The GenAI Job Reentry Dilemma
(draft) It's a serious game of musical chairs.
Pretend for a moment that you have a normal job, whatever that means to you. Half of your job description involves tasks you think of as drudge work, from consolidating spreadsheets to requesting information from different branches, issuing reports nobody seems to read, and other such activities.
Even though GenAI Automates Tasks, Not Jobs, the jobs still fall.
The GenAI-Jobs-Education Trilemma
Here's the crux:
- GenAI automates a cluster of tasks that comprise a job category.
- That job category vanishes as a desirable human goal.
- Pretty soon, everyone performing that job category has to find something else to do, hopefully something that will match or surpass their old salary.
- Retraining takes time. Adjacent job categories may be simple to shift to, but others may require several years of training and qualifying.
- Meanwhile, GenAI (wielded by humans, of course) is busy automating other job categories. Nobody really knows which will tumble, when.
- Aim wrong when you start to retrain, and you'll have to start over.
I'll guess that most retraining will mean not only learning a new job, but also learning how to use GenAI effectively, which increases the training need and time. Unless GenAI can itself speed the cycle.
To use a lighthearted metaphor, this becomes a global game of Employment Musical Chairs, with the people implementing GenAI doing the chair removal.
Timing is everything.
If the lag time of training is longer than the lag time of the automation cycle, this dynamic will get ugly, quickly.
When your career disappears
Per Aditya Agarwal's article, A Claude Catharsis:
There’s something deeply disorienting about watching the pillars of your professional identity, what you built and how you built it, get reproduced in a weekend by a tool that doesn’t need to eat or sleep.
Yet right after, he writes:
But here’s the thing about disorientation: It passes. And what replaced my sadness was something I didn’t expect: a kind of wild, almost reckless energy.