We are living in interesting times, to say the least. While it is not new for technological progress to drive us forward towards new way of livings, the rate of change is unprecedented. It is only logical to wonder, what does this really mean for your, or any, job, let alone businesses and the economy.

My view on this, from the start was that most jobs are fine and AI is a tool ⚒️ but now that I have AI doing most tasks I was doing at my pre AI phase of my career, even I started wondering. However, I still think my original thesis stands, we just need to find a more timeless and grounded way of describing the argument. So here is the revision.

I suggest that they way you should assess the changes AI brings to the job market is around these three questions

😱 Is my job exposed to AI?

📈 Will there be more demand for my job?

💰 Will my job be worth less or more?

Is my job exposed to AI?

There are many ways to answer this question, but here is the framework I use

✅ Is the outcome of the job verifiable? think code that either runs or not versus a legal contract

👩‍🏫 Is the output an artifact or human delivery? think teaching compared to an Excel sheet

This creates the following four quadrants with the most exposed jobs being the ones producing artifacts (code, excel, accounting books) and are highly verifiable and the least exposed those that are not as easy to verify and need human delivery (teaching, medicine, coaching, therapy)

Will there be more demand for my job?

Interestingly high exposure does not translate to high disruption necessarily, something that is usually referred to as Javons paradox. This is the idea that as cost of production falls i.e. cost to produce code falls, demand increases, sometimes to the point where there is more demand than before. We are seeing this first hand with software engineering that instead of being replaced, even though AI is writing most of the code nowadays, its demand is only growing.