Will AI take over your job? It's complicated

India Today

28-04-2025

Every 15 days or so, a clip goes viral on Twitter and Reddit. It is a clip from 60 Minutes, a TV show. In it, we see a sage-like Rick Rubin, sitting cross-legged in a meditative stance, answering a few questions. He is a music producer, famed and celebrated in the industry. Do you play instruments — Rubin is asked. Do you know how to work a soundboard? The answer is no to both. 'I have no technical ability,' Rubin says. 'And I know nothing about music.' So, what does he have? Taste, Rubin has taste. Or so he says.advertisementThis clip goes viral often nowadays, because when people start thinking of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek, they come to a conclusion that soon technical skills will not matter. That is because AI will offer all the technical skills one might need. It is already doing plenty of coding, for example. Google CEO Sundar Pichai just said that within his company, almost 30 per cent of code is now written by AI. These AI tools are also already doing quite significant heavy lifting in industries like graphics design, media production, business writing and communications, consulting and data analysis.So, in a world where technical skills — for example, the ability to code in Java — is already cheap and available to all, why will humans have a job where these skills are required? The answer which many give is — taste. Like Rick Rubin's taste.advertisement
But then, some people counter? They believe that taste is irrelevant. The argument goes that it is only in select industries where you need something like 'taste'. In other industries, the work itself has no room for it. What taste does an HR person require to create a spreadsheet with salary data? More significantly, you don't need an army of 10,000 workers for 'taste'. This taste can be defined by a group of 10 people. Or just by one person, like Steve Jobs did so often at Apple.In other words, taste is not going to save jobs for humans in a world where AI tools have an IQ of 130 — think Google Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI O3 — and where they can do most of the routine work better than humans can.Logically, if you look at it, the job market for humans isn't looking all that rosy. The whole apparatus is stacked against them. Even in areas where it is not apparent if AI can take over, for example, in manual jobs, humans should worry. Take the case of drivers: It has been slow in coming, but the driverless cars are finally on the road. Google's cab service Waymo is now doing over a million driverless rides in San Francisco every month, rides which otherwise would have been managed by human drivers.advertisementSo, are we looking at mass unemployment in the future? The logical answer would be yes. But nothing about human affairs is logical. Because, if we were logical, John Lennon wouldn't have been Imagine-ing world peace and rivers full of milk and honey. That would have been reality.The reality is that a large percentage of the jobs that we do currently, the jobs that employ hundreds of millions of people across the world, are already redundant. Covid exposed many truths about the world we live in. One, it did more than expose was show just how unnecessary most of our jobs were. Millions of office workers simply stopped going to work as lockdowns after lockdowns spread across the world. Yes, these people did, in most instances, keep 'working'. Yet, it was clear that if a large chunk of people suddenly stopped working, the world would still keep functioning. It would still revolve and there would still be enough for everyone to eat and survive. Millions of jobs were exposed as a facade that we humans had erected, not because these jobs were necessary, but because they served some other function.advertisementThis view is not new. And no longer original. Anthropologist David Graeber famously explored it in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. 'Some jobs are so pointless that no one even notices if the person who has a job vanishes,' he wrote in his book. A while later, he added, 'Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.'The jobs, which Graeber described as bullshit jobs, are also the kind of jobs that AI tools will excel at doing. Will that happen? Will it lead to the loss of jobs for people who currently do this work? This is where, I believe, it gets a little complicated.Graeber explained why bullshit jobs exist and, in most instances, he blamed human nature. But there is another angle. Graeber touched upon it, but I believe this is a more significant factor in the proliferation of these jobs. And this factor is redistribution of wealth and keeping order in society.Most people work nowadays in jobs that are not needed because the jobs — public sector or private — are used by the governments to redistribute wealth. It is not a perfect mechanism by any means, but it is one way to spread some of the productivity gains that the world has seen since the 1950s. Two, bullshit jobs also help governments keep order in society, because if people are not working, then they will probably end up doing something else — and in an imperfect world, and given human nature, that something else has more chances of being something troublesome.advertisementEssentially, most jobs are not just about work and productivity, irrespective of whatever motivational quotes say. Covid exposed this myth of productivity rather brilliantly. They are about keeping the social structure intact and keeping society functioning in a certain order.And because jobs are not merely about productivity, it is not clear how AI will be able to replace humans in these jobs. The AI tools will certainly supersede most — but not all — humans in acuity and reasoning that are needed for sorting and analysing traffic data of a particular city. But humans might still retain their jobs because many of these jobs are anyway not about productivity or efficiency at all. They are about keeping an appearance and there is a good chance that this appearance will still be kept intact in the world of super-intelligent AI. There might be some short-term disruptions, but they won't last. If AI replaces humans in jobs, chances are that humans will invent a few more of these jobs. AI or no AI, humans will still have 'work' to do.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Tune InMust Watch