“AI is coming for your job.” Possibly. But first, what exactly is your job? Most are not one neat task performed by one perfectly rational person. If they were, half of management would have been automated by the photocopier.
A job is usually a jumble of skill, judgement and working out what someone meant when they said, “Could you just make it pop?” The translation can take longer than the work. Occasionally, by several meetings.
AI may do the first draft, the quick calculation, the tidy-up. Then someone has to explain that the customer doesn’t want the technically optimal option; they want the one they can defend to their partner, boss or group chat. Someone has to teach the machine that people say they want cheap, then choose the one with the nicer packaging. We are walking bundles of exceptions.
Perhaps the future job is part doing the work, part teaching AI how the work behaves in the wild. Not just what the brief says, but what it forgot to say. Not only the rules, but the strange little reasons people ignore them.
That doesn’t mean every “people” job is safe and every science job is doomed. AI can write, design and analyse. The dividing line may be less “humanities versus science” and more “can this be solved from a pattern, or does somebody need to understand why the pattern just went out for a sandwich?”
So if AI takes part of your job, perhaps the next part is helping it deal with customers, colleagues and the rest of humanity: a species that can spend months comparing cars, then buy one because the cupholder feels right.
Not a bad job, really. Though you may have to teach the AI to pretend it was its idea.