• A think tank boss believes AI will replace most jobs by 2045, leaving billions without work.
• Sex work, coaching, and politics may survive, but not at the scale society needs, Adam Dorr said.
• He said the future could bring mass inequality or "super-abundance," depending on our response now.

By 2045, robots and artificial intelligence could render most human jobs obsolete — and there's little time to prepare for the fallout, according to Adam Dorr, director of research at the RethinkX think tank.

In a Wednesday interview with The Guardian, Dorr warned that machines are advancing so rapidly that within a generation, they'll be able to perform virtually every job humans do, at a lower cost and with equal or superior quality.

Drawing from historical patterns of disruption, he compared today's workforce to horses in the age of cars, or traditional cameras in the age of digital photography.

"We're the horses, we're the film cameras," he said.

Dorr and his research team have documented more than 1,500 major technological transformations. In most cases, he said, once a technology gains even a few percentage points of market share, it quickly dominates — typically within 15 to 20 years.

"Machines that can think are here, and their capabilities are expanding day by day with no end in sight," he said. "We don't have that long to get ready for this."

Still, he said, not every job is destined for extinction. Dorr believes a narrow set of roles may survive the AI takeover, especially those grounded in human connection, trust, and ethical complexity.

He pointed to sex workers, sports coaches, politicians, and ethicists as examples of jobs that could remain relevant.

"There will remain a niche for human labor in some domains," he said. "The problem is that there are nowhere near enough of those occupations to employ 4 billion people."

Dorr argued that the looming upheaval could lead either to mass inequality or to what he called "super-abundance" — a society where human needs are met without traditional labor. But achieving the latter, he said, will require bold experiments in how we define work, value, and ownership.

"This could be one of the most amazing things to ever happen to humanity," he said — but only if we're ready.

The AI takeover debate is heating up

Several top AI researchers and tech leaders have shared Dorr's concerns, though views on which jobs will endure vary.

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the "Godfather of AI," warned that "mundane intellectual labor" is most at risk. On the Diary of a CEO podcast in June, he said he'd be "terrified" to work in a call center or as a paralegal.

Hinton believes hands-on roles like plumbing are safer, at least for now, saying it will be a long time before AI is "as good at physical manipulation" as people.

In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that he believes that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, including roles in tech, finance, law, and consulting, could disappear within five years.

But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta's Yann LeCun have pushed back, saying AI will transform jobs, not eliminate them entirely.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said AI will displace many roles, but believes new ones will emerge, even if they look "sillier and sillier" over time. "We have always been really good at figuring out new things to do," he said.

MIT economist David Autor took a darker view: AI may not wipe out jobs, but it could make people's skills worthless, ushering in a "Mad Max" economy where many fight over a shrinking pool of valuable jobs.

• Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, but it's already showing signs of strain.
• Tehran may turn to proxies, missiles, or the Strait of Hormuz if the conflict reignites.
• Analysts told BI that Iran's options are limited and it risks a strong backlash.

Despite being outmatched by Israel's advanced arsenal, Iran retains several military options should the fragile ceasefire first announced by President Donald Trump collapse.

On Monday, Trump announced that the US had brokered a "complete and total" truce between the two countries, but since then there have already been signs that the deal is on shaky ground.

By Tuesday morning, Trump was urging restraint on Truth Social, calling on both countries to "not violate" the ceasefire. He later urged Israel to avoid "dropping those bombs," or risk committing a "major violation."

Ongoing covert operations and missile launches have already chipped away at its credibility, Andreas Krieg, a Gulf specialist at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King's College London, told Business Insider.

"The ceasefire that took effect following US and Qatari mediation is brittle and fragile," Krieg said. "It rests more on political signaling and public posturing than on concrete enforcement mechanisms."

He added: "In practice, the ceasefire has mostly existed on social media, with each side using digital platforms to declare restraint while continuing activities that fall short of open warfare."

Mining or threatening the Strait of Hormuz

"There is a case where a ceasefire could hold," Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab British Understanding, told BI, "but there's also a case sort of saying that both sides want to be the last to fire."

If the ceasefire collapses, Iran's most powerful geopolitical lever remains the Strait of Hormuz — a vital 21-mile-wide chokepoint through which 20% of the world's oil flows.

Iran has long threatened to block it.

While Iran lacks the legal authority to shut down the Strait of Hormuz outright, it could cripple global energy markets by making the waters barely navigable.

"Under normal circumstances, this might be seen as a self-destructive option given Iran's own dependence on revenue from oil exports through that corridor," Jacob Parakilas, a research leader for Defence Strategy, Policy and Capabilities at RAND Europe, told Business Insider.

"But if Israeli strikes cause enough damage to Iranian oil infrastructure, that calculation might well change," he said, adding that Iran could use missile-armed small boats, drones, and naval mines.

"This arsenal could pose a significant challenge to navigation," said Sidharth Kaushal, a sea power expert at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

Kaushal said the US Navy is equipped to counter this, but the time needed to do so would be costly for all involved.

A full closure of the Straits could push Brent crude past $110 a barrel, according to Goldman Sachs.

Attacks on US bases

Iran launched a missile strike on Monday on Al Udeid, the largest US base in the region. This was before the ceasefire was announced.

While Qatar said its air defense systems intercepted the missiles, and no casualties were reported, the attack showed Tehran's willingness to target US bases.

The US has bolstered its regional strength by deploying carrier strike groups and missile defense systems and repositioning aircraft, including B-2 bombers, away from vulnerable sites like Al Udeid.

However, Doyle believes that Iran is unlikely to escalate directly against the US.

Instead, he said that Iran's strategy could be to prolong the conflict with Israel, aiming to outlast its will politically and economically.

He described this as a war of attrition, rather than one of decisive strikes. "Whilst these dangerous weapons are still being used, anything can happen," he said.

Proxy groups

Beyond direct military action, Iran has long relied on its network of proxy forces — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen.

These offer Tehran plausible deniability and the ability to hit Israel or US assets without direct confrontation.

But Iran's proxies are not what they once were.

Israel's offensives have decimated Hamas' military leadership and driven Hezbollah into retreat after heavy airstrikes and an incursion into southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, President Bashar Assad has been ousted in Syria.

The deaths of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the political wing of Hamas, have further degraded Tehran's reach.

Edmund Fitton-Brown, a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, cautioned that Tehran may already be close to exhausting its proxy playbook.

These groups "are already doing everything they can," he said.

"Iran cannot supply the proxies — the Houthis are under siege," he added. "The main threats to the Americans would be from the Iraqi proxies, and even they may act independently rather than under direct Iranian command."

Activating these forces en masse also risks broader escalation, especially if unconventional weapons are used.

Ballistic missile capabilities

While Iran's air force can't compete with Israel's, its ballistic missile arsenal has expanded into the largest in the region.

Tehran now possesses an estimated 3,000 missiles, including a growing stockpile of solid-fueled, precision-guided medium-range weapons like the Fattah-1 and Kheibarshekan, which were both used in an attack on Israel last October.

But experts say these, too, have been significantly reduced.

Iran's "ballistic missile supply is not infinite and has already decreased significantly," Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Kent, said.

Fitton-Brown agreed: "They've mainly been depleted because they've been used — and the Israelis have taken aim at military-industrial sites."

No good options

Browne Maddox, director of the Chatham House think tank, wrote in a Sunday briefing that few of the choices available to Iran are attractive to it.

But it may still go for them "rather than be seen to be forced back to the table," she said.

It's also a delicate matter for the country domestically.

Being forced by the US to give up its nuclear enrichment — a key demand of the Trump administration — "would very likely be perceived by Iranians as surrender," she said.

One option for Tehran, she said, is to draw out negotiations while quietly rebuilding its nuclear program, taking advantage of ongoing disagreements in the Trump camp over how best to proceed.

But all its military options risk a devastating US or Israeli response.

"Iran doesn't have good options," Fitton-Brown said. "It's run out of them."

• Mark Cuban criticized Bluesky for becoming an echo chamber, warning it was driving some users away.
• Engagement on Bluesky has plunged since February, with far fewer daily unique users.
• Cuban questioned BlueSky's future, citing vanishing nuance and an absence of some topics.

Mark Cuban is sounding the alarm on Bluesky's declining engagement — and he's not pulling his punches.

In a series of Bluesky posts, the billionaire investor and entrepreneur criticized the platform for fostering an echo chamber that he said was driving users away and inadvertently boosting traffic back to Elon Musk's X.

"The lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage," Cuban wrote, linking to a Washington Post opinion piece headlined "BlueSky's decline stems from never hearing from the other side."

Once known for "great give-and-take discussions on politics and news," Cuban said Bluesky had become a monoculture where dissent was unwelcome and nuance was vanishing.

"Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to 'agree with me or you are a Nazi fascist,'" he posted.

A graph of Bluesky's unique daily posters supports his concern.

On February 28, Bluesky had more than 1 million unique users daily. Since then, engagement has plummeted, with June 7 and 8 hovering well below that peak at about 670,000 daily posters.

The Musk factor

BlueSky's rise accelerated following the election of President Donald Trump, whom CEO Musk backed financially, and after X introduced new terms of service.

Many X users migrated to Bluesky, with some 2.5 million joining in one week in November.

Some were seeking a friendlier, more open platform with less hate speech and misinformation, and more control over what content is shown in their feeds.

A startup, BlueArk, even sprang up to help users migrate their X/Twitter histories to Bluesky, porting over millions of posts and creating the illusion of continuity on a new platform.

At the time, Cuban told Business Insider he preferred Bluesky over alternatives due to its variety of content and growing engagement.

Now, some of the earliest and most visible converts, including Cuban, are questioning whether the migration created a new community, or just repackaged the same silos.

"Why would anyone stop using Twitter if the only topic that is acceptable to you is news and politics?" he asked.

Cuban also criticized the platform's culture, saying: "The replies on here may not be as racist as Twitter, but they damn sure are hateful."

Posts about AI, business, or healthcare — traditionally strong areas for Cuban — often gain little traction or were met with outright hostility, he added.

Cuban also questioned Bluesky's business model: "How does everyone suggest BlueSky survive as a business? Or do you not care?"

• The OECD cut its forecast for US economic growth in 2025 from 2.8% to 1.6%.
• It cited President Donald Trump's tariffs, which had pushed the US import rate to the highest level since 1938.
• Global growth is also set to slow as trade tensions disrupt investment and inflation rises, the OECD said.

The US and global economy are losing steam, and a key forecaster said President Donald Trump's trade tariffs were part of the reason.

In its latest Economic Outlook, released on Tuesday, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development cut its forecast for US economic growth in 2025, pointing to the fallout from the administration's trade policies. The 2.8% rate it predicted in March has now been reduced to 1.6%.

The OECD warned that these tariffs, which have pushed the effective US import rate to 15.4% — the highest since 1938 — were not only affecting US growth but reverberating across the global economy too.

Global growth was now projected to slow to 2.9% in both 2025 and 2026, down from 3.3% in 2024.

The OECD said the slowdown in growth was concentrated in the US, Canada, Mexico, and China. Growth in China, the world's second-largest economy, was expected to fall to 4.7% in 2025, down from 5% last year, and come in at 4.3% in 2026.

As of May 27, a blanket 10% tariff applies to all goods imported into the US, with some limited exemptions.

Stoking inflation

A 50% tariff on imports from the European Union were paused until July 7 amid "fast-tracked" negotiations, while steep levies on imports from China have also been put on hold.

The OECD said these policies were eroding investment, disrupting supply chains, and stoking inflation — especially in the US, where price growth is now projected to approach 4% by the end of the year.

OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann said governments needed to work to keep markets open and preserve the "economic benefits of rules-based global trade for competition, innovation, productivity, efficiency and ultimately growth."

Chief economist Álvaro Pereira added: "Lower growth and less trade will hit incomes and slow job growth."

The organization urged governments to de-escalate tensions and roll back tariffs to avoid further damage to the global economy.

In a Monday note, Deutsche Bank economists said there were global signs of a "turbulent but sustained path toward trade de-escalation. The fallout from the US 'Liberation Day' policies — from falling approval ratings to a sell-off in US government bonds — forced a rethink in Washington. While recent court rulings could pave the way for an even more benign trade regime, they also prolong uncertainty."

The bank also expected US GDP to grow by 1.6% this year and by 1.7% in 2026 on an annual average basis.