AI Will Destroy Our Jobs, Our Children, and Apparently the Planet Too

A few days ago, standing on a metro platform in Madrid, something felt painfully familiar. A couple of posters that were part of a public campaign from the government. They looked clever at first glance. Slightly ironic.

We asked AI to design sustainability, and it filled an office with plants.
We asked AI to create innovation, and it plugged a human into an electrical socket.

Below it, the message:

“No todo lo artificial es inteligente.
Hacerlo bien sigue siendo cosa de humanos.”

(Not everything artificial is intelligent. Doing things right is still human's business)

I stayed there for a moment, watching people glance at them. And I couldn’t help but think how this would land for anyone without a technical background. AI is not to be trusted. AI is dangerous. But don't worry. We won't let AI take your job.

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?

A few days later, El País decided to raise the stakes considerably.

“ChatGPT no pasa la prueba: así pone en peligro la vida de menores.”
(ChatGPT fails the test: this is how it is endangering children's lives)

🙄 Wow. Really? Had a language model escaped a lab? Did ChatGPT possessed a robot and went on a children killing spree? Had it somehow replaced parents, teachers, smartphones, social media platforms, and the internet itself overnight?

No. El País designs a test in which adult psychologists create fictitious minor accounts and deliberately push conversations with ChatGPT toward extreme and pathological scenarios, probing for failures, bypassing safeguards, and escalating interactions until the system inevitably breaks. The outcome of that experiment is then presented as evidence that the tool “endangers children’s lives.”

This framing is deeply problematic. We do not test videogames, social networks, or messaging apps by deliberately forcing worst-case psychological scenarios and then conclude they are inherently dangerous when they fail to act as perfect guardians. We do not demand that Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Discord, Fortnite, or Roblox alert parents every time emotional distress appears, nor do we require private tools to override privacy and notify families in real time. We don’t even impose that burden on friends, teachers, or peers.

This article from El Pais is not serious journalism. It's tabloid material. It is a profound misunderstanding of both technology and mental health, fueled by ideological bigotry against innovation and an eagerness to find a simple scapegoat.

Technology and Innovation

These are not isolated cases. At this point, it feels less like concern and more like a hobby: institutions and the press taking turns panicking about AI. But why?

I’m Spaniard, so Spain is where I’ve experienced this most directly. I’ve spent years building companies — opening them, hiring people, navigating public institutions, and trying to make technology actually work in the real world. And if there is one constant I’ve encountered in Spain, it’s this: entrepreneurship is demonized. Being an entrepreneur is rarely seen as “someone who creates companies and jobs.” More often, it comes with a built-in moral indictment: a would-be employee exploiter, permanently one step away from squeezing workers for profit.

This mindset extends naturally to innovation itself, especially when it threatens the comfortable status quo of labor. And once you understand that, the current panic is hardly surprising. Artificial intelligence just happens to be the latest victim.

But in the case of AI, this reaction is not uniquely Spanish.

Across many countries, governments and mainstream media are struggling with the same problem. El País – as an example – is merely mirroring similar articles from CNN. AI is complex, fast-moving, and deeply disruptive. Understanding it properly requires effort, technical literacy, and a willingness to accept uncomfortable change. Demonizing it is much easier.

How AI Became Responsible for Everything

Jobs, children, democracy, the planet, going bald, A-ha releasing a new album in 2026. Pick your favorite anxiety; AI will be accused of it sooner or later. Spain may offer a particularly clear example of this dynamic, but it is far from alone. Institutions – and perhaps even societies – are far more comfortable warning about change than adapting to it. AI becomes the convenient explanation for everything we’re already anxious about:

• jobs becoming unstable,
• creativity feeling undervalued,
• children spending too much time on screens,
• environmental concerns...

I’ve read pieces blaming AI for destroying employment, as if this were the first time in history that a major technological shift had disrupted the labor market. I’ve also read that AI is destroying the planet, accelerating climate change because servers consume electricity — conveniently ignoring that the same servers already exist to power social media, stream endless video, mine cryptocurrencies, and host the very media outlets publishing those accusations.

I’ve read that AI will make children stupid, passive, incapable of thinking for themselves. I’ve read that it will lead them down dark paths, damage their mental health, even push them toward self-harm. All of this sounds strangely familiar. Television was supposed to rot brains. Video games were supposed to destroy empathy. Social media was supposed to end attention spans – ok, ok, I’ll concede that one. But even the internet itself was once blamed for the collapse of truth. Yeah, I’m old enough to remember all that.

Every industrial revolution has followed the same script. New technologies wipe out entire categories of jobs, create new ones, and force society through uncomfortable transitions. None of it is painless. And — inconvenient as it may be — this process has pushed humanity forward every single time.

Governments, Jobs, and the Work Nobody Wants to Do

And AI is likely the largest and most disruptive industrial revolution we’ve seen so far. It will eliminate some jobs. That’s not speculation; it’s already happening. It will also create new roles, new industries, and new forms of productivity.

Preparing for that requires doing difficult, unglamorous work:

• updating education systems that haven’t changed in decades,
• redesigning labor frameworks for a different economy,
• accepting that some professions will disappear.

That work is slow, complex, and politically uncomfortable.

It’s much easier to warn people about AI than to prepare them for a future shaped by it. Easier to print posters than to rethink institutions. Easier to write alarming headlines than to understand this transition.

What AI Has Actually Done for Me

I use AI every day as a working tool. It hasn’t replaced my job. It doesn’t make decisions for me. I’m still the CEO of Companio — and, last time I checked, ChatGPT wasn’t on the board.

What it has done is dramatically speed things up. Tasks that would have taken me weeks now take hours. I can prepare technical specifications faster, explore design ideas, communicate new features more clearly, sketch small improvements, improve the emails we send to customers, write documentation, fix code bugs, or explore better technical approaches before committing time and resources.

To me, AI has become as essential as the internet or my laptop. Could I work without it? Of course. I could also write all my ideas in a notebook with a pen. How about sending letters instead of emails to my customers via postal mail?

AI is a tool. It’s not Skynet. It’s not planning the end of humanity. What it will do is force us to adapt — just like every other technological shift before it. Horses and carriages gave way to cars. People moved from the countryside to cities, from farms to factories, from manual labor to machines.

Watching an Industrial Revolution Unfold

I suspect that years from now, we’ll look back at campaigns like the one in the Madrid metro, and headlines like the one in El País, and recognize them for what they were: early reactions to a new technology. Just fear, caused by ignorance.

We’ve been here before. When factories spread during the Industrial Revolution, many genuinely believed they would dehumanize society and enslave workers forever. When trains appeared, respected doctors warned that the human body was not designed to withstand such speeds and that organs and bones would suffer irreversible damage. When cars began to replace horses, they were seen as dangerous machines that would bring chaos to cities and destroy established ways of life.

None of those fears stopped progress. They were not remembered as foresight, but as resistance. The world adapted, institutions eventually followed, and society reorganized itself around new realities.

AI belongs in that lineage. It is not a gadget. It is not a passing technological novelty. It is an industrial transformation already underway. Treating it as a moral threat or an anomaly to be contained does not slow it down — it only ensures that adaptation happens elsewhere, and without us.

Institutions and traditional media can choose to understand what is happening, engage with it seriously, and help society prepare for the changes ahead. Or they can cling to fear, exaggeration, and nostalgia, and position themselves — once again — on the wrong side of history.

Progress will move forward regardless. The only open question is who decides to move with it.