current “soul-crushing work.” By automating repetitive tasks, ServiceNow aims to free employees for more strategic and creative roles.

“You have to realize the soul-crushing work that most people are stuck with on a day-to-day basis is not actually the work they ever dreamed of doing,” he noted.

The CEO of Fiverr, the world’s leading freelancer platform, posted an internal email claiming that AI is coming for everyone’s job — including his own.

“So here’s the unpleasant truth: AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too. This is a wake up call.”

While the tone varies from optimistic to pessimistic on the consequences of Agentic adoption, the general idea that they're the "next big thing" seems to be accepted by most tech giants, and others are following suit.

Job cuts and restructuring

As companies embrace AI, some are "restructuring their workforces," often meaning cutting jobs.

This month, Microsoft announced it would cut 3% of its workforce, about 6,000 employees, as reported by CNBC. The layoffs, which included 1,985 positions at its Redmond headquarters, aimed to “reduce management layers” and position the company for success in a “dynamic marketplace.”

While Microsoft did not explicitly link the layoffs to AI, the timing and context suggest that technological advancements, including automation, may play a role.

The company’s focus on adapting to platform shifts aligns with the broader industry trend of using AI to enhance efficiency, potentially reducing the need for certain roles.

And sure, junior coders are at risk of getting replaced.

What if most of the current jobs go away? Will there be new jobs?

America has panicked over automation before.

In the 1940s, headlines asked apprehensively, “Does Machine Displace Men?” as machines trimmed factory payrolls.

By the 1980s, robots on assembly lines revived the same dread. The 1990s internet boom sparked fresh worry as clerical tasks went digital.

Each wave erased millions of jobs — U.S. manufacturing alone shed 5 million roles from 2000-2010, most studies say because of automation. Yet new industries kept emerging, and total employment ultimately climbed.

Economists still argue tech’s long-run gains outweigh short-term losses. But the transition hurts: displaced workers rarely slide smoothly into higher-skill posts, and wealth often concentrates before it spreads.

But the most unsettling bit isn’t merely job loss; it’s the speed at which exponential curves upend straight-line thinking.

We traditionally like to think of progress in straight lines, but computer intelligence is growing exponentially and there is a chance that there is a “tipping point.”

Skill sets that seemed rock solid for the last two decades may become irrelevant in a matter of months.

A study from Goldman Sachs predicted that there could be up to 300 million full-time jobs that could be affected by AI.

So what are the jobs of the future then? What are we all going to do if there are no jobs left to do? The scary thing is, no one really knows.

But there is definitely going to be a “transition” period (which we are already in) from the world as we know it, to something very different.

Government meets future: Gov. Katie Hobbs announced that she had formed a statewide “AI Steering Committee” tasked with developing a framework and strategy for AI in state government. The group includes representatives from public schools and universities, police and law enforcement, tech and business, and local and statewide government, and will work on everything from procurement guidelines to implementation to AI literacy.

“This committee will ensure that AI is implemented in a way that expands opportunity, strengthens public trust, and delivers better outcomes for every Arizonan,” Hobbs said in a statement.

GPT is the tip of the iceberg: Even if you don’t use ChatGPT, AI is probably touching your life, AZFamily’s Mitchell Koch writes in a piece summarizing how local government and companies use AI. From managing local government data, to translation services at the local library, to redacting police records, AI is everywhere.

Shut down the loophole: Hobbs signed a bill last week to criminalize AI-generated child porn — which wasn’t technically illegal since it doesn’t depict real children. Republican Rep. Julie Willoughby, who sponsored the legislation, said predators are exploiting the loophole in the law, and “if it looks like a real child is being abused, that’s enough.”

State pushback: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes joined 39 counterparts in a bipartisan letter urging Congress to strip out a portion of the proposed federal budget bill that would bar states from regulating AI for 10 years, arguing the freeze would gut hundreds of consumer-safety laws and leave residents exposed, per Reuters.

“In the face of Congressional inaction on the emergence of real-world harms raised by the use of AI, states are likely to be the forum for addressing such issues,” the letter from 40 AGs said.

No sympathy for the deepfake: After an Arizona court allowed a deepfake of a man murdered in a road rage incident to address his killer, Republic columnists EJ Montini and Elvia Diaz sound off on the decision on KJZZ’s “The Show.” Neither was a fan.

“The person is not alive. Most unfortunate. And yes, the deceased is a victim, but also the family members of him in this case are the victims. And they have the responsibility and are entitled to speak in court. But they should do it themselves, not a fake person,” Diaz said.

Face off, live: An open-source tool called Deep-Live-Cam is trending after demos showed it grafting anyone’s face onto a webcam feed with near-perfect lighting and motion sync from a single photo. Fans hail new creative freedom, while security folks warn it slashes the cost of real-time identity scams.

AI class record: Google says 260,000 people registered for its free five-day Generative AI training series — enough for a Guinness World Record as the largest virtual AI conference in a single week.

AlphaEvolve debut: DeepMind’s new coding agent pairs Gemini 2.0 models with an “evolutionary scorer” (basically a DNA analysis tool) to invent algorithms. It has already broken a 56-year-old matrix-multiplication benchmark and shaved 0.7 % off Google’s data-center energy use, with chip design and drug-discovery tests next.

Design legend returns: OpenAI is snapping up former Apple design guru Jony Ive’s stealth hardware startup, io, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $6.5 billion. Ive and his ex-Apple crew will now lead design inside OpenAI, with the first AI-native device targeted for release as early as 2026.

Lights, camera, soundtrack: Google’s new Veo 3 model doesn’t just invent video from text prompts — it composes the ambient audio to match. Early demos show crisp lip-sync, smoother motion, and scene-aware soundscapes.