The conventional framing of AI and employment is defensive: how do we protect jobs from automation? Stuart McClure inverts it entirely. His argument is not just that AI displacement is inevitable, but that for the vast majority of workers, it is actively desirable — and that the real policy failure would be slowing it down.
Stuart has observed across five companies and decades of technology leadership that most people spend the majority of their working hours on tasks they find neither engaging nor meaningful: repetitive data processing, routine communication, compliance documentation, status tracking. These are exactly the tasks at which AI excels. Automating them does not diminish human work — it liberates humans to do the work that only humans can do well: strategic judgment, creative problem-solving, relational leadership, and the kind of contextual reasoning that comes from embodied human experience.
The essay confronts the legitimate anxiety that surrounds this transition honestly. Not every displaced worker will seamlessly pivot to higher-value work, and the distribution of transition costs is deeply unequal. Stuart does not dismiss these concerns — he takes them seriously enough to argue that they require active policy intervention and organizational investment in workforce development, rather than the economically costly and ultimately futile effort to slow automation.
The title's dark humor is the point: if you are doing work that AI can do better, demanding that AI not do it is not in your long-term interest. The liberating path is to stop defending those tasks and start building the distinctly human capabilities that the next economy will actually reward.