Seller or creator
As you may or may not know, I’m a software engineer and have been for well over a decade now. You should not be surprised to hear me say that the field of work today is miles away from what it was just six months ago.
Today I want to talk about what I think will happen in other industries in the future, because you can easily find narratives that say jobs will cease to exist: that level of drama is not productive for society.
Don’t get me wrong, I think some jobs will disappear and some new ones will be created. However, I would argue that the most drastic change will be the collapse of everything in between into two worlds: seller or creator.
When you think about it, most work boils down to selling (i.e. convincing someone that they need something) or creating (i.e. providing that something), but effectively both types can only do their main function a fraction of the time: they need to communicate with others, do administrative work, handle scheduling of future work, and so on. That is a whole class of jobs we can generally label as operational requirements for a company.
I believe that this range of jobs will be the first to disappear with AI because they generally only require context from the field and the ability to act on it across a software and/or hardware interface. One might argue that the context does not always exist: I agree, it often does not exist because it was only rarely used (e.g. onboarding new people), but now that it can be used, I expect businesses to do so whenever they can, since return on investment will compound easily over time.
If we remove those kinds of jobs: the cook can focus on cooking instead of thinking about food inventory, the nurse can focus on helping patients instead of filling out documents, salespeople can sell without thinking about creating assets, and engineers can build new systems without thinking about paperwork.
I really believe that the future will offer two careers: creator or seller, with everything in between collapsing over the long term.