When the market sneezes, everyone catches the cold. But this time, the market has a mild flu — and everyone still catches the cold. The virus? AI.

AI has broken the usual mould of how retrenchment works. Even before the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence, its current form has already proven sufficient for organisations to reduce reliance on workers who spent decades supporting the business. The market doesn’t need to be in crisis for jobs to disappear. That’s new — and that’s worth sitting with.

At the other end, fresh graduates are booing speakers who state what has already occurred — that AI is the next Industrial Revolution. I understand the frustration. They did everything right. Studied hard, got the degree, showed up ready. And the runway is shorter than anyone told them it would be.

Two groups. No clean answers.

For those who’ve been retrenched or fear they will be, the advice is familiar: upskill, understand AI, work it into your workflow. Fine. But learning does not equate to having a job. It gives you an edge over those who don’t adapt — but there’s still an element of luck involved. Being at the right place, at the right time, in front of the right person.

For fresh graduates, the situation is grimmer. Their degrees have quietly become Singapore’s Certificate of Entitlement for cars — an expensive piece of paper that proves you competed hard for something that may no longer get you where you expected to go.

“They need to be hungrier,” some say. But what does hunger look like in a market with shrinking entry-level roles? Going door to door? Building portfolios of internships and side projects, hoping luck lands on their side?

I’ve been writing about enterprise technology for close to a decade. I don’t have a clean answer. And I think anyone who tells you they do is probably selling something.

The physical labour argument — and why it doesn’t hold

One suggestion that surfaces in these conversations: pivot to physical labour. Trades. Roles that require human hands in unstructured environments. It’s not wrong — for now. But robotics is advancing, and what feels like a refuge today may not hold in five to ten years. The queue just moves. It doesn’t stop.

UBI: the hedge hiding in plain sight

The most honest policy answer on the table may be Universal Basic Income — governments taking a share of corporate profits and redistributing it directly to citizens, decoupling survival from employment. The idea has already moved beyond theory.

Finland’s UBI pilot saw employment rates increase and depression drop by 10 percentage points among recipients. In Kenya, the US$30 million, 12-year programme run by nonprofit GiveDirectly has been giving unconditional cash to more than 20,000 adults across 200 villages since 2016. The results across pilots consistently show the same thing: people don’t stop working. They gain flexibility.

Then there is Sam Altman. Through his nonprofit OpenResearch, the OpenAI chief executive funded a US$14 million study — the largest of its kind in the United States — giving 1,000 low-income adults US$1,000 a month for three years starting in 2020. The man whose company is building the tools that displace jobs was simultaneously funding research into what happens when those jobs disappear.

But here is the twist. Altman has since walked back his enthusiasm for UBI, telling The Atlantic: “I no longer believe in universal basic income as much as I once did. I’m much more interested in ways where we think about kind of collective ownership.” He ran the experiment, collected the data, and quietly shifted his position toward something vaguer. Make of that what you will.

If UBI eventually becomes necessary, it suggests that even those driving AI development don’t fully believe their own “higher order jobs for everyone” narrative. The pilots are real. The hedging is real. The question of who bears the cost of this transition — workers, governments, or the companies capturing the productivity gains — remains unanswered.

The countdown nobody wants to name

“I cannot imagine AI doing my role.” I still hear this often. The problem is, that statement is no longer a defence. It’s a countdown. Not today, perhaps. But in five to ten years? Where will you be — possibly in your 40s or 50s, where retrenchment hits hardest, both financially and in terms of identity?

I don’t have answers. I’m not sure anyone does yet. But I think the only honest move available to most of us is to keep completing the checklist — whatever governments and organisations prescribe — and pivot accordingly. Not because it guarantees anything. But because it’s the only known-known we have left.

The tide isn’t turning back. The question is how we position ourselves against it.