What Humans Do Next

On 5 types of human work in the gentle singularity.

Jun 25, 2025

In The Relationship Is the Job, I argued that relational labor — the work of presence, context, care, and ultimately, trust — will be central to working with people as manual and cognitive tasks are automated. This essay extends that thinking about the future of human work amidst the many predictions about an impending AI-dominant world.

The Artist’s Utopia Fantasy

The AI kings keep promising us the same fairy tale: humans won't need to work at all, that we'll spend our days creating art while robots handle everything else.

On a long enough timeline, maybe. It's one of those unprovable predictions where skeptics can always be told they're "still too early."

But there’s been a notable shift recently. We've pulled back from the breathless talk of sudden world-ending AGI. The conversation has turned to something a bit more calming to the nervous system: Sam Altman’s "gentle singularity" — a gradual progression where humans and machines coexist and co-contribute:

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before … If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly.

Five Domains of Human Work

We've invented superintelligence of some kind, but I'm skeptical about how fast it replaces human-run systems. Machines become the "core" of operations, but we'll still need a "human layer" in every domain. The digital singularity arrives before the physical one, both with humans in the loop.

The question isn't whether humans will work, but what kind of work humans do in the ‘gentle singularity.’ It's not just art, and creativity isn't the only skill we'll need. Human work will live in Trades, Research, Art, Community, and Stewardship.

1) Trades: when lawyers look like electricians

The lawyer billing $1000/hour and your electrician, the surgeon and your auto mechanic: each pair will soon have more in common than you think.

When cognitive work gets automated, everything starts looking like trade work. Traditional "blue collar" trades like plumbing and electrical work stick around and improve. AI increasingly handles the diagnostics and business operations while humans handle problem-solving and customer interaction. "White collar" professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, therapists) start resembling trades. Reasoning gets automated while judgment and relationships stay human.

Machine core, human layer. This is the organizational paradigm of the future. Machines think better than us but they can’t be us. If software engineers all used to be inventors, now they’ll be operators. Humans orchestrate and polish. Machines man the middle. You might still sit in an office behind a laptop but the work becomes more procedural over cerebral and intertwined with people and context.

New operational trade-like roles emerge: AI trainers, workflow engineers, system monitors. The four-year degree as pre-requisite will give way to trade schools. Education is replaced with apprenticeship. When knowledge has a half-life measured in weeks and months, adaptation becomes the critical skill.

2) Research: the golden age of human curiosity

We're about to enter the golden age of human curiosity. When research becomes faster and cheaper, we ask bigger questions and pursue bolder answers. AI will unleash R&D everywhere it's been bottlenecked — whether opaque, slow, expensive, or all of the above. We'll see big leaps in technology, health science, longevity, materials research, space exploration, even consciousness studies.

The most interesting work today is already happening at the research frontier. The top engineering jobs are no longer about coding features. They’re more and more about figuring out how cutting-edge AI actually works, training the models, assessing risks (and acting on what AI coding tools tell engineers to do). OpenAI is as much a research company as a tech company as a consumer product company. Executives leave to start rival research labs; employees get poached for their research genius. Either way, investment flowing into research is massive — expect frontier tech companies to look and act more like “science” companies.

Humans will remain the essential question-askers. Trades will execute within known systems. Research will push us into uncharted territory for progress. You can't automate what you don't yet understand, and what is as much art as science. The AI 2027 manifesto calls this "research taste." AI keeps up with top experts at research execution but only hits the 25th percentile at "deciding what to study next and what experiments to run, or having inklings of potential new paradigms."

Eventually research becomes more trade-like too, but on a much longer timeline. The advantage will belong to whoever can spot the hardest unsolved problems and iterate quickly, whether indie researchers, startups, or trillion-dollar orgs.

3) Art: the power laws of creativity

When we automate away so much of what we do, what's left but fostering beauty and connection in the world? We'll make more art, yes. But we call art our last refuge as if it's the only thing that lacks utility, when it's loaded with it.

Art isn't just traditional fine art like painting and sculpture. There's art we consume like books, music, movies, podcasts. There's experiential art like theater and dance where live performance is everything. There's also vast kinds of applied art like designing websites, apps, phones, clothing, buildings. The masses crave "entertainmeaning” (my timely portmanteau of entertaining and meaningful).

So much of "art" is and will be about influence and attention: creators building audiences, shaping culture, directing where people look and what they value. The biggest economies of our time revolve around the media-machine fusion. Creating "content" as an endeavor will never fade. But the economic reality is that art follows brutal power laws—few artists capture most attention and value.

Better tools give us leverage, but art is defined by its humanity. It wants a human signature and a point of view machines can't replicate. In the future, art becomes even more personal, participatory, and defined by its human lore than individual masterpieces. Art will be bodies of work with novel aesthetic frameworks.

Not all 8 billion of us will make our living from traditional art, but creation will be central to our lives. Local art becomes valuable via experience and presence and not global scale. Human art becomes an artisanal good with unique value. Making something meaningful and being valued for it is always how humans find purpose.

4) Community: 8 billion local creators

The dominant non-utilitarian work in the gentle utopia will be what I call "local social craft." The real opportunity isn't everyone sitting at home making art. It's everyone going back to building community. The future we think of as an artist's utopia may actually be a community builder's utopia.

Kevin Kelly's "1000 True Fans" is the digital equation for the online creator economy, but it becomes impossible to fulfill if literally everyone is an "artist." Where do we get long tail distribution? At the local level. The solution is sub-scale. My coffee shop only competes against the neighborhood coffee shops.

The “creator economy” accommodates 8 billion creators when what they’re creating is local community. Robots can make products, but humans still make the connections. It's about creating context for people to connect and experience things together. Coffee shops, bookstores, town squares, libraries, theaters are the "third spaces" where community happens. You may not make a living selling paintings at Sotheby's but you could be a local caricaturist or host paint nights.

Community work is the relational labor. We feel fulfilled when we earn our connection to people. So we're going back to old times when your value was tied not only to your "useful" skills but to your integrated role within the community.

5) Stewardship: who controls the robot army?

If humans remain in charge and robots don't overthrow us entirely, someone has to decide what the robot army does. Stewardship includes leadership, management, governance, politics, even institutional investing. (Marc Andreessen has said investing could be one of the last jobs, and it’s really not a crazy thought).

These decisions about which AI systems to deploy and regulate and how, and whether to share them internationally ultimately also determines global power.

When everyone has the same tools, stewards become curators of possibilities, choosing which problems to prioritize and how to solve them and really which futures to pursue. This creates a stewardship dilemma: the bold risk-takers who champion technological frontiers may also steer us in the wrong direction.

AI makes recommendations, but who's responsible for the outcomes? Even if AI could make perfect decisions, would people accept them? We want leaders who can be moved by emotion as well as reason and those who understand that the best decision on paper isn't always right for people. The leaders of major AI companies today will be the most critical stewards of our collective future.

The Entrepreneurial Layer

Entrepreneurship is how some people will approach any of the 5 types of work, creating new value rather than working within existing systems. You can be an entrepreneur in trades (starting a service business), research (founding a lab), art (creating a style), community (creating new spaces), or stewardship (running for office, launching a fund).

The brutal market economics that govern art will govern innovation in every category. A few big companies will still capture most value, and no longer from always having superior AI models but more often from figuring out how to control the ecosystems that make AI useful (the mature play). These winners then become the almighty kingdoms of the post-AI world. The 'app' arena will be more decentralized, especially in community and trades where local matters more.

We'll see the opposite trend too: decentralized tools (software made for us by us) and personalized tools created by a non-professional class of software creators — the modern craftsmen creating nice-to-haves that could become need-to-haves. But the power laws don’t cease here either. As always, the best of everything still accumulates attention and power.

The entrepreneurial urge to create something new or make something better will be as vital in the gentle singularity as it is today. But it will be hard as ever.

The Gentle Utopia?

When does all this happen? The digital transformation could unfold over decades while the physical world transformation takes centuries (but this is the debate).

We talk about AI making things simpler but fail to acknowledge that it creates new kinds of complexity too. New efficiencies inevitably create new bottlenecks. New AI systems need new oversight mechanisms. New capabilities create new risks requiring new management. The gentle singularity is a job shift.

The five jobs are more than survivor jobs. They capture more value precisely because everything else gets cheaper. When we automate the cognitive, the physical and relational become scarce. When we automate the routine, the exceptional gets repriced. The plumber may have higher status than the consultant and the community organizer may be more valuable than the data analyst. Local beats global in ways we haven't seen since before the internet.

Technology follows a predictable path: first it's a luxury for the rich, then it’s ubiquitous and cheap, and then the human version becomes the luxury. It goes like this: handmade goods to mass production to artisanal craft and back again. Live music to recorded music and back again. Humans doing what robots can becomes the ultimate luxury good. Rather than asking what will humans do for meaning, ask what meaningful work remains valuable for humans to do.

AI kings promise us an artist's utopia but we're not retreating to pure creativity and we're not all becoming artists either. We're maturing as participants in creation ecosystems where we're no longer the only thinkers and doers and no longer the best at both. If we want to compete at scale, we’ll have to play harder and smarter and faster. If we want to feel needed, we'll have to go local.

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