AI Won't Take Your Job — It Will Change What You Do
What will be left for us to work on
In this ICML 2026 invited talk, Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan argues that AI will not automate most jobs but will augment human work, shifting effort toward less verifiable tasks like evaluation and monitoring. He predicts a migration from problem-solving to question-asking in research, and a growing importance of relational, domain, and judgment skills in industry.
The evidence suggests that AI is better seen as an augmentation than an automation technology.
- QuantumNoodle
There are three parts of this talk, the last part (~last 15mins) bluntly address the question "how human roles shift in a world with advanced AI?"
My main takeaways from the speaker's position are: purely technical skills will get devalued because they tend to be verifiable tasks and AI will get better. Also effort will shift from building to evaluation of AI and systems. Speaker also mentioned that more of our time will go to decision making while AI takes over delivering on decisions.
I found many arguments to be at odds with one another bc the speaker does not address how someone can gain understanding without accumulating purely technical skills. It simply does not add up that someone who lacks purely technical skills in an area can make good decisions. Experience is often a by product of accumulating technical acumine in a particular problem area.
- mohsen1
I have a question about “domain expertise” as a component of future knowledge worker requirements. How does one gain such expertise in a context where thinking is expected to be delegated to AI (shifting from problem solving to question asking, as noted in this paper)?
How does one learn to pose the right questions when basic ones are rarely “manually” answered? that is, without an AI assistant’s help
This pattern appears in schools, where AI interferes with human development that typically demands long and difficult effort of actually answering questions
- reasonableklout
The author has a blog post mirroring their talk in writing: https://www.normaltech.ai/p/what-will-be-left-for-us-to-work
- ErystelaThevale
AI won’t function unless you give it a purpose (at least for now). Isn’t it crucial, then, that we define that purpose as specifically as possible?
Both AI and humans make mistakes. What they have in common is that review is necessary.
- thangalin
Thoughts?