Is AI Impacting Jobs or Not? (The Automation Timeline)

For the last two years, we've been hearing all about the impact artificial intelligence is going to have on the workforce. Yet when you look at the actual labor market, things look fine. Labor market looks really stable. In fact, in many job categories, we're actually seeing growth. What is happening as AI impacting jobs, or is it not? For this week's episode of "I've Got Questions," we wanted to bring you a moment from an interview I just did with the Mighty Pursuit podcast, where we dive into this paradox. Is artificial intelligence overhyped when it comes to the job market? And if not, when is its impact going to be felt? I also dive into the end of the 9-to-5 era, and where the workforce could be going next. I'm Shenebo Val, and this is "I've Got Questions." So I want you to imagine someone, let's call her Sarah, she spent all of 2025 hearing that AI was going to wipe out jobs, the white collar work would collapse, the entire industries would disappear. And so now it's 2026, she still has her job, none of her friends have been replaced at least not yet. And so her life mostly looks the same, and she's starting to wonder if it was all overhyped. What would you say to her? What would I say to Sarah? I would say that we are definitely overestimating the impact that we'll see with AI and jobs and change in the short run. So I think over the long term, a lot of the jobs that Sarah is hearing about in 2025, that will eventually go away or be radically transformed and become unrecognizable, that will be true. Over the 18 month or 24 month, convenient timeline that also happens to coincide with a lot of funding cycles and raising cycles, probably not. We're starting to see some changes in the data with respect to labor and skill composition within workflows. What this idea, and I know I've heard the stats too, 50% of white collar jobs could be obsolete by maybe now it's been pushed to 2027, 2028. That might not be the case over the short term, but over the long term, depending on what Sarah does, I would say that she could bet that her job will look really different or maybe not exist at all, that workflow might not make sense. When you say short term and long term, how do you define those? That's a great question, and I know the pendulum keeps swinging and moving. I would say short term for me is three years, which is interesting because that tends to be companies longer term strategic plans, which is just tragic. If you're thinking three years into the future and that's where it ends, you're probably going to get disrupted. In longer term, I would say looking seven to ten years. And so there, the forecast seemed to be, and it's funny, the further out you go into the future, the less you can predict or see. But when it comes to these general purpose technologies that behave in a certain way, your estimates of change tend to be a little bit more, not accurate, but closer to the forecast. When you think about technology change throughout history, I mean seven to ten years is still pretty short term. I mean, do you think about the fact that I mean, however many thousands of years of history, it took to get to the internet. In like the 1990s and then even from then to social media to now, I mean, seven to ten years is like not them. Well, I guess we could count. I mean, AI has been around for a while, but if we could count from the end of 2022, which had to be really came on the scene, and then we're looking ten years from now. So we're looking around thirteen years in this latest era, transformers, architecture, lifespan, what type of change could we see. And it's not actually that unforeseeable. I mean, if you look at about 80 years, 60% of the occupations that exist today didn't exist 80 years ago. And if we're to go back to the industrial revolution, moving from agriculture to mechanized work and in the rise of factory labor, you're looking at about 70% of people doing something radically different over a hundred years. So the question that's in front of us is what would that look like to have 70% of the population do something different, but not on an industrial scale or an industrial timeline, but closer to that 10 to 15 to 20 years. And that's where you could see it as alarm bells or maybe that's reassuring for a lot of people, but that's where the time scale tends to start making a little bit more sense. So when you hear figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman say that like AI is going to replace most jobs, do you feel like people should believe those sorts of statements. I would say it's what is the part to to that statement. So a lot of the different tech leaders will say, and there's different economists, depending on where you fall, that sure, maybe a lot of the jobs that they're currently building AI systems for could maybe be done by AI systems. And this would be specifically knowledge work. So things that are happening on a computer, maybe financial analysts or tax returns or paralegals that that type of role or roles that involves those types of tasks. So could those be wiped out potentially? That's at least what they're optimizing and building AI specifically to do. But that's where their forecast 10 to end. It's over. And that is the end. All the best to everybody else. I see a part 2 to that. And depending on which economists you subscribe to, they would either agree or disagree. That when an input becomes more abundant. So in this case, it's going to be, we'll say intelligence and we'll definitely use it in air quotes. The economy will reconfigure around that new resource becoming abundant. And it could reconfigure in really strange ways. The same way when communication and distribution became free and abundant, aka the internet. People started to make money over pretending they were in a vehicle and they're not and they're filming a video about something. And there's an entire new economy around that. So when intelligence becomes much cheaper, how does the economy reconfigure? And then what do we do on the other side of that? We will do something. We'll probably work less. We'll probably work in very unrecognizable ways. Even though what we're doing right now, what are we doing? That's entirely unrecognizable. So it will still be like that. It will just be something different and something that doesn't necessarily resemble the knowledge economy. Those tasks will probably be good AI. But there's a lot of disagreement. There will be AI leaders that would push back on that and say, nope, it's done. And then the robots are here. I think there will be a part two. What do you mean that what we're doing is unrecognizable? I mean, how would you describe the work that you and I do? Or even the work of a brand manager to somebody 150 years ago? That's a good point, yeah. What would you say that that actually is? Somebody is helping to describe, well, what's a brand? Well, it's, you know, okay, so why is there somebody managing that? All of these jobs that we invented and towards more service and towards more knowledge work. So we moved from a world where work was or labor was defined by muscle. Now we're in a world where labor is defined in some ways by the cognitive capabilities you have. And we're moving to a world where work may be defined by. And that's variable X. Yeah, we don't know. We don't know. Yeah, that's fascinating. Really, if you as a thought experiment, if you go through that and think about if you explain to somebody in 1850, like, oh, we record, what do you mean? Record, like, so it's just like, yeah, we build Microsoft Excel sheets and we try to predict how much money people in a different country are going to have. Well, why would you do that? Like, all of these things that we've created don't necessarily make sense out of context. And that's why whatever comes next won't really make sense to us right now because the systems that encompass it have truly not been invented. Now in terms of the statements from these tech figures, so one of our recent guests was Bill Gurley and he's like a legendary investor in Silicon Valley. Uber was the big thing that he got in early on. And and so we were talking with him about like AI fear. And it's interesting because he's like an insider with with I think benchmark capital. And he was just talking about how these people hyped their own products and and services to raise more money. And so basically in some ways, the thing that is like sparking fear ends up raising a ton of money because it's so hyped like we're going to build this thing. And then that leads them. So do you do feel like that reality is also accurate part of the picture? Sure. Yeah. There's definitely marketing and fundraising incentives that are driving some of the some of the narratives that we hear. And that isn't anything new. So yes, I think some of the narratives definitely come from we have a we have a funding round coming up. The system we are particularly building can build and do all jobs in the knowledge economy. That's very profitable. And if an AI system can do that, that company is going to make a lot of money. So that makes a lot of sense. But I don't think it's entirely wrong again that AI will be able to do a significant portion of the jobs that some of the jobs that we see today. And even though I think there's going to be an economy. There will be an economy. How many people are in it and do those jobs? Do the jobs of the future replace or are they actually geographically found in areas where in regions where jobs were lost? Those are all questions that we don't necessarily know. The same way globalization changed the composition of work and who we could say more winners and more losers economically speaking, we might see strange patterns like that. But yes, again, the narrative of it's going to be able to do everything is a very profitable one. So if you follow those incentives, sure, you're going to make a little bit more money versus saying, all right, AI can do a few tasks sometimes for a couple people, probably not going to raise much. Yeah, it's more nuance. Now, if you look at the latest jobs reports in the US, this was, this was, I think January, but I don't know what it was at in February, but employment still growing and unemployment is have around levels that we've kind of seen for years and parts of Europe, there's some softening, but nothing resembling a collapse. So on the surface, the labor market looks steady right now. If you were just like, read the news headlines. So is that a misreading of the data or do you think we're just asking the wrong question entirely? No, I think I mean, that is what the data does show that even some of the productivity numbers are quite misleading as well too. You'll hear productivity is through the roof. It's incredible or we're not seeing anything. So I think some of that data is right. When you drill down though into hiring, so we're seeing some fewer job postings in certain areas, we're seeing the composition of skills within the jobs that companies are actually hiring for change. So maybe now you were hiring for a finance analyst, this person has to be able to do amazing with spreadsheets. And now if you're to actually drill down into how that post has changed or that job position has changed, it's you have to be able to direct and observe or apply judgment to different financial patterns. So something that's much more akin to directing or guiding AI systems over just building and crunching the numbers. So the composition of work has changed. And then that has a downstream impact because that might not be the same person. So the person who was best for the job posting in 2024 may no longer be a fit in 2026. So those are interesting signals. And kind of the level of the data that I would be going into to show, okay, who companies are hiring for is starting to change. But this idea that it's, you know, everybody's going to be wiped out in a year that doesn't really, I'm not seeing that data either. But I also, it's one thing for the data to be overstated or for the data to, you know, say one set of numbers and AI companies to say something else. But policy still has an important role to play in between. And if AI companies are telling us what they're trying to build, even though it doesn't show up in the numbers yet, I think policy makers would still be wise to have a plan in the event that it goes really well or not so well. And that's the gap that I'm really paying attention to that you can't just because you don't see it in the numbers. It doesn't mean that you should sit back and enjoy the ride because that ride might be really bumpy. And that's where my concerns lie. I wouldn't consider myself an optimist or pessimist. I'm neither of those things. And just because I think there's going to be an economy on the other side that involves people, it doesn't mean that that transition is smooth. And it doesn't mean that it brings everyone if you don't intentionally design a system to do that. And that's where it's still been crickets from the policy crowd. I think this year and over the next couple years, we'll start to see the rise of political campaigns totally centered around AI and not sovereign AI, national security, that type of narrative. But what AI hopefully means for the person and the economy, I think we're going to start to see it and to hear about it. Now, when you think about all these scenarios and the government preparing for them, do you see the moment that we're living in like right now in 2026 as the calm before the storm? Is that how you would paint or paint it differently than that? Has the calm before the storm? Sure. Yeah. Because if you are to zoom out into kind of a wider historical lens and measure something over the course of a century or over the course of a few decades, change is coming. And it's not just AI that is headed toward us. There's then quantum behind it and then there's synthetic biology and their space and AI is multiplying the speed of discovery and the speed of progress in all of those fields. So sure, yes, I would say that we could see this as a calm before and it doesn't necessarily have to be a storm. But the calm before a period where we come out on the other side, whether that's in 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and life starts to become very unrecognizable. But again, we've we've been living unrecognizable lives. It's just likely going to compress. What I love about your work is you I feel like you can you help instill hope in people in very practical ways. And so whether in your podcast and sub-sac, a lot of the things that you've been writing and talking about, I think it really helps people like prepare for that transition. So like of what the next 10 years are going to look like. And so if you were to folk, you call this the dawn of the independent era. And so can you explain a little bit about that and what you feel like is coming? Yeah. And of course, nobody can make predictions about the future, especially not a futurist. But what we can start to see in the data is the rise of more contract or independent based work as the dominant form of work in the market. So if you think about this from the perspective of a company, and we've even talked about it today, a financial analyst job today may look very different in 18 months. You still might need somebody to do different things, maybe direct image AI agents, but the skills are going to change. Then maybe that work flows entirely different again in 48 months. So I'm less likely if I'm the CEO of a of a big company to hire for that role as full time, I'm going to opt much for a shorter term contract a year, 18 months. So when you think about that, times a lot of the jobs in, we can focus in on the knowledge economy for now, we'll start to see the rise of much more independent based work in the workforce. And that's kind of new for a lot of people. We do see the rise of much more, I mean, you and I are both technically independent workers as it is. We do our own thing. But the dominant form of labor may start to look more like that. Where instead of working for one company, between one thing, you work for a few companies doing the skills that you are in doubt with or the skills that you have in the field that you work in. And that's a very different type of workforce because it means you become your own CEO, right? You are an organization of one and you apply your skills to a variety of different companies or projects. And so that's I'd say the rise of the independent era. And it's a very different future. It has many implications for things like health insurance and social security. Not everybody wants to be an independent worker. There's a lot of comfort for some people. Some people it's their nightmare, but for others being able to have consistency nine to five. But we should start to see the idea of a nine to five job for one company will be a chapter in human history. And that chapter is closing for sure. I mean, that could bring a lot of anxiety for a lot of anxiety for for for people of like. I mean, I know what it's like to like run run a run a company and be an entrepreneur. I mean, we've been doing this for like eight years, but there's a lot of stuff that that goes into that. And so I wouldn't say it does sort of acquire a particular type of person or at least a particular type of mindset to be able to endure because there's so much uncertainty. There's so much like like if you're working for five different companies and you're a freelancer and one of those things drops, then 20% of income that goes out the window versus I'm there might be bored at work, but the safety net is I have like $80,000 a year coming in. You can plan. Yeah. Right. It becomes impossible to not know what is my income next year or the year after, but remember things that variables don't change in isolation. So when the fabric of the workforce starts to shift new business models, new types of platforms and infrastructure start to come into play that allow that to make more sense. So right now, what we're probably doing is extrapolating. Okay, everything is the same. The only thing that changes about the world around me is that I now hold three different jobs for three different companies. And there are these massive gaps between new projects that we're going to work on and existing ones fading away. Other variables will start to change. But yeah, I mean, it is a very unsettling future for many that take that enjoy the security of a stable job. And I mean, it is something that I do try to call attention to on my platforms. If we can see this transition happening, something like social security and something like healthcare is going to become really important for people. And even just having the ability to reach up and grab new skills or to be able to continuously pivot, that's an entirely different market. But it's one that we're starting to move towards. So my advice for people in this moment is don't think of your job in terms of the title that you hold. Think of the skills that you have under it. So be industry agnostic, be job title agnostic. What are the types of skills that you're performing? Right? Okay, so I exercise judgment when I do this. I use creative intelligence because I'm the person that always comes up with the ideas. Whatever it is that are the kind of skills that you that you occupy that you use every single day, those are what you'll continue to apply. It's just in different ways. And so maybe you'll be directing AI systems to do those tasks, but applying the expertise that you have and the role that you've been maybe holding for the last five years. And that's how you start to look at it. So it's going to change, of course. I mean, in work has always changed. Even the even the idea that a lot of people work from home, like that That was so right. Even a decade ago that a significant portion of people would opt for virtual work or at least partial virtual work So I think we can adjust to it But do we have the infrastructure and play the policy support the entire different again I've mentioned social security because I think it's really important and we don't have those safety nets But yeah thinking of yourself as an organization that offers a bundle of skills to a variety of different projects That's that's one way to think about the future and to think about Skills overthinking about job titles much more important Now I don't know if it's in terms of thinking About skills invalidates a standard question, but the the idea of being a synthesizer versus in like a generalist versus like a specialist and in one sort of area How would you think about that because like for example if you have been working for the past 10 or 15 years and you've been doing this one Sort of thing, right? Let's just say marketing you're doing you're doing email marketing and There's someone who might be a generalist They might not be in like an expert in like email marketing, but they might be doing seven different things across the means and marketing so they have like a way wider Expertise and also in some ways I would I would probably say their risk is lower Because they can pipe in and out of different things because they are like general and synthesizer versus everything isn't relying on them being an email marketing and them going Oh, like I don't know how to do anything else Do you feel like that aspect of the conversation is going to be relevant with with they are? Who who's better positioned the experts and the people with domain expertise or the generalist exactly? I don't think that we've netted out on On if there's if who wins what where because there's so let's take that example You're working in email marketing and I think we could probably safely say that is something that AI is already doing So going forward that's you know if it hasn't already impacted your work. It's probably going to okay So does that mean that the generalist comes in and scoops up all of those email marketing jobs? Hmm, if you look at the skills under email marketing. Why is it that somebody clicked your emails over? the other companies and how did you think about adjusting those campaigns when it wasn't working? Right, what was the psychology that went into how you structured those titles and where you placed images that allowed somebody to respond differently? How does that type of thinking Happened in a world where AI is marketing the product and you're giving AI the framing of your brand the culture of the company Whatever it is that you're selling so what were the underlying skills that went into you structuring that and that's why it's so foreign for us To think about how we were thinking or how we are thinking We just don't think about it that way we just do the task But what was the thinking that happened before that task and how you evaluated whether that was successful That is what you were taking with you to the next thing and that you're saying that's what's going to be valuable to a company It's the thinking under it. Yeah, so maybe you're not writing emails anymore because AI writes it better But you are bringing the skill set in that people Don't like to hear the number first when you start with the price even though it's an amazing sale They don't want to hear it like you're still bringing in those types of things And this is why or if we can you'll have better ideas perhaps if you're thinking about it that way Then somebody that's just never in their life dealt with marketing they can do some stuff But you could outcompete them in certain areas if you're thinking about how you're thinking And that's of course not just a universal thing that's going to apply across the board But it can apply in many cases So does that mean that someone wouldn't have to know email marketing at all and that like because of AI and that is that it's helping with that Someone would be able to pipe into temporarily doing email marketing because they carry a set of skills Wait, so I'm not sure I understand what you mean So If someone's carrying the set of skills across Like domains and across tasks And they're working with AI to accomplish those things does that mean that their ability to know the end's announced of email marketing Is less relevant? Okay, so I love that you asked that because what you were essentially saying is You could have skills in one area And they actually become more applicable in another area So the person that had amazing judgment skills let's say in finance or human resources May actually be the best person to run marketing in the AI first world because the types of skills that they were executing May actually work well in the types of decisions that they're making where AI is the dominant platform So yes, it is possible that somebody That the skills and this is the you know, I to quote one of my previous professors the skills that made you dominant before AI May not be the same skills after AI right so the email marketing person Based on the types of decisions that they were making if they can think about how they were thinking They may be the best person to make judgment calls on hiring Right, so we're going to start to do different things So if that's why it's so much more important to think about the underlying skills of how you made decisions For not just the simple task that you did But how do you make the decision before that task and we're not taught to think about thinking on that meta level But it's really important and that it also expands the type of work you think You're capable of because you might be limiting yourself to email marketing But you could actually be the best person to make judgment calls on finance decisions because the AI is crunchy in all the numbers You're making the judgment call Do we go with market x or market y and market x is these types of people and this type of this type of group is very sensitive to price Every time we engage with them on email, but this type of group never cared about the emails about price and we're trying to target luxury Let's go after them and that could be the email marketer Well, yeah, I mean, I think it in terms of further pain because we suddenly getting of the the conversation The idea of envisioning a future world that that doesn't exist It almost feels like Chinese to a lot of people so we were further paint that world you've talked about Like career ladders shrinking And that the shelf life of skills will shorten so the very idea of like a career might evolve And so like what does that what does that mean exactly? Yeah, so I think we have spent the last few decades building up the idea of work where you learn you work and then you retire and that worked for a certain type of economy where Skills and tasks were cumulative and pretty predictable But in an era where AI and different technologies will continue to change the types of skills that we're going to need to bring to the table And how different types of work gets done and which types of products are interesting and are buying behavior That consistency of working vertically up a ladder starts to make less sense Because in in an era of skills over say job titles and sometimes even over experience It doesn't necessarily matter if someone has worked five years or 15 If the person who's worked five years is continuing they can learn different skills or how they apply their skills Um is more advantageous So that career ladder starts to make less sense and we're already starting to see some of it Not entirely get pulled out but junior hires not necessarily making us We're seeing lower numbers of junior hires And that I think is actually going to be temporary I think we're going to start to see them funnel into different types of roles like direct in AI systems and AI agents And then that becomes and that's actually quite interesting right if you take a legal firm A partner is probably best to make the final judgment calls like okay We've been in this type of court scenario before this is how this judge behaves But the junior or the younger person that now is no longer on that paralegal ladder or whatever came first But they're on the AI agent director ladder They're I don't know who's they're pretty equally important in that firm because that legal company can no longer keep up if they aren't diffusing agents the way their competitors are so that idea of the autonomy ladder and all of that That starts to make less and less sense in a skills over job title era