AI workplace fear—summed up by the “FOBO” acronym for Fear of Becoming Obsolete—faces a reality check as MIT researchers report how AI performance advances across thousands of job tasks. The study, titled “Crashing Waves vs. Rising Tides,” finds AI progress looks more like a “rising tide” than an abrupt wave of task elimination. Using more than 17,000 evaluations of large language model outputs across over 3,000 tasks drawn from the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET, MIT researchers track quality thresholds set by domain-expert graders. The research suggests the pace of improvement can be serious and accelerating, but not an overnight disruption that wipes out entire job categories immediately. For colleges and employers planning workforce development, the findings imply that retraining and job redesign will likely need to be continuous rather than triggered by a single inflection point—especially as models improve task performance unevenly across more complex, higher-stakes workflows.