It’s now largely agreed that AI will impact plenty of jobs in the coming years, but not all kinds of jobs will be equally impacted.
Chris Paik, General Partner at Pace Capital, has broken down how AI will impact different kinds of jobs. “If what you do basically gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job’s gone,” he said on the TBPN podcast. “But if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, it’s a huge moat,” he added.
He also shared his thoughts in a post on X titled “Robots at work but humans in art”. “We hate other people when latency becomes intolerable. As soon as a task is about speed, other humans feel like an irritating inconvenience. The Uber driver’s small talk annoys us. We wish we were in a Waymo. The cashier’s tip screen feels like a micro-ransom when all we want is a bottle of water. Elevator operators, switchboard attendants, bank tellers; casualties of our impatience, gone without eulogy. In the economy of necessity, humans are friction, and friction is waste,” he wrote.
“But when the stopwatch stops, we flip. We crave other people. Leisure is a hall of mirrors, and only another mortal can polish the glass. A robot could throw perfect strikes forever, but no one would pay to watch. We want the thrill of potential failure. The human tremor that turns repetition into story. Stockfish calculates deeper than Magnus Carlsen, but Carlsen’s fallibility turns calculation into drama. Drama is the premium we pay to feel implicated,” he continued.
“Wherever output is graded by speed, accuracy, or cost, silicon will inherit the earth and we will welcome new overlords. Wherever value depends on provenance, uncertainty, and social risk, humans are irreplaceable,” he said.
Paik seemed to be saying that jobs which were purely functional in nature — which humans were forced to do to reach an end goal — would end up getting automated. But jobs which revealed humans’ failures and foibles would still stay. This would include jobs that entertained other people, or those which help create human connections that AI couldn’t replicate. It’s a pretty interesting insight, and one that people could keep in mind as they look to build their careers in the age of AI.