Work is changing, in some spaces dramatically, because of AI. This is not new. Technology advances have been dramatically changing how work gets done since at least WWII. That’s 80 years of humans adapting, companies evolving, and the economy reacting to drastic changes in how work can be accomplished. Jobs still exist; some of them are very different than they used to be.
Back in the mid-1980s, my mother enrolled me in the only official summer program of my childhood: a typing class. She was convinced if I could type, I would always be employable. I have never had a job that asked if I could type, but for most of the 20th century, many jobs for women involved knowing and citing their WPM (words per minute); that is, the number of words they could type per minute minus the mistakes. Knowing how to touch-type has proved incredibly valuable in my life–I am using it now to write this–but it is not why I was compelled to learn it in the first place. The lesson here is that skills you learn for one purpose may end up being applied to others and that the future of work is always changing.
I frequently read articles that predict some version of “entry-level roles are going to be replaced by AI.” I am sure some will be, but AI will also create opportunities and needs for different entry-level roles. These same articles often worry that a university education will no longer be helpful in this changed world or that its value will be diminished. I disagree. In the early 1940s, a family friend wrote his engineering degree thesis on how to keep ice off propellers on planes flying at high altitudes. This was a big problem for the US Air Force in World War II; it was also an obsolete problem by the time he completed the thesis. We invented jet engines and started using them. Fifty years later, when I was an undergraduate, he relayed this story and said that the most important thing he learned in college was to “learn how to learn new technologies.” In the years since, I have heard non-technical versions of this: “College taught me how to think critically;” “I learned to analyze and interpret data.” Those are adaptive skills. Skills that are necessary in a rapidly changing world.
The counterargument I hear is that “AI is different” than the technologies that have come before, but I am unconvinced that is the most salient point. AI IS different. Other things once were too. The internet was different; social media was different; the iPhone was different. All of these things changed lives, work, industries, culture. They eliminated and drastically changed some roles and invented others.
It is worth noting that AI has been around for decades in some capacity. The New Yorker recently quoted a cognitive scientist: “For hurricanes or pandemics, this is as rigorous as science gets; for sequences of words, everyone seems to lose their mind.”[1] I relate. Once AI was applied to language, everyone was talking about it. Its capabilities also became accessible to anyone with a computer. You didn’t need to code to interact with it–you just needed to type (or even speak). The industries and places AI has been used for years also evolved–weather forecasting, threat detection, advertising–these industries hired more data scientists and fewer roles with other skills.
AI is powerful and is changing the way we interact with technology and, in some places, each other. New technologies will continue to rapidly change the world and industry and the nature of work. It will eliminate the need and value of some skills while creating more need for new jobs and skills. The ways this will happen are uncertain, but I am certain of our ability to evolve and adapt as the world and technology changes around us.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either
