In the summer of 2025, I was in the process of buying a flat and had gotten to the point of signing the mortgage documents. Looking at the monthly payments stretched across 30 years, I started thinking seriously about my future as a software engineer.
AI has changed my work dramatically over the last couple of years. Almost everything I did as a junior engineer when I started is now automated, and the job market reflects that. I realised that if I lost my job, finding another would be very hard. The AI available today can already do most of what I do, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Across a 30 year mortgage term, the odds of being able to consistently find work felt vanishingly small.
I had a breakdown. AI had shattered my belief in what the future would look like, a future of working, contributing, owning a home I could maybe one day start a family in. That future suddenly felt impossible, and AI had taken it from me.
I recognised I wasn't making the decision to buy with confidence, so I pulled out of the purchase. I started reading more about where AI was heading, and the conclusion felt unavoidable: a technology capable of displacing work at this scale poses a genuine threat to how society functions, and to humanity's survival. I felt lost, not knowing what I could do to help, until I found PauseAI.