Everyone is doing the math on AI and jobs and coming up with the same answer: mass unemployment. But what if the math is wrong? Not because AI isn't powerful enough to automate most of what we do. But because we're failing to imagine what comes next. Here's a different way to think about it.
TDLR:
The Wrong Conversation 🗣
What Actually Becomes Scarce 🔍
The Starbucks Signal ☕
The Relational Economy 🤝
The Future of Work Nobody's Describing 💼
The Bro's Take 🤔
Every AI jobs discussion follows the same script.
First 45 seconds: AI is going to automate everything. Jobs will disappear. 15 to 50% unemployment. Then a tiny footnote: some new jobs might emerge. Probably.
Economist Alex Amos flips this. His argument isn't that AI won't disrupt labour markets. It's that we're spending all our time looking at the destruction and none of our time imagining the creation. That asymmetry is making us stupid about what's actually coming.
Here's the question nobody's asking: when AI can produce almost anything at low cost, what can't it make cheap?
Economics is the study of scarcity. If AI eliminates scarcity in commodity production, scarcity doesn't disappear. It relocates. The question is where it goes.
Amos's answer: it goes to human involvement itself. Not just human labour as an input. But human presence, judgment, warmth, and provenance as the product.
AI-generated artwork gained 21% in value from exclusivity. Human-made artwork gained 44%. The mere involvement of AI made the work feel reproducible regardless of how many copies existed. That gap tells you something important.
Starbucks tried to automate its way to better margins.
Fewer baristas. More mechanised processes. Streamlined everything. Then the CEO reversed course. Handwritten notes on cups. Ceramic mugs. More baristas per store. The conclusion: small details in human hospitality drive satisfaction in ways automation simply can't replicate.
This is not nostalgia. This is economics. When commodity production gets cheap, spending shifts to the things that can't be commodified. That's been true every time a major productivity shock has hit the economy. AI is not different. It's just bigger.
Amos calls it the relational sector. The part of the economy where the human element is not just an input but the actual product.
Teachers. Nurses. Therapists. Personal chefs. Craft brewers. Live performers. Hospitality. Care work. Bespoke anything. These aren't jobs that AI will eventually get around to automating. They're jobs whose value increases precisely because AI can't replicate what makes them valuable.
History backs this up. In 1900, 40% of the American workforce was in farming. Today it's less than 2%. Did people stop eating? No. The economy transformed. Labour moved. New sectors absorbed it.
The same logic applies now. Automated sectors get cheap. Real incomes rise. Spending shifts towards high income elasticity sectors where human involvement still carries irreplaceable value.
The Future of Work Nobody's Describing 💼
The durable jobs of the future won't be prompt engineers or AI monitors. Those are transitional roles.
The durable jobs will be in the relational sector. Some already exist and are growing. Others are emerging. Many haven't been invented yet. Six out of ten jobs people hold today didn't exist in 1940.
The pushback Amos gets is always the same: not everyone is creative. Not everyone can be an artist. His response cuts through it. You don't need to be Picasso. You need to be the person whose involvement makes something feel like it was made for someone by someone.
That's not a small market. That's the direction the entire economy is heading
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I'm not going to tell you the AI jobs transition will be painless. It won't be.
But the dominant narrative right now is that AI change leads somewhere worse. That we fall off a labour cliff and the only options are working at an AI lab or joining a permanent underclass. That framing is lazy and it's wrong.
Every major productivity shock in history has looked terrifying from inside it. The destruction is always visible before the creation. That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to start imagining what comes next.
The question is not whether AI transforms the economy. It's whether you're spending any time thinking about what it transforms into.
And that's it for today! Thanks for reading ♥️
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