45. If AI takes all jobs what will we do?

I see a lot of questions on my feeds around “If AI takes all jobs, what will we do?”

I don’t know if people are seriously asking that question, or if it’s clickbait. It’s hard to tell these days.

AI won’t replace all jobs. It will replace some jobs. It will change many jobs. And new jobs will be created. Also, a large part of the AI discourse only applies to knowledge work.

YouTuber wasn’t a thing 25 years ago. Software engineering wasn’t a thing 100 years ago.

At work, I spend a lot of time looking at agentic use cases and how roles are going to evolve in an operations-intensive world. If the job you do now doesn’t require a lot of judgment, there is a big chance that it will be fully replaced.

Think about the main tasks you do at work. If those tasks can be written down step by step somewhere, an AI agent can probably do that.

If your entire job is full of such tasks, there is a chance that the job will be replaced. If only part of your job can be written down, then it will change your job. You’ll get to do less of the boring parts. If it’s not easy to describe what you do, for example, you make a lot of decisions driven by gut feeling and your wisdom, it’s much harder to replace that. At least for a while.

I don’t think all jobs fall strictly into those categories, so a more likely outcome is large parts of certain jobs getting automated and small parts of some others. One person will be able to do the job of 3 to 5 people.

This is what has always happened in the past - with electricity, machines, computers, internet. It will keep happening. But it will also lead to the creation of new jobs. I don’t know what jobs will exist 10 years from now, but think of all the jobs that didn’t exist 100 years ago, but were created due to advances in technology. Air traffic controllers, video editors, programmers, YouTubers, and influencers.

The world will always have needs. Businesses will come up catering those needs, and businesses will need some sort of workers. We just don’t know it yet.

What can you do about it?

The best way to react to this is to lean into it. You can either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by others. In the 90s, if you refused to use computers, you probably would have a hard time finding jobs a decade later. Learn to work with AI.

Think about your unfair advantages, maybe you can start that business you always wanted to start. AI replaces things, but it is also a force multiplier for many other things - are you good at one of those?

Cars replaced horses, but created an entire industry. Life will go on.

Also, don’t forget to touch grass.