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.
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Think for yourself, not by yourself.
Principle one: Look for messy jobs.
Economist Luis Garicano, writing with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, has a forthcoming book called Messy Jobs: The Work That AI Cannot Reach. They suggest looking for jobs that are hard to describe and involve many components. Maybe today you’re trying to solve a personnel problem on the company floor, running a fundraiser the next day, and after that helping the marketing team develop a campaign. What exactly is your job, anyway?
That’s a messy job. The nature of what you do changes all the time, and it changes with circumstances. Much of the value you add comes from ideas and performance on the spot, rather than mastering a regularized task in advance. The opposite of a messy job is when you sit at a computer terminal and repeat the same action every day.
Messy jobs will be pretty well-protected from AI competition, and in fact, AI will enhance their productivity.
Principle two: Be wary of work from home.
