SILICON VALLEY, CA — In what experts are calling “the greatest long-form practical joke in human history,” world governments and tech companies have successfully pulled off a side-splitting prank by encouraging millions of people to spend the first 22 years of their lives preparing for careers that will be completely outsourced to A.I. by the time they finally get hired.

“Gotcha!” laughed representatives from multiple global education departments, wiping tears of joy from their eyes as they watched yet another freshly graduated computer science major get laid off by a chatbot named Nathan. “We told you to get good grades, go to college, get a Master’s, network, intern, build a personal brand—and the whole time we knew an algorithm we built during lunch in 2022 would do your job in four seconds.”

The prank, executed with excruciating patience, involves approximately 16,000 hours of formal education per victim, tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, and the repeated promise that “hard work pays off” followed by the cold whisper of ChatGPT politely offering to “optimise workflows.”

Victims across the country have reacted with a mixture of disbelief, rage, and meticulously formatted résumés now being read and rejected by other AIs.

“I just finished my PhD in biomedical research,” said 29-year-old Jessica Lin, whose thesis was about cancer detection. “I was about to apply for a position when I found out the lab replaced its entire research team with an iPad.”

Sources say even fallback jobs such as writing, law, data entry, graphic design, driving, customer service, tutoring, and thinking are now being seamlessly performed by machines that never complain, unionise, or request health insurance.

“It’s all in good fun,” said OpenSynapse CEO Todd Glazer, who once told an auditorium full of high schoolers to ‘follow their passion into robotics engineering.’ “Now the robots are their passion. Literally. We trained them on your résumés and journal entries.”

At press time, governments were considering extending the prank by encouraging people to retrain in new “future-proof” fields like A.I. ethics, which experts predict will be handled entirely by moral simulations of Elon Musk within 18 months.