Bee Movie may have taught us more about the future of work than any McKinsey report ever could.

Bear with me on this one.

In the film, bees sue humanity and win back all their honey. With a surplus of honey, the bees stop working.

But once pollination stops, flowers die, and the food chain collapses. It’s a short-term win but long-term catastrophe.

The bees have everything they ever wanted but nothing they truly need: purpose.

These charts make for scary reading. In a few years, we may find ourselves in a very similar situation to the Bees due to AI & automation.

Senior employees seem to be handling this shift just fine; however, it makes for very different reading for new entrants to the job market.

Junior roles are vanishing. Apprentice work is automated. Entry points are disappearing.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky recently came out and said, “employers need to hire Gen Z even if AI can do the interns’ work, or one day, the bots will outnumber bosses.”

When you remove the need for human labor, you don't just remove wages. You remove identity.

That's the bees without pollination. Comfortable but purposeless.

When I was an apprentice, there were countless tasks I didn't love. I actually found ways to automate some of them. But they were critical. They helped me understand how everything connects – from the weeds to, longer term, the bigger picture.

That grounding, where you take time to learn the foundations, shapes everything that comes after.

So many people took a chance on me in those early days. They gave me the support I needed to get where I am today. We have a duty to pay that forward.

If we build super-lean AI companies with incredible margins, shareholders will rejoice. Efficiency metrics will soar. But who replaces the seniors in 10, 20 years when there's no one trained to step up?

This isn't just about jobs. It's about society itself.

Will all companies be small teams? How do people enter the job market when AGI is sold to do everything? How will people spend their time when work as we know it disappears?

In Bee Movie, "winning" breaks everything. The bees get their honey but lose their world.

Right now, AI efficiency looks like winning. But we might be one generation away from realising we've broken the very thing that made society work.

We may laugh at Bee Movie, but it was doing post-work economic theory before we even knew we needed it.

The question isn't whether AI will replace workers. It's whether we'll notice the flowers dying before it's too late.