NYT on jobs that AI could create

"A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You. In a few key areas, humans will be more essential than ever."

A friend shared a NYT piece listing jobs AI may create to make up for the ones it will obsolesce (link). Some I agree with, but not others.

1. “A.I. auditors — people who dig down into the A.I. to understand what it is doing and why and can then document it for technical, explanatory or liability purposes.”
   
   This fundamentally misunderstands how AI works and how to manage it. I can see legislation mandating this work, which will create compliance employment, but it’s ridiculous.

2. “A.I. translator: someone who understands A.I. well enough to explain its mechanics to others in the business, particularly to leaders and managers.”
   
   This seems more like a role than a job, but yes, people who understand should help others onboard.
   

3. “Trust authenticator, trust director. And such jobs will need to be adjacent to other new roles, which are essentially variations on an A.I. ethicist”
   
   You cannot hold a machine accountable, so there need to be a human with skin-in-the-game somewhere in the chain. However, this is distinct from A.I. ethicists, who have no skin-in-the-game, and arose as part of a funding action from Effective Alturists. Ethan Mollick calls this role a “sin eater,” which is mentioned later in this article as a “legal guarantor.” The basic QA function will just move to evals. There will be no “consistency coordinators”.
   

4. “One more possibility: escalation officer… In customer service, when the A.I. has been going around and around, people will want to speak with a human capable of empathy and understanding.”
   
   I’m torn on this. It makes intuitive sense, but for many empathetic tasks AI is actually nice than a person. The frustration people have with customer service is the systems not understanding the problem, and not being able to make an exception. Neither of those are issues of “empathy”.
   

5. “A.I. integrators: experts who figure out how to best use A.I. in a company, then implement it.”
   
   Yes. Happening now. This extends to all technical roles to build and maintain these systems.
   

6. “An A.I. personality director will fine-tune these issues, and in the future, an organization’s A.I. personality could become as core to its brand as its logo.”
   
   This seems likely, although it’s just an extension of a general brand director, which already exist. You can do this today buy appending text in your voice to a basic LLM and asking it to re-write whatever in your style.
   

7. Taste, a la Rick Rubin: “The confidence I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists.”
   
   If the NYT writer is confident of anything, it’s their taste, or at least their ability to identify who has it and follow them. Taste is a broader topic tied to distribution (which was once called “status”) social adroitness, but what of craft?

It’s grim to imagine an age when our writers don’t write, our musicians don’t play instruments and our illustrators don’t draw. But that’s not really the age we’re entering; the act of craft, after all, will always have a huge impact on thinking. Mollick sees this even when it comes to his academic writing. “I will have it do research in advance, but I will never let it write before I write,” Mollick said of A.I. “I have to write messily to think something through. Otherwise, the A.I. will dominate my thoughts.”

Using AI write a first draft, or summarize a text, will let the AI dominate your thoughts on that topic. But honestly, this is what all non-primary sources do — book summaries, news programs, NYT articles. What’s different about AI? Maybe people will use it in creative ways, to generate a summary but also a counter-summary, so you can get up to speed quickly, but then also keep your mind open and form your own ideas.

I think this is hardest for young people. They need to learn to use this technology, but they also need to basics of proactively seeking, actively reading, and critically analyzing a text. I don’t know what the solution is, but it may be more urgent than questions about jobs.