Stop Comforting Yourself: AI Isn't Just Coming for the "Worst" Workers

There is a comforting lie circulating in corporate break rooms and LinkedIn comment sections right now. It goes something like this:

"Don't worry. AI is only going to replace the lazy, the unskilled, and the bottom-tier performers. If you're good at your job, you're safe."

It’s a nice sentiment. It appeals to our sense of meritocracy. It makes us feel secure because we all believe we are "above average."

It is also completely wrong.

If you look at the actual data and the economic incentives driving AI adoption, the reality is far uglier. AI isn't a filter that removes the bad workers; it’s a leveling mechanism that devalues the good ones.

1. The "Leveling Up" Effect (Why Mediocrity Wins)

Recent studies, including research from institutions like MIT and Stanford, have uncovered a phenomenon that should terrify senior professionals.

When you give AI tools (like LLMs or coding assistants) to a group of workers, the lowest-skilled workers see the biggest performance boost.

The "floor" is raised, but the "ceiling" stays mostly the same.

• The "Bad" Writer: Suddenly produces clean, grammatically correct, coherent emails and reports.
• The Junior Coder: Can now output standard boilerplate code at the speed of a senior developer.
• The Average Support Agent: Resolves tickets faster because the AI feeds them the right answers instantly.

Meanwhile, the top-tier experts? They see marginal gains. In some cases, AI actually slows them down because they spend time fact-checking the machine's hallucinations.

The Consequence: The gap between a junior employee earning $60k and a senior employee earning $150k effectively shrinks. If a junior with GPT-4 can do 80% of the work of a senior for 40% of the cost, the CFO isn't going to fire the junior. They're going to fire the senior.

2. It’s About "Good Enough," Not "Great"

The "AI replaces the worst" narrative assumes that companies prioritize excellence above all else. They don't. They prioritize efficiency and profit margins.

Most corporate outputs do not need to be masterpieces. Internal memos, basic code functions, marketing copy, and data analysis just need to be functional.

• AI generates "B-minus" work instantly and virtually for free.
• A human expert generates "A-plus" work slowly and expensively.

In a brutal market, "good enough" at scale usually beats "perfect" at a premium. The workers most at risk are the mid-level professionals whose entire career is built on producing "pretty good" work that AI can now simulate in seconds.

3. The Death of the "Apprentice"

This is the darkest part of the transition. We are seeing the eradication of the entry-level "learning" role.

Historically, companies hired juniors to do the grunt work—summarizing notes, writing basic code, drafting emails. This work wasn't profitable, but it was an investment; it trained them to become seniors.

AI now does the grunt work.

So, companies are freezing hiring for entry-level roles. This creates a "broken rung" in the corporate ladder. We aren't firing the worst workers; we are preventing them from ever existing.

4. The Safe Zone is Smaller Than You Think

So, who is actually safe?

If AI raises the floor, the only people who are safe are those who live on the ceiling.

• The Top 1%: The visionaries who know what to ask the AI.
• The Physical Workers: Plumbers, electricians, and nurses (AI cannot fix a leaking pipe... yet).
• The Liability Sponges: Humans required for legal accountability. You can't sue an algorithm (easily), so you need a human to sign the document and take the blame if it goes wrong.

Conclusion

AI is not a meritocratic cleanser that will scrub the workplace of lazy employees. It is a tool of commoditization.

It takes skills that used to be special—writing, coding, analyzing, designing—and makes them cheap and abundant. When a skill becomes abundant, the wages for that skill drop.

The danger isn't that you are "the worst." The danger is that you are expensive, and an AI-augmented junior is almost as good as you, for half the price.