Parents with college-age or post-college kids are all asking a version of the same question these days. It isn’t “What should my kid major in?” anymore. It’s something closer to “What kind of work will AI leave standing?”
The Wall Street Journal captured this tension in a recent story about two sisters—one a young writer struggling to find footing in a shifting job market, the other a stable and in-demand auto mechanic. The story struck a nerve because it mirrors a conversation happening in kitchens, dorm rooms, and graduation parties everywhere.
Underneath it is a deeper worry. Parents want to know where the future is solid and where it is fragile. They want to know what kinds of work will remain human.
To answer that, we have to look at the shape of work, a topic I explain in more detail in UNMANAGED.
AI does not replace “intelligence.” Because today's AI is in reality a "Rhetoric Engine" it replaces the patterned parts of knowledge work, the places where the output is predictable, templated, or reducible to language. I call this rhetorical replacement. It turns out a large amount of entry-level professional work lives right in that zone.
To make this clearer, I use a continuum that behaves like a vortex. On one edge sits The Messy Real World—the unpredictable, physical, judgment-driven work where humans still excel. On the opposite edge is the Creative, Innovative, or Unique side—work that is original, interpretive, and hard to standardize. But the center of the continuum—the work that is Highly Repeatable and Understood—is where the pull of technology is strongest. This middle zone is the gravitational well of automation. Machines have always eaten this layer first, and AI deepens that pull, drawing more and more “somewhat repeatable” and “somewhat creative” tasks into its center.
Now think back to the two sisters.
The mechanic sister works on the left edge of the continuum: unpredictable problems, hands-on diagnosis, physical reality. Very little of that can be automated anytime soon.
The writer sister is trying to enter the middle. The early steps of a writing career—blog posts, research summaries, standard copy—are now well within the reach of AI. That doesn’t mean writing is dead. It means the entry point has changed. And this is the nuance most discussions miss.
In creative and innovative fields, experienced people are still extremely valuable. Senior designers, editors, strategists, and creative thinkers will be needed for a long time. If anything, their value increases as the baseline becomes more automated. The challenge is the gap: AI compresses the early-career ladder. The places young people would normally learn judgment are the very places automation is landing first. The writer sister isn’t less capable. She’s simply entering during a transition, where the bottom rungs on the career ladder are disappearing.
If we widen the lens further, a third lane appears. It isn’t just the work of building the automation and AI systems themselves, though that remains an important piece of it. Increasingly, the real opportunity sits in helping organizations adopt the technology, implement it responsibly, and navigate the transformations that follow. This lane includes everything from cognitive science and human-centered design to organizational behavior, systems thinking, linguistics, and yes, some programming. It’s the intersection where technology meets the messy realities of human work — and companies need an enormous amount of help there. These roles are growing faster than almost any others because they require a kind of judgment that machines cannot supply.
So what should our kids do?
They should move toward the edges.
Toward the messy real world, where judgment, presence, and real-time adaptation still matter.
Toward the innovative frontier, where originality and synthesis remain unmistakably human.
Or toward the transformation lane, where the next generation of systems is not only built, but also implemented, integrated, and made workable in the organizations that depend on them.
AI isn’t eliminating human work.
But it is collapsing the middle.
The future will belong to those who learn to thrive on the edges.
