Not Which Jobs. Which Tasks.
People are asking which jobs AI will take. It's the wrong question. Here's a better framework.
Your job is a container. A label on a box. What matters is what’s actually inside it - which tasks fill your days, and how vulnerable each one is to being automated away.
Think of two axes.
The first: how rule-based is the work? At one end, strict rules written down somewhere. At the other, judgment calls that depend on reading a room, a person, a situation that’s never quite the same twice. The second: how physical is the environment? Purely digital at one end, purely physical at the other.
Work that’s digital and rule-based is going first. Tax prep. Compliance checks. Data routing. The rules are already written, the feedback is immediate, the environment is perfectly readable. AI just executes it faster and cheaper.
Work that’s physical and ambiguous is last. Maybe never. A trauma nurse reading a patient’s face for pain they can’t articulate. A plumber diagnosing a leak in a 100-year-old house where nothing is where the blueprint says it should be. A founder sitting across from a furious investor, trying to hold the relationship together without saying the wrong thing.
AI can draft a perfect legal contract in three seconds. It can’t sit across from someone who’s about to walk out and talk them back in.
A useful test: could a brilliant intern do this task with the right instructions? Not mediocre - brilliant. One who never sleeps, never gets frustrated, processes information faster than any human alive. If yes, the task is exposed. If the instructions themselves are the hard part - if there’s no way to write down what “good” looks like -you’re probably okay.
For now. That part matters more than people want it to.
The physical, ambiguous quadrant is shrinking. Slowly, but it’s shrinking. Surgical robots handle procedures considered too delicate for machines a decade ago. Autonomous vehicles navigate ambiguity that seemed permanently human.
Most people, if they’re honest about how they actually spend their week, find they’re more exposed than their job title suggests.
The useful exercise: write down the 10 tasks that consume most of your time. Ask the intern question for each one. Map it honestly.
The corners aren’t safe. They’re moving.
Know where you stand before someone else shows you.
🙏
Be kind,
Manuel