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Tyler Cowen: Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI
The Seamstress. Painting of the Utrecht School, 17th century. La Chartreuse Museum, Douai, France. (Illustration by The Free Press; image by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images, )
Go into the office, embrace ‘messy jobs,’ and other dos and don’ts for the future workplace.
By Tyler Cowen
05.25.26 — Tech and Business
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Are you afraid of losing your job to AI? It is hotly debated whether AI is making jobs scarcer right now. But whatever may be the case today, it is not crazy to have this fear for the future. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. already has told us he expects to hire more AIs and fewer bankers.

With this risk in mind, I thought I would write a simple guide on how to protect and support your career prospects. There are no absolute guarantees, but you can improve your odds in the labor market. The same steps will also benefit society by allocating your labor more efficiently and minimizing the time you might spend on the dole.

Principle one: Look for messy jobs.

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Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Faculty Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best-seller. He was named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade and Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him "America's Hottest Economist." Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its "Top 100 Global Thinkers" of 2011. He co-writes a blog at www.MarginalRevolution.com, hosts a podcast Conversations with Tyler, and is co-founder of an online economics education project, MRU.org. He is also director of the philanthropic project Emergent Ventures.
Tags:
AI
Tech
Economics
Business
Artificial Intelligence
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