You’re not imagining it: The AI job squeeze isn’t some future apocalypse, it’s already quietly underway. Professor Yoshua Bengio spent four decades building the technology that is now coming for your job. He is a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, a Turing Award winner, and one of the most-cited scientists in the world on Google Scholar—and now he’s turned his back on his life’s work to warn that your job is probably already under threat.
Desk jobs, or as Bengio called them, “cognitive jobs, the jobs that you can do behind a keyboard,” will be the first casualties of automation.
“It’s just a matter of time,” the AI pioneer stressed on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast in late 2025.
“Unless we hit a wall scientifically, like some obstacle prevents us from making progress to make AIs smarter and smarter, there’s going to be a time when they’ll be doing more and more, able to do more and more of the work that people do … And then, of course, it takes years for companies to really integrate that into their workflows, but they’re eager to do it. So it’s more a matter of time than, is it happening or not?”
