Technological revolutions always trigger the same cycles. Jobs shift from ones that are easy to automate to ones that aren't, and unprecedented productivity is unlocked.
We'll see the same shift with AI: There will be an obvious reduction in jobs related to concrete and verifiable tasks. But there will also be a significant rise in the things that AI cannot do well, but which can now be done at unprecedented scale with AI.
LLMs have proven exceptionally good at taking over concrete tasks that are easily verifiable, such as coding. These jobs will fade away. But due to structural flaws, LLMs are quite limited in their ability to perform tasks that require ambiguity, open-endedness, and creativity. These are the jobs that will thrive. Creative enterprises will take off for the same reason that digital cameras, digital audio workstations (DAWs), the internet, and social media turned us all into creators. Roles requiring organizational management and communication will become more important than ever, as will those that require human interaction. Systems-level roles will also flourish as the need to oversee droves of agents rises.
Take the film industry. The rise of video generation models has recently stirred up speculation about the durability of moviemaking. But human actors acting out stories created by human screenwriters aren't going anywhere. Those are creative enterprises that only humans can do well. Yet all the other stuff that goes into a movie—from financing to casting calls to managing logistics—will be streamlined to levels never before seen. This will allow artists to take more creative risk and to do things that were previously neither technically nor economically feasible.
It will take several decades, but job markets will eventually have far fewer roles made up of busy work, and more roles made up of capabilities that humans uniquely possess.
