Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI
Economist Noah Smith argues that AI isn't shrinking opportunity, it's reshaping it. His case rests on comparative advantage, arguing that even as AI gets better at all tasks, it's constrained by compute, so we have to choose wisely what it does and doesn't do. As a result, the demand for human judgment, coordination, and decision-making grows with it.
It's the clearest counter to the "we're all getting replaced" narrative I've seen, and I think he's largely right. Yet, the transition won't be evenly distributed. design leaders especially should be paying attention to which parts of their role are overlap and which are core.