ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI Doesn’t Have to Replace You to Take Your Job

Partial automation can be as devastating as full automation

An empty office chair beside a laptop running code — a visual metaphor for how AI can hollow out jobs. Image generated with DALL·E, OpenAI.

Much of the talk about AI and jobs gets stuck on absolutes. Can AI really do what a human can? Is it smart enough to replace an entire profession? The honest answer is often that it can’t do the job and may never be able to.

However, the reality is that AI doesn’t need to fully replace you to effectively take your job.

For 35 years I worked as a Unix consultant, troubleshooting both simple and complex system issues. AI would not have been able to do everything I did — too many corner cases, too much tacit knowledge built over years. But it would have been able to do a large portion of it: routine debugging, log analysis, configuration checking, even writing code to ferret out where failures originated. That alone would have greatly reduced demand for human specialists like me.

Partial success can damage jobs

Often the danger isn’t total replacement — it’s erosion. If AI takes over 60 or 70 percent of the work, the remaining demand is spread thin across other specialists. That creates a race to the bottom in rates, and at least some, and perhaps many, skilled people can no longer…