Matt Shumer’s viral blog about AI’s looming impact on knowledge workers is based on flawed assumptions

AI Influencer Matt Shumer penned a viral blog on X about AI’s potential to disrupt, and ultimately automate, almost all knowledge work that has racked up more than 55 million views in the past 24 hours.

Shumer’s 5,000-word essay certainly hit a nerve. Written in a breathless tone, the blog is constructed as a warning to friends and family about how their jobs are about to be radically upended. (Fortune also ran an adapted version of Shumer’s post as a commentary piece.)

“On February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3-Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic,” he writes. “And something clicked. Not like a light switch … more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.”

Shumer says coders are the canary in the coal mine for every other profession. “The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from ‘helpful tool’ to ‘does my job better than I do,’ is the experience everyone else is about to have,” he writes. “Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think ...