The Next Renaissance

CHAPTER 9The Future of Work

For millennia, automation has targeted the jobs society valued least: the laborers, the clerks, the line workers. Machines came for the bottom first.

This time, it's different.

AI is coming straight for the top—for the credentialed, the analytical, the “safe” jobs that defined middle‐ and upper‐class stability for generations. Lawyers. Analysts. Marketers. Engineers. Even doctors. The very work once thought untouchable by automation suddenly feels most obviously automatable.

Some of this change will feel like loss. Some will feel like liberation. Most of it will feel unfamiliar—maybe even frightening. Like every great transformation, navigating the workforce of the RenAIssance will require reinvention. Our opportunity, and our responsibility to ourselves, is to understand where that reinvention begins, and how we can prepare to thrive in it.

We've been here before. In the late 18th century, British weavers and textile workers forcefully objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Experienced artisans feared that unskilled machine operators would rob them of their livelihood, so some began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a fictitious young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile machine in 1779, and who ostensibly sent threatening letters to factory owners, signed “King Ludd.”¹

The protests were fierce enough that Britain passed the ...