The death of white-collar-jobs - or how to enable new products
While everyone's panicking about AI killing white-collar-jobs, we're missing out on the opportunities to re-shape how we work - just like a young startup employee who showed me an alternative view on the world.
I have recently spoken with a young student who's working in a startup that uses AI to provide teaching experiences to students. He didn't complain about AI taking his job - he proudly told how he and his mates use generative AI to successfully scale their services. AI is not a threat to him, but the enabling factor that allows them to focus on different tasks while AI is automating software creation. To them, AI is the value creator - which contradicts to the popular narrative about "AI killing white-collar jobs", which too many newspapers show these days.
What if we shifted focus from what AI automates to what it can't do? What if experienced workers taught collaboration instead of delegation? What if we showed junior staff how to truly listen to customers rather than just collecting documents for us? What if we spent more time innovating based on AI-generated insights instead of doing the analysis ourselves?
White-collar work will change in the upcoming years - but it's not dead. We (the older workers) should better re-think our expectations on entry-level workers!
What are skills you think we should be teaching more?