The question everyone asks is wrong.
“What jobs will AI take?” assumes a fixed pie of work that AI and humans divide between them. It treats labor as a zero-sum competition where every AI capability is a human loss.
What happens to identity when everything that used to define us can be outsourced?
I've been thinking about children growing up right now—kids who will be teenagers when AI has fully arrived, adults when its implications have settled into ordinary life. What will they learn? What will they strive for? What will they remember about growing up?
Émile Durkheim made sociology possible by insisting on something counterintuitive. Social facts are real and irreducible to individual psychology. Suicide rates persist even as the individuals who commit suicide change. Norms constrain behavior independent of any single person’s choices. The collective exists above and beyond the individuals who compose it.
The printing press democratized text. Books spread beyond monasteries. Literacy became possible for people who would never have touched a manuscript. The information was out there, waiting for anyone who could read.
Margaret used to sit in her garden and think about nothing in particular.
Not planning. Not problem-solving. Not working through a decision. Just sitting with whatever thoughts arose, letting them drift, following them nowhere. Sometimes she would realize twenty minutes had passed and she had been thinking about her mother, or about a conversation from decades ago, or about what clouds look like from above.
Start with knowledge. You don’t know what to do. This is the easiest gap to close. Information exists. Education works. Most interventions live here because it’s tractable.