AI + The New Human Frontier

CHAPTER 15AI Creating Its Own Careers … for Us

The most significant benefits, ultimately, from new forms of AI will come when organizations wholly reorganize around the technology. Costs will fall, but it could take many years for the technology to become sufficiently cheap for mass deployment. And until then, we likely will not see the kind of mass labor displacement that some people fear. In fact, historical trend data clearly shows that with mass adoption of new technologies comes entirely new growth sectors, businesses, and jobs. This economic cycle has held strong for hundreds of years.¹ So, while we can speculate more broadly about whether AI poses existential risks to human labor in the long term, we know that in the nearer term, many job areas will grow—and new jobs never seen before will emerge. Dramatic workplace changes will lead to jobs and careers that do not yet exist. This will, in turn, require education systems to adapt and equip the workers of the future with the skills they need. What new professions might emerge? AI ethicists? Digital footprint coaches? Algorithmic diagnosis patient advocates? The possibilities are endless.

There is a broad ecosystem of human workers servicing the growth of the AI sector itself. We talked earlier, for instance, about the growth of the prompt engineering (and prompt crafting) field. Looking upstream, 60 percent of new generative AI job postings in the United States are in just 15 metro areas. Generative AI may produce “winner-takes-most” ...