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Key Takeaways AI won’t just change jobs — it will redefine what human work is worth.
Careers built on human connection, presence and experience will outlast purely cognitive roles.
It was a very 2024 kind of image: a laid-off tech worker reduced to posting his availability on Manhattan streetlights with a QR code connected to his LinkedIn. “I thought that would make me stand out,” Glenn Kugelman told the Wall Street Journal.
UC Berkeley computer science professor James O’Brien immediately followed up the WSJ investigation with his own story of students with perfect 4.0 GPAs in their major contacting him worried about having zero offers. “Tech degrees no longer guarantee a job,” he wrote on LinkedIn, comparing it to the relatively recent days when Berkeley CS graduates received multiple good offers.
As a Berkeley grad myself who has worked in finance, crypto and AI, I have mentored students facing these anxieties about where to take their careers. It’s pretty clear that what is happening is very different from the boom-bust cycle of previous tech downturns.
IT sector unemployment grew from 3.9% to 5.7% in a single month earlier this year, and Mark Zuckerberg has already said AI will replace mid-level engineers in 2025. Yet we have massively overallocated our youth to roles like software engineering and the diagnostic aspects of medicine that AI will replace en masse.
This is just the start of a fundamental restructuring of what human labor is actually worth. With that in mind, we have to think about what work retains value when machines can do almost everything.
The framework
The jobs that will become more resistant to AI displacement need to be valuable, scalable, ethical and what I call “AGI-resistant.” The outcome of that last criterion is the hardest to predict.
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