Imagine graduating college and landing your first job aboard a spacecraft, no meetings required, with Saturn's rings as your office view. Sounds like science fiction, right? Not according to Sam Altman, who thinks this could be reality for the class of 2035.

The OpenAI CEO shared this vision during an August interview with video journalist Cleo Abram on her YouTube series "Huge If True." Abram kicked things off with a provocative setup: picture yourself graduating in 2035, at a time when half of all entry-level white-collar jobs might have vanished thanks to AI.

Altman's response? He doubled down on optimism.

From Cubicles to Spaceships

"If they still go to college at all," Altman said, "[they] could very well be like leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some kind of completely new exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job and feeling so bad for you and I that like we had to do this kind of like really boring old kind of work. And everything is just better."

He wasn't being facetious. Altman's point is that AI won't just disrupt existing industries—it'll create entirely new categories of work we can't even imagine yet. His own career trajectory proves it. "I have a job that nobody would have thought we could have a decade ago," he noted.

The Billion-Dollar Solo Act

For today's young workers, Altman sees unprecedented opportunity. "If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history," he said. "There's never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new, to go invent something, to start a company, whatever it is."

The era of the one-person unicorn isn't science fiction anymore, according to Altman. "I think it is probably possible now to start a company that is a one-person company that will go on to be worth like more than a billion dollars," he said. "And more importantly than that, deliver an amazing product and service to the world."

That's the promise of AI tools: they're force multipliers that let individuals operate at a scale previously requiring entire teams. You don't need a massive organization to build something meaningful anymore.

The Adaptation Gap

But Altman's vision isn't all starships and billion-dollar startups. He's realistic about the casualties. "Some classes of jobs will totally go away," he acknowledged. "And young people are the best at adapting to this. I'm more worried about what it means, not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn't want to retrain or reskill or whatever the politicians call it."

That's the uncomfortable truth behind the hype. While fresh graduates might seamlessly transition into jobs we can't yet imagine, older workers face a tougher road. The skills that made someone successful for 40 years could become obsolete faster than they can adapt.

Faster Than We Think

The timeline for all this change? Sooner than most people realize. "Ten years forward will be even much harder, much more different," Altman said. "If you compound the current rate of change for ten more years, it's probably something we can't even… time travel trips."

That last bit sounds almost unhinged, but it captures the exponential nature of what's happening. We're not talking about linear progress where things get 10% better each year. We're talking about compounding transformation that makes each year look radically different from the last.

So the next time your calendar fills up with pointless meetings and your inbox overflows, take comfort in this: the class of 2035 might be busy exploring distant planets, and they'll probably feel sorry for us poor souls who had to suffer through "really boring old kind of work" back on Earth.

Whether that future arrives exactly as Altman predicts remains to be seen. But one thing seems certain: the world of work is changing faster than most of us are prepared for, and the gap between those who adapt and those who don't is only going to widen.