The Career You Spent 20 Years Building Just Got A New Expiry Date

I was recently interviewed by an Australian media publication about the ways AI will reshape our workforce. If you’re worried about your career – and want strategies for protecting it – the below Q&A is worth a read.

What is the value of work in the age of AI?

AI made production cheap and abundant. Anyone can now produce a slick deck or a clean prototype in minutes. So human value relocates to three things:

• Judgement. Assessing risk, defining what “done” means, and recognising when AI output is off.
• Human persuasion. Convincing a room of people to back your idea, or to buy your service.
• Agent management. Getting machines to do what you want them to do. Preferably at scale.

The best leaders and entrepreneurs of tomorrow will be strong across all three of these domains.

What does the future of jobs look like in an AI-driven economy?

For entry-level workers, work will shift from doing tasks to managing AI agents. 

There will be fewer mid-level managers, and the survivors will do less busywork and more architecting of hybrid agentic/human teams.

Executives will – for the first time in history – be capital allocators of companies with near-infinite production capacity. Their job will shift from asking “can we build it?” to “what is actually worth building?”

How will people earn a living as certain roles and salary structures evolve or disappear?

Let me give you the bad news. A lot of people will lose their jobs – despite what Sam Altmans of the world are telling us.

The roles that vanish first will be the narrow, do-the-task ones. Software developers and content writers are feeling it already, with most now spending their days managing agents instead of writing code or polishing prose.

The good news is that it won’t be an “everyone is out of work” scenario. It will be a flip in what we view as scarce. For a century, production talent was expensive and scarce. 

Soon, talent will be available on demand for a price approximating the cost of electricity. What will be rare is knowing what to ask for, knowing how to direct it and recognising when the output is any good. 

That’s where the money is – you earn a living by climbing out of the doing and into the judging.

What are your broader thoughts on the future of work?

My view is that the standard career pathways will reorder. For decades, people followed a similar well-trodden path:

school, tertiary education, then the corporate world, with a few weirdos like me becoming entrepreneurs.

I think it will shift to: school, tertiary/entrepreneurship hybrid stint. People with an aptitude for entrepreneurship will continue on that track. People who don’t will get corporate jobs.

Here’s my logic. The most valuable skill ahead is judgement, and you can’t obtain it from theory; you need first-hand experience. That’s what graduate programs used to be for, but employers won’t subsidise years of juniors’ learning when their work can be done by AI for free.

So you fund your own apprenticeship by building something – while you’re at uni. For students, that’s freeing: your degree isn’t a credential to wave around, it’s where you learned to build.

Steven