ctrlAIOther Tomorrows
Mon 08:41Fiction

At 8:41 on a Monday morning, your replacement finishes your week.

What’s real here, and what’s imagined Open

This story is fiction. The lines marked in it lean on the real world, and here is where each one stands. When reality catches up with a line, it moves to “Real already,” with the date. Checked September 23, 2026.

Real already

Real
A company lets you go because an AI now does your work.

In 2025, Salesforce’s chief executive said AI agents had let the company cut its support staff from 9,000 to about 5,000. The company said it mostly stopped refilling those roles, and moved hundreds of people to other jobs.

Real
A plumber’s work is harder for AI to take than an office job.

A 2024 study in Science estimated that about 80% of US workers are in jobs where at least a tenth of the tasks are exposed to language models, and that higher-paid jobs are more exposed. The authors’ earlier working paper found trades like mechanics and cement masons had no exposed tasks. Exposed means AI could speed a task up, not that the job disappears.

Real
People work fewer days for the same pay.

In a 2022 UK pilot, 61 companies cut working hours without cutting pay. Afterward, 56 kept the four-day week and 18 made it permanent. The companies volunteered, and there was no control group.

Real
Letting AI grade children needs special rules.

The EU’s AI Act classifies AI that evaluates students’ learning as high-risk, which brings extra obligations for whoever builds or uses it. An amendment adopted in July 2026 delayed those obligations to December 2, 2027.

Real
Few people have had a say in how AI behaves.

When AI companies have asked the public how their models should behave, it has been about a thousand people at a time: about 1,000 Americans for Anthropic and the Collective Intelligence Project in 2023, and about 1,000 people for OpenAI in 2025. Bigger studies have since asked tens of thousands what they want from AI, but they gather opinions. They don’t set the rules.

Not yet

Not yet
An AI finishes a week of your work by Monday morning.

METR has found the length of software tasks AI agents can finish on their own doubling roughly every seven months since 2019, and about every four months since 2023. In OpenAI’s GDPval test, experts rated the best model’s work as good as or better than professionals’ on 47.6% of well-defined tasks from 44 occupations. That’s tasks, not whole jobs.

Not yet
Everyone gets a monthly share of what public AI earns.

No country pays its people a share of what AI earns. The nearest real thing is Alaska, which has paid every eligible resident a yearly dividend from its oil fund since 1982; it was $1,000 in 2025. In 2020, researchers proposed a “Windfall Clause” asking AI companies to pledge part of any extreme profits. We know of no company that has signed one.

Imagined

Imagined
You own the AI that does your job, and sell what it makes.

Many people use AI for parts of their work. But owning an agent that does your whole job, and selling its output to your old employer, isn’t an established arrangement anywhere we know of.

Nobody knows yet

  • Which of these arrangements, if any, we end up with.
  • Whether the work that’s left is work people want.
  • Who, in the end, grades the machine.

Other Tomorrows is published by Ctrl AI at ctrlai.com.