For the past few years, the global conversation around artificial intelligence has centered on a singular, terrifying question regarding whether robots will take our jobs. We obsess over unemployment statistics and picture a future where humans are obsolete. Amidst this focus on the quantity of jobs, we often overlook a significant shift regarding the quality of careers. The primary threat of AI involves burning the bridge that connects entry-level work to expert status. AI is effectively dismantling the career ladder rather than destroying the job market entirely. The Death Of The “Rep” To understand this, we have to look at how professional mastery is built. For decades, the path to becoming an expert followed a predictable curve. You started at the bottom, doing the grunt work. Junior lawyers spent years reviewing tedious contracts. Junior developers wrote simple, repetitive boilerplate code. Junior marketers wrote hundreds of subject lines before finding one that worked. We often complained about this work and called it drudgery. In hindsight, this drudgery served a vital purpose. It was “learning by osmosis.” By struggling through the basics, junior employees absorbed the fundamental logic of their craft. They learned what a good contract looks like by reading a… Read MoreInc42 Media
