IBNS-CMEDIA: Matt Shumer, CEO of AI startup HyperWrite, has joined a growing list of experts warning that the future of white-collar, screen-based jobs may be highly vulnerable to automation.
In an essay published on his social media page titled “Something Big Is Happening,” Shumer argues that AI systems are rapidly acquiring the ability to perform tasks that are digital, structured, and repetitive.
Drawing a comparison to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote: “Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper, you would have thought they were spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.”
Shumer suggests that AI is currently in a similar “this seems overblown” phase, but warns that the shift could be far more transformative than COVID.
“I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term,” he wrote. “If your job happens on a screen — if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard — then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t ‘someday.’ It’s already started.”
He added that while robots are not yet fully capable of handling physical labour, progress in AI tends to accelerate faster than expected. “Not quite there yet” often becomes “here” surprisingly quickly.
Shumer identified several screen-based professions already facing disruption:
Legal work: AI systems can read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs, and conduct legal research at levels comparable to junior associates.
Financial analysis: Building models, analyzing datasets, preparing investment memos, and generating reports.
Writing and content creation: Marketing copy, journalism, technical documentation, and reports.
Software engineering: AI can now complete multi-day coding projects.
Medical analysis: Reviewing scans, analyzing lab results, and suggesting diagnoses.
Customer service: AI agents increasingly capable of managing complex interactions.
Separately, Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, a professor of computer science at the University of Louisville, warned on The Diary of a CEO podcast that the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in unprecedented levels of unemployment.
“There is not a job that cannot be automated,” he said, suggesting AGI systems capable of outperforming humans across most cognitive tasks could emerge as early as 2027.
“In five years, all physical labour can also be automated,” he added. “We’re looking at levels of unemployment we’ve never seen before — not 10 percent, but potentially 99 percent.”
Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has highlighted the rapid transformation within software engineering. “I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it,” he noted.
Amodei further cautioned that AI systems could soon handle most, if not all, aspects of software development. “We might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all, of what software engineers do end-to-end. Then it’s a question of how fast that loop closes.”
Together, these warnings reflect a growing consensus among AI leaders that the transformation of white-collar work is not a distant possibility — but an unfolding reality.
