AI Is Not Going to Take Our Jobs

Artificial intelligence is stirring up conflicting feelings in very different people around the world. Some are afraid it will take their jobs and respond by looking for moral arguments against it. Others are afraid of falling behind, so they rush to consume technical information, courses, hacks, prompt libraries, anything that might help them take advantage of this moment before someone else does it better. Some see an imminent danger to humanity. At the other extreme, some see the arrival of a new kind of human being, one imbued with artificial intelligence, corrected by artificial intelligence, perhaps even governed by it. A human being no longer ruled so much by personal, governmental, or corporate interests, but by some impartial mathematical calculation seeking the best possible future.

Everyone is reacting. Everyone is trying to make room in their mind for a technology that appeared too quickly and that we still do not know how to name properly. I want to offer my perspective, not because I have every qualification in the world or believe my view is definitive, but because I have been watching this revolution from the beginning, using it, investing time in it, and also receiving concrete benefits from it.

I do not remember the exact year, because I am terrible with dates, but I opened an account from Cuba back when we were still talking about GPT-3. I remember those early games where we imitated speeches by political leaders and I had Fidel say things he would never have thought to say. It was a joke, of course, but it carried that mix of wonder and mischief that new technologies inspire before they have been domesticated. I also remember when we began testing whether it could write poetry, or serve as a conversation partner while we worked our way toward an idea. Then the models improved and I stopped seeing it only as a toy. I began bringing it into my work.

I took OpenAI courses on artificial intelligence and prompting. In those early days, I learned the importance of separating context from the specific instruction, of putting quotation marks around what the AI should treat as source material and keeping separate what it should treat as a command. That distinction matters less today because the models understand more, but the habit stayed with me. I kept prompt libraries. I watched image generation arrive, then video generation, and watched the process of design, editing, marketing, and customer service grow shorter. I do not mean that in the abstract. My productivity increased. The number of clients I could serve increased. I was able to focus more on digital marketing because part of the creative process, which used to take far more of my time, became much less demanding.

So when I talk about artificial intelligence, I am not speaking from the comfortable corner of someone who looks at it suspiciously but never touches it. I have used it. I have benefited from it. I have paid for it. And I have also earned more because of it. That is precisely why I think we need to turn down the volume on the fantasies, both the apocalyptic ones and the utopian ones.

Artificial intelligence is not going to bring human work to an end.

Work is a human technology

It will not do so because work is not simply a list of tasks someone performs. Before anything else, it is a human technology. It does not exist only to produce things. It helps arrange us in relation to one another, to compete, negotiate, serve, buy, sell, measure ourselves, and establish our value in society. A machine that can produce does not dissolve any of that. That is why the idea that we will stop working is more utopian, more difficult, and more extraordinary than the existence of artificial intelligence itself. A machine doing things is not enough to make work disappear. A part of the way we organize human life, something far too deep, would have to disappear with it.

That is why I believe neither in the utopia of a universal income where machines do everything and the rest of us relax happily, nor in the technocratic nightmare where machines do everything and we are left at the mercy of those who own them. There is something theatrical about both visions. Reality will probably be grayer and more uncomfortable. We will keep working, but many jobs will change shape.

What changes is judgment, not work

So what will happen? Artificial intelligence will force certain jobs to become more varied. It will not necessarily push each person to specialize more deeply in a single thing. Instead, it will ask one person to cover several parts of a process that used to be divided among different specialists. I have already written about this in “The Return of the Polymath.” AI is driving a kind of return of the professional with broad judgment, someone who does not merely know how to execute one mechanical part of a process, but understands where the final result needs to go.

Think of a designer. It might once have been enough to have a good hand, a good line, solid technique. I am not saying any of that stops mattering. That would be absurd. But now it will matter even more that the designer understands what a brand needs, what it needs to communicate, what it wants to sell, and what feeling it wants to create. A designer who only knows how to draw loses ground to one who understands marketing, identity, narrative, and intention. At the same time, the designer who understands all of that but lacks an artistic eye also falls short. AI can generate a probable image, a statistically reasonable image, even a beautiful one, but it cannot necessarily find the exact point you are looking for. That exact point requires human judgment. It requires further editing. It requires someone looking at the work and saying: this is not it yet, this is getting close, this communicates the opposite, this looks beautiful but will not sell, this sells but betrays the essence.

That is the change. Work does not disappear. The kind of judgment we reward changes.

Nor do I believe that artificial intelligence will usher in a dictatorship of technocrats governing humanity through pure calculation. Not because technocrats would not like to, because I am sure some of them would, but because artificial intelligence cannot replace every kind of work that sustains human competition. As long as capitalism exists, as long as companies, people, brands, and countries compete with one another, we will still need judgment, character, interpretation, and a willingness to take risks. AI helps us produce. But competition is not just production. A machine can calculate the most probable option, but it does not lose the client, put its name at risk, or bear the cost of being wrong. Competition means deciding what to produce, for whom, when, in what tone, at what risk, at what cost, with what sacrifice, and for what purpose.

Every major technology has been dangerous

Can artificial intelligence be dangerous? Of course it can. But every major technology has been dangerous. Gunpowder, atomic bombs, industry, the internet. Each opened a new door and, alongside it, a new way for us to hurt one another. The fact that a technology is dangerous does not make it exceptional in human history. It places it in the family of major technologies, the ones that expand our abilities and, in doing so, also expand the harm we can cause.

I am not saying this to minimize the danger. I am saying it to put the danger in its proper place. Every time human beings invent a powerful tool, we also invent a new way to harm ourselves. But we also invent a new way to live better. Capitalism, with all its inequality and all its injustice, has enabled us to live lives that would have looked like the lives of kings a thousand years ago. The bed we sleep in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the possibility of eating fruit out of season, medicine, transportation, communication, all of it comes from an immense chain of competition, ambition, markets, technique, and human desire.

Yes, capitalism widens the distance between the 1 percent and the 99 percent because, by encouraging competition, it concentrates power among the most competitive. But it also raises the baseline for everyone. The 1 percent rises more, but the 99 percent rises too. That is the part we often lose in the argument. Inequality exists. It hurts. But when you look across history, it is not only the distance between those at the top and those at the bottom that changed. What it means to be at the bottom also changed. Poor people today live surrounded by technologies that would have been miracles to previous generations.

Something similar will happen with AI. There will be concentration and abuse. Some companies will become obscenely powerful, and some workers will be displaced from particular functions. Some people will fall behind because of pride, fear, or laziness. But there will also be a broad increase in what people are capable of doing. Ordinary people will be able to do things that once required entire teams. Small businesses will be able to produce content, analyze data, organize finances, design campaigns, and make better decisions without hiring five different specialists. Not everyone will do it well. But the possibility will be there.

A future that is boring and exciting at the same time

That is why the future I see is not a cinematic catastrophe. It is something more boring and, at the same time, more exciting. Boring because AI will eventually be absorbed into everyday life the way the internet was. People from 1990 would look at many of the things we do today and call them science fiction. We do not experience them that way because they have already become part of the landscape. The same will happen with artificial intelligence. New generations will grow up with AI the way earlier generations grew up with the internet.

But it is exciting because human beings, who have always been the tool-making species, have now created a tool that works on intelligence itself. It is not a shovel, a wheel, or a steam engine. It is an abstract tool that helps us think, produce, organize, imagine, correct, compare, translate, design, and program. It does not replace all the other tools. It accelerates our ability to create and use them.

What remains with us

Now, the people who say we need to take advantage of AI are right. But they can still be wrong if they believe AI replaces the virtues that have always mattered. The disciplined person, the one who knows how to save money, build a business, understand people, sell, buy, negotiate, work with clients, form relationships, and maintain a reputation, will still have an advantage before, during, and after this revolution. AI does not eliminate character. On the contrary, it exposes it more clearly.

Even a fruit seller can use AI. It can serve as an accountant, a second opinion, an aid for organizing inventory, a guide for thinking through prices or promotions. But if the vendor next door does not use AI and still knows his customers better, has discipline, knows how to buy and sell, and knows when to wait and when to take a risk, that vendor can still beat him. A tool does not replace the person who knows how to use tools. Much less can it replace someone who knows how to deal with other people.

So what remains with us? The same things as always, now with a new tool on top: character, discipline, intelligence, and the decision to act. Alongside them, we need to integrate artificial intelligence into our processes so we do not fall out of step with what humanity is doing. We should neither worship it nor fear it as if it were an inevitable demon. We should not sell our souls to the first technocrat who promises a calculated future. We should use it, understand it, correct it, and place it at the service of what we should already have been cultivating before it arrived.

Because in the end, AI does not change the most basic thing. People are still what makes the difference.