The Real Future of AI and Work

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
You know, it's a really boring conversation. Will AI take all of our jobs? This unfortunately is the conversation about jobs that the AI industry has wanted to have for far too long. But finally, we are starting to get a little more thoughtful consideration as more time passes. And it turns out, AI doesn't just take all the jobs. What AI does do is change the entire landscape of how we work on both individual levels, on team levels, in terms of what we can individually inspire to, in terms of what our teams can aspire to, in terms of how companies should organize themselves, in terms of what skills we should prioritize. And all of those are the really interesting and productive conversations to have about AI and jobs. And that is exactly what we are talking about today.
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Now, today's episode is of course a weekend long read slash Big Think episode. And our friends over at Every have the perfect Big Think content for right now. Every recently announced their first conference called Thesis. And alongside it, they announced a new project called Thesis Statements that will have a hundred builders and thinkers write short essays about the future that they envision coming with AI.
Every CEO Dan Schipper put it this way, We believe there is a bright future for human work after automation. And we believe that there's a small group of humans who know what it looks like because they live the answers every day.
But their ideas are still largely missing from the mainstream discourse about AI. That's why we're creating a public record of what people at the frontier are seeing now, so we can get these ideas to as many people as possible. For those of you who want to go check it out for yourself, you can find this at every.to slash thesis dash statements. I will of course include a link in the show notes. And what we're going to do is look at a set of these first 25 statements, read the short essays that go along with them, and then of course I'll give my thoughts. We're going to organize them into a few categories. And the first category we'll call foundations. And it is Dan himself who I think puts a fine point on the thesis that surrounds all of this with his short essay, After Automation, There Will Be More Human Work Than Ever. Dan writes, One thing CEO, knowledge workers and investors seem to agree on is that AI is a threat to jobs, the economy, safety and human meaning. But if you talk to anyone in the AI industry or to early adopters outside of it, you'll hear the same thing we've noticed internally here at Every. There's more work to do than ever. I don't believe there will be a tipping point where things flip and the jobs are gone. The new reality is the opposite. The more we automate, the more expert human work there is to do.
Here's why. AI commoditizes the residue of human expertise, whatever can be made explicit enough to train on, that collapses the value of default model output and creates demand for what's different. Demand for what's different is demand for human experts, even as we approach artificial general intelligence. Every is a team of almost 30 people, and we haven't fired all of our employees in favor of agents. We haven't ditched software as a service products in favor of vibe-coded apps. We still hire humans to do customer service with a lot of agent assistants, and we still hire human writers and editors and engineers.
Sure, employee agents take over more of the stable, repeatable, well-framed layer of work, but there is a lot of work that still requires a human being in the loop. We've found over and over that for any kind of complex task, the best way to get great work is to have an AI and a human going back and forth in the same workspace.