Re-Sorting and Adaptability

AI will reshape the labor market and societal status; be adaptable

I’m currently reading both Superagency and a biography of George Washington. While reading about Washington have been struck by the extent to which the future president’s physical strength and prowess was core to his leadership and success. He had great control of a horse, could withstand harsh conditions in battle, and had tremendous physical strength; those abilities allowed him to persevere in battle and become an exceptional leader.

Today, physical strength and ability to withstand harsh conditions may be helpful in very specialized professions (if you’re a Navy SEAL or a pro athlete) or as a general part of improving one’s health and resilience. But physical prowess is only very loosely correlated with professional success or prestige.

If you go back in history, you can find countless other skills that were at one time highly valued but are now more akin to hobbies than professions: sewing, portraiture, typesetting, and even many traditional types of farming¹.

Change and evolution in the relative importance of skills is a constant feature of a free market economy. And it will be significantly accelerated by AI.

There are a bunch of skills — many of them currently seen in the domain of the highest status professionals — that will become much less useful for humans in just the next few years.

I take two things from this.

1. Professional Re-Sorting. These developments will lead to something of a re-sorting of professions. There are certain professions that are in high demand and will decline in relative importance and prestige.

2. Planning for Adaptability. AI propagation provides an invitation and incentive for each of us to become more adaptable. Yes, the expertise you have in a highly specific accounting technique has been really valuable the past few decades. But it is quite possible that improvements in AI will turn your highly specialized technique into something that can be done by a piece of software in a few seconds.

Both re-sorting and planning for adaptability feel scary and unfair to many people. If you spent years in school learning accounting, and have had a twenty or thirty year career building an unusual level of skill and a highly specific set of techniques to so something highly valued, it sucks to imagine that your main comparative advantage may (soon) have disappeared.

Professional Athletes

To handle these challenges as individuals, it may be worth studying the plight of professional athletes.

Professional athletes have short athletic careers. They may earn $30,000 a year playing in an obscure league in a less popular sport, and they may earn $30,000,000 a year playing for the LA Lakers or Real Madrid; regardless, they know that their time playing sports professionally will likely be finished before they turn 40.

Suffice it to say that there is a very wide range of outcomes for athletes in the second part of their careers. There are countless examples of ex-athlete success in politics, business, and academia in addition to those who stay in sports as broadcasters, coaches, or administrators. There are also bankruptcies and addictions and people who struggle when they no longer have a team and/or a paycheck for their physical accomplishments.

There is a moderate amount of research on athletes’ long term outcomes, and I think it’s a model we ought to be looking at more as AI progresses. For decades, the 33-year-old soccer player has had to grapple with the knowledge that the skills that were central to both his prosperity and identity no longer apply. In the years to come, the 55-year-old accountant or lawyer may be struck with the same realization.

That 33-year-old athlete has built up a set of skills and habits — fitness, discipline, fame, and connections — and (with the development of non-soccer skills) can deploy them to his advantage. Similarly, that 55-year-old accountant has a base of skills and habits that she can use to her advantage even if her ability with that one specific accounting technique is no longer a highly valued skill.

This is something we ought to talk about more and get ahead of.

1. Farming is of course immensely important, but the skills required in 2025 are quite different from those required 100 years ago.