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JS John Sherman Host of For Humanity: An AI Risk Podcast, a weekly interview show from The AI Risk Network on AI extinction risk, regulation, kill switches and data center oppo...

“Those are the first jobs. Like the coders wrote themselves out of their own jobs knowingly. It's like going to work every day and cutting off a little piece of your arm and eating it until you have no arm left. And it's like, you were eating your arm. How did you think you would have an arm when you kept eating your arm?”

For Humanity: An AI Risk Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

“Those are the first jobs. Like the coders wrote themselves out of their own jobs knowingly. It's like going to work every day and cutting off a little piece of your arm and eating it until you have no arm left. And it's like, you were eating your arm. How did you think you would have an arm when you kept eating your arm?” — John Sherman, For Humanity: An AI Risk Podcast

Context

His guest had just said coding seems like the first job AI will take. The host recalls a meeting with coders two years earlier who were sure their jobs were safe.

Transcript

For Humanity: An AI Risk Podcast Around 23:02 into the episode
Dewayne Moore

…because all the other ones were way lower under like the mean is or whatever. And I said, I wonder if that's the AI influence because I said a lot of those jobs are starting to get phased out or if they're not, they're soon going to be like coding. Coding seems like it's the first to go probably.

Speaker 3

Hey guys, John and Dolly out here on Baltimore's Inner Harbor telling you, if you like what we're doing at AI Risk Network, be sure to check out our sub stack. A lot of unique content coming on Substack all the time these days. Check it out.

John Sherman

It's so wild, man. I did it. I did a like a live meeting with a bunch of coders like two years ago in Philadelphia that was talking about X-risk and stuff. And they were all fully confident that their jobs were safe, that we were safe. How will it ever get out? How would it ever escape? I don't know. We put it on the open internet. How would it take our jobs? Those are the first jobs. Like the coders wrote themselves out of their own jobs knowingly. It's like, it's like going to work every day and cutting off a little piece of your arm and eating it until you have no arm left. And it's like, you were eating your arm. How did you think you would have an arm when you kept eating your arm?

Dewayne Moore

Right.

John Sherman

When you think about your future with this stuff, do you ever, in your mind, think about this is how I think the end will go for me? Like, have you, have you, do you have a vision of sort of like what a bad outcome would actually look like?

Dewayne Moore

Yeah, I mean, I haven't thought of anything specifically like for me or what it would be like for me at the very end, but I have thought, I have thought like, you know, when I told you, I wondered if it was already too late. Like maybe what's out there now on the internet, it just seems like it…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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